Oh, I knew I had to be wrong about it. Gussie and the Wiz and Trotsky all believed in J. P.’s ideas and said that one day his journals would be famous. I mean, if the Wiz believed in them, they must be so, because he’d been to all those colleges and had studied everything. But try as I might to believe, I couldn’t. And it was beginning to seem to me that maybe the best thing for everybody would be for me to leave.
But, when I thought of getting out of my own family, I got scared. Where would I go? How would I live? If I was going to school the way I wanted, I’d have to live in some kind of a regular home and all of that. I didn’t know anybody who lived in a regular home. It was a problem, all right.
We got out to New Jersey, found a shopping mall in some town, and worked it for a while. Ooma was still feeling grumpy. She wouldn’t put any effort into our songs, wouldn’t sing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and messed up the chord changes so it all sounded pretty bad. We had a late start, too, so between everything we ended up making twelve bucks, which gave us a total of twenty-nine. Out of that we had to buy gas for the vans. There wasn’t much left for lunch, so we ate peanut-butter sandwiches and drank Coke in the backs of the vans, right there in the shopping mall. Everybody was feeling kind of gloomy about it. J. P. and the Wiz talked over reclaiming some tuna fish and cheese from the supermarket in the shopping mall, so as to give us a more balanced diet. After all, J. P. said, it was a free country and a person had a right to give his family a balanced diet. But they decided against it: Our luck wasn’t running very well, and it didn’t seem like a good time to take chances.
Then a cop came along and told us we couldn’t camp in the shopping mall. So we got into the vans and wasted a lot of gas driving out into the country where we could park on a back road alongside a patch of woods. And that was when I decided I would talk to J. P. about the whole thing.
“All right, Fergy,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.” It was getting on toward five o’clock by now. The sky had clouded over, and it was a little chilly. We walked on down the road until the woods on one side gave out. There was a field there, with stone walls around it, and down at the other side of the field a white clapboard house. In the field, a bunch of kids were playing with a football—a couple of girls and three or four guys—little ones, big ones. They weren’t playing a game exactly, but were just running around and tossing the football back and forth among themselves and shouting and hollering, “Give it here.” The house was just an ordinary house. A string of blue gray wood smoke was coming out of the chimney. Even at that distance I could smell the smoke. After a while the kids would go inside, at least the ones who lived there. They would warm up in front of the fire, and then they would wash their hands and faces and go into the dining room and eat their suppers. Maybe they would have fried chicken, peas, and mashed potatoes and gravy, although maybe they weren’t that rich and would only have hot dogs and baked beans. But I hoped it would be fried chicken and mashed potatoes—I loved mashed potatoes with gravy on them.
We sat down on the stone wall where we could watch the kids toss the football around. “Look at that, Fergy,” J. P. said. “Competition. It’s just training for war.”
“They just seem to be tossing the ball around,” I said.
J. P. shrugged. “It comes down to the same thing. So. What’s on your mind, Fergy?”
I swallowed, because it isn’t easy to tell your own dad what he ought to do. “J. P., maybe if we had a regular house, and you and Gussie had regular jobs, and Ooma and I went to school, maybe Ooma wouldn’t be getting into trouble all the time.”
J. P. turned his head to look at me. He just looked for a while, tugging at his mustache. “Where’d you get a strange idea like that from, Fergy? Who’ve you been talking to?”
“Nobody,” I said. “It’s my own idea. I didn’t get it from anybody.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. I sat on the stone wall, smelling the wood smoke and watching the kids play. One of the big kids had the football and was dodging around while the others chased him. Finally, they got him down and piled on top of him. “Fergy,” J. P. said, “it’s pretty disappointing for me to hear you say something like that. I thought I’d taught you better. Don’t you realize what the system will do to you if it hooks you?”
I knew, because he’d told us often enough. “Well, I know, J. P. They’ll turn me into one of their automatons. They’ll lure me in with material goods and then trap me into spending the rest of my life manufacturing instant obsolescence and the tools of war.”
“Exactly,” J. P. said. Out in the field, a couple of girls had got the football away from the big kid and were racing around, passing it to each other to keep it away from the rest. “First, they lure you in with something small—a Walkman, something like that. So you go to work for them to pay for it in a deadly, monotonous factory somewhere, pushing a button or pulling a lever a thousand times an hour. Then, they get your mouth watering for something bigger—a new car, maybe. So you tell yourself you’ll work for them a little longer—what’s the difference if you put in a couple of more years? The next thing you know, you’ve got a credit card, a revolving charge account, you’re up to here in debt, and they’ve got you, because you have to keep on working for them until you get the debt cleared off. And you never will, because they’ll keep on luring you in with more goodies—a house in the suburbs, a swimming pool, a vacation condo in Florida. The next thing you know, you’re retired and you’ve spent your whole life working for a company that makes nuclear weapons or cars designed to fall apart in three years, or planning TV advertisements meant to sell the system to the next generation coming along. You know all this, Fergy. It’s all in the journals. Haven’t I explained it often enough?”
“Yes,” I said. Out in the field, a couple of the little kids had got hold of the girl with the ball and were trying to tackle her. She threw it to the other girl, but it wasn’t a good throw and the ball bounced along the ground. They all chased after it. “The only thing is, J. P., sometimes I have trouble believing it.”
He gave me a long look and pulled at his mustache again. “Isn’t it obvious to you, Fergy? Maybe you better go back and do some more reading in the journals.”
I hoped he wouldn’t make me do that. Even if he was my father, the journals were the most boring things I’d ever read, all full of philosophy and his ideas about the system and so forth. The only good parts were where he told stories about the bad things that the system did to us, such as arresting him for false advertising about the honey. Or the time that Ooma got some kind of contagious skin disease in Hartford and they put her in a home for a week until she got better. Or the time that J. P. and the Wiz got caught draining gas-pump hoses in a gas station late at night and had to go to jail overnight until we could earn enough money to get them out. Those parts of the journals were interesting, but most of it was J. R.’s thoughts and boring as could be.
“Well,” I said, “I know you’re right, but I’m having an awful lot of trouble believing it. I mean, what’s better about telling people our honey cures high blood pressure than regular TV advertising?”
“It is good for hypertension,” J. P. said. “I read it in a magazine somewhere.”
Out in the field, the kids were all piled together like a bunch of puppies. The football was underneath them. “You always told us not to believe anything we read in magazines. You said it was all propaganda for the system.”
He looked kind of cross, and I wished I hadn’t said it. “It wasn’t that kind of a magazine. It was a medical journal.” He gave me a look. “You’ve got to understand, Fergy. The system is set up to steal from us; it’s only fair for us to reclaim what we need.”
I didn’t say anything, just sat there on that stone wall looking out at the kids piled up in the field. A bell began to ring down near the clapboard house.
The kids unpiled themselves and began to jog toward the house, still tossing the football back and forth among them. “J. P., I’m worr
ied about not going to school. I’m getting dumber and dumber every day, and I’m scared that by the time I’m grown-up I won’t know anything and it’ll be too late.”
He frowned and looked down at his hands. Then he looked at me and said, “Ninety percent of what you learn in school is propaganda, Fergy. What can you expect? They’re paid by the system, so they teach the values of the system.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “But what about arithmetic and science and stuff like that? I can’t even do long division.”
“You can learn that stuff on your own, Fergy. Gussie can get you some books and help you.”
I wasn’t sure she could. Gussie’s father was a professor of history at Harvard. His name was Gordon E. Hamilton, and his wife’s name was Margaret Hamilton. They were our grandparents, but we hardly knew anything about them. J. P. didn’t like Gussie to talk about them to us, and we weren’t allowed to see them, because they tried to have J. P. put in jail when Gussie ran away with him when she was sixteen. But, sometimes, when Gussie was in the right mood and J. P. wasn’t around, she would tell Ooma and me what it was like when she was our age. They had two servants—a cook and a maid to clean and serve the meals. They ate at a fancy table filled with silverware and glasses that cost thousands of dollars. “We always had cut flowers on the table, flowers cut fresh every day. Oh, the table looked so beautiful when it was set, with the light from the chandelier glinting off the glasses and the silver so shiny and bright. I thought it was beautiful when I was a little girl. I was so proud of my parents for having such beautiful things. My dad was a famous historian, and important people were always coming to the house for dinner. My mother was beautiful. She was descended from Priscilla Alden and had played with Governor Waters and Senator Fillmore when they were children. My parents seemed so wonderful to me, like movie stars—sort of beautiful and faraway. I always knew I wasn’t good enough for them. Then I met J. P. and he changed my life.”
“How did you meet J. P.?”
“He came to Harvard to work on a demonstration against war. My father was on some committee, and J. P. came to our house to talk to him. I decided he was a great man and I fell in love, and when the administration broke up the demonstration, the police came after J. P. and we had to jump out of a window in Leveret House and get out of Cambridge. It seemed so romantic to me.”
The police caught up with them, tried to put J. P. in jail for kidnapping Gussie, and brought Gussie home. But she ran away again, and, since she was over sixteen and was going with J. P. of her own free will, they couldn’t do anything to J. P. And that was why we were never allowed to see our grandparents.
A lot of times I wondered what our grandparents were like. Were they nice? Were they funny or sad or what? Would they like me if we ever went to visit them? For I was determined that one day, when I was grown-up and didn’t have to do what J. P. said anymore, I would go to visit them, if they weren’t already dead.
But it meant that Gussie never had had any schooling after she was sixteen, so I didn’t know how much she could teach me. She probably knew about long division and chlorophyll, but I figured that somebody who dropped out in the tenth grade couldn’t be too good of a teacher. J. P. was older and had started college, but after a year he’d dropped out and hitchhiked all over the United States getting up demonstrations. He probably knew more than Gussie did, but I knew he wouldn’t teach me, because he was always too busy writing his journals. “J. P., I ought to go to a regular school, so I could be sure I was learning right.”
J. P. slapped his knee, looking kind of exasperated. “Fergy, I think we’ve had enough of this conversation. I’m not going to go back on my principles just to suit you. We’ll get you some books to study from.” He got up from the stone wall and started back to where the vans were parked. I went on sitting there.
Down at the end of the field, the kids were going into the white clapboard house, the whole bunch of them. I figured that the mother would give them all Cokes and cookies, unless she figured it would spoil their appetites for the fried chicken and the mashed potatoes and gravy.
FOUR
WE WORKED AROUND New Jersey for a while, mostly in shopping malls in the suburbs. “There’s plenty of money in these places,” J. P. said. “They’re bored and they don’t know what to do with it. You can sell these suckers anything if you pitch it right. Tell them it’ll make people admire them, tell them it’ll make them feel good, tell them it’ll make them rich. The system’s got them conditioned to believe that products will solve their problems. If you’ve got troubles, there’s always something you can buy to relieve them.”
That was one thing J. P. was right about. He told people that the amulets were mystic symbols invented by the Indians five hundred years ago right on that very spot of wherever we were, and they believed it and paid fifteen dollars apiece for them. He told them that the honey would cure high blood pressure and a whole lot of other things, too, and they believed that and paid fifteen dollars for that, too. He told them that the answers to their problems were all in the “Extracts from the Journals of J. P. Wheeler,” and they took the pamphlets and read them looking for the answers. They probably would have read all the journals, not just the extracts, but the journals were hundreds of pages long—and getting longer all the time—and we couldn’t afford to have them printed up. It was expensive enough getting a thirty-two-page pamphlet of extracts printed. Gussie always said we ought to sell them, instead of giving them away, but J. P. wouldn’t hear of that. He wanted them to have the widest possible readership. “We’re gaining thousands of adherents every year,” he said. “We’re whetting their appetites for the complete work. Someday we’ll start printing that up volume by volume and sell it. It’ll make a fortune.”
But even if we weren’t making any money on the pamphlets, we were doing okay with the amulets and the honey. We were going along pretty well, able to eat at McDonald’s and Burger King and buy wine for the grown-ups. Then Ooma got us in trouble again. The way it happened was this: We were parked in a shopping mall, set up in front of a store called Madman Meyer’s Electronic Cabin, which sold stereos and transistors and stuff like that. J. P. should have known better, for Ooma has a special weakness for radios and cassette players. The minute we finished our act and J. P. started his sales pitch about the honey, she went over to the window of Madman Meyer’s and stood there with her thumb in her mouth looking at the stuff. I went over and stood next to her. “Ooma, just forget it,” I said. “You’re going to get us in trouble again. If you do, we’ll be back to peanut-butter sandwiches and won’t be able to eat at McDonald’s anymore.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything,” she said around her thumb.
“Yes, you were,” I said. “Now, just forget it.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
Just then J. P. signaled me to bring him another case of honey from the van. I went over there, trying to keep an eye on Ooma as best I could. I climbed into the van, dragged out a carton of honey, and took another look at Ooma. She was still standing there in front of the window, with her thumb in her mouth. I brought the case over to the folding table, and then, as usual, the manager of Madman Meyer’s came out of the store shouting at us. “Who gave you permission to do this?”
“The Constitution of the United States gave us permission,” J. P. said, giving the manager a smile. “We’re exercising our First Amendment rights. We’re a religious organization.”
The manager stood behind the folding table next to J. P., with his hands on his hips. “I don’t care if you’re Saint Alabaster the Great, you’re blocking my door. Now, pack up and get out of here before I call the police.”
J. P. gave the crowd a big wink and they laughed.
“Please do call the police,” he said. “They’ll be pretty thrilled that you’re interfering with our First Amendment rights.”
“You can bet I’m going to interfere with your First Amendment rights. We’ll see what the police have to say about it.” He
stomped off into his store.
I followed him a little bit to see what he would do. Sure enough, through the window I could see him go over to the phone hanging on the wall behind the counter and dial. Then I realized that Ooma wasn’t there anymore. I spun around and saw her slipping into the back of the van, carrying a radio near as big as a bread box. I dashed over to the van and grabbed her by the shoulder. “Give me that thing,” I said. I made a grab for it, and then I heard a shout. I looked back. The manager of Madman Meyer’s was standing in front of the store, with his hands on his hips, looking quickly all around him. His mouth was grim, and I knew we were going to be in serious trouble the minute he found that radio. “Quick, Ooma. Shove that thing inside a sleeping bag.”
Then I ran back over to J. P. “We better get out of here,” I said in a low voice. “Ooma’s got a huge, big radio in the van.”
J. P. glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, folks,” he said in a loud voice. “I’m afraid our time’s up. We’re due in Metuchen in half an hour to deliver our spiritual message to a group there.” In a low voice he said to the others, “Ooma’s done it again. Let’s get out of here.”
Outside Looking In Page 3