In winter, Jim moved the combat to his room, one place he might avoid his stepfather and sudden paddlings with bright orange Hot Wheels track. He created elaborate narratives of quests and battles, skirmishes and rescues carried out by his collection of Army figures and medieval knights and their steeds. Across the cellar floor, he constructed a vast landscape of castles and stockades, every miniature mountain range and bend in the river a setting for story.
Modeling clay was a block of nothing. Here was potential. You could create something from this nothing. When I was playing with the soldiers and knights, if there was some element of the story missing—a horse or a guy or a building—I would create it. My imagination could transform this amorphous block into something.
Ravenna officials couldn’t quite decide to which school district the ranch house belonged, and in the first six years he lived there, Jim was assigned to as many different schools. No sooner did he make friends than he’d be shuttled off by Betty, the bus driver, to a new school. First grade, third grade, fourth—a continual adjustment to new teachers, new classmates, and confusion about where to find the lunchroom.
I was always introducing myself to new people. As an only child, I kind of lived in my head anyway, so I brought my friends with me, having many voices in my head. The glass-half-empty view of this is isolation.
But the glass-half-full version is independence. I wasn’t subjected to the hierarchy that had already been established with these kids who grew up together and who knew each others’ faults and flaws and what they could do well. I wasn’t pigeonholed into the established social order.
Every time I had to make an important decision, I could rely on my own instincts. I could rely on three voices: my head, my heart, and my gut. No outside noise can penetrate a solid sense of self-trust.
Jim didn’t aspire to be the most popular boy in class or teacher’s pet or the one who got the best grades. His goal was to decipher the unspoken code the other children seemed intuitively to understand. They raised their hands and waited to be called on before they spoke. They formed orderly lines when they walked outside for recess and knew the rules of the game when they stepped onto the softball field—all apparently without being told. None of it quite made sense to Jim, but he went through the motions as best he could, as if he understood the plan. And sometimes, he defied the rules.
One afternoon, while his second-grade classmates sat hunched over their penmanship assignment, he went to the pencil sharpener at the back of the room. Curious, he removed it from the wall and discovered inside yellow curls of wood shavings and bits of soft, black graphite. Impulsively, he smudged it across his upper lip and cheerfully goose-stepped his way back to his desk.
His prank resulted in the first of many trips to the hall to endure a paddling from a paddling-prone teacher. After that, it seemed the slightest infraction—laughing too loudly, losing his place in his reading book, tasting paste—warranted the same punishment, and he soon gave up even trying to play by the rules. As soon as the morning bell had rung, he’d don another mustache or speak out of turn in order to get the anticipated spanking out of the way as soon as possible.
Judith surmised her son might benefit from an activity both structured and enjoyable, and suggested he join the local Cub Scout troop. Perhaps swimming and building balsa-wood airplanes and ascending the ranks with the other boys would help him develop not only social skills but a bit of much-needed self-esteem.
She drove Jim to his first meeting and he joined the pack around the Formica kitchen table. The den mother brought the meeting to order and set a fat white candle in the center of the table. She lit it and informed the boys that when it had burned all the way down, she’d bring out cake and cookies and Hawaiian Punch. If they misbehaved, she warned, she’d blow out the candle and they’d receive no treats that day. These were rules Jim could understand.
He returned the next week, eager to learn all about camping and hiking and pinewood derbies. The den mother lit the candle, and almost immediately, the other boys pursed their lips and began blowing gently toward the flame, delighting in its quivering dance. Jim watched them lean closer and puff harder until the flame went out. Young as he was, he was bewildered and appalled by their self-sabotage. Feeling more the outsider than ever, he vowed that his scouting days were over and worried whether he’d ever find the place he belonged—or recognize it when he did.
Jim’s grades were solid in every subject, but not exceptional. His teachers noted on his report cards that he lacked focus, but the personality inventories he completed in those years suggested two areas in which he might excel: the military and art.
Three times a week, Jim attended services with his mother and stepfather in a series of grim fundamentalist churches, each more devoutly self-righteous than the last. “It was horrifying to me when they started that,” Pam would recall. “Once, they came over to my parents’ after church. Jimmy was sitting on the sofa and doing nothing, not even talking. It was like he’d had a lobotomy. I’m like, ‘Jimmy, what is the matter with you? What’s happening? Let’s go up in the acorn tree. Let’s read.’ Nothing.”
Terrorized as he was by the threat of eternal damnation, Jim was uneasy with the pervasive hypocrisy he sensed among the pious. He watched ministers weep upon the altar, begging forgiveness as they skimmed from church coffers. He heard them preach of purity even as they imagined the next week’s tryst with the deacon or enticing some small boy into the sacristy.
The congregations turned a blind eye to their pastors’ crimes, believing absolution lay in accurately reciting Bible verses about the wages of sin. They cautioned Jim that his shortcomings—his less than stellar grades and classroom disruptions—marked him as a prime candidate for possession by Satan himself.
Life on the playground was no easier. He tried to emulate the other boys—boys who knew that athletic success was one of the few tickets out of a place like Ravenna. They’d mastered bats and balls and even strikes and spares long before, and Jim’s was often the last name called when the two captains chose up sides for a game.
But with third grade came Jim’s first distinguishing achievement. Clad in a tall red hat and black pack straps crossed smartly across his chest, he appeared as a tin soldier opposite classmate Kelly Callahan in the school play Mr. Grumpy’s Toy Shop. When Jim turned the key on Kelly’s back, her china-doll character was brought to life to dance on Christmas Eve with the Raggedy Anns and Andys and teddy bears that made up the rest of the ensemble. A small magic happened when he stepped center stage in full costume and character to play make-believe in someone else’s story.
Not long after, Betty, the bus driver, phoned Judith with the astonishing news that Jim no longer disrupted her route by burning holes in his math book with a magnifying glass or singing too loudly along with the Fleetwood Mac tape in her eight-track player. Perhaps he’d changed merely because he’d turned nine. Or perhaps Jim’s discovery that he could channel his gift of storytelling to productive ends left him little time for mischief.
The other sixth graders chose conventional topics for their end-of-year science projects, but Jim selected the Sasquatch. His presentation included a display assembled from pictures he’d found in magazines, and he retrieved the modeling clay from the back of his closet and created a detailed diorama of Bigfoot lumbering through the forest. More pseudoscience than fact, his elaborate project—his story—nonetheless impressed the judges and earned a blue ribbon.
And at home, he packed up his knights and soldiers and cleared the basement to make room for a makeshift stage delineated by cardboard cartons and stray lengths of lumber. At one end, he set a portable record player and folded out its built-in speakers. He flipped through the Alice Cooper, Joni Mitchell, and Kiss albums Aunt Pam had introduced him to, and at last slid his Jackson Five records over the spindle.
Improvised mic in hand, he stood alone on the little stage, accompanying the Jack
sons on “ABC” and “I’ll Be There.” He gyrated his way through “Dancing Machine,” and sometimes, when he managed to hit the notes just right, he imagined his cabaret was real, the bare bulb in the ceiling a colored spotlight, the music continuing long into the morning.
Lights flashed in a pulsating strobe across the yard, and the wail of sirens echoed against the barn wall and over the field. Just inside the split rail fence, Jim stood alone, watching the team of EMTs as they bent over the blanketed figure that lay motionless upon a stretcher. He looked up when Billy’s father from next door approached purposefully from the shadows and asked what the commotion was all about.“I don’t know,” Jim told him. “My mom’s going to the hospital.”
His curiosity satisfied, the man turned and walked back to his house, his own son safely asleep inside. He returned to his television and his recliner, leaving Jim on the other side of the fence in the sound and the light and the darkness.
Perhaps the aneurysm had been brought on by high blood pressure, and perhaps it had been a long time coming. Whatever the case, the vessel in Judith’s brain had ballooned to the point of rupture. In the hospital, she suffered two more hemorrhagic strokes, leaving her half-paralyzed, half-blind, and unable to respond when Jim tried to talk with her. “You could see her struggling to make the word happen, but she couldn’t say it,” he’d recall years later.
Few support groups existed in 1976 to help families care for someone in Judith’s state. Her husband and son were on their own, and the counsel of their current church group was less than helpful. “She wasn’t right with God,” they told Jim. “That’s why she got sick.” They offered no assistance or listening ear, and took their good time deciding whether it was proper for Judith to come to church in the slacks she must wear over her incontinence pads.
“Judy had to wear some godawful ugly shoes because she was paralyzed, and they gave her a hard time about that, too,” Pam would remember. “After the stroke, I took Jim to their church and the minister gave a sermon about how our blood was going to run four miles wide and four miles deep unless we came up and saved ourselves. So of course I took Jim and left. And I said that I would never, ever take him to church again.”
Though I did meet some wonderful people at those churches, people with a solid foundation of family and togetherness, they were caught up in dogma. It was my first brush with “Fuck your church.” I knew in my heart that the universe is not that ugly and that nobody’s sitting in judgment. There’s just shit that happens, and if we all help each other, we can work through it.
I knew these people were wrong. What they were saying had nothing to do with what I was forced to learn in Bible study. It was weird, crazy judgment and it made me not want to have any part of it.
Even people in the family told my mother her affliction was God’s punishment. Punishment by God for your behavior is not one of the things on the list of how the world works. What fucking God of love is that?
When one home health aide after another proved incompetent or unreliable, Aunt Pam stepped in to help with Judith’s care. “I tried to make life as normal as I could,” she would recall. “And Jim did everything he could for his mother. She was all he had.”
Jim shadowed Judith in case she fell, helped her bake cookies or her favorite maraschino cherry nut cake, buttoned her into her clothes, and loaded her endless laundry into the washing machine. He accompanied her to the bathroom.
Often late for school because of his obligations, Jim suffered the taunting of classmates and scoldings from the principal when he ran down the hall to get to class on time. Yet school was a respite. He continued to earn good grades, and when the gym teacher introduced the 50-yard dash, he discovered a welcome release. He ran, and he learned he was good at it. His own speed rushing in his ears, he could focus on no one’s performance but his own, forget for a little while the other boys and the teachers and the sadness waiting for him at home.
And all the while, he’d find himself watching, as if just over his shoulder someone might appear. Someone to catch his glance, understand an unspoken joke, ask to hear his story and stand beside him to help rewrite it.
The patchwork of fields and woods and highways tipped as the plane banked over the rainy Grand Rapids airport. Jim pressed close to the window and took in what he could of this Michigan, this flat, gray place he’d never seen before and would now call home.
Judith, in a moment of clarity, had realized caring for her and rushing sleepy off to school was no life for a 13-year-old. After a flurry of phone calls between Ohio and Michigan, Mike and his new wife, Jan, agreed the only sensible option was to bring Jim to Scottville to live with them.
Though they knew it was all for the best, they were ill-prepared for the sudden arrival of a nearly grown son. They enjoyed the students in their science and English classrooms, and Mike was a devoted mentor to the young athletes he coached on the high school wrestling team. But this would be a different matter altogether. “Even though I was around kids all day, I knew nothing about motherhood,” Jan would recall. “Suddenly I’m inheriting a teenager.”
And there was Jim, emerging from the burst of passengers at the arrival gate, already nearly as tall as his father, his dark, wavy hair framing his solemn face, his hand extended in polite greeting.
Covering their discomfort and doubt in smiles and small talk, Mike and Jan loaded Jim’s carry-ons and oversized black footlocker into the back of their Toyota. Yes, the flight from Cleveland had been fine and he hadn’t been nervous traveling alone. No, Judith’s condition hadn’t changed. His room on the second floor was ready for him; spring break was over and school would start again on Monday.
Once on the road, they fell into thoughtful silence, lulled by the rain and the unremitting sameness of the miles.
His son was plenty intelligent, Mike thought. He’d seen signs of that during his infrequent visits to Ohio, and Jim’s graciousness at the airport had confirmed his belief. He imagined the perfect son he would become, a chip right off the old Mike block, a boy who’d make the honor roll and join the wrestling team next year when he was in high school.
A visit to J. C. Penney would be their first order of business, Jan decided. They could stop there when they reached town in about an hour. Jim’s torn jeans—no matter how trendy—would never do for a teacher’s son. She imagined the new friends he’d bring home—the quiet, well-behaved children of good families who’d cause no disruption in her well-ordered house. She wondered what was in the big black trunk. She sighed.
I probably looked like some kind of derelict to them. This was something that had been tossed in Jan’s lap, and if she had to deal with it, she was going to clean this thing up.
When you settle into a pair of jeans, you love them, and new clothes are stiff and awkward. I didn’t feel like they respected me, and I grumbled because they were trying to change me.
But I took their lead because they knew these Scottville people better than I did. I had no idea if I’d fit in or not.
Jan and Mike didn’t set out to transform Jim into someone he wasn’t. With the best of intentions and limited experience as parents, they began innocently writing script and stage directions for a boy they barely knew.
While they planned his life, Jim sat quietly between them and looked out the rain-streaked windows. He wondered who lived in the towns they drove through, tiny towns with curious names like Rothbury and New Era. He read billboards advertising silver lakes and sandy dunes, took in a landscape different from the one he’d left behind, a landscape of rivers and forests and misty fields and a stand of pine trees arranged on a hillside in the shape of a star.
As they neared their house, Mike left the highway and took the county’s back roads, muddy, uneven expanses rutted by snowplows only weeks before. Neatly kept barns and farmhouses stood well back from the roads, and massive maple trees clustered like sentinels at the ends of their driveways. T
hen the farms became less frequent, the ferny asparagus fields between them wider. At last, after a long stretch of uninterrupted road, Mike turned the car off Darr Road and parked before a compact house finished in rough-cut shingles and set amid tall second-growth pines. A redwood deck circled the front of the house, and the porch light was on.
On Monday morning, they piled back into the Toyota and made the four-mile drive to the new Mason County Central Middle School just north of town. It was Jim’s first glimpse of Scottville: the block-long collection of hardware stores and coffee shops and drugstores bounded by railroad tracks to the south and the town’s single traffic light to the north. The shops would be busy come Friday night when husbands received their paychecks and brought wives in for their weekly groceries. On Tuesday, farmers would truck their cattle to the livestock sale in the odiferous barn at the far end of the parking lot behind the bank. But this morning, the street was quiet, and Jim concentrated on his stiff oxford cloth shirt and new J. C. Penney slacks.
He’d spent the weekend adjusting to the routine of the Keenan household and suffering Jan’s anger when she forbade him to tape his poster of Kiss bassist Gene Simmons and his unnaturally long tongue to the raw wood paneling in his room.
In comparison, getting used to a new school wouldn’t be so hard, he knew. He’d learned a long time ago how to quickly assess the hierarchy of in-crowd and scholars and cutups and bullies and the invisible but impenetrable lines that separated them.
For their part, his new classmates had known one another since kindergarten and were just as practiced in dealing with newcomers. They knew from experience that in their eagerness to fit in, incoming students often overstepped boundaries, exaggerated their accomplishments, and disrupted classes in their bid for attention. They were generally given a wide berth until they learned the unspoken rules of the tribe and came to obey them. “As the new guy, you’re under scrutiny on so many levels,” he’d explain decades later. “You’re being watched by the jocks, the middle of the pack, the farmers, the brainiacs. The rule breakers, the rule followers, everybody’s watching to see what you’re going to do.”
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 2