by Dean Ing
Aaron, it’s not my fault you’re only half Jewish; it took two guys to steer Charlie between the ditches. Any kid with two pals this loyal, cautious, industrious and forgiving is rich beyond measure. If Charlie had much value to you it was probably as your hood ornament. Friendships of this grandeur do not fade; they’re only interrupted now and then. Because, as I’ve noted before, integrity is thicker than blood.
As for Charlie himself, I may be the least qualified person to give a fair account of him. My middle name, by some immense coincidence, is Charles, and Tex-Mex schoolmates nicknamed me “Chollie Huevos.” I have no earthly idea what that implies. Charlie contains cupfuls of two cousins, a teaspoonful of my neighbor Jimmy, and a smidgin of a knowitall kid I loathed in class. Charlie was merry, and sturdy, and sly, and overconfident, and lazy, and deceptive, and sometimes a dimwit, and occasionally the opposite. Dad warned me that if I were ever arrested he would be obliged to penalize me more than others. This may account in part for the fact that officers never caught the youth they followed across Austin rooftops in what is known today as parkour.
Only after I turned Charlie loose did I begin to realize how deeply World War II changed nearly all Americans, saving perhaps only the few insulated rich. At the time, battles in headlines were romantic distant adventures to boys—with startling exceptions. I met a sixteen-year-old combat veteran, honorably discharged after medics discovered this wounded Marine had managed to keep his youth a secret for a year. A few eighteen-year-old vets returned to finish high school, and to play football against fourteen-year-olds. The romance of war faded early for the vets, but eventually for the Charlies too. We all accumulated bruises of one kind or another, and for me, a few broken bones and teeth. This was Texas high-school football, remember.
My dad, like many another, felt so guilty drawing a princely salary in an aircraft plant that he enlisted in the Army for a tenth of that sum, rising to the dizzy elevation of Private First Class. I won more stripes than that, but on my backside, from my mother. I could claim I didn’t earn them, but the facts would keep getting in my way. At work my mother commanded a huge machine of many small parts, a Mergenthaler Linotype, that composed newstype column by column. Women became welders, assemblers, riveters, and ferry pilots, and in the process feminists. Combat vets who returned expecting to find their wives unchanged, joked that they needed a treaty in the war between the sexes.
Many things changed by just disappearing. Our big-little books, metal toys, and old tools went into scrap drives. Postwar replacements, when they came, were unrecognizable. Balsa was a war material, and the rubber-powered flying model hobby never recovered. And does anybody not know why I still grieve for my Action Comics #1, introducing Superman, that went into a scrap drive in 1943? A fine copy recently sold for over $2 million.
But it wasn’t just things that, in changing, changed us as well. A new and more knowing (some would say “cynical”) set of attitudes crowded older ones aside. I was tempted to slather Charlie’s days with the special flavors of Southwest mythology, but much of it, today, would be met with glaze-eyed disbelief from my grandlarvae. A sample: before the war it was well-known to many of us that a single remedy was favored by Grandma for baldness, acne, poison ivy, sunburn and assorted bug bites. The remedy? A poultice of fresh cow patty. After the war, even little kids realized that the world is not quite what they were told it is.
Of course, a few old myths lurch ahead into this century. Not always because they make sense, but because they’re still fun. I fondly recall how therapeutic it was to sneak up and burst a paper sack behind the head of a person in the throes of hiccups. If he hadn’t had hiccups, well, now he would. The time that head was my fearsome Uncle Fred’s, I escaped justice only by insisting I’d been almost certain he’d hiccupped.
Or maybe that was Charlie.