CHAPTER FIVE

In which the whole family moves away to a nice little town somewhere else

 

Now nothing would have suited me better than to stay in that fine little town of Trippabad, Colorado where I could have grown up to become the local neighborhood “Boo Radley,” or joined the Mafia which was in charge of City Hall at that time, or what the heck, who knows, maybe I would have fallen in love with some nice little girl from the other side of town where we couldn’t afford to live, and lived off her Daddy’s money till death do us part.  But as fate would have it, and like it or not, it was not to be so, and shortly after my Grandma Wrathburn died of smothering from playing with dry-cleaner clothes-wrapping plastic film that someone left in her crib, and then catching stomach cancer, it was not too long after she was safely covered up with dirt that my Mama began spreading the rumor amongst her children that perhaps now my Daddy would be forced to accept one of those promotions that cause you to pull up roots and ship off with your whole family to some strange town somewhere else.  And apparently the family had experienced several of these moving-away promotions before I was born, and the one that landed us all in Trippabad resulted in what has ever since been considered by my family to be our own personal family version of the Death March through Hell.  But living in this grubby little ex-mining town full of unemployed miners and migrant grape pickers was an essential part of the master plan, for unbeknownst to us all, it was really my fault that we ended up there because as I explained earlier, I needed a really nasty place to be born and raised so that I would suffer enough to make the down-payment on the cosmic debts of certain parties, which pretty much amounted to becoming twisted up enough through the experiencing of sordid and extreme trials and tribulations as an infant that I would grow up to be the type of young man who would want to save the world.

Now in the midst of all this excitement and during the countdown towards our impending escape from Trippabad, we and our aunts and uncles and cousins on my Mama’s side of the family had the sad task of meeting together at my dead Grandma Wrathburn’s little old house in the next town over, to paint her house and rake her yard and put the dead leaves in little piles to be burned.  When we drove up to the little wooden house I can remember feeling extra nice and happy, stepping out of the car into sunshine, green grass and blue sky, breathing fresh clean air all the way down into my chest.  I walked into the empty house with my head up straight and wandered around looking at it with clear eyes for the first time in my five years of living.  My aunts and uncles and cousins knew by now that there was no sense in talking to me because I would not speak to anyone who didn’t live in my own house, but I would occasionally play girl games with the girls and I would sometimes play boy games with the boys as long as there was no rough-housing or other physical contact, laughing, or talking involved.  Mostly I tagged around behind my Mama and my Daddy and my aunts and my uncles because they were too busy to notice me, and still being in shock from the suddenness of how Grandma Wrathburn had succumbed and died so quickly from her stomach cancer, and since they were all grown up anyway, they didn’t nag me to play noisy childish games with them, so for the most part, except for occasional probings about whether or not the cat had got my tongue, I was able to blend in with a brown stain on the kitchen wallpaper behind where the stovepipe used to be.  It was about my size and the same color as my long sleeve shirt, and long-sleeved was the only kind of shirt I would wear because I was not going to let anybody see me in short sleeves or short pants, after all that I had been through.

Towards the part of the day when I would have on a normal day been pretending to take a nap, I was standing in the front yard of my dead Grandma Wrathburn’s house waiting for my Uncle Buddy who was in charge of burning up the piles of leaves, to come around front and start some fires.  My cousins were all in the back yard playing with the little fires back there when they thought no one was looking, and I had come around front by myself so that when they got in trouble for playing with fire I would not be there to be blamed.  I was waiting for Uncle Buddy to come around front and start me up a fire of my own, when all of a sudden here came a little kid just my size who I had never seen before, and he was grinning and holding up a little box of matches.  He asked me if I wanted to have some fun, and I shook my head back and forth, which meant No, but that little kid wasn’t paying any attention and he seemed so pleased with himself as he explained to me that he had stolen the matches from his Daddy, that his bright red freckles seemed to glow with a light all of their own, and I could almost imagine two little horns sprouting out of his forehead.  As he lit up a match stick, he looked at me right in my eyes and said, Look, Maxwell, and I got a funny feeling I’d known him before but couldn’t figure out from where, but maybe I had played with him sometime when we had visited my Grandma Wrathburn every Sunday at her house.  Anyhow, this little red-haired boy took those matches and lighted up every pile of leaves in the front yard, and looked at me again and laughed real loud, and then he ran up a tree and disappeared from sight.

Then here came my Uncle Buddy around the corner of the house, and there I was standing in front of a whole bunch of little leaf fires, and he came over and stood next to me and looked down at me with his kind blue eyes so full of all-knowing wisdom, and he said to me, Maxwell, tell me who lit these fires, and I said to him in a little squeaky voice, because although I normally would never speak to anyone who didn’t live in my own house, I was so absolutely quaking with fear of getting in trouble that I managed to squeak out, Some little boy, and I pointed up into the tree where he had disappeared.  And my Uncle Buddy said, while I stared at my shoes, Well if you see that little boy around here again, you come tell me or tell your Daddy, because no little boys are supposed to be lighting fires without big people around.

And then here came my Uncle Buddy’s son, my cousin Dale, who is older than me and even a little bit older than my oldest big sister Glenda, and he was tuckered out from raking those leaves into piles all morning, and he was mighty disappointed that they were already half burnt, but my Uncle Buddy said to him, You just stay here with your little cousin Maxwell and show him how to stir the leaves with a stick so they all will get burnt, and don’t let him fall in and get burnt up himself.  Then my Uncle Buddy, who was married to Grandma Wrathburn’s daughter, my Mama’s next to oldest big sister, gave me a wink and looked up into that tree where he thought that bad little boy was still hiding, and walked into the house to help my Daddy paint the kitchen again because the first layer of paint they’d put on the day before had all peeled off since my Mama had brought the wrong kind of paint from the store.

After my Uncle Buddy went inside the house, I looked up from the little fire which my cousin Dale was teaching me how to stir, to see where that little red-headed boy was hiding, but there was no little boy in that tree, no little boy at all.

When we and our cousins and aunts and uncles were finally finished cleaning up my dead Grandma Wrathburn’s house, my Mama piled all us kids into the family car and took us home to the next town, leaving my Daddy and my Uncle Buddy to finish painting the kitchen again.  Once home, I walked into my bedroom and jumped on my horse Jerky who was named that because of the way he could be made to jump around all over the bedroom floor if you galloped him so hard that the springs holding him to his metal framework stretched out as far as they could, and I went into an ecstatic trance and my insides opened up and I could see all the way in, and this is what I saw.

My Grandma Wrathburn was in there, and so was that little red-headed freckled boy who started the fires, and my poor old Grandma Wrathburn was being chased all around my insides by that monstrous, bad little boy until he caught her, rolled her up into a greasy little ball, popped her into his mouth and swallowed her whole.  Then he jumped out of my chest, which zipped itself up behind him, and he ran out of my room and down the hall and when I went out there looking for him, he was nowhere to be found, and my Mama asked me if I wasn’t supposed to be putting on my pajamas instead of banging around on that horse.

I went into my room and put on my pajamas like a zombie and lay down on my bed, and got ready to stare at the ceiling for a couple hours, in anticipation of the nightmares that always came when I went to sleep, when all of the sudden I noticed an odd sort of blank spot in my chest where my Grandma Wrathburn used to be.  I had the oddest sort of feeling that I could no longer remember almost anything that had ever happened to me, and as I faded off into that very soothing feeling, soffing on the smooth blanket edge, I vowed to myself that I would keep that blank spot in my chest empty so that I could feed off of it forever.

And that is very nearly what I ended up doing, for in order to write the preceding earlier chapters of this book I have endured every form of torture as an adult, from hypnosis to primal screaming therapy to every other kind of charlatanism in between, trying to make myself remember whatever nasty kinds of things must have been done to me as a fragile young infant boy, and let me tell you that none of that gobbledegoop could make me remember a darn thing, so in my desperate need to write this book, beginning with the part of my life that I can’t remember, I have been forced to exaggerate and embellish the part of it I could remember, the part that was too weird to believe but too real in my memory to deny, and the other half of the stuff that I have just described in these earlier preceding chapters was pure fabricated lies and conjectured speculation, because there is no other way than way-out true weirdness to explain the extreme outlandishness of the way in which I have chosen to conduct the balance of my life after that.

What follows here on out is my true confession of my life as a social cripple.

Of primary and utmost importance to me that summer was the upcoming start of my entry into my new life as a Kindergartener, for I had learned how to write my own name, Irving Maxwell Zdaemon, and my one and only ambition in life at this point was to show my teacher, whoever she might be, how I could do that.

When my Mama piled us kids into the family car to go down to the school and get us all signed up, except for my brother Dirk who was just along for the ride, and was as irritated as he could be that he was not yet five years old like me, all I could think about was what a great thing it would be to finally get to walk into that classroom and write down my name for my teacher.  As soon as my Mama walked us into what was going to be my Kindergarten classroom when school would get started up in a few weeks, my teacher-to-be came right on up to me and asked me what my name was, and I swallowed hard and with heart-thumping anticipation was just about getting my vocal cords all revved up while I stared at my shoes, practicing what I was going to say, when both my sisters, in their elder wisdom and compassion, piped up with the usual, He’s shy! routine and I was left staring at my shoes until my Mama dragged me off to a little table where I watched her write my name on pieces of paper until she said it was time for us to go.

I noticed that all the boys in the class were at least three feet taller than me, and noisy little bastards they were, blond and curly-haired like Boy in the Tarzan shows on TV, and before I knew it, my Mama was telling me again that we were all through there and it was time to go home.  I panicked inside and informed her in a dire whisper that I had not yet been given the opportunity to write my name for my teacher, and she looked over and, seeing that my teacher was busy talking to someone else’s Mama, she took me over to the chalkboard and handed me a piece of chalk and told me to write my name on the board.  Which I grudgingly did, although this was not what I’d had in mind all along, and with that we walked on out of there and piled back into the family car and went home to eat our cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and pretend to take our naps.

But still I held onto the vague hope that perhaps my teacher-to-be would someday allow me to write down my name for her, and maybe while she was at it she would protect me from those other wild boys who I could tell would only beat me up and tease me.  Looking forward to this postponed climax of my life, it was with great distress and disappointment that I heard my Mama say one day shortly thereafter, with all us kids gathered up into a little semi-circle in front of her, that we had all better get our rooms cleaned up real fast because she only had two weeks to pack all our things up into cardboard boxes and get us signed up for a different school many miles away from there in a town where we had never been called Forward Falls, Colorado, because my Daddy’s next promotion had finally come through and we would not be attending school in Trippabad after all.

And that was the end of my family’s personal and extended Death March through Hell, which we have ever after referred to cynically as just “Trippabad,” and the beginning of what was to become our life as the scarred refugees of an epic but secret war.