CHAPTER SIX

In which I gain more experience at botching a new lease on life

 

We had moved to Forward Falls in such a big fat hurry that we had no time to go find us a house to live in, so instead we put most of our things away somewhere and moved into the Naughty Pine Lodge out on the edge of town.  It was here in our furnished cottage at the Naughty Pine Lodge, and likewise at later times in similar situations when the family was kept holed up in temporary lodgings like vacationing campers, that we all got along real nice and had a hell of a good time just grooving on each others’ vibe.  I cannot explain it to this day, because it only just occurred to me as I sat down to think this up, but perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my Daddy was sitting up on top of a whole heap of new responsibilities which were not yet sitting up on top of him as they would get to be later after he found out what was really going on in his ever-upward climb to the seventh heaven of bureaucracy, which is the terminal desk job of a man with a mortgage and a bunch of credit cards.

Maybe our unusually happy condition was also partly to be blamed on the fact that all our stuff, which we had daily slimed with our soul parts which we wore out on our shirtsleeves, were hidden away in a warehouse somewhere and therefore not calling our attention at all times to the insidious crimes for which we would never forgive each other until the slimed artifactual reminders, one by one, dropped out of our lives.  There was two or three things in particular about this new place that made me a happy camper, and one was the toaster, which made better toast than any toast I had ever tasted, and I kept my Mama busy every day at breakfast time making me more toast and more toast until she would finally make me stop.  Another thing was me and my brother Dirk’s bunk bed, which was like a jungle gym where no other kids could play, so this was the first time we’d gotten close to anything like something we could climb on without getting yelled at, except my Grandpa Zdaemon, the human monkey bars, who was not dead yet but who still lived 150 miles away.  Another thing was that player piano that the owners of the Naughty Pine Lodge had in their cottage, which was just like the player piano which we had in our storage warehouse, having brought it all the way from a sheepherder’s shack somewhere in the vicinity of Trippabad, except that this player piano worked and ours didn’t.  Every so often my whole family and me would go over to those people’s cottage along with everybody else who lived at the Naughty Pine Lodge, and the big bald man who let us live in one of his cottages would sit in front of that player piano and push on those pedals and make music come out of it, and he would strip down to his tee-shirt and drip sweat and holler out the song words so loud that almost anyone who wasn’t a complete idiot like me would feel obligated to join right in and try to drown him out.  But it was some kind of rare privilege at that point in my life to see a man work so hard and make so much noise and have actual fun doing it.

Another thing about that place that I can’t forget was the secret playground.  To get there you had to go up above the whole lodge on a little path that no one knew about, and once you got up there to this little spot that was hidden by the trees, lo and behold, there you were surrounded by magical toys that I still cannot to this day remember or describe.  All I remember was that there was an old man there who sat and smiled but looked away whenever I went up to the toys to play on them, which was how he let me know that he was not going to tell on me for sneaking off to the woods, and he never said anything, not even, Has the cat got your tongue, and neither did I say anything, and that’s all I can remember.  I can’t even remember how I got home from there because the next thing you know I’d just be sitting up in my bed rubbing me eyes, ready to go into the kitchen and eat some more of that good toast.

Another thing that happened in that place was that me and Dirk had a neighbor boy who we sometimes played with who sometimes stayed with his grandma who lived in the cottage across the big circular driveway that went in between the two rows of Naughty Pine cottages.  The boy’s Grandmother was a nice little old lady who had always lived in that cottage all her life, and she always gave us as much candy as we could eat and never asked me if the cat had got my tongue.

Now this grandson of hers, who had no name, had his own room in the attic with a rope ladder leading up to it, and this boy would haul me and Dirk up to his attic, and haul the rope ladder up behind us, and then he would slam shut the wooden trap door that let us up there, and then he would go about throwing all his toys around the room, smashing them into teeny little pieces, and yelling and screaming.  Me and Dirk thought this was the price we had to pay to get to eat as much candy as we wanted, so we just sat there popping sweet things into our mouths, our eyes bulging out of our heads. 

This experience paid off later on in life when I found that in order to get a puff on a marijuana cigarette, it was sometimes necessary to tag along with any kind of asshole who would put up with a companion who only looks and listens, but doesn’t speak.

Anyhow, pretty soon, after our friend with no name had smashed up all his toys and we had eaten up all the candy and he didn’t have anything else to do but to throw his whole self around the room pretending he was two missile bombers in hand-to-hand combat, his Grandmother would come to the bottom of where the stairs would be if there were any, wanting to know if we needed anything, and the boy would open up the trapdoor and start throwing all his broken toy trucks and tractors and machine guns at her, screaming all kinds of words that I had never heard before and now I can’t even remember what those words were.  So his Grandmother would run away and go into the living room and turn up her TV a little bit more, and to this day neither me nor Dirk can remember how we ever got out of that attic alive, nor can we figure out why we went back to visit our nameless friend more than once, unless maybe it was for the candy.

Another thing that happened to me when we lived in the Naughty Pine Lodge, was that my Daddy and my Mama decided I was big enough to have a real bicycle with only two wheels, which made me the happiest critter in camp, and then when we got that beat-up little purple thing home my Daddy put me up on it and pushed me around and around the circular driveway, always holding on so I wouldn’t fall down, until one day he announced that he was actually not holding on at all, he was really just running along behind the bicycle pretending to hold me up, and I was actually holding myself up all by myself.  Which terrified me to think about it, but for the first time in my life I had found out that there are things that are OK to try despite the possibility that all might not go as planned, and I proceeded to continue learning how to ride on my bicycle until no one had to even run along behind me, but there was one thing that I could not do and would not even consider doing, and that was to get on or off by myself.  Someone always had to be there to grab me off of my bicycle as I flew past them, because I had a complete and absolute aversion to pushing on the brakes, knowing with my whole body that if I ever let the bicycle slow down, it would certainly fall down, and I would crack my head open on the pavement and die.

So for many weeks, my way of approaching the whole idea of bicycle riding was to wheedle one of my parents or my big sisters into starting me off with a big push, then I would fly around the circular driveway of the Naughty Pine Lodge at top speed until my Mama or my Daddy would look out there and see me about to drop dead from exhaustion, because I would not call out in a public place out in the open like this for help, though barely able to keep that little purple thing from wobbling over and flinging me to the pavement, and they would run out and haul me off next time I came around, and the bicycle would stop itself in the trees or bushes.

I wish I could say that nothing happened during the fall and winter when we lived at the Naughty Pine Lodge that didn’t happen right there at the Naughty Pine Lodge, because that place was just the right size for me and it was all I wanted.  But alas, there was that other nasty reality to contend with, which for some reason had sounded interesting enough when we lived in Trippabad, but now that three weeks had passed and we had moved from Hellhouse into Naughty Pine Heaven, nothing could have been further from my hopes and dreams than to launch out into a big, smelly old red brick schoolhouse full of screaming, uncontrolled brats who were sure to get me into trouble, and ignorant adults who hadn’t realized, and hadn’t even heard, that the cat had got my tongue and there was nothing they could do about it.

Apparently my Mama and my Daddy had decided that since I was brave enough to ride on a bicycle almost by myself, I would also be brave enough to ride on a school bus all by myself, so when the first real day of school came along, and my Daddy was already off to work in the car and there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could do about it, my Mama put me in my coat and put my milk money in my pocket and put my Huckleberry Hound lunch box in my arms and hauled me off to the edge of the road with all those big mean cars zipping by and told me this is where the big yellow school bus is going to stop and let you on it and take you to school.  So when she loosened up her grip on my arm to bend over and peck me on my quivering, tear-soaked cheek, I broke free and dashed into the house and ran into my room, tearing off my coat and my nice polished shoes, throwing my hat into the closet and my Huckleberry Hound lunch box into the corner, and jumping out of my clothes and into my pajamas and back into my bed so fast that all my Mama could do was stand there and think about what was she going to do, because if she did not get me onto that school bus when it came by, she would certainly be arrested and thrown into jail.

My Mama and me had visited my Kindergarten room-to-be on the previous day prior to this, and I knew exactly what I was facing, and I had laid in my bed all night long staring at the ceiling thinking about how I could keep my poor little self from having to get on that school bus and go to that school, and all I could think of was to simply refuse to get out of my bed and refuse to put on my clothes and refuse to be dragged out of the house.  But it seemed apparent that my Mama had not been listening while all this refusing was going on, so all I could think of to do was to start back at the beginning and try to make my intentions more obvious this time.

Now here is what had happened to me on the previous day prior to this when my Mama and me had walked into that room in that school.  I could not explain it to her at the time, and I have never tried to explain it to anyone else till right now, so if it comes out sounding all jumbled up and stretched out of shape, then so be it, but little ladies and gentlemen, I cannot tell a lie, this is really what happened to my insides when my Mama very first dragged me into that room to meet my fate.

I hated that noise!  All that screaming, laughing scared me so bad that I had to pull my shoulders up around my earlobes to shut out the sound, and I had to lean up against a table to keep my dizzy self from diving out of there right through the floor, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut to keep those big old light bulbs way up there on that twenty-foot-tall ceiling from burning a hole right through my sorry little Jell-O pudding self.  As the overwhelmingness of the intensity fell around me and gradually turned off most of my physical senses, I crawled inside a big orange pulsating hole somewhere inside myself, and listened from across the universe as one person after another tried to hammer their way into my empty shell, and from my peculiar vantage point at the end of the universe, I asked myself this question:

Why on god’s green Earth was I ever made different from everybody else, and how am I ever going to get them to go away and leave me alone?

As if in response to my assertion that I was completely alone in the universe—although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time—I was hauled back into my physical body by a sudden hush falling over the part of the room where my tormentors had gathered around me.  I opened my eyes, and there right next to me was a little girl in a furry coat and red tights, leaning up against the table just like me, her eyes squeezed shut and her cheeks wet, and she was pissing down her red tights like the devil was beating it out of her.

But that was then and this was now.  I’d had all night to think about it, and I was not going to be dragged back out to that bus stop.  Not now, and not never.  As I firmly repeated my decision to myself, my Mama just as firmly put me back into my clothes, put my hat and shoes and coat back on me, picked up my Huckleberry Hound lunch box in one of her hands and picked me up in the other, and just as the big yellow school bus stopped in front of the Naughty Pine Lodge, here we came flying out the door, me screaming like I hadn’t screamed since I was laying in my crib, kicking and flailing my arms around and still trying to rip my clothes off—

Three hours later, Kindergarten was over and I was headed back for home on another big yellow school bus with a different driver, and one by one and two by two and three by three the other kids got off at the special corners where the bus driver knew to stop and the kids knew to get out.  What the bus driver didn’t know was that I was not going to tell him where to stop and let me out, and since the Naughty Pine Lodge was just the end of town to him, all he did is to turn around in the circular driveway there and head back toward town, looking at me in his rear view mirror and telling me for the last time that if I don’t pipe up and tell him where he’s supposed to be letting me out, he’s gonna have to take me right back to school so that the Principal can either squeeze it out of me himself, or call my parents so they can come get me.

And there was my Mama, way back there where we left her, still standing in the middle of the highway and waving her arms, shouting who knows what as the nice man drives me back to school.