CHAPTER EIGHT

In which the torturefest continues

 

Despite the indisputable fact that being stuck in my empty shell continued to be comparable to the Chinese water torture, the 6½ years that my family tarried in Forward Falls, Colorado remains in all of our memories the symbol of our happiest years as a dysfunctional unit.

While my Mama and my Daddy were having a house built specially for us, we lived in a rented home on Grand Avenue.  One day me and my brother Dirk were playing and fighting in our back yard when a little boy with a big grin and dimples popped over the fence and introduced himself as Craig.  He instantly became our best friend, and was my primary companion for most of our stay in Forward Falls.  Fortunately he was bolder and more adventurous than we were, so our experience widened beyond our own backyard and riding our bikes to the store on errands for our Mama, to such activities as trying to peek in windows while neighbor girls were getting ready for bed, catching frogs, selling Kool-Aid to our neighbors, hiking to the Cave where we would catch lizard tails on the Skinny Trail, losing all our arrows in the pursuit of magpies, fighting for territorial rights to vacant lots, watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. when we could sleep over at Craig’s, waging wars against the big bullies down the street who managed to ignore us, and locating a secret fort to serve as headquarters for our mischievous plots in the scrub oak forest behind the house that my Mama and my Daddy built on Park Drive.

Park Drive was so named because it had once been the golf course where the gambler and gunslinger Doc Holliday and his friends had played.  Their spirit was still there, and Craig was right in touch with it.  Our house was built next to the railroad tracks and the irrigation ditch, and just on the other side of the tracks was a barbed-wire fence with a No Trespassing sign on it which I used to have nightmares about.  We would slide under the fence with our hearts pounding, knowing that this time we would surely be shot by the owner of the property—who we never did meet—and run down our trail and down around the curve to the left where the big rock was, where we would stand and look down the steep dirt slope that led down to the Hoarse Fork River and across to the mountains beyond.  Not being allowed at the river without big people since we would surely fall in and drown, we would then go back up the trail, and take a left at the secret intersection and crawl through the scrub oak to the tiny little clearing we had found that became our fort.  There we would draw up our plans to take over the neighborhood and make maps of our secret forest, and Craig would try to entice little girls to join us for educational viewings of mysterious anatomical wonders.

Only once did he succeed in this, his greatest ambition.  Poor little Carol Rogers was one of five sisters in a family that had recently moved to Forward Falls from New York.  Being from Back East, she knew a word that was not being used in Colorado at that time, and that word was “Shit-ass.”  Since we pretended to hate Carol and her sisters so they would let us play at being neighborhood rivals, we were constantly being called Shit-asses, and although I didn’t know what an ass was and I didn’t know what shit was, I found the whole name-calling experience fairly exhilarating, and did what I could to encourage it.  One summer day when me and my brother Dirk were lounging around in the house bored out of our minds and trying to think of something to fight about, we heard Craig’s secret bleating outside in the street and ran outside to see what was up.  He was beside himself with excitement and red as a beet, just like the time when he and my brother Dirk had taken all their clothes off and stood in our front picture window giggling, with their little red peckers standing up at attention, and me hurrying to get the drapes shut before I could be blamed for their actions.  Anyhow, here he was quivering and blushing and whispering about how Carol Rogers had finally agreed to join us at our fort.

Apparently he had done some fancy negotiating to get her to agree to what he had in mind, and the terms of their contract were that only Craig would be allowed to look, and me and my brother Dirk would have to cover our eyes with our hands, but Craig told us all we had to do was peek through our fingers.  Leaving us drooling with anticipation, Craig sped home on his bike to get Carol and haul her back to the fort, where we all met a few minutes later.

Never before had anyone been to our fort but the three of us, and no one in the whole entire world even knew it existed, and Craig’s first act was to remove Carol’s blindfold so that she would stop squawking.  It took several more minutes for him to convince her that she was now obligated to keep her part of the bargain, and just when I thought she was going to back out, she said, OK, but Dirky and Maxwell have to cover up their eyes, which we were only too glad to do, not wanting to be implicated later in this affair should rumors ever get around of its having taken place.

When she was certain that my brother Dirk and I were completely blinded, she grudgingly pulled her pants down for a split second that has become frozen in my mind for eternity; for as soon as we had gotten the cracks between our fingers closed back up, who should pop up from behind a scrub oak bush six feet away from us, but Gracie who lived next to the vacant lot and Rita our next-door neighbor.  They informed us that we were the baddest boys in the whole wide world and promised to tell our Mamas and our Daddies what we did, and Carol started crying and ran to her protectresses who hauled her out of the forest with Craig close behind, begging the forgiveness and mercy of the whole female species, and me and Dirk trudging along hanging our heads and wondering what kind of terrible punishment we would be facing by dinnertime.

Nothing ever came of it, and whatever deal Craig struck with those girls remains a mystery to this day.

 

School was the sort of punishment that was worth enduring only because I felt so much better when it was over.  If it hadn’t been for recess, I would have never made any friends at all, because in the classroom I was so terrified of making a mistake that I learned to read, write and do arithmetic so fast that there was seldom any possibility of attracting criticism, and to further insure this, I was pathologically obedient.  But once we got onto the playground, I gradually learned to relax a little, and I eventually got into the habit of finding one playmate and glomming onto him for dear life until summer vacation rolled around.

In the first grade, I had at first been insulated by a friend of the family from church, a third-grader named Larry Lastson who showed me around and let me accompany him as he wandered around trying to get his classmates to let him play with them, until his recess privilege was canceled because he was not being a good boy in his classroom.  Then I was on my own, and I used to meet a big red-headed kid under the tree every day so he could push me down and sit on me and threaten to take my pants off in front of the girls.  Then he died or joined the circus or joined the Mafia and moved away, and I was at a loss for companionship until one day I saw this funny-looking little crew-cut kid watching me, and for some reason I looked at him and crossed my eyes.  He cracked up, and pointed me out to his friend, and the two of them followed me around laughing at my funny faces every day at recess for a few weeks, until they got tired of me and ran off to play with kids who knew how to play.  After that, I started hanging around with Dan Rooster, who was the tallest and stupidest kid in my class, and no one else would play with him even though he was the nicest kid in the world, because he needed friends worse than anything.  We would stand together under the stairs after lunch and watch the other kids play until the bell rung and we had to go inside to face our respective dooms.  I don’t remember what he used to talk about.

In the second grade, I had a friend on the playground named Paul, who had just moved to town and didn’t know about my reputation as a vegetable.  All I remember about him was that he came up to me and said he wanted to be friends on the first day of school.  When he started making friends with other kids too, I snuck away and played on the swings the rest of the year.  The great thing about the swings, apart from feeling like you were flying, was the solitariness of the experience.

That was the year that President Kennedy decided that all schoolchildren would take Physical Education classes.  One day in PE our teacher Mr. Ralph Hubbell taught us how to do the duck walk, where you squat down and grab your ankles and start walking, and in Mr. Hubbell’s class, part of the requirement was to quack.  After getting in trouble for not quacking like the other kids, I pretended to quack but was really just opening and closing my mouth.  But everyone else enjoyed doing the duck walk so much that after lunch when we were out on the playground waiting for the bell to ring, they continued waddling around quacking until we had to go in.

For some reason that day, my teacher Mrs. Handsome was late getting back into the classroom, and as usual there were some bad, bad children in the class who couldn’t stay in their seats unless a big person was there to hold them down, and these horrible children started doing the duck walk right there in the classroom.  I watched in terror as others joined them until pretty soon half my classmates or more were on the floor, quacking their silly heads off, bumping into each other and knocking each other down, and laughing like hyenas.  At the peak of this cacophony, who should appear in the doorway but Mrs. Handsome herself, followed by the sound of fifteen desks scooting six inches across the floor as their appointed denizens leaped into them in the middle of their final quack.

Boy was Mrs. Handsome mad, and I felt so guilty for the sins of my incorrigible classmates that when she ordered “everybody who did the duck walk” to go over and write their names on the board, I became confused and asked myself this question:  Is she talking about everybody who did the duck walk in PE, or just about those degenerates who were doing the duck walk in the classroom after the bell rang?  Just to be on the safe side, I got up and wrote my name on the board along with those of the duck walkers who were willing to turn themselves in.  Then my teacher Mrs. Handsome asked for snitches to go up and write the names of anyone who had been doing the duck walk but hadn’t turned themselves in, and after this grisly business was taken care of, we were informed that everyone whose name was on the board would have to stay in during afternoon recess.  Then we buckled down to our studies.

When recess time rolled around, I still couldn’t bring myself to admit to my teacher that I had written my name on the board by mistake, and when all the good little boys and girls who had restrained themselves from doing the duck walk after the bell rang had filed out of the room and raced out to the playground, Mrs. Handsome announced to those of us who were left behind that our punishment was to get down on the floor, grab our ankles, start walking, and QUACK!

Horror of horrors, I was so embarrassed I felt like I was doing the duck walk naked on the 5:00 News, waddling like a damn fool and opening and closing my mouth pretending to quack, until some nice girl who I would have married if we had stayed in town long enough went up to the teacher, pointed to me, and whispered in the teacher’s ear.  Mrs. Handsome came over to me and scolded me for writing my name on the board when I was not guilty, and sent me out to the playground.  I jumped on a swing and worked off my embarrassment by swinging higher than I ever had before.

In the third grade, my teacher Miss Derringer had a policy that if anyone in the class got an F on the daily spelling test, the whole class had to stay in for recess and put our heads on our desks.  Since Dan Rooster was in that class, I didn’t see much of the playground that year, but after lunch when Miss Derringer had no jurisdiction over us, I played with Drew Boxwell, a Korean kid who was friendlier than anybody else I had ever met.

We had been warned about Mrs. Scarecrow, our fourth-grade teacher:  she was the “best teacher in the whole school,” so we knew we were in deep doo-doo that first day when she strode into the room and leered down at us from atop her almighty flagpole of excellence.

Mrs. Scarecrow informed us weekly that she was a Conservative Republican, and she had more to say to fourth graders about the Bloody Feet of General Washington’s Ragtag, Shoeless Patriot Army and their Endless Winter of Selfless Endurance at Valley Forge than any fourth-grade teacher in the history of this fine capitalist nation.  That woman would absolutely vibrate to the sound of 28 little voices chiming in on the Pledge of Allegiance.  And was she the one who made us pray before we said the Pledge?  Someone made us pray.  I think it was her.

I can count the times I attracted any serious criticism in elementary school on one finger, and Mrs. Scarecrow the Born Again Republican was the ruthless monster who blemished my image as a perfect little angel.

One day she gave us a True or False test, our first ever, explaining that we didn’t have to write “true” or “false;” it would be enough to write “T” or “F.”  Well, to me, literal-minded and in fear of appearing lazy, the minimum requirement was never enough to ease my sense of being the root cause of the world’s woes, so in an extraordinary effort to win the Nobel Prize for Industriousness in the Fourth Grade, I carefully spelled out “true” or “false” on all my answers.  I couldn’t swallow this charade that Mrs. Scarecrow really wanted us to take the easy way out, and as the second smartest kid in the class, I didn’t need her pity anyway; it was totally out of character for her, and frankly, I was disappointed in her and worried that she might be losing the Vision.  To make matters worse—and this was obviously my fault too—I’d gotten started on the test later than the others because the school nurse had called me in to take care of some kind of paperwork business since my Daddy worked for the government.  So there sat the whole class, long minutes after the clock said we should be at recess, waiting for me to finish my quiz.  I could feel my ears turn red and buzz as all eyes were on me.  Becoming flustered and confused by the undivided fidgeting that was being directed at me, it became ever so difficult to focus on the words before me on the test form.  Did that question mean what it said, or was it really implying what it should be saying?  Did “true” mean “true all the time,” or just “true enough to get by,” or perhaps “true if the teacher thinks it’s true?”  Did I wish I was somewhere else just then?  Why couldn’t I have fallen down the stairs on the way to the nurse’s office, cracked my head open, and missed the whole test?

Finally, Mrs. Scarecrow took pity on me in my time of need and strode over to my desk to determine the nature of my problem and to offer her assistance.  Thank goodness for this, because I was hanging by a slender thread and the recess period of a whole roomful of ten-year olds was hanging there with me.  She took one look at my paper and exploded with indignant wrath.  How could I be so inconsiderate to my fellow classmates, sitting there drawing my pretty little block letters, T-R-U-E and F-A-L-S-E??!!!  Hadn’t I ever heard of following instructions?  Was there even one little part of a conscience hidden somewhere in my greedy little mind?  The nerve!  To deprive my poor classmates of the playtime that they so deeply deserved, so that I could entertain myself at their expense!  Shame on Maxwell!  Shame!

I was quivering like a jellyfish, and my whole body was jerking in silent convulsive sobbing.  Mrs. Scarecrow’s diatribe dragged on and on, beyond the point where there was anything left in me for her to besmirch.  Finally realizing that I had nothing to say for myself, she threw up her hands in disgust and sent the class out to the playground to enjoy the last two minutes of recess.  It was all my fault.  I was forever damned.

I don’t remember what happened next; let’s say I lost consciousness and dove deep inside of my empty shell where I found a gate leading to a little secret garden.  In that garden I met my favorite cousin Rose, who took me by the hand with that big mischievous grin of hers and led me to a gnarly, twisted old tree with leaves of every size, shape, and color.  At the base of the tree was a tarnished old plaque that read:

 

I AM THE TREE OF MYSTERY

EAT MY FRUIT ONCE AND YOU WILL WONDER

EAT MY FRUIT TWICE AND YOU WILL DOUBT WHAT YOU SEE

EAT MY FRUIT THREE TIMES AND YOU WILL FORGET WHO YOU ARE

 

Rose boosted me up into the branches of that tree, and I devoured every piece of fruit I could reach.

When I came to, I was out on the playground standing in line to play tetherball.  For the first time, I felt inside myself the seed of doubt that would grow during the next several years into a full-blown case of suspicion toward anyone claiming to know what true and false were supposed to mean to me.  I began to distrust the intentions and abilities of the adults who ran my life.  That woman had done me a great favor:  she had pushed me over the edge.  Because of her it became possible for me to begin the process of gradually coming to the realization that Reality as defined by the Collective Average was just some poor desperate downtrodden average asshole’s mistaken assumption about his personally preferred escape route, and that the only way out of my own personal nightmare would be for me to seek out and find a reality map of my own.  I became obsessed with playing tetherball, for several reasons: it was not a team sport, so no one cared if I screwed up; unlike playing on the swings, I didn’t have to worry about being called a sissy; and it involved hitting something as hard as I could without making anybody cry.

My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Shaveass, was not only my first male teacher, he was so extremely male that he also coached the Forward Falls High School basketball team, the Demons.  He had some traits in common with Mrs. Scarecrow, including brazen outspokenness, militaristic patriotism, and a strong work ethic.  The main difference between them was that, while Mrs. Scarecrow believed she could turn us little monsters into model citizens if she railed at us long enough, Mr. Shaveass’s reason for hollering at us was that he just plain liked us.

One day halfway through the school year, we were taking turns reading aloud out of our textbook when he stopped the whole show and stood up to tell us something very, very important.  It seemed that there were certain people in the class who thought they could make it through life speaking in a squeaky, timid little voice barely above a whisper.  Boy did he have something to say to these students, who would not be named. 

“You’d better listen up, boys and girls, because what I’m about to say to you will follow you everywhere you go in life from now on, and you better hope you’re paying attention, because if you aren’t, you stand to lose, and you stand to lose big.  Are you listening?  Good.

“The quality of your VOICE signals your INTENT to the world and to yourself.  If you go around hanging your head and muttering, everyone will assume you have nothing to say, and you might as well not bother to say anything at all.  But if you hold your head up when you speak and push your voice out from your belly, nice and loud and clear and full of confidence, people will notice you, they will listen to you, and you will stand some kind of chance of getting what you want out of life.”  And on, and on, and on.

I hung on Mr. Shaveass’s every word, intrigued and frightened and inspired by his enthusiasm and by the conviction with which he spoke.  He had lit a fire in my empty little chest, and when he finally finished his lecture and we resumed our reading exercise, I was appalled that the whisperers were still whispering, and when it was my turn to read, I stuck my chest out, lifted my head up, and nearly shouted my reading passage.  When I was done, Mr. Shaveass just said, Next! and as the next student began to read, I looked up and behold!  My big, mean, loudmouth, insensitive teacher was looking me straight in my eyes, and he was smiling at me.

That man, who had the reputation amongst the women in my family of being a brainless, irrepressible dolt, deserves a medal.