CHAPTER TEN

In which I take refuge from the Cosmos as a nobody in the big city

 

It was at such a crucial juncture in my social development that the simple question of, Where shall I find a friend? remade itself in the likeness of Boo Radley forced to attend school in a big, mean city, and my Mama’s need to make me go out and make friends was forgotten, replaced by her daily obsession with such questions as, Why don’t the neighbors introduce themselves like they did in every other town we ever moved to? and, What has the Plymouth Rock Moving and Storage Company done with our furniture?

There we were in a nice big rented house, eating off of our camping plates with plastic silverware, and sleeping in our sleeping bags.  All we had for entertainment was a little radio, which played “Ode to Billie Joe” 24 times a day during those two weeks of monastic living, and my Daddy was already gone on a long business trip, and we were happy as bugs in a rug.  I can’t explain it.  If it wasn’t for the fact that my oldest big sister Glenda was supposed to get on an airplane and head off for her first year of college in Stockton, California any day now, I believe my Mama would have just sat down and happily played double solitaire with us indefinitely.  Deep down inside ourselves, none of us missed the mucky detritus of dysfunctionality that stuck to those table legs and sofa cushions.  Like the camping trips we used to love, this was a free time, when the past didn’t exist and the future didn’t matter.  Life was an adventure again.

Like my Daddy used to say, If you stay in one place too long, you grow stagnant.

My obsession at this time was to collect science fiction novels, which I never had time to read because my real interest was to record the grammar and alphabet of the Guillohutian language.  I had realized sometime during the later introspective years in Forward Falls that I was actually the King of Guillohutie, a land located in another dimension, and that I had saved my people from the pesky perennial harassment of their traditional enemies, the Kozmos, by volunteering to go into exile on the planet Earth.  Now the enemy sorcerer warriors were after me, and they would hide behind the clouds all day, trying to spot me with their thought sensors.  I could make myself invisible by concentrating on a sort of cacophony of angry, elderly female voices that I could hear in my head if I cleared all thoughts out of my mind and waited.  The gaggling geezerettes would cover up my thoughts so the sorcerers navigating the scout ships couldn’t sense my presence.  In Forward Falls I used to careen through the mists of this personal Twilight Zone on my bike, relishing the otherworldliness of the experience.  In Albuquerque, the bicycle was lost somewhere with the rest of our furniture, and I never needed it again; my daily trips to the Shopping Mall to drool over the science fiction books taught me the awesomeness of walking.

The only kind of walking that I didn’t like was walking to and from school, because there was always the remote possibility that somebody would recognize me from school and want to talk to me.  Horror of horrors, those sorcerers were out in force at times like that and would not hesitate to snatch me up in their black vessels of war if they could find me distracted by a petty conversation with an ordinary schoolchild.  To keep such a likelihood as distant as possible, I tried several different routes walking home from school, counting the number of footsteps needed along each route, to discover the shortest route and to keep my mind empty until I finally reached home and slammed the front door behind me.

And there would be my Mama, on the phone with the Plymouth Rock Moving and Storage Company again, begging them to please find our clothes, our dishes, our furniture, our player piano that didn’t work, our bicycles, and our books.  Wasn’t there anything that could be done?

And then my Mama would be on the phone long distance to my Daddy, and there was something in her voice that I’d never heard before, since until now all their negotiations as a couple had taken place behind closed doors.  She tried to get him to call the Plymouth Rock Moving and Storage Company, and he tried to tell her that it was her job, and she tried to tell him that Glenda was due at college in three days, and something in her voice said without saying, If you were here being the man in this house, this would never have happened.

I knew what I had to do.  As the Monarch of an entire dimension, I possessed within my grasp the wisdom of the ages and the authority of all the Monarchs who had gone before me, so the next time she got herself all wound up to talk to those Plymouth Rock people on the phone, I got inside her head and told her what to say:

You lazy, good-for-nothing, incompetent bums, (she translated into her own words), you aren’t even trying to find my furniture, and you are lying to me and laughing at me as if this were nothing!  I know you know where my furniture is, and you just don’t feel like giving it to me, and you’re not going to get away with it!  So get this, you moronic shit-eating dogs from hell, if my furniture is not in my house TODAY, and if my daughter and her brand new school clothes aren’t on that plane tomorrow, I will haul the Plymouth Rock Moving and Storage Company into court on its happy little ass, and then I will be your boss instead of the creep you’re working for now, and I will toss you out into the gutter on your grimy, sneering faces and stomp on you till your ugly, syphilitic, lice-infested wives won’t even recognize you, and you will rot in the slime-ridden gutters of this evil city forever!

My Mama slammed down the phone, I disengaged my speech implanting probe and jumped out of her head, and the Plymouth Rock Moving and Storage Company van was at our house before Bobbie Gentry could say, “And Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahasee Bri-idge.”

I loved that song.

 

My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Veraspect, was largely responsible for the fact that I failed to completely lose my sanity during my first year in the Big Mean City.  She was a frustrated opera singer who had settled for teaching the sixth grade because she couldn’t quit smoking.  She put me and my best friend, R. J. McDonald, who I called “McDoodle” since he hated it, in our own reading group and assigned us extra reading and writing assignments to keep us from getting too far off the deep end into our own little worlds as she struggled to get the rest of the class up to snuff for graduation from elementary school.  She taught us music and made us all write a song, and played the song I wrote for the class because she thought it was the best one.  She defied the authorities by letting us put up christmas decorations in the class; this was 1968 and by now the accumulation of meddlesome busybodies in the school administrations everywhere, by way of the Peter Principle, had accelerated to dangerous proportions, and the meddlesome busybodies were concerned that christmas decorations were somehow a violation of the separation of Church and State.  I thought all this was interesting, though I separated myself from the Church that year anyway, realizing that the Presbyterians in my Mama and Daddy’s church didn’t believe in their own devils and angels and holy ghosts and all that irrelevant nonsense anyway, and only showed up to church every Sunday for social reasons.  I didn’t do anything for social reasons.  I was from another dimension.

When Mrs. Veraspect announced to the class that the teacher’s union was getting ready to strike for better wages, I became so upset that I actually flunked a test.  When the Curriculum Committee dug deep into their pockets to buy us some musical teaching tapes that were on the level of mentally retarded four-year olds, she passed around a piece of paper so we could all put down what we thought of what the Curriculum Committee thought of us, and gave the tapes back, along with our comments.  Every day after school, her former pupils would visit her to shoot the breeze and tell her about life at Monroe Junior High School.

On the last day of school, Mrs. Veraspect asked us all to please leave immediately when the bell rang, because she didn’t want us to see her cry.  We could not obey, and she did cry.

 

Gone was the asphalt playground of Forward Falls Elementary School, and in its place was a huge expanse of hot sand, the same sandy soil that covered the entire region around Albuquerque.  I hated recess, and the twenty minutes after lunch waiting for the bell to ring dragged on for hours.  It’s not that no one would play with me; it seemed that team sports were the big thing in this city, and I refused invitations to join in until the invitations stopped coming.  They weren’t going to drag me into that ring of fire to humiliate myself in front of the girls and the jocks.  The way the other kids—especially the tall, blond Viking twins—mocked the retarded kids, I knew I was on the wrong Planet and had better remain as inconspicuous as possible.  I couldn’t even stand to watch the other kids play ball, for fear of being mistaken for one of them; my preoccupation was to wander around the huge playground kicking up little cocklebur weeds and anthills, which were the only things that grew in that sand.  I made it my business to try and eliminate the weeds and the anthills completely, but before I could reach my goal, fate stepped in and I got made a friend of.

McDoodle was the skinniest kid I’d ever met, and when he ran, he looked like a marionette puppet, because he was just doing his best to keep up.  He had muscular dystrophy, and he also had just as much energy as any kid his age.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, he was a Scorpio.  One day, as I was concentrating on a particularly pesky burr plant, I heard someone calling for help.  I looked up, and there was McDoodle and Horse, playing off by themselves.  McDoodle was looking right at me, and Horse, who was the tallest kid in class, was just standing there grinning.  Help! McDoodle cried, Help, Help, Help!

It looked like Horse was the one who needed help, because McDoodle was all over him, climbing on this back and beating him with his fists, kicking him and trying to knock him down.  Horse just stood there grinning.

Help!

I couldn’t escape the nagging suspicion that my presence was being requested, so I meandered in their direction as slowly as I could, hoping that they had mistaken me for someone else, and would dismiss me when they discovered their mistake.  McDoodle stopped cursing and smacking Horse long enough to explain that he and Horse were at war, and I was being recruited to be a private in McDoodle’s army.  I was still trying to figure out how to decline his offer when the bell rang, and Horse ran for the door laughing.  I walked quickly, and McDoodle ran breathlessly along beside me, explaining that he and I were the two smartest kids in our class and we had better stick together because the dumbshits were out to get us, and he wanted me to be vice-president of his secret club.  He showed me the official salute, and told me that we club members always had to salute each other.  As we walked into the classroom, he was extracting my promise to go home with him after school.  I sat in class all afternoon worrying that my Mama would call the police if I wasn’t home by 3:15, so when school got out, McDoodle came home with me and explained to my Mama that I would be going home with him quite frequently from now on, because he had a secret clubhouse in his back yard, and my presence would be required since I was now vice-president of his secret club.

My Mama could not refuse.

 

The following spring, while McDoodle and I were temporarily not speaking to each other ever again, my bladder got tired and started causing me some problems.    Ever since starting school in Albuquerque, and just like when I was in Kindergarten and the first grade, I had become unwilling to pee in a public rest room.  I had valiantly been holding my pee till I got home, every day for nearly nine months, when it just stopped working.  Every afternoon I would sit there in class, tapping my feet and crossing my legs and clicking my tongue, and then biting my tongue, until finally the pain grew so intense I had to let a little go.  By experimentation I discovered that it was impossible to let go of just a little, because it felt so good that I had to unleash it all, albeit as slowly as possible so it would all soak up into my clothes and not pool up in my seat and under my desk, like it had for Hazel Aragon in the fifth grade when she let it all come out at once.

So when the final bell finally rang, I’d get my books together as slowly as possible while everyone else raced for the door, so that I could exit the school at the back of the crowd, holding my notebook in front of me, and then behind me, depending on who was coming and from which direction.

My Mama knew something was wrong when I started doing laundry.  But after taking my temperature, she determined that I was just lonely for McDoodle, and encouraged me to make up with him.

Every day at school, the dreaded pain in my bladder would start up earlier in the day, until the last two or three hours had become an excruciating nightmare.  Then came the day that I couldn’t hold it till the final hour, and had to let go just before PE  As the rest of the class crowded through the door to go outside and play soccer, I hung back and followed them into the hall.

One of the nicer kids in the class, who later became a biker like his brothers, asked me why I was carrying my notebook to gym class, and I had a sudden inspiration as I fished desperately in my mind for an explanation.  I told my friend to inform Mrs. Veraspect when he got back to class from PE that I had gotten sick and gone home.

It was the first lie I ever told.

With my heart pounding, and glancing over my shoulder half expecting to be pulled over by the police for not being in school, I slogged home both dreading and curiously looking forward to what I would have to do when I got there.  I couldn’t tell two lies in one day; when I walked in the door, my Mama looked up and asked me why I was home so early. 

“I wet my pants.”

I strode into the bathroom before she could ask Why, and took a long bath.  When I got out, my Mama was very nice to me and said she’d called Mrs. Veraspect and explained that I had a bladder disease, and told me she’d made an appointment with the doctor for the very next day, to find out what that bladder disease was.

I suppose if she was someone else’s Mama, she would have sat down and talked to me and asked me questions and badgered me until she had gotten me to admit that I was afraid to pull out my pee-pee in front of the other boys, but that was not her way of doing things; besides, she had only known me for twelve years and wasn’t about to start asking me a bunch of personal questions, which is why we were still strangers and getting stranger every day.

Once, not long before we left Forward Falls, me and my brother Dirk were at the grocery store with my Mama and she suddenly asked us if we knew the difference between girls and boys.  Of course I knew, because there was a paperback copy of What To Tell Your Kids About Sex on the bookshelf in the basement where all us kids’s bedrooms were, and I’d read that book at least a hundred times, but for some reason I didn’t want to admit to my Mama that I’d been sneaking around educating myself behind her back.  So, quickly before Dirk could blow it for me, I spoke up and said, Boys have short hair and girls have long hair.

Well, she didn’t want to discuss it any further right there in the grocery store, but promised that we would finish this conversation later.  She actually never brought it up again, but that night my Mama and my Daddy had one of those conversations in their bedroom, and a few days later a funny thing happened.

Me and Dirk and my Daddy were sitting in the TV room, and Glenda and Mo were downstairs playing with some overnight visitors, when my Daddy started getting up and down from his chair to peek out into the hall.  Finally he shut the door, and turned off the TV and announced that we were old enough to know what the difference was between boys and girls.  Then he unzipped his pants and pulled out his great big pee-pee and started showing it to us, telling us all about foreskins and how he got circumcised when he was thirteen and about how when we were older we would get big balls like his with hair on them.

No, my Daddy was not an exhibitionist, he was just trying to do his best, which I’ll admit came off a little bizarre, and boy was I glad when he put that thing away and turned the TV back on.  I’d seen it a million times before in the locker room at the swimming pool; it had always made me uncomfortable and in fact I always put on my swimming trunks at home before we left for the pool so I wouldn’t have to undress in public.

Back to Albuquerque . . . my Mama took me to see the doctor about my poor diseased bladder, and he made her leave the room so he could ask me some questions:  When you pee—which reminds me, my brother Dirk once got in trouble for saying “pee” instead of “urinate”—when you pee, how far does the stream go?  This far?  Or maybe this far?  Or could it be that when you piss the stream only goes this far?  If you took a leak right now, from where you’re sitting, do you think you could hit the wall with it?  What about pain?  Does it hurt when you tinkle?  Is there any pain at all when you take a whiz?  Not even just a little bit?  Or is it just  kind of a good feeling, a feeling of relief, sort of a warm, welcome, happy sensation?

What a relief it was to get out of that doctor’s office, away from all those embarrassing questions.  The next day when we went to morning recess I leaped out of my body as it was trying to walk right past the Boys’ Room door, and tripped it and sent it flying through that door, where it landed in front of a urinal, pulled out its pee-pee, and whizzed away.  I just stood there watching proudly.  I didn’t have to do a damn thing; it was automatic.

That doctor was one smart peckerhead.