CHAPTER ELEVEN

In which I attract the attention of the powers that be

 

The onset of adolescence overwhelmed me one pube at a time, quickly growing into a tangled and convoluted forest of hairy proportions.  I must admit that my forest was not unique in the pubescent world, for hormones were all the rage amongst my peers, too.  However, I seem to recall that the feelings and issues which I wore upon the sleeve of the hairshirt of my own adolescence manifested themselves in more bizarre and extreme ways than those of anyone I knew.  In the locker room I would receive compliments on the development of my hairiness from older kids who didn’t know me, but on the playground the hairiness of what I was going through at the hands of the kids who did know me was not easy to dismiss as normal growing pains.

Robin and Roland Viking had somehow graduated from the sixth grade and were the natural leaders of the Monroe Junior High School Jock Mafia, which was a group of athletes, would-be athletes, and hangers-on like myself and Davy Hunyak who were sadly mistaken to crave the wrong company for the wrong reasons.  They would stand on top of Jock Hill after lunch and say and do jocklike things.  I would stand up there with them, off to the side a little, where I would not be mistaken for one of the crowd, but would be conveniently accessible should any of the Real Men need a scapegoat for their budding teenage frustrations.  Davy Hunyak would attempt to mingle with them until they threw him out, and then he would come over to me and try to make fun of me.  The jocks just sneered at his attempts to humiliate me as only they knew how.

It’s not that they wanted to taunt me and mock me and accuse me of having sexual relations with Belley Cream, the fat red-haired girl; they were just so full of life and good humor that they couldn’t restrain themselves.  And there I was, eating it up, day after day, so what else were they going to do with their lives but to make me the butt of their jokes?  I envied their ability to laugh at nothing.

I’ll never forget how all this fun got started.  One of the things we lost as seventh-graders was recess; in its place was the school library, where our teachers would occasionally send us as an alternative to mowing us down with machine guns, which weren’t allowed in schools in those days anyway.  Library trips were essentially the same thing as recess had been, except that the boys and girls no longer had balls and swings and jump ropes and monkey bars to play with; thus the need to create fun in the absence of the encouragement to have any.  As for me, I didn’t miss all that other stuff anyway, and the expectation that there would be no yelling or running around was a huge relief to me.

But a big room full of books and only one adult to supervise lent itself perfectly to the game of Hit Maxwell on the Arm and Make him Smile.  I became the unofficial playground equipment of the school library.

It was the first time in my life that I had found myself surrounded on all sides by the happy, smiling faces of my peers, and never mind that they were using their fists on me; I cannot tell you how good it felt to finally have my existence acknowledged by the general populace, how wonderful it was to at last be the center of attention.  The pretending was over; I had discovered the secret of just being myself, and letting it all hang out, and just going with the flow.  The game was Stanley Spitwad’s invention.  He was trying to get into the Jock Mafia, and after his fine performance in the library that day, he was in the clique, and I was glad to have helped.

Stanley hit me on the arm with his fist, and said, Does that hurt?

I grinned and shook my head no, since it was against the rules to talk in the library.

Here came the fist again, a little harder, and again I affirmed my complete approval.

Stanley called his friends over, and demonstrated my iron will and great sense of humor to them.  They joined in:  Does that hurt, Does that hurt, and by now I was in seventh heaven, surrounded by new friends, my future as a punching bag laid out before me.  Nothing could have dragged me away from center stage, but alas, the librarian eventually appeared and told us all to go sit down and shut up.

Now that I was a celebrity, I couldn’t hold back.  While the kids at my table ignored me, those at the table across from me were whispering and pointing at me.  Not wanting to disappoint them, I made a goofy face, and the girl sitting directly across from me looked me right in my eyes and laughed right out loud.  Imagine that!  A girl!  Laughing at me!  Little ole invisible me!  I grinned from ear to ear.  It was the happiest moment in my life.

I was in love.

Whether she knew it or not, Scharee Hines tormented me day and night for years.  I never spoke to her, but I could think of nothing else but Scharee, Scharee, Scharee.  Never mind that her parents didn’t know how to spell Cheri.  I tortured myself, going two miles out of my way to walk home past her house after school, walking as slowly as I could when I got to her place, trying not to look in the windows, wishing that she would see me and run out of her house, knock me down and have sex with me right there on the sidewalk, until the police came to haul me away to sex jail, with Scharee calling after me, restrained by her mother, Maxwell!  Maxwell!  Where are you taking my Maxwell!  There was no way to deal with this incredible human being named Scharee Hines.  All I could do was sit in English class and stare at the back of her head while the boys in the class took turns going to the pencil sharpener and thumping me on the cranium with their pencils, once on the way and once on the way back.  They no longer had to ask, Does that hurt?  They knew they could not hurt Maxwell Zdaemon.

This was 1969, when the English curriculum had been liberated from the stifling ways of the Old School, and our only task was to read something—anything—and then write something about it.  We got credit for our writing, but the teacher didn’t read what we wrote because that would have been an invasion of our private thoughts.  So there was plenty of time for everybody to go back and forth to the pencil sharpener.

I became so morose from my heart sickness over Scharee Hines that I wouldn’t even go home with McDoodle after school to build mud castles and play Ping-Pong and watch Gilligan’s Island reruns.  All I could do was trudge home alone, fantasizing that Scharee Hines had fallen down on the tennis court and I was forced to carry her home in her arms, and present her lifeless body to her parents, dead of a scraped elbow at the age of thirteen.

I would be the first to get home after school, since Dirk was practicing for a school play and my Mama was in charge of the yarn department in a big crafts store, and Mo was off somewhere making out with her boyfriend, and when I walked in the front door and slammed it behind me, the luxury of my melancholy caved in around me, and when the dogs and cats ran up to greet me, all I could do was kick them and scream at them and throw them against the wall, then run into my room and slam the door and push my face down in the pillow and scream until the pain in my head matched the pain in my empty shell.

You cannot hurt Maxwell Zdaemon.

As the jocks gradually grew bored with me, I had to go to extra lengths to remind myself that I was a celebrity.  I took to wearing one of those roll-up cloth fishing hats to school, because I could put it in my pocket when class started and put it back on my head when I got into the hall.  As soon as I left the house in the morning, I would pull the tails of my shirt out most of the way and mess up my hair, and push my glasses way down on my nose, and put a goofy look on my face.  I would make Scharee fall for me, no matter what I had to do.

I left Jock Hill behind after Robin and Roland Viking stole my golf ball and got me in trouble for not having it when PE class came around.  I wandered around till Tommy Trouble found me.  He was a big acned juvenile delinquent on leave from the Boys’ Home who had no idea what to do with his excess intelligence except to tie my shoe laces together and push me down in the sand.  When that failed to make me cry, he took my shoelaces off and broke them into little pieces.  Laceless shoes were a fine addition to my uniform.  Finally he figured out how to get to me:  he took my hat.

Now I was pissed.  I chased Tommy Trouble and Davy Hunyak all around the school yard as they played catch with my hat, until the bell rang and we all split for our respective classes.  I spent the next three hours trying to decide what I would do to them when I got ahold of them, and settled on putting Tommy Trouble’s cigarette out in his eyes, and then dousing Davy Hunyak with gasoline and using Tommy Trouble’s cigarette lighter to put him out of his ignorant misery.  When the last bell rang I leaped out of my chair and began scouring the hallways for them.  I couldn’t find them anywhere, so went to my locker to get ready for the long walk home, when someone tapped me on the shoulder.  I spun around, and there stood Davy Hunyak, looking very, very sad.  He had something cupped in his hands.  I just stared at him until he opened up his hands, and there was my hat, carefully torn into perfect little strips.  He pulled the collar of my shirt away from my neck, and dumped the cloth strips in there.

My insides turned into magma, and without thinking, I threw my books on the floor, grabbed Davy Hunyak by the collar, picked him up with one hand, and shoved him up against the lockers so hard that I knocked the wind out of him and his eyes popped out of his head and his mouth hung open.  Robin Viking was standing right there, and said, You better leave him alone, Hunyak.

Things settled down after that.  Everybody was tired of me but me, so there was nothing left to do but watch my emotional decline continue at its own petty pace.

My favorite cousin Rose was writing me letters telling me I was a normal guy, and girls would like me if I gave them a chance, so to keep from making a liar out of her, I stopped short of committing actual suicide.  Besides, I’d decided way back in the sixth grade, while listening to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” on the radio, that I could not kill myself until I had written a book.

What actually saved my life was a late night TV show for adults called Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.  Not that I was allowed to stay up to watch it; being only thirteen years old, my bedtime was still 8:30 or 9:00.  And oddly enough, I still had insomnia.

Then one day, my sister Mo and my Mama told me about an incredible novelty act they’d seen on Laugh-In, and insisted that I had to see this man, Tiny Tim, sing and play the ukulele.  They told me about his long, stringy hair, the shopping bag in which he carried his ukulele, his outrageous affectations and ungodly falsetto, and I suspected that for once they had judged my interests correctly when they asserted that I had to watch his act.  I scoured the TV Guide religiously for weeks, until finally I got my chance.  My Mama let me stay up past my bedtime to see him, and lo and behold, here was a performer that I was born to emulate.  I saved all my money to buy his records, my Mama and my Daddy bought me a ukulele and a music book, and for the next year I sat in my room becoming Tiny Tim to the best of my ability.  I never could match his proficiency at chirping, but I spent all my free time trying.  Since many of the old songs he sang hit me right where it hurt, in a spot of melancholy deep inside my empty shell, I listened to them over and over till the grooves on the record were worn out.

My other obsession at this time was studying Welsh folklore and language.  My Daddy took me to the main library downtown and showed me how to make copies of pages that interested me on the copy machine, and when that source dried up, he took me to the university library where I hit pay dirt.  I could barely get started with what I wanted to do in the little time we had, so nearly every Saturday that summer I got on the bus and went to the university where I would copy whole pages of old Welsh manuscripts by hand, since I could only afford a few photocopies, and I would take my notes home to calligraphize them and to try and translate them with the Welsh dictionary I bought by saving my allowance.  The first time I got on the bus to come home from the university, I got on the wrong bus, and it stopped to turn around before I was halfway home.  By the time I finally walked in our front door, my Daddy was already at the police station reporting me kidnapped.

Then one day I was reading an article in Hobbies magazine about Tiny Tim, and discovered that he didn’t consider himself a novelty act; he took his art very seriously, and was an expert on the old music from the turn of the century that he interpreted in his act.  We had always had a cabinet full of old player piano rolls that came with our player piano that didn’t work, and I pored over the titles trying to find one that Tiny Tim had done on one of his albums.  Finally I found one:  “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” and I knew I had to make that player piano work.

My Mama and all us kids had spent days, while my Daddy was gone out of town on a business trip, going through the innards of the player piano turning screws and trying this and that, hoping that by magic it would start working and we could sit my Daddy down in front of it when he got home and make him play us beautiful music.  He loved that player piano, and still has it.  But the closest we got was to hook the vacuum cleaner up to it and make it go, though you could hardly hear the music over the noise of the vacuum cleaner.

I approached my Daddy with a proposal that we do whatever we had to do to get the piano working again, so he took me to the public library and got me a book on how to rebuild player pianos.  I read the book and wanted to try it, so he took me to a local piano tuner who was rebuilding player pianos for Shakey’s Pizza Parlors all over the country, and bought me the materials I needed.  Then, since it was summer and I was getting really old and couldn’t sleep anyway, my Mama and my Daddy said I could stay up as late as I wanted.

This was the happiest time in my life since the early days in Forward Falls.  I would stay up all night working on the player piano, putting new cloth on the bellows and replacing the air tubes and performing all the other dozens of tedious procedures that had to be accomplished so it would hold air again, watching Johnny Carson and old movies on TV, putting myself to sleep with Tiny Tim records.

Finally, the job was done, and I put it all back together.  I really doubted that it would work because it seemed like magic, and although I wanted to believe in magic, it seemed like too much to ask that my luck could change that much.  I put a roll on, and sat down.  My Mama sat down next to me on the piano bench.

Every time I think about that piano bench, I remember an event that my Mama says never happened.  Maybe it was a dream.  When I was real little, I saw my Mama sitting on the piano bench, hanging her head.  Maybe it was around the time when she taught me how to read music and taught me a few songs on the piano before I lost interest.  Anyhow, I went up to her and looked at her eyes.  She looked pale, and dull, like a ghost.  She told me that she was going to die soon, so I should be ready for that to happen.  I felt helpless and started preparing my mind to lose her, but nothing ever came of it.

So here we were, sitting together on the piano bench, ready to start pumping.  I put my feet on the pedals, took a deep breath, and started pumping.  Nothing happened.  I pumped harder.  Still nothing.  She said, Aw shucks! and I could see her looking at me out of the corner of her eye.  I pumped again, with everything I had, and smacked the piano with the palm of my hand.  Suddenly music started coming out of it, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  My Mama sang the words that appeared on the roll:

 

If I am not at the roll call

after the battle is done,

won’t you be kind to my mother

just for her soldier son?

Tell her I know how she loves me,

and prays for me constantly.

May angels protect her,

sweet comrade befriend her,

and kiss her good-bye for me.

 

With that project out of the way, I had a lot of time on my hands, so I started going jogging at the park down the street from my house with Mo and my Daddy, who were always trying to lose a few pounds.  After a few laps I got bored and lay down under a little pine tree.

“Hello Maxwell,” said the tree.

It was a girl tree.

We talked about everything and more.  I stroked her bark and she purred in my ear.  It was so nice to have a friend, someone I could talk to.  I never told anyone about her. After that, I would go out at night and walk to the park to hang out with my tree and talk.  It was so nice, such a soft, kind, gentle happening.

But my Mama wanted to know why I was going to the park at night by myself.  She asked me if I was Meeting People there.  I said, No, I just like to walk.

She didn’t believe me, and told me I couldn’t go to the park at night anymore by myself.

After that, I would go out to the sidewalk in front of the house and wait till the evil sorcerers sniffed me out and started chasing me.  They were on their crazy black stallions, but I was crazier and smarter than they, and I had the power to outrun them, as long as my feet were bare.  I could run like the wind with those bastards behind me, and the sharp little pebbles digging into the soles of my feet just made me more powerful.

And then, just as I was about to turn myself into pure demon energy and scare those evil wizards back to where they came from, my Daddy asked me if I wanted to get on an airplane with him and go to Hazing, Kansas, where he was going to get interviewed for his next promotion.