CHAPTER TWELVE

In which I return to the rotten apple for one more bite

 

Like all people everywhere, my opinion of Kansas was prejudiced by multiple viewings of The Wizard of Oz, in which Kansas was portrayed as a gray and desolate place which any child in his right mind would want to avoid if at all possible, even if it meant being whisked up in a tornado to do it.

That’s not the impression I got when my Daddy flew me to Hazing so he could glom on to his new job promotion.  Our first evening there, being without the family car, we went for a walk.  The air was thick with something indescribable, which in retrospect I’ve decided must have been a feeling of new hope that comes with new beginnings.  As my Daddy always said, If you stay in one place too long, you grow stagnant.

Then again, it could have just been the 90% humidity.

I don’t know that stagnancy was a problem I was having in Albuquerque after only three years there, but as we walked down that dark, quiet street through clouds of fireflies in that nice, medium-sized town, all I could do was to savor this New Feeling I was having, and hope it was for real.

One of the things we would be leaving behind in Albuquerque was my sister Mo, and I’ve neglected to tell you a thing that had happened to me regarding my sister Mo, during our last months in Albuquerque.

Mo and I had been the bitterest of enemies ever since she got old enough to baby-sit me and my brother Dirk, for then she had the privacy she needed to kick the shit out of me as much as she wanted, and when my Mama and my Daddy didn’t believe me when I told them this was happening, it pissed Mo off that much more and the beatings escalated until I finally convinced my Mama and my Daddy that I was old enough to tuck myself into my own bed when they were gone, and didn’t need Mo to drop-kick me into it.

By the time we got to Albuquerque, I was at least as big as my sister Mo and we pretty much ignored each other most of the time, except that by tacit mutual agreement, when my Mama and Daddy weren’t home we all stayed up as late as we damn well pleased, and turned off the TV and ran to bed when they drove up in the family car.

After I rebuilt the player piano, and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and McDoodle and I were pretty much tired of each other most of the time, I started noticing on TV every night how they kept telling us how many American soldiers came home from Vietnam in body bags that day, and every day the number kept getting bigger.  I had learned from McDoodle that war was good, and me and him were in mutual agreement that teenagers, hippies, and peaceniks were bad.  McDoodle had skipped lunch for three years and saved his lunch money and used it to buy some land out in the desert where he and some of his warmonger friends would have bottle-rocket wars.  That’s how much he liked war.  According to his doctor, McDoodle was supposed to die by the time he was 21, so he was trying to use up 90 years’ worth of energy before it was too late.

My sister Mo was in her first year of college and was turning into one of those anti-war peaceniks, and one day after we watched the demonstrators get whomped by the National Guard at the Democratic convention in Chicago on the Walter Cronkite show, and my Mama declared that she was sure Walter Cronkite was about to bust out crying, I looked at the black armband that my sister Mo was wearing everywhere she went, and asked her if she had another one that I could try on.  She asked me what I thought about the war and all that, and I said, Watch this, and I took the black strip of cloth she gave me and tied it on my arm.  I told her, That’s what I think about Vietnam, it’s a bunch of shit.

I started wearing my armband to school, until one afternoon the Principal came on the intercom and gave us a big speech about how we all had to take off our armbands because school was where we went to have government-approved double-talk shoved down our throats, and not any kind of a place to advertise political opinions.  I took my armband off with a big sneer and put it in my pocket, not realizing that the Principal couldn’t see me over the intercom, but after school I tied it around my new hat and wore it that way the rest of the year.

On the last day of school I was walking home with my friend Bull Durham, who later became a hippie, but that day he was not one and he was trying to tell me to take that stupid black arm band off my hat, and while I was at it, why not take off that stupid hat too.  I refused, but when we got to the park, there were some girls walking by so he saw his opportunity to humiliate me, and said if I didn’t take off the armband, he would take it off for me.  I didn’t believe him, but pretty soon when he was sure those girls were looking, he shoved me down and sat on me and took the black band off my hat and tore it up into little pieces.  That made him a real patriot in those girls’s eyes.

My sister Mo saw me making a new black band for my hat that evening and I told her what happened, and she told me she would take me to the university one of these days so I could attend a peace rally with her.  Meanwhile, the Kent State Massacre took place, in which the National Guard executed four students for having opinions, and most of the universities in the country went on strike, including my sister Mo’s school, the University of New Mexico.  The students there took over the Student Union, saying it was theirs anyway, and a Free University was formed in which you could learn about things like how to have a sit-in and how to have good vibes and all that.  One day there was a big rally at my sister Mo’s school, and when the National Guard got there, they lined up along one edge of the plaza and charged the rallying students with fixed bayonets.

Five or six people wound up in the hospital from bayonet wounds, one of them was critically injured with the tendons in his legs sliced up.  There is a famous poster from that day showing a man with two leg casts being carried by two other men, and they were running away from the National Guard who were behind them, lined up across the plaza like a bunch of hungry lizards, running towards them with fixed bayonets.  Mo took me to the university the next day and showed me the blood stains on the plaza, and then we sat and watched some people get up at a microphone and give their impressions of what it had felt like to get assaulted by the National Guard for having opinions.  I wondered why everyone kept shouting, Ride on!  Ride on!  but figured out later it was just an expression.  One of those speakers was the man in the leg casts, and boy was he mad.  He went on and on, screaming bad words till everybody started leaving and his friends made him get off the stage.  That day was more fun than any day I’d ever spent at a public gathering.  One thing was certain:  the war between me and my sister Mo was over forever.

That summer Mo got herself a boyfriend named Aaron, and he was like a great breath of fresh air to our family, because he liked to hang out and talk and make a lot of silly puns.  It was almost like having Glenda back.  My Mama loved him and even my Daddy almost laughed out loud at his jokes, although to this day I don’t believe I’ve ever heard my Daddy actually laugh out loud.  He smiles a lot though, especially when someone’s trying to have a conversation with him and he’s trying to figure out what he’s supposed to say next.

When we were getting all our stuff put into cardboard boxes to move to Hazing, Mo said she was going to get married to Aaron and stay in Albuquerque with him.  Well, OK, my Mama said, we’ll have to come down for the wedding, and Mo said, that won’t be necessary because we’re getting married this week before the Plymouth Rock Moving and Storage Company comes to take all your middle-class materialistic stuff away.  My Mama thought that was short on notice and grudgingly got in touch with her minister who grudgingly agreed to do the ceremony on short notice as long as Mo and Aaron would be willing to squeeze in some counseling sessions first.  Well OK, but at the last minute she decided that was boring and with Aaron’s sister and brother and Aaron’s brother’s girlfriend and Aaron’s Mama all headed for Albuquerque on the airplane already, she and Aaron made an appointment with a judge instead.

So my Mama helped Mo sew herself a nice flowered miniskirt to get married in, and we met all of Aaron’s family at the airport and took them straight over to the judge’s office and went on in there and watched Mo and Aaron get married.  Then Aaron’s brother and Aaron’s brother’s girlfriend pulled out their guitars right there in the judge’s office, and the judge’s secretaries all came in to watch, and they played and sang for us the prettiest song I had ever heard, which goes like this:  “Teach your children well, their father’s hell will slowly go by,” and so on.  Everything went fine and the National Guard was not called, so we went to the park and had a wedding picnic that couldn’t be beat, and then me and my brother Dirk and my Mama and Daddy and our two cats got into the family car and followed the Plymouth Rock Moving Van all the way to Hazing, Kansas, to make sure it didn’t get lost.

But that’s not all that happened in Albuquerque.

Way back in the sixth grade, there was a sort of little room or big closet off through me and my brother Dirk’s room, and one day my Mama and my Daddy had the bright idea that if I wanted a room of my own as bad as my brother Dirk thought I did, maybe I could move my bed in there.  Well that was just fine and dandy with me, and boy was I happy to finally have my very own room for the first time in my life, even if it was only big enough for my bed and my Mama’s ironing board, since she also used my room for a sewing room.

Something funny happened after I got my own room.  All of a sudden, out of the blue, for no inconceivable reason, I stopped wetting my bed.

Yes, it’s true.  For the first twelve years of my life, I would wake up in Urineworld, almost every morning, so as a result I have never been a morning person, because as a child I became accustomed to waking up with my first thought being, Why me?  If this ever happened to you, even once, then I don’t have to tell you what a desperate situation it is.  The worst part was wetting other people’s beds when we were visiting relatives or spending the night at a friend’s house, because they didn’t have plastic liners on their mattresses like I did, and somehow I can’t begin to tell you what it was like on all those camping trips to go to bed each night in a sleeping bag that had been hanging in the sun all day roasting in the previous night’s yellow flood.

My poor Mama and Daddy took turns getting me and my brother Dirk out of bed in the middle of the night and holding us up on rubbery legs as we staggered to the bathroom.  But there was always more pee to come.  They bought buzzers that were supposed to go off at the first sign of moisture on the sheets, but instead they went off whenever they felt like it, several times a night.  The whole thing was so miserable that, as an adult, the first time I spent the night with a girlfriend who had a little child, when her child woke up crying in a wet bed, I cried harder. 

Those few mornings when I woke up dry, I thought I’d died in my sleep and woken up in heaven.  So when the nightmare finally ended, I was without my usual outlet, and for the first time in my life, I decided to kill myself.

I was sitting at the table in Dirk’s room that we used for a desk, writing my suicide note.  So far, all it said was, “I am going to kill myself.”  I was squirming in the chair, picking my nose, listening to pop hits on the radio, scratching my butt, and trying to figure out what to write next, when I got a big inspiration.  I scratched out what I had written, and wrote, “I am going to write a book.”  The song on the radio at that moment was “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”  At that time, I didn’t even know what state San Jose was in, although since then I have found out.

My first book-writing attempt was something about a hero with a magic sword looking for a magic ring he needed so he could save the world.  His name was Hicsjezia wez Abo.

I never got anywhere with Hicsjezia, but I went all the way with my second book.  It was about the seven sons of Eliver, who lived on an island with their father.  On his deathbed, Eliver informed his sons that there was a great big nasty old world out there on the other side of the water, and he’d never told his sons about it because it was a war-infested nightmare and he didn’t want to get them involved.  But now that he was leaving his sons, he’d had a change of heart and enjoined them to get in the family boat and go across the water and find the magical Battle Horn that, if blown by a warlord, would cause the world to end, but if blown by an innocent, would cause all war to end forever.

The next book I wrote, during our last summer in Albuquerque and that autumn in Hazing, was about a king who was marooned in his castle by a flood, which was caused when the local crazy girl opened the floodgates in order to drown everybody.  All the castle’s inhabitants except its owner were out on the plain outside the castle walls having a feast, and they’d chased her off by making fun of her, so she got even by drowning them all.  The lord of the castle didn’t like parties, so he had gone up into the room in the top of the tower where he liked to hang out and drink wine, and watched the crazy girl drown all his tenants and neighbors.  Then the girl sat on top of the dike and the lord of the castle sat in his tower, and they watched each other across the water as they slowly went crazy and starved to death .

All in all, I’d have to say that Albuquerque was a very stimulating experience.