The question is: did I, as a young boy, periodically leap from the top of the stairs, as I seem to remember, or was this simply a recurring dream? Common sense, of course, would indicate that these leaps were simply fantasies, especially since I can recall no post-landing damage: no tears or broken bones or soothing spoonfuls of Scotch and honey, the standard medicine dispensed after similar collisions between a pliant boy and the unyielding world. I am, however, perplexed by the utter vividness and un-dream-like nature of these memories. On more than one occasion, I remember (or believe I remember) clutching my Charlie Brown doll as I descended, a cherished talisman whose plastic nose bore fading traces of a concentrated but fruitless suckling. This was hardly surprising: the fundamental sensory experiences of my generation were, after all, molded by the taste and texture of synthetics, a circumstance for which our mothers bear primary responsibility. For after all, was it not their choice to sacrifice their mammalian duties at the alter of freedom and convenience? to succumb to the oily blandishments of magazine advertising and logical positivism? to thrust mass-produced simulations of their own ducts into the mouths of their frustrated, unfulfilled, breastyearning offspring?
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Doubtless, this and other concessions to the demands of technology offered a degree of succor to a nation still reeling from the shock of Sputnik’s successful launching. While cultural anthropologists can likely illuminate the many unintended consequences that resulted from the sudden introduction of bottle-feeding on America’s innocent youth, the most enduring effect can perhaps be seen in the current popularity (soon to be Constitutional birthright) of breast implants, a phenomenon in which inorganic simulations have merged with--and, in many instances, supplanted--the human tissue for which they formerly served as functional representations. I leave it to these same anthropologists to determine whether this popularity is more indicative of infantilism, regression, fetishism, objectification, or an uneasy combination of all four.
Both of my parents worked; during my earliest years, I was tended by the woman next who door, who had the unlikely name of Thorn. (My first love? Perhaps, although the feelings she inspired were more liable to the result of simple imprinting. She smelled of graham crackers and animal cookies.) My mother was engaged in some sort of secretarial work in a Detroit firm, although she had, for a time, been employed in the Washington offices of Richard Nixon. I have a picture of the two of them, she seated, he hunched and standing, both of them smiling awkwardly. Had she not abandoned her career for marriage, it is entirely possible that she, and not RoseMary Woods, would have been the party responsible for “accidentally” erasing the eighteen and a half minutes of Oval Office audiotape. Unfortunately, fame was destined to bypass her...
My father, during these pre-realtor days, labored on the assembly line at Ford Motor Company; he later claimed that his skin would often turn a muted shade of orange from the chemicals with which he worked, a circumstance which prompted frequent visits to bars and an affinity for Ray Charles records. Class-conscious from an early age, he had worked hard to efface from his discourse any audible traces of his hillbilly childhood in Paducah, Kentucky. Apart from a superfluous /r/ sound in the word “wash,” he was remarkably successful in this makeover.
My father’s mother, who lived with us for the first four or five years of my life, made no such linguistic adjustments; she spoke with a thick hills accent, the syllables of which always seemed to rise alarmingly in volume at the ends of sentences. She also worked in some kind of manufacturing plant. I remember that she was once threatened at her place of work by a knife-wielding man who demanded her purse; the fact that A), the assailant happened to be black, and B), wasn’t immediately lynched for his temerity in attacking a white woman, confirmed her worst suspicions about life above the Mason-Dixon line. I called her “Memaw,” because this is what I was told to call her, and I was always good at following orders. (My cousins in Florida called her “Gimme,” a name I considered both juvenile and contemptible.) She had had a husband, at one point, but this gentleman had died when I was an infant. I had no memory of him; I never thought to ask of his whereabouts; I accepted his absence as placidly as I accepted all other things.
There was an even greater paucity of grandparents on the maternal side. Another accepted absence: they were never mentioned; no photographs were displayed, no stories shared. I remember feeling astonished when friends spoke of having two, three and sometimes even four grandparents. Like Sartre’s nauseated protagonist, I found this to be a disturbing surfeit. Despite her strange and intrusive accent, I was content with my singular grandparent,; she let me drink Vernor’s floats and once bought me a Slinky and usually let me stay up late when she was babysitting.
(Years later, my mother inadvertently let slip the pertinent facts regarding my other grandparents. One had been vaguely Native American, in some diminished or fractional capacity—Cherokee, of course, the default tribal affiliation of all white trash yearning for mystical ancestry; the other but recently emigrated from the British Isles; both enthusiastic alcoholics...one spring morning, after strapping their infant daughter into her high chair, they left the house for a prolonged drinking binge, from which they—inadvertently or not-- failed to return. After nearly a day and a half of confinement, my mother’s cries, still potent but diminishing in volume, were providentially heard by some neighborhood girls, who alerted their parents, who rescued her from the high chair, eventually gaining legal custody of her.)
Several years later, my grandfather, in the midst of another drinking binge, threw his pregnant wife down a staircase, killing her instantly.
As far as I know, neither of my paternal grandparents ever killed anybody. The sissies.
My parents called me “Corky,” for some reason, despite the fact that my official first name was Terry. (Years later, when I asked my father about why I was saddled with a nickname that caused me endless ridicule at school, he replied that I looked like a Corky when I was born. This was the closest he ever came to sounding Zen.) Our house was located on the corner of the street, a location which afforded me a certain unearned (but not unexploited) status. It was a pleasant enough street: I remember milkmen, dressed in crisp white uniforms, delivering frosted bottles through the glass-enclosed apertures located by the front door. There were fire hydrants which firemen opened during the humid summers, unleashing torrents of water down the high-curbed streets; a variety of trees to climb; the bumpers of slowly-moving Good Humor trucks upon which to crouch; a series of conjoined neighborhood backyards, through which the more adventurous of us would often run on dares, the object being to avoid any angry dogs suddenly roused from sleep. In short, it was everything a boy could want.
There was also, unfortunately, a giant Buster Brown shoe ad painted on the side of a Rexall Drug Store on 12 Mile Road, a building we often passed while on family business. This was an image that terrified me beyond cogent description when I was young. I often dreamed of this dog, with its insane grin and wild eyes, creeping quietly into my bedroom at night, moving slowly across the floor, its rows of ravening white fangs reflecting the sickly moonlight...
Despite coming from an irreligious family, I was beset by any number of spiritual calamities during my early years. My second-best-friend, Dennis Kipe, who periodically attended some mysterious function called Katty Kism, once smugly told me that my soul--which he described as a small yellow blanket in the middle of either my head or back--acquired an immutable black spot every time I told a lie, and that later, when my soul ran out of room, God would fly down from Heaven and kill me in a fit of righteous rage. This, apparently, was called Catholicism.
Shortly after this revelation, I suddenly realized, after idly pulling a flower from the ground, that I could somehow see through to the center of the earth, where hellfire boiled and devils capered with savage joy. One serpentlike plume of fire even roared up the hole left by the flower’s roots and nearly had me; with a scream, I jumped back and ran into the house, locking the door behind me. The encroaching fire confirmed Dennis Kipe’s words and served to alert me to the fact my counting was way off—I thought I still had at least six or seven lies to go before I needed to start worrying. Trembling with fear, I crouched by the back door and waited to be dragged down into the flames.
And waited. And waited. After a while, I realized that my soul must have some extra space on it after all. Relieved (but none the wiser), I stole a chocolate-chip cookie from the jar on the counter and went back outside to play. I did, however, take pains to avoid the spot where the flower had been pulled. I also never told anybody about my glimpse of Hell, not even my first-best friend Ricky DiTommaso, despite the fact that we had pricked our fingers with old safety pins and swore the sacred blood brother oath. This omission likely resulted in even more black spots being attached to my soul blanket.
As though Satan and Catholics weren’t enough of a nuisance, I was also frequently traumatized by Little Baby Jesus. My Great-Aunt Sissy, another Kentuckian, had once given me a large book detailing the adventures of the plucky infant savior. For some reason, the drawings in this book, far from inspiring wholesome, spiritual thoughts, instead filled me with revulsion, loathing and dread. One image in particular--a drawing that depicted the Messiah being cradled by his mother--was unendurable. Something about the artist’s rendering--the knowing glint of Jesus’ eyes, the pink Aryan cheeks, the disheveled mop of curly blonde hair—induced tremendous panic; I tried to keep away from the book, but couldn’t; it summoned me from the bookshelf; I was helpless in the face of its monstrous, shiny pages, and yet I couldn’t stop myself from periodically opening the book and peeking at the foulness within.
I thought about throwing the book away—maybe even down the hole into Hell!--but I knew that the consequences would likely be swift and severe. I tried hiding it around the house a few times, but it always made its way back to my bookshelf, somehow.
After Kindergarten, which mostly involved mats, snacks, and a benign presence named Mrs. Gutenschwager, the pleasures of school went swiftly downhill. We read about Dick and Jane and their pointless activities. We counted drawings of chickens. We sat at desks and practiced ducking and covering, anticipating the upcoming nuclear war. (Many of us believed that such a war wouldn’t be entirely bad if it took the schools as well.) Relief from thirst, hunger, or bursting bladders came at the unpredictable whim of furious, yardstickwielding teachers, who were always yelling at us about something or other they’d written on the chalkboard. Half of our school time seemed to involve the practice of standing in lines, an endeavor we consistently failed to master. (This failure, I should say, was usually gender-based: all the girls seemed to have proper line-standing techniques encoded in their DNA, while most boys were unable to grasp even the simplest aspects of the maneuver.)
It was strange, but nearly all the school-based adults—teachers, monitors, and janitors--seemed to derive deep satisfaction from their power to arbitrarily deny us bathroom privileges. While we hopped around, holding our privates and trying not to explode, they lectured us about the need to regulate our natural processes in conjunction with the school schedule. It was clear that the adults considered us responsible for our own discomfort; we had “failed to go” during the official time allotted for such activities, regardless of whether we had to “go” or not. In our opinion, this was the clearest evidence yet of the insanity of adults. My friends and I, while disagreeing over the probable cause of this insanity, nonetheless made solemn vows to never grow up.
The school playground, simultaneously infinite and chokingly claustrophobic, offered little relief; it was a chalk-lined killing field wherein coded messages where passed, where alliances were formed and broken, where students sought analogous revenge on smaller and weaker classmates. The playground hierarchy, apparently established long before I was born, was irresistible; everybody seemed to fit seamlessly, even unconsciously, into the roles assigned to them by unknown forces. Sometimes, on particularly bright days, you could catch glimpses, in those flushed, elastic childhood faces, of the grim adult masks that would inevitably emerge.
My front yard (and, by extension, the rest of my neighborhood), remained a refuge from religious damnation and the incomprehensible restrictions of teachers and parents. During summer, adults were like distant thunderclouds, a vaguely troubling phenomenon that could be ignored up to the point they called an end to the day’s important activities. On winter weekends, though, grown-ups were more of an abstraction, as if the snow somehow muted their capricious control over every aspect of our lives. They watched TV in the overheated recesses of their houses and grumbled about impassable roads and frozen car engines; meanwhile, outside, we erected elaborate snow forts and engaged in epic snowball fights which seemed to last for days at a time. Survival in these endeavors was predicated on one’s ability to switch allegiances at the drop of a hat.
My neighborhood had all the standard features, including a homicidal bully named Ricky Thoyer. All kids afforded him varying degrees of distance, lest his random anger be given accidental focus and purpose. Unfortunately, due to some real or imagined slight, I once found myself the adversary of this red-headed monster. To my shock, he did the “Pushing The Other Guy On The Shoulder” movement, which, like magic, caused the two of us to be suddenly encircled by kids panting in eager anticipation. Having no choice, and resigned to the vicious beating that was sure to come I closed my eyes and began blindly hitting and slapping. After a few moments, I took a quick peek to assess the situation and found that I was somehow winning the fight.
The feeling was indescribable. I was beating Ricky Thoyer! My bloodlust now roused, I went in for the kill. The final punch. At that moment, my time of triumph, when Ricky Thoyer would be required by the sacred boy code to cry out “Uncle!”, disappearing forever into the dustbin of neighborhood history, deconstructed, neutered, brought down to the level of the jackal-like mob...at that precise moment, with my victory fist raised, Ricky Thoyer—the boy whose lusterless eyes seemed to absorb all light; whose crewcut resembled a massive cranial infection; whose face was tattooed with insistently red freckles that seemed to swell and subside in conjunction with his unspeakable pulse-- reared back his leg and kicked me as hard as he could in the crotch.
There was a moment in which I seemed to disappear from myself. Sadly, this moment was especially fleeting. While I writhed on the ground, the post-fight analysts (newly fawning, it should be noted) conferred and delivered their verdict. While the ancient rules of neighborhood fighting had certainly been breached—to say nothing of the Marquis of Queensbury--the sheer efficiency and instrumentality of Ricky’s kick could not be denied. And, of course, they would be beat up if they delivered any other decision. Cheering the victor, the crowd slowly dispersed, leaving me alone, on the grass, trying to remember how to breathe.
To this day, I have not fully recovered from the shock and unfairness of that unexpected foot. And then we moved to Phoenix, where I became addicted to television.
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