Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.
“Where did you go?”
“Out.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
ROBERT PAUL SMITH
Drawings by James J. Spanfeller
W . W . Norton & Company
NEW YORK • LONDON
For Monica
“Where did you go?”
“Out.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
THE THING IS, I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT KIDS do with themselves any more. I have two boys of my own, I live in a suburb where three out of three fathers are up to here with catching that commuting train and paying that mortgage and burning those leaves and shoveling that snow, and when all else is indefensible, say, “But it’s a wonderful place to raise children.” Spock and Gesell and others of that Ilg are the local deities, the school teachers speak of that little stinker from Croveny Road as “a real challenge,” there are play groups and athletic supervisors and Little Leagues and classes in advanced finger painting and family counselors and child psychologists. Ladies who don’t know a posteriori from tertium quid carry the words “sibling rivalry” in the pocketbooks of their minds as faithfully as their no-smear lipstick.
And yet—I was with a bunch of kids a week ago, ranging in age from ten to fourteen (to forty-one counting me) and since none of them seemed to know what to do for the next fifteen minutes I said to them, “How about a game of mumbly-peg?” And can you believe that not one of these little siblings knew spank the baby from Johnny jump the fence? All right, I thought, they don’t know mumbly-peg, maybe they’re territory players. One of them knew that game. As a matter of fact, he beat me at it, but I figure that was because it was his knife. The wrong kind. When we were kids, we had a scout knife, and for only one reason. Oh, I know it says in the catalogs that the blade is a leather punch, but on my block that narrow fluted blade was a mumbly-peg blade. In an emergency you could punch a hole in something with the blade—but with us it was a knee or a forehead, most often, when we were doing knees or heads in mumblypeg. It was called a scout knife, but it was a mumbly-peg knife.
On my block, when I was a kid, there was a lot of loose talk being carried on above our heads about how a father was supposed to be a pal to his boy. This was just another of those stupid things that grownups said. It was our theory that the grownup was the natural enemy of the child, and if any father had come around being a pal to us we would have figured he was either a little dotty or a spy. What we learned we learned from another kid. I don’t remember being taught how to play mumbly-peg. (I know, I know. In the books they write it “mumblety-peg,” but we said, and it was, “mumbly-peg.”) When you were a little kid, you stood around while a covey of ancients of nine or ten played mumbly-peg, shifting from foot to foot and wiping your nose on your sleeve and hitching up your knickerbockers, saying, “Lemme do it, aw come on, lemme have a turn,” until one of them struck you in a soft spot and you went home to sit under the porch by yourself or found a smaller kid to torture, or loused up your sister’s rope-skipping, or made a collection of small round stones. The small round stones were not for anything, it was just to have a collection of small round stones.
One day you said, “Lemme have a turn, lemme have a turn,” and some soft-hearted older brother, never your own, said, “Go-wan, let the kid have a turn,” and there, by all that was holy, you were playing mumbly-peg.
Well now, I taught those kids to play mumbly-peg, and for all I know, if I hadn’t happened to be around that day, in another fifteen years they would have to start protecting mumbly-peg players like rosy spoonbills or the passenger pigeon—but why don’t the kids teach the other kids to play mumbly-peg? What do these kids do with themselves all the time?
So far as I can find out, they don’t play immies any more. I see in the newsreels every once in a while that they’re holding the national marble championships. What kind of an insanity is this? In the first place, any kid on my block who called an immie a marble would have been barred from civilized intercourse for life. In the second place, who cares who’s marble champion of the world? The problem is, who’s the best immie shooter on the block. And in the third place, they play some idiotic kind of marbles with a ring drawn in paint, and I’ll bet a hat the rules are written down in a book. On my block, the rules were written down in kids. The rules were that as soon as the ground got over being frozen, any right-minded kid on the way home from school, or in recess, planted his left heel in the ground at an angle of forty-five degrees and walked around it with his right foot until there was a hole of a certain size. You couldn’t measure this hole. We all knew what size the hole was supposed to be. I could go outside right now and make a hole the right size. (I did. It’s still the same size. The size of an immie hole. And while I was outside I drew a line with the toe of my foot the proper distance from the hole. It’s still the same distance. It isn’t something you measure in feet. It’s the distance from the immie hole that the line is supposed to be.) Then you stood on the line and, to start, threw immies, underhand, at the hole. There was a kid who moved from another town who said this was “lagging” but we didn’t pay much attention to him. There’s a lot more to immies. There’s fins (or fens) and knucks down and whether it was fair to wiggle your feet while you were doing fins. (Or fens.) There were steelies, which were big ball bearings and could bust an immie and depending on the size of the kids these were legal or illegal, there were realies and glassies. There was the immie bag that your mother made and you put to one side because all right-minded kids carried them in a big bulge in the pocket until the pocket tore. The grownups used to talk about not playing for keeps, which was more nonsense like fathers being pals, and there was the time when I owed a boy I will call Charlie Pagliaro, because that was almost his name, one hundred and forty-four immies. He played me until I had no immies, then he extended me credit, and I doubled and redoubled, and staggered home trying to absorb the fact that I owed him one hundred and forty-four immies. Now the first thing to understand is that there is no such thing as one hundred and forty-four immies. Twenty maybe, or with the help of your good friends, thirty-six, or maybe by going into servitude for the rest of your life to every kid on the whole block, you might get up to about sixty. But there is no such thing as one hundred and forty-four marbles, that’s the first thing. The second thing is that Charlie told me he would cut my head off with his knife—which was no boy scout knife, Charlie being, believe me, no boy scout. The third thing is that I believed Charlie would do it. The fourth thing is that I believed Charlie believed he would do it. I still do. Immies were a penny apiece then.
You go to your mother and say, “I owe Charlie Pagliaro one hundred and forty-four marbles.” Your mother says, “I told you not to play for keeps.” You go to your father and you say, “I owe Charlie Pagliaro one hundred and forty-four marbles.” Your father says, “One hundred and forty-four? Well, tell him you didn’t mean to go that high.”
You go to your best friend. He believes that Charlie Pagliaro will cut your head off. He lends you three immies and a steelie, which, if I remember, was worth five immies, or if big enough, ten, if the guy you were swapping with wanted a steelie at all. Two copies of The Boy Allies and a box of blank cartridges, a seebackroscope you got from the Johnson Smith catalog, and a promise to Charlie Pagliaro that you will do his homework for the rest of your life, twenty-five cents in cash, and that’s it. Charlie takes the stuff, and all you owe him now is fifteen immies. He knows you have a realie. Realies are worth more than diamonds. It is not a good thing to have Charlie mad at you. There goes the realie. You are alive, but poverty
-stricken for all time.
(It occurs to me that Charlie Pagliaro may still be alive, and a pillar of the community. It occurs to me maybe you think of him as one of these kids you see around now, with those black leather jackets and motorcycle boots. That’s wrong. I would be lying if I didn’t say that he was tough. I would be lying if I didn’t say that from time to time all of us kids threw rocks at each other, with the avowed intention of killing the other kid dead. I was no pillar of strength, and if it was possible to avoid having a fight with another kid, any other kid, I did. And even then, I had more than my share of fights. We fought and we stole and we lied and defended our honor and we lived by a code that had very little to do with an organization more high-minded than the Mafia. But Charlie didn’t pull a knife on me, I don’t believe he ever pulled a knife on anybody, and all the time we were engaged in juvenile rape and pillage, I never saw a kid deliberately hit another kid with anything but his hands or feet. There were a few wild men, who, aroused into red fury, laid hold of a handy one-by-two and let go, but nobody ever armed themselves for combat. This seems to have changed.)
So, they don’t play mumbly-peg and they don’t play immies. And all you people who are going to tell me about aggies, and the way you played marbles—peace. You played a different way. But whatever way you played, that was the way, that was the only way to play, and you would have had no more of me telling you then than I will of you telling me now. Most of all, did you ever in your whole life conceive of a grownup coming around and having the effrontery to butt into a game? It wasn’t only that he would be silly, he wouldn’t know. Also it was none of his goddam business. Oh, somebody’s big brother, somebody who had used to be around the block, maybe even was going to college—he knew. We used to play football. Nobody ever taught us, we played, and if somebody’s big brother taught you the center was supposed (or not supposed?) to lean on the ball, that you had to get your fingers onto the seam to throw what we called “a sparrow,” that was all right. He was a big kid. He wasn’t a grownup. He was on our side.
I remember a baseball called a nickel rocket. I have a feeling even then inflation was on us and a nickel rocket cost ten cents. The first thing you did with a nickel rocket was to nip into somebody’s garage and hook a roll of friction tape. If the garage was dark enough, for a minute or an hour you would grab the end of the tape and pull it back quickly and see the blue sparks. None of my teachers told me about static electricity, nor did anyone’s father. I don’t even know that they knew about this, or indeed that anybody but me knows about it to this day. Some kid found out that if you pulled the end of the tape back quickly, you saw blue sparks. Some kid told some other kid, and some other kid told some other kid. We knew it. All kids knew it. When we got tired of watching the sparks we wrapped the nickel rocket with friction tape, and if any was left over, we wrapped the handle of the bat with it. I guess I know now the reason we did this with the nickel rocket was that if by any wild chance one of us had gotten a solid hit, the ball would have come apart. But that’s not the point. There was no reasoning going on then. You wrapped a nickel rocket with friction tape because that’s what you did with a nickel rocket. And you put it on the handle of the bat because there was some tape left over. And if there was still some left over, you put it around your wrist, like a strong man. And I have never thought about it until this minute, but why did people keep rolls of friction tape in the garage? We didn’t know. It’s just that that’s where friction tape was. I feel it’s got some connection with automobiles, that it was a way of helping to patch inner tubes, but I wouldn’t bet a nickel either way.
There must have been some time in my life when I played baseball with nine men on a team, but surely it was not on our block. We played with as many kids as were around, and I don’t think there were eighteen kids on the block. We always carefully looked at the bat to make sure the label was up, because if the label wasn’t up, it would split the bat. Is there any truth in this? I don’t know. It was an article of faith, and any kid who didn’t turn the label up was screamed at until he did.
My kids don’t play baseball because of their magnificent inheritance (constitutional sloth and an inability to get out of the way of their own feet), but all the kids I see playing baseball these days are in something called The Little League and have a covey of overseeing grownups hanging around and bothering them and putting catcher’s masks on them and making it so bloody important the kids don’t even know about one o’ cat, or one old cat, or whatever you called it. They tell me these kids in the Little League cry when they lose a game. Nobody ever cried in our baseball games unless he caught a foul tip with the end of his finger, or unless someone slang the bat and caught the catcher across the shins with it, and since it was a kid umpiring, no matter what the score came up finally, you could argue long enough about any decision so that you either won or were robbed. Or some kid had to leave in the middle to practice the piano or go down to the store or go for a ride in his uncle’s new Essex. So, even though we never played nine men on a side, nor were ever in a game that went nine innings, what I remember is the sound of a ball in a glove, and the feeling in my fingers when the bat threatened to split (you vibrated clear up to your ears, and somebody hollered at you to hold the label up) and I remember how somebody got some very precious stuff called neat’s-foot oil (“It comes from the foot of a neat, you dope!”) and we rubbed that in our gloves instead of Three-in-One. And then there was the little kid who had been given a glove that we thought was much too good for him, and from the loftiness of our advanced years, we advised him that the only way to really truly properly break it in was to rub it with horse dung and leave it in the sun.
Kids, as far as I can tell you, don’t do things like that any more. There’s always some interfering grownup around being a pal to them, telling them where to put their feet when they stand at the plate. We found out. Stand the way you wanted to and there was everybody on your side hollering “Take your foot out of the bucket,” and you took your foot out of the bucket. When things got tough for our side, we picked out a real little kid, just big enough to hold the bat and stand at the plate. Just stand there, we told him, and the pitcher would carry on for a while, how it was gypping, who could throw strikes that low, then he’d throw him four straight balls and we had a man—a man!—on base.
Oh, all the wisdom. A kid hit a bunch of fouls. We knew what to say. “He’s gonna have chicken for supper.” Somebody was between you and what you wanted to see. “Sit down,” we’d say, “waddya think, your father’s a glazier?” We had, by the way, no idea of what a glazier was. Two infants would be flailing each other at recess, striking out like windmills and crying bitterly from pure rage. “Hit ’im in the kishkas,” we said, “hit ’im in the bread basket, down in the la bonza, he don’t like it down there.”
We used to play a game called stoop ball. It is my considered reflection that for three months out of every year, for years on end, all we did was play stoop ball. It had to be played with a golf ball, I don’t know why. After a certain amount of time, the golf ball—which we wouldn’t have had at all unless the cover was cut almost to ribbons—would have enough cuts in it so you could pull off the white covering. Then for another three days, what you did was unwind the rubber band. I am not sure what you did with the rubber string you unwound, except to wrap it around various parts of your body until the circulation stopped. Mostly, once again, it was just what kids did. Unwound the rubber. In the center was a little white ball the size of an immie. Inside it, we knew, was something which was so dangerous it was inconceivable. There were two schools of thought. One, that it was an explosive so powerful that, that, that—well jeez, it was an explosive! The other school of thought held that it was a poison that killed, not only on contact anybody who was foolhardy enough to open it, but it would strike dead, on the whole block, every person, cat, collie dog. It could also wither trees and probably melt the pavement.
We cut one open once, and a thick white liqu
id dribbled out. I was the wise guy. Somebody said it was poison, so I had to say it wasn’t. I touched it. Catch me doing that today! That stuff there, that stuff—why jeez, it’s an explosive!
I suppose this is all just an indication of my advanced years, but I don’t know things now like I used to know then. What we knew as kids, what we learned from other kids, was not tentatively true, or extremely probable, or proven by science or polls or surveys. It was so. I suppose this has to do with ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. We were savages, we were in that stage of the world’s history when the earth stood still and everything else moved. I wrote on the flyleaf of my schoolbooks, and apparently every other kid in the world did, including James Joyce and Abe Lincoln and I am sure Tito and Fats Waller and Michelangelo, in descending order my name, my street, my town, my county, my state, my country, my continent, my hemisphere, my planet, my solar system. And let nobody dissemble: it started out with me, the universe was the outer circle of a number of concentric rings, and the center point was me, me, me, sixty-two pounds wringing wet with heavy shoes on. I have the notion, and perhaps I am wrong, that kids don’t feel that way any more. Damn Captain Video! And also, I am afraid, damn “The Real True Honest-to-God Book of Elementary Astrophysics in Words of One Syllable for Pre-School Use.”
Once again, it’s because we grownups are always around pumping our kids full of what we laughingly call facts. They don’t want science. They want magic. They don’t want hypotheses, they want immutable truth. They want to be, they should be, in a clearing in the jungle painting themselves blue, dancing around the fire and making it rain by patting snakes and shaking rattles. It is so strange: nobody, so far as I know, sat around worrying about the insides of our heads, and we made ourselves safe. Time enough to find out, as we are finding out now, that nothing is so. Not even close to so.