Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. Page 6

  However.

  In the hut we looked and we learned. And drooled. I remember a picture of Clara Bow with one shoulder strap—and then there was Toby Wing—and look at Lily Damita—she’s bending way over.

  Allow me to assure you that I will never lust after anything in my life as I did in the hut after the girl who played in the Wheeler and Woolsey pictures. I tell you, she didn’t wear practically anything. Did she, Mitch?

  I don’t believe my kids will have to hook those magazines: first, because I don’t believe any of them exists any more; and second because the last time I looked at the Saturday Evening Post, a lady was deploring brilliantly and quite rightly, I thought, the depravity of the Cannes Film Festival, and in case anyone wondered what depravity she was talking about, there was a profusion of photographic bosom that would have made Film Fun look like St. Nicholas.

  Now the old man is really snarling: when I was a kid, there was a difference between respectable and disrespectable, even a distinction between good and bad, and that seems to have gone by the board along with Concord grapes and sickle pears (don’t give me that Seckel pear jazz) and Country Gentleman corn and blackberries with grit and taste in them, pullet eggs and stiff farmer cheese. There were two kinds of magazines: one with pictures of naked ladies in it, therefore bad, therefore enjoyable. There was another kind of magazine with stories about dogs that everybody thought were chicken-killers but were not, about young men who invented new kinds of carburetors and married the boss’s daughter with freckles on her nose, with editorials that were in praise of America, all America, every bit of it, both sides and top and bottom, to and fro and hither and yon and upwards and onwards; where the illustrations were drawn so that you could count every hair in Grandma’s head as she threw her hands up and said, “Laws!”; where the good guys were clean-shaven and the pure girls were blonde: therefore these magazines were good; therefore intermittently tolerable, only occasionally enjoyable.

  Before that, there had been John Martin’s Big Book, which was so wonderful I cannot begin to tell you about it, and St. Nicholas, which my sisters liked.

  But at this age, when we lived in the hut and smoked cigarettes and honed after Renée Adorée (pronounced, of course, Reenee A-door-ee) we were Sinn Feiners and Revisionists and Bolsheviks in our souls, we wanted big muscles and big guns and big knives, we were, and I am not making fun, enemies of society and we needed things that were bad more than we needed cod-liver oil. And let me tell you, we had opponents worthy of our steel; the day came when I was walking to school and somebody said I would not smoke out there on the street, so of course I did, and you know that the lady who lived at the top of the hill on Primrose Avenue called my old lady, and I caught several kinds of hell. The lady on Primrose had not even the slightest quaver of doubt at calling my mother; I was a child, I had, every day on my way to school, played the game with the other kids of standing up in front of her hedge with my back to it, putting my arms out wide, and falling back like a felled tree. She had hollered at us for doing it, we had run to avoid identification, she knew I was her and her hedge’s enemy, and first chance she got to get even, she did.

  But here’s the point: that left me free to ruin her hedge and smoke cigarettes, both delightful occupations. My kids can’t break any grown-up statutes, and hear the delightful noise of shackles breaking, because they can’t find out what laws there are to break. Let me settle the problem of juvenile delinquency once and for all, because I happen to know: the reason these kids are getting in trouble with cops is because cops are the first people they meet who say, and mean it, “You can’t do that.”

  If there’s anything in the world kids need, it’s rules. When I was a kid, we honest-to-God did the business of drawing a line on the ground and if a kid wanted to fight, he had a choice, to step over the line or not. There it was. No more argle-bargle, step over the line, and pow. Or, stay on your side of the line. Keep the knife in your pocket in school and keep it. Take it out and lose it. Come in the house this minute, or straight to bed when I catch you.

  When my kids were smaller, their mother and I had been washed in the blood of, God save the mark, permissive upbringing. We privately, or at least I privately, thought it was a crock, particularly when I observed that my first-born had permission to take his bottles at any time, provided those times were two, four, six, two—or whatever the hell hours they were. And his nap was entirely at his discretion as long as it was when his parents were totally exhausted.

  He soon learned that he could do anything he wanted as long as what he wanted was what we wanted. Which is a fact of life, between parents and kids. But when their little heads first deal with problems of more complicated decisions, when parents begin to wonder if they have the right to make decisions for them, when those same parents know they have an obligation to, it gets a little harder. But not as hard as all that.

  I can no longer remember the crisis which involved my son: but in essence, it had reached the point, the point of all arguments, when he was saying the hell he would and I was saying the hell he wouldn’t. I don’t know—go to bed, or get out of bed, or come in from the garden or get the hell out into the garden.

  He was two or three. His mother rushed in to say that I must Gesell him a little, or at least Spock him or treat him with a little Ilg, and I went away. To bed, or out of bed, into the garden or out of the garden. She then left him to his own devices.

  I found him later, ready to renew hostilities, but on his face and in his manner was much weariness, much fatigue, and a kind of desperation. I had a moment of pure illumination: I stood there and saw inside his head as clearly as if there had been a pane of glass let in his forehead. What he was saying was, “Please, please, for Heaven’s sake, somebody come and take this decision out of my hands, it’s too big for me.”

  I grabbed him and picked him up and carried him to wherever it was I thought he was supposed to go. He was little then, he hit me and bit me and wet me, he hollered bloody murder and did his level best to kill me. I remember now, it was to his bed he was supposed to go. I got him there, and dumped him in, put the crib side up. He was in his cage, and he had been put there by his keeper, and he went to sleep as happy as ever I saw him. There were rules. Nobody was going to leave him out in the middle of nowhere trying to figure out what he was supposed to do, when he was too young to know what to do.

  The lady at the top of Primrose tipped off the domestic cops, and there was a rule established. The rule was, don’t smoke on your way to school when you are eleven years old and people on Primrose Avenue know who you are.

  So we stole Film Fun, and read it in the hut, and absorbed from each other the most intoxicating misinformation about ladies, naked and otherwise.

  Among the other things that were clearly and demonstrably good and bad were books. Good books were books that came from the library. Bad books were books that came from other kids. We always liked bad books, and only sometimes liked good books.

  This had nothing at all to do with naked ladies, and oddly enough, it had nothing to do with the contents of the books. Henty came from the library. Certainly, The Cat of Bubastes was as good a book as anybody had ever written. The title alone was one of the best things ever written. Washington Irving was a stinker, from the library or from home.

  Good books were either library books or birthday presents. Bad books were fifty cents apiece, new, and were tradeable. Bad books were The Boy Allies, The Motor Boys, Tom Swift, Sax Rohmer. They were not read so much as devoured. There was an established rate of exchange, and it took at least three Rover Boys—they were, for some reason, held in much scorn in my literary circle—for even not the latest Tom Swift. The newest Tom Swift was read by three people at once, one holding the book and two saying, “Not so fast,” or “Come on, fa Crise sake, turn the page.”

  This lasted only until we found Jules Verne. What a surprise that was, finding out that there was somebody better than Victor Appleton—and in the library, honest, I s
wear, I’ll show ya!

  Then an uncle of mine gave me a complete set of Mark Twain, and I was, and am, equipped for life. I started in at Volume One, and read through to the end of Volume Twenty. I concluded that there was very little else of value written down, and I went back to Volume One and started all over again. I have never stopped doing this. I was told the other evening that someone, either Thurber or Mencken, or both, looked forward to old age as sitting on a screened porch reading Huckleberry Finn. With, for me, maybe Louis Armstrong playing “Beale Street Blues” in a handy grape arbor, and a jug of Paddy’s Irish whiskey like it used to be, close at hand.

  However.

  I found Mark Twain, and my education as an adult began.

  As a kid, I read Dan Beard, Tanglewood Tales, The Tennessee Shad Stories, Stalky and Company, and all the rest of Kipling—it is odd, but I cannot remember reading any children’s books at all. Not Grimm, or Andersen, or the Blue, Green, Yellow or Puce Fairy Stories. The only book I can remember having read to me was some crud called Bobby and the Big Road, which I strongly suspect was the natural ancestor of all those woolly-bear books the kids get now. It was read to me on the supposition, I have no doubt, that since I was called Bobby, I would identify with the presumed hero of the book. This was an oaf, who, by all that’s holy, tripped over shadows. A fat chance of letting myself get mixed up with a schlemiel like that.

  We did have a set of books for children: it was called “The Boys’ and Girls’ Bookshelf” and that I read from Volume One to Volume Whatever it was, and I remember only one thing from it.

  There was a photograph of some square in some foreign city: there was a fenced-off grass park, and on the road at the right, otherwise deserted, was a hansom cab coming down the street. I used to stare and stare at this picture, why I cannot tell you, and one day I saw the horse and carriage move. I reported this information to a sister—I was very small—and she informed me that this was not possible. I then concluded that it was unwise to tell important things to sisters.

  There was another book, of which all I remember is that there was a frontispiece illustration, in color, called “The Garden of the Birds.” Do not ask me what that had to do with the book. Then, it was the book. They were very odd-looking birds, some with tails that would have pulled them ass-over-tea-kettle, some with heads they would have had to trip over (like a bull-terrier pup next door, that, so help me, used to gallop along until its head overbalanced it and then somersaulted), and all the birds stood on little stick legs that, I seem to recall, had no feet, but were just stuck into green grass. This was before I could read, and for reasons that are quite inexplicable to me now, there was enough in this picture to keep me studying it for months.

  To find out how the birds were supposed to work, I guess. Or just plain nothing to do.

  Because that was the main thing about kids then: we spent an awful lot of time doing nothing. There was an occupation called “just running around.” It was no game. It had no rules. It didn’t start and it didn’t stop. Maybe we were all idiots, but a good deal of the time we just plain ran around.

  Many many hours of my childhood were spent in learning how to whistle. In learning how to snap my fingers. In hanging from the branch of a tree. In looking at an ants’ nest. In digging holes. Making piles. Tearing things down. Throwing rocks at things.

  Spitting. Breaking sticks in half. Unplugging storm drains, and dropping things down storm drains, and getting dropped things out of storm drains. (Which we called sewers.) So help us, we went and picked wild flowers. This was Hunt’s Woods again. In the spring I went there for violets, and yellow violets, and dogtooth violets, and Jack in the Pulpit, and sometimes Dutchman’s breeches, and Indian pipe, the whitest thing I have ever seen in my life, strange and really ghostlike against the black boggy earth. Later, something we called star grass, tiny, intensely blue flowers and the stem triangular, a real wonder. I was a real goof about these things, and on Sundays, when we went for a ride, my sisters used to groan when we passed a clump of tiger lilies, because I made myself a real pest, a thorough kid brother, until the car was stopped and I could gather a bunch. I was looney about flowers.

  All of us, for a long time, spent a long time picking wild flowers. Catching tadpoles. Looking for arrowheads. Getting our feet wet. Playing with mud. And sand. And water. You understand, not doing anything. What there was to do with sand was let it run through your fingers. What there was to do with mud was pat it, and thrust in it, lift it up and throw it down.

  When it rained, water ran along the curb and we sailed twigs down the current, built little dams. In the winter, after the snowballs and the snow forts, after the sleds and the toboggans, there was the crusty snow, and there was the (what to call it? Not a game, not a sport, not even a contest)—there was just the thing of seeing if you could walk on the crust without breaking through. There was ice-skating, and a kind of primitive hockey, and we made slides on the sidewalk and damn near broke our necks, and then some grownup came out and spread ashes on it, and we grumbled. But there was also just the thing of standing on a frozen place on land and breaking the ice delicately by teetering, or even better than that, just rocking there and watching the air bubble slide back and forth under the ice.

  There was The Reservoir (which is now a swimming pool, I am told). It was where we skated, and we never knew how exactly to say it, so we slurred the last syllable. We knew it wasn’t “voyer,” and “vwah” was way uptown, so we split the difference. But one thing we knew. It was capital T on The and capital R on Reservoir. It was the only one in the world, you see. We played hockey there, we had learned discussions about the various kinds of skates. Double runner, for little kids. Then single runner, that clamped on. Then, for the girls only, figure skates. I had hockey skates, after a while, when I graduated to shoe skates, and ankle supporters, which were shameful and put on so nobody could see. And did no good. What we all wanted was racing tubes, because only the big kids and the men had them, and they went around in a fast and vicious circle in the best part of The Reservoir, crouching, wearing knitted Balaclavas, crossing their feet on the turns and making a wonderful noise. We tried to cross our feet in the rink turn and went upon our behinds many times. But the best thing I remember about The Reservoir had nothing to do with skating: it was one day when there was something called rubber ice, that bent in long waves as you walked on it. That was something. I never saw it but once.

  But about this doing nothing: we swung on swings. We went for walks. We lay on our backs in backyards and chewed grass. I can’t number the afternoons my best friend and I took a book apiece, walked to opposite ends of his front porch, sank down on a glider at his end, a wicker couch at mine, and read. We paid absolutely no attention to each other, we never spoke while we were reading, and when we were done, he walked me home to my house, and when we got there I walked him back to his house, and then he—aria da capo.

  We watched things: we watched people build houses, we watched men fix cars, we watched each other patch bicycle tires with rubber bands. We watched men dig ditches, climb telephone poles—I can hear the sound now of climbing irons on a pole, this was a race of heroes!—we watched trains at the station, shoe-shine men at the station, Italian men playing boccie, our fathers playing cards, our mothers making jam, our sisters skipping rope, curling their hair.

  For at least a month I watched my sisters making beads: they cut paper into long triangular strips, put glue on them, wrapped them around hatpins, and then I think they varnished them. I don’t recall that they ever wore them, but I’m here to tell you they made them. They also did something called tie-dying: it was a rage, and it produced handkerchiefs of unbelievable ugliness.

  We strung beads on strings: we strung spools on strings; we tied each other up with string, and belts and clothesline.

  We sat in boxes; we sat under porches; we sat on roofs; we sat on limbs of trees.

  We stood on boards over excavations; we stood on tops of piles of leaves; w
e stood under rain dripping from the eaves; we stood up to our ears in snow.

  We looked at things like knives and immies and pig nuts and grasshoppers and clouds and dogs and people.

  We skipped and hopped and jumped. Not going anywhere—just skipping and hopping and jumping and galloping.

  We sang and whistled and hummed and screamed.

  What I mean, Jack, we did a lot of nothing. And let’s face it, we still do it, all of us grownups and kids. But now, for some reason, we’re ashamed of it. I’ll leave the grownups out, but take a kid these days, standing or sitting or lying down all by himself, not actively engaged in any recognizable—by grownups—socially acceptable activity. We want to know what’s the matter. That’s because we don’t know how to do nothing any more. Kids have got enough sense to roll with the punch, to give in and be a slack-jawed idiot when boredom is afoot, but we can’t let them alone. It’s the old business of the reformed drunk: we can’t do that any more, so we won’t let them.