You know that old doll house that my wife rescued for me? You don’t? Well, about six or seven years ago she spotted it on the sidewalk with a pile of other trash waiting for the city garbage collectors. She asked the homeowner about it. It was a kit they had bought at Michael’s but never finished, so my wife immediately thought, “My goofy old husband collects dolls all the time, so he will love this.”
“Take it,” said the homeowner, “It’s a shame to have to throw it out.”
So she brought it home and gave it to me. I of course, collect twelve inch dolls and action figures, none of which fit in a doll house of this particular scale. So it had to sit practically empty for a space of about four years. Then my daughter got tired of some of the small Happy Meal dolls that she had gotten from McDonald’s when she was a wee gamin. (Yes, that’s a real thing… you can look it up.) I acquired two mostly naked Mini-Barbies, and four other doll-house size dolls, two baseball players and a Lullaby League Girl from Oz, along with a small Winkie Soldier. Then Dreamworks did the Trolls movie.
They began moving in by two different routes, these trolls. Teacher Troll and Baby Troll and Big Troll, whose hair in the back is the only visible part of him… or possibly her, moved in from where I found them in kids’ bedrooms and the garage while cleaning. I used to keep a stash of them to give out as classroom prizes back in the 90’s. I bought the movie Trolls from Walmart at $5 a shot over a bunch of weeks between Thanksgiving and last weekend. The empty spaces where I didn’t even have appropriate doll furniture were now being filled by Trolls.
In the downstairs bedroom you can see the little yellow Troll has joined Naked Mini-Barbie, the Lullaby-Leaguer, Ceramic Book-Lovin’ Bear and the Angel who used to hold my wedding ring. (I could never wear it due to arthritis, and it eventually got lost in the move from South Texas to Dallas.) (Yes, I know it is not a good thing to lose your wedding ring, but it is possible my wife sold it so she could shop for a better husband. At least, that’s what she told me while she was really angry.) (And yes, I know I’m supposed to be talking about Trolls taking over my doll house, but I actually like bird-walking while telling such stories. It lends such every-day Mickey-ness to the story.)
The baseball player in the upstairs sitting room where nobody sits, once spent an entire winter at the bottom of the swimming pool. That’s why his blue uniform turned a bit putrid green. He stays in this room with my Wish-nik Troll from 1967 and the Winkie Soldier from Oz, who is naturally green in the face and never took a swim.
Also upstairs are my Troll-topped Pez dispensers, two more movie Trolls, and the former Teacher Troll who lost her apple and my daughter gave a modelling clay diaper to for modesty’s sake which has long since melted a bit (the diaper, not the modesty).
And at the top of it all, in the attic, are the two movie Trolls that I bought first and started this whole Troll-collection nonsense. So now the doll house is no longer empty. But the Trolls are beginning to complain that there is no paint on the walls, and I really ought to do something about that before they take matters into their own hands. You never know what they might do in the middle of the night when nobody is looking.
There is so much left to be said before my time runs out. Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it. We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.
Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom. You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls. I get that. But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.
Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is? (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)
I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and… Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning. So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence. The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe. And the universe is conscious… self aware. How do I know this? Because I am conscious and self-aware. I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me. And when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new. All of mankind passes away. Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more. But that is not what matters. There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend. I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole. I am in no hurry to die. Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death. Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.
I claim to be a literate individual. But, of course, before they let you teach English Language Arts to seventh graders, you have to prove it. They want you to prove you can handle a classroom, and not only can read and write, but can teach seventh graders to do it too… at least to a minimum competency level. After all, the English language in the hands of a hormonal personality-bomb otherwise known as a seventh grade boy or a seventh grade girl, it is a potential weapon of mass destruction.
I set out to become more than merely competently literate in high school. Even then, I wanted to read all the best books ever written and learn to write like that too. In fact, I set myself a quest when I was a junior in high school taking Mr. Sorum’s version of the novel-reading class set out by the Iowa State Board of Education’s curriculum guide as The Modern Novel, a quest to find and read the greatest novel ever written. I started in that class with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
But that fit too easily into the “Modern Novel” thing since it was written in the 60’s and I was reading it in the 70’s. I had to be more illogical than that. So, I also found a book on the Scholastic Book Order form called The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy and read that. It was not exactly a modern novel having been written in the 1870’s and was actually a 96-year-old book when I read it. And it was a tragic love story where everybody ends up married to the wrong person and true love was thwarted up until the chapter where there are multiple drownings. I, of course, fell in love with the Reddleman, Diggory Venn (Reddlemen go from farm to farm dipping sheep in the reddle to kill ticks and fleas) who is covered head to toe in red dye from dipping sheep. He is the humble soul who loves the good girl that the bad man wants to marry even though he’s actually in love with the bad woman who wants to marry Clym Yoebright (the returning native of the title) for his family fortune so she can escape the hated heath country. I realized from the first chapter onward that I was supposed to identify with Clym as the main character. But, illogical introvert that I am (and that Diggory also is) I had to identify with the humble Mr. Venn. And guess what? Diggory not only saves Clym from drowning as he lets the bad man and the bad woman visit Neptune the hard way, he also gets to marry the good girl in the end.
Goofy choice for a great book, right? But it is a great book. It is about people who love drama in their lives and live for the wrong things in life getting what they probably deserve while the plodders and reddlemen get the real rewards in the end. Victorian hooberglob, sure… but good hooberglob with vivid characters, an oppressive setting, and a darkly comic look at love, repressed love, evil love, and just plain love in the end.
But I couldn’t go on thinking forever that The Return of the Native was the best novel ever written. I would go on to read some very good Hemingway, some x-rated Heinlein, and a couple of dog stories before I finished that class. (I definitely read more novels than anyone else in that class as most of them were making their book reports from the blurbs on the back of the book and the part they hide inside the front cover rather than actually reading a whole book.)
But then, as a freshman in college, I was introduced to Saul Bellow.
Good god! Why had they been keeping this writer a secret from me?
Humboldt’s Gift was the book we read and discussed in class. It was written the year before we read it and it both won Bellow a Pulitzer and helped him win the Novel Prize for Literature the year after I read and studied it. It is the story of a friendship between writers. The narrator, Charlie Citrine and the Humboldt poet from the title get to know each other in a friendship that spans the decades between the 1930’s and the middle of the 1970’s. But it also convinced me that most great writers and the books they write that become great books are totally obsessed with sex and death. Charlie is mourning in the story about his latest divorce, his new love that his last love is keeping him separated from, the death in an airplane crash of his love before the lady he just divorced, and his own obsession with his own death.
Yes, sex and death. Lesson learned about great books.
And I learned all those lessons again in a book I found at the university book store by Bellow and read on my own. Henderson the Rain King is about a rich and socially powerful man who is seeking the meaning of life and totally dissatisfied with everything he has discovered so far.
He goes on a trip to Africa complete with guide and tourist group only to take off on his own when he gets there, hiring a native guide, visiting a native village, lifting a gigantic stone statue of a god, and accidentally becoming the official Rain King of the Wirari tribe. He then goes into a long period of philosophical discussion with the tribal king, pokes around at learning the meaning of life from an African point of view, and then goes on a lion hunt with the king wherein the king is killed by the lion, making Henderson the new king, the next step up from tribal Rain King.
And then there was William Faulkner.
Yes, the drunken postal clerk who wrote some of what may be the best novels ever written.
Make that some of the best super-wordy novels ever written, long paragraphs and all.
I have read more Faulkner than just The Sound and the Fury. But this is the first Faulkner I read as part of an American Literature class in grad school.
The title of this book is based on the Shakespeare quote from MacBeth’s soliloquy. “…It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury… signifying nothing.” So, this writer can poke fun at himself.
The three main characters of the book, the Compson brothers, are three very different viewpoint characters that take the swirling toilet bowl of stream-of-consciousness narratives about life in Mississippi and show us how meaningless and pointless our lives are. Benjy is the mentally handicapped brother who barely understands anything about the world around him. Jason is the hot-headed brother working in a farm-supply store and constantly fuming about money and class struggles. Quentin is the lucky brother who gets to go to college and mess up his life on a bigger stage than the other two. Caddy is the sister that all three talk and think about, especially when it comes to the tragedy of what actually happens to her. Everything is one big joke to Faulkner, as demonstrated by the scene in the end of the story where Jason (symbolizing Fury) is beating the snot out of his loudly squalling brother Benjy (the Sound.) It almost seems like the entire story is one big set-up for that one final sight-gag.
I have to say, I considered all of these books as potentially the best novel ever written. But none of these were the final choice. And the four books that I intended to add to this discussion weren’t the final choice either, so I had no trouble editing them out as this essay is way too long already. But the fact that I read and loved these books is basically proof that the reading part of being literate I have down. I’ll bet, if you have read this far, that you haven’t read any of these classics. But I don’t bet money. And you probably didn’t even read this far into a big-windy essay like this one. It doesn’t matter. These books exist. I love them. And I am glad I made them part of my little introverted and totally perverted world.
At Mother’s breakfast table we were always encouraged to talk about stuff. That was a given. It was how families operated in the 60’s and 70’s. Mom and Dad not only listened to the mindless drivel coming out of the childish mouths of me, my two sisters, and my stinky little brother, but they also tended to hold forth about things they wished to teach us. We learned Methodist-Church-flavored Christianity and Eisenhower-Republican values. Ike had been president when I was born and got most of the credit for the post-war boom in the economy. We were middle-class people with solid middle-class values.
And then I had the bad sense to grow up and start thinking for myself. Nixon had let me down big-time when I was in high school. I had defended him against my McGovern-leaning loony liberal friends. My best friend was a preacher’s kid, a Methodist preacher’s kid. His father actually believed in progressive nonsense about sex-education for children and helping to feed the poor. And then Nixon turned out to be a liar, a coverer-upper, a cheat, and a bad-word-user. I suspect, though my Dad never admitted it, that he may have voted for Carter over Ford. It was my first time voting, and it actually felt good to use my vote to strike back at the party that betrayed my trust.
Religion, too. In the late seventies a man named Carl Sagan put on a TV show called Cosmos. The man bedazzled my father and I with Science. He taught us that every molecule of us was composed of atoms that could only have been forged in the cosmic furnaces in the centers of stars. He showed us how spectroscopy of the stars could show us what they were made of. He showed us the meaning of Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity. He pulled the universe together for us in a way that could not be undone. And he did it without calling upon the name and blessings of God. But he pointed out that we are connected to everything in the universe and everything is connected to us. To me, that seemed to define God. My religion was changing from Christianity to Saganism. Of course, Mom heard that as “paganism”. Breakfast table talking changed into early morning arguments. We didn’t exactly throw chairs at each other, but some pretty heated and pretty large ideas went flying through the air. Religion and politics became the banned topics at the breakfast table.
So that brings me to the Paffooney points for today. This blog has turned into a place where a disobedient son, a horrible sort of “free-thinker” type of radical hippie pinko goofball, can talk about the loony-liberal progressive ideas that have taken over his good-little Eisenhower-Republican little-boy mind. I spent the last post talking existentially about my religious beliefs. My conservative, old-fashioned friends and family call me an atheist now, but I truly believe in God. It’s just, I recognize the factors behind Christian myths. I bow to the wisdom of Scientists like Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking… as well as hippie psychologists like Alan Watts… and literary heroes like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S, Lewis.
I am proud to be an Iowegian (a Mickian word for being from Iowa), yet my birth-State produces gawd-awful Tea Party politicians like Steve King and Joni Ernst. The stuff that comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make good fertilizer. But they are comedy gold. Will Rogers would have pointed out that the jokes will write themselves. All the humorist would have to do is consult the front page of the newspaper. I also live in Texas where the debate over secession from the United States still goes on with new Governor Greg Abbott, a man who is a Rick Perry clone, except that he hasn’t bothered to put on glasses as much to make him smarter. And Texans are looking forward to the next Republican president in 2016. Both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are running. That doubles Texas’ chances, right? With Global Warming not being accepted as a real thing, the need for giving all our money to the Koch brothers and the Walton family being recognized by both parties in Congress, and looming war with foreign nations that have the bad sense to be “Muslim in nature”, the future looks kinda bleak. But it is a great time to be a humorist, and I am guessing I won’t be doing very much talking at the breakfast table for a while.
Yep, I did it again. Novel number 21, the very first paperback produced in the obligatory selfie.
Of course, this one is different than any of the others. This is a fantasy novel where most of the actual characters are three inches tall or shorter. The only normal human character gets shrunk down by magic to visit the fairy world.
Blueberry Bates is the human girl who met and befriended fairies in a previous book Magical Miss Morgan.She’s got the ability to actually see them, and loves to draw colored-pencil pictures of them.
Derfentwinkle is a main character and co-narrator of the story. She is a Sylph with magical ability that has been forced to be the Necromancer’s Apprentice of the title and sent on a suicide mission against the good fairies. She is captured by the good guys and given a chance to make new choices.
Bob is the Sorcerer’s apprentice to the Sorcerer Eli Tragedy (standing behind him in the red coat and hat.) He is the other co-narrator of the story, and he tries hard to help Derfentwinkle change sides. He is quiet and ccmpetent, unlike his fellow apprentice, Mickey the wererat (seen in the background.)
The whole book is set in an imaginary fairy kingdom called Tellosia that I first imagined in the 1980’s.
It all reveals the character of somebody like me who lives most of the important parts of his life entirely in his own stupid head. I have always been a quiet introvert like Bob in this story. Not loud and proud. Just quiet and capable. I am much more comfortable writing my truth in a story like this one rather than being a newsman, celebrity, or actor. Not that I couldn’t have forced myself to succeed in one of those jobs. But the front of the classroom was the closest to center stage I will ever need to be.
I draw pictures and tell stories. That works for the job of public school teacher. In fact, those abilities are useful in putting lessons across to students. But beyond that, I couldn’t go. I am like Bob, not somebody who can force his face in front of others for self-aggrandizement.
So the proof is not in the pudding like the pudding of the old saying that makes no sense to me. (Who ever found a rolled-up scroll with proof of anything on it at the bottom of their bowl of chocolate pudding? Even Jell-o pudding.) The proof is in my book.
Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain from Disney’s Fantasia
The old faun
In musical terms, Allegro Non Troppo means fast tempo, but not too fast. So, I recently discovered that Allegro Non Troppo is one of many rare and obscure old movies which I am passionate about that can be found in its entirety on YouTube. I will include the YouTube link to a portion of it at the end of this post, and I sincerely recommend that if you have never seen this movie, you watch the whole thing at least once. No matter how many cringes or winces or blushes it causes, this is a movie of many bizarre parts that you really need to take in as a whole. It ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime, the atrociously ugly to the lyrically beautiful, from the brilliant classical score being played by a mistreated band of old ladies with orchestral instruments to a gorilla running amok, from Debussy to Ravel, from an artist released from his cage to single-handedly draw the animation, to a satire rich with baudy humor making fun of no less a work of animation than Prisney’s.. I mean Disney’s Fantasia. The dark elements are there. The light-hearted, lilting comedy is there. The fairy tale delicacy and technicolor dreaming is all there.
And why should this be important to me? Especially now that I am retired from a long and fruitful teaching career? Well, I have history with this movie. I saw it first in college. I was an English major, but I took every film as literature class I could fit into my silly schedule. As an undergrad, I was determined to be a cartoonist for a career. I took classes seriously and aced most of them, but I was at college to intellectually play around. I didn’t take the prescribed courses to be an English teacher. That had to wait for the more responsible me to come along in grad school for that. I saw both Fantasia and Allegro Non Troppo during one of the play-time years. Much as the old satyr in Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, I was enamored with sensory experience. I took my first girlfriend to see Disney’s Fantasia, and she later turned down the opportunity to see Allegro Non Troppo with me. Good sense on her part, but the beginning of the end of our relationship. Just as Fantasia has the part in it where Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring describes evolution from the beginning of the Earth to the end of the dinosaurs, Allegro Non Troppo uses Ravel’s Bolero to describe the evolution of life on a weird planet from germs in a discarded Coke bottle to the inevitable coming of the malevolent monkey who is ultimately us. And, of course, the satire would not be complete without some off-set for Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. As near as I can figure it out, the apprentice, played by Mickey Mouse, becomes the snake from the Garden of Eden in Allegro Non Troppo. When the snake is unable to get Adam and Eve to eat the apple, he makes the mistake of eating the apple himself. He learns the hard way that, no matter how clever, even diabolically clever, you think you are, you are not really in control of anything in life. Every would-be wizard in the world has to understand that he is powerless without hard experience. And what a boring world full of naked people this would be if there were never any apprentices in it foolish enough to actually become wizards. Of course, I haven’t really talked about the most heart-twisting part of Allegro Non Troppo… the sad cat wandering the ruins of his former home, or the most laugh-aloud part with the super-tidy little lady-bee trying to eat a blossom, but being interrupted by a couple of picnickers.
But the thing is, this movie is a timely subject for me. Not only did I, just yesterday, rediscover it, but it still has the same meaning for me now as it did when I first saw it. Then I was an aspiring young artist who loved this movie because it approached ideas non-consecutively, just as I approached my learning years… rambling here and there, finding first a bitter-sweet something, and then a sad beauty behind everything in life. And it is where I am again now, in a poor-health enforced retirement… divorced from teacher’s schedules and time itself. Able to do as I please, and aspiring once again to commit great acts of art.
The doctor looked at me with a pained and worried look on his pasty white face.
“Um, okay, I don’t know how to tell you this, but…”
“Well, if you don’t know how to tell it, then maybe you should look at the notes you made one more time.” “Yes, okay, tell about your major symptoms one more time.”
“Well, Doc, I don’t seem to be able to explain anything to anybody without using complicated metaphors, similes, or timely literary allusions.”
“That’s why you began, “It was the best of times and the worst of times?” When you visited the first time, I mean.”
“Yes, with somber Dickensian overtures to the grim details of the London streets in summer. I didn’t feel like myself, since I live in Texas.”
I grinned at him and continued in a sad voice.
“And what’s worse, when I go to sleep, I dream dreams where there is a horrifying beginning, a mysterious ramble in the middle, and I can’t wake up until I have achieved a satisfactory conclusion.”
“I see.” the doctor said.
“Yes, first I see, then I take what I saw, and use the saw with hammer and nails to build a setting. And then I stir up some doughy memories and add highly conflicted seasoning, stir vigorously, and then bake it all into a plot.” I grinned as I said that sadly.
“Did you try the medicine I gave you last time?”
“Yes, I did. I read what I already red while I was writing, and the red pills helped me spot where the plot’s crankshaft was wobbling. A minor revision with the blue pills of clarity, and then a huge dose of the green pills of proofreading. After a while the engine of theme and meaning was purring.”
“Do I detect a bit of pun infecting your system?”
“No, I took the read pill while reeding.”
“Okay, I get it. A bit of dyslexia perhaps?”
“Possibly. Or perhaps pernicious practical punnery.”
“Ooh! Let’s hope it’s not that bad. Please continue.”
“It seems I have a lot of voices in my head. They are constantly telling me things about their lives. Sometimes deeply personal things. This one voice is a young girl who reminds me distinctly of a student I had back in 1994 and 1995. She was a very strong-minded young woman who definitely got her head together around the time she was thirteen and fourteen. She may have had a slight crush on me. But she had a hard time with a number of tough hands that life had dealt her in the poker game for all the marbles. It was a sort of extended poker game with the old Devil himself. And she was losing. But with a little bit of advice from me, and a whole lot of life lessons from her to me, she learned how to beat the old Devil himself. And this time the Devil was not just in the details, but also at the poker table of Life. And he cheats. But she beat him anyway. And I found I had so many things and notes and story-parts from that, that I needed to write a book about it. And when I did, it was never enough. I had to write another and another.”
“Yes, I believe I am getting the whole picture now. By the way, that’s Valerie in the picture, isn’t it?”
“It’s supposed to be, yes.”
“I see. …But leave the saw on the table, Mickey.”
“So… so, what is the matter with me, Doc?”
“Well, I hate to break it to you like this, but you want me to be completely honest with you, don’t you?”
“Yes, just give it to me straight, Doc.”
“The bad news is, Mickey, that you are an incurable novelist. You can’t help yourself at this point. You are seriously infected with storytelling.”
“Is it fatal, Doc?”
“Probably. You will definitely have this disorder until the day you die. There is no cure. There is only editing, editors, and the joy of publishing that can help you now. You just have to take it one day at a time, one story after another, from now until the final chapter ends.”
After that, I felt better. There was no cure, but at least I knew the prognosis.
Try not to be upset with me for drawing a naked lady. You see, she is not really a lady, she is a caryatid, a stone pillar for holding up a building. Besides, I have been recently very ill, and drawing naked ladies makes me happy, even though it is a sin and means I will probably burn in hell. I am a hopeless sinner in this regard. I got kicked off Pinterest for liking an oil painting of a naked lady. I think it was a painting by William Adolphe Bouguereau. How could I be so terrible? You should check out my post about his sinful, horrible paintings so you can see how terrible I am for yourself. (Bouguereau) Of course, This post is not about naked ladies at all, so why am I fuming and ranting and telling all my darkest secrets about that?
This post is about architecture, about giving structure to things, about holding things together and holding things up. Is it clever that I drew this picture of an ornate pillar and placed it in this post so it looks like it is standing on later paragraphs and holding up the introduction? I find weird surrealist things like that help me write stuff that makes a few people laugh. It helps me because I can focus on nonsensical side-stuff like that (mixed up with obscure puns and alliterations like “pillar” and “placed” that, when cooked together with goofy rhythms in over-long sentences end up sounding funnier than they really are), and then I can say stuff that is actually funny because I don’t realize how wrong, or weird, or silly some of these words I am futzing it all up with truly are. (And I am amazed that the Pinterest police haven’t come and kicked me off WordPress for using a word like “futzing”, even though they don’t know what it means. Heck, even the spell-checker didn’t object to the word!)
But someone like me who is trying to be funny needs structure more than anyone else you can think of. Why? Because the sad-clown-crying-on-the-inside is so very true. The dark dips of depression… pain, illness, and more pain… family stress from others in my family who also suffer… That’s what makes the laughing so very necessary. You need the lighter stuff to fill up the room (somewhat like a really big fart) because you depend on the sheer buoyancy of it to lift the entire house up and keep it from sinking to the very center of the earth. (And the stink of it can also help keep you awake when otherwise you might never get out of bed again)… (But please don’t light any matches around my house.)
So, in conclusion, this stuff I write does have basic structures, basic rules. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a theme, a point that needs to be made, And then it needs to end with some kind of a kicker line or punch line… because when that finally hits me square in the face (like a pie thrown by a pie-whacker clown), it helps me remember… I am still alive, and I can still laugh about it.
It was an evil plan, a wickedness the boys would never see coming. But Valerie knew it was a necessary plan. She made them go by foot. You could reach the skinny-dipping pond by foot if you followed the tracks out south of town, past Uncle Dash’s farm and past the Sumpter Park Woods where the city of Norwall maintained a shelter house with picnic tables and a manicured lawn that led to trails into the woods and eventually to the old Sumpter log cabin, what was left of it.
There was an old ox-bow pond that once had been connected to the Iowa River, but now was a separate body of water coming out of an artesian spring that brought fresh water from the shared river water table.
“Really? We’re going to the old Pirates’ skinny-dipping place?” Ricky Porter asked skeptically.
“It’s too late in the year for swimming, Val,” Billy Martin reminded her. “October is too cold in Iowa.”
“You really think I would make you come this far just for a chance to see you guys naked? Again?”
“When did you ever see me naked?” asked Billy. At eighteen he was a rather bony and skinny youth. And he was so painfully shy that Val had not even seen him in swimming trunks.
“Okay, well… I wasn’t referring to you.”
“I only go in if you do,” Ricky said to her. He had dared her like that once before, though she had seen his golden-brown, muscled form and then successfully backed out of going in herself.
“We didn’t come here for that,” she answered with a frown. “I needed to talk to you both. I had another one of those dreams again last night. I spent the whole night crying.”
“The angel dreams again?” Billy asked, wide-eyed.
“Michel Volant, yes.”
“You know we’re here for you, Val. We’re your friends and fellow Pirates,” Ricky said.
“But you also know how much it hurts to talk about Francois,” Billy said, tears already forming in his eyes.
Valerie looked him squarely in the eyes. She knew he would see exactly what she meant.
“Oh, gawd, Val, you haven’t been hurting yourself already have you?” Billy asked, his voice quavering slightly.
“Not this time. But you know those dreams usually mean another black depression is coming on. And you know what we have to do about it.”
“Yeah. We promised to always tell each other if we ever had those kinds of thoughts again.” Ricky’s eyes were tearing up again too. Val was aware he had cut himself on the ankles more than any of them had ever done themselves self-harm. He was the one who had spent a week in the hospital two years ago.
“Have you been thinking about hurting yourself, Val?” Billy asked.
“Maybe. That’s why we had to talk today and not wait any longer.”
“Is it… is it Francois again?”
“Billy, we can talk about Tommy this time. I just need to hear it again. I just know if we don’t do something about the ones we lost…”
“…To keep them alive in our hearts, yeah,” said Ricky.
“You know I can’t tell you anything about Tommy. I never met him. I spent the whole blizzard down in the cellar next to the furnace while it burned propane.” Billy looked sadly across the wind-rippled water.
“What do you want to know about Tommy? I don’t know everything, but I knew him a few years longer than you did.” Ricky’s eyes were glistening.
“You haven’t heard from him since the blizzard, have you?” She asked.
“You know I would tell you if I had. Besides, he didn’t take anybody’s phone number with him.”
“He could’ve looked us up. He knows you were taken in by Cliff Baily and his new wife. He knows I live in town with my mother.”
“Yeah, but that’s not Tommy’s style. He survived on the road because he always lived in the moment. He was focused on where he was and the people he was with… in the NOW.”
“Yeah. I remember him that way too.”
“What more do you really want to know about him, Val?”
“Why did you boys follow him all the way to Norwall?”
“Well… um, I… Yeah…”
“You can tell me. No matter how hard it may seem, Ricky. We’re Pirates, you and I. You can tell me anything.”
“Are we still Norwall Pirates?” Billy asked. “We haven’t had a club meeting in two years. And you made your little cousin, Tim Kellogg, the new Pirate leader.”
“You did? You didn’t tell me?”
“Oh, Ricky. You left the Pirates before Billy and I did. They are all younger kids now. We’re old. Almost adults.”
“Yeah, but… Once a Pirate, always a Pirate.”
“We’ll always be a part of it. The club was started by my cousin Brent Clarke, and he says he’s still a Pirate. It’s just that the Pirates belong in the control of the Norwall kids, so they learn to rely on each other, and form the team that helps us all survive the perils of the unknown.”
Ricky and Billy both smiled and laughed a little at that. They knew it was true just as surely as Valerie did.
“We’re off topic now, Rick,” Billy said. “You promised her to tell her why you followed Tommy here to Norwall.”
“Yeah… um… You know that most kids in the foster care system get abused one way or another…”
“Yeah, Tommy told me that too… during the blizzard.”
“We didn’t form the Fantastic Foursome just by getting on that Trailways bus together. Terry and I met in the group home. He had nobody to talk to him in his previous foster homes… because nobody spoke sign language.”
“Did you know sign when you met him?” Billy asked.
“Terry taught me. He needed someone to talk to desperately. And I learned fast.”
“Faster than you taught it to me?”
“Well, yeah… You’re kinda a slow learner, Billy.”
“Okay, but that don’t mean I ain’t smart.”
“Of course, not,” Valerie said.
“Well, you can see what Terry’s real father did to him if you look at his burned ears. His father was the reason he was deaf.”
“And what about Tommy and Dennis?” Val asked.
“Well, you remember Denny had those crutches. He got that way from malnourishment. His first fosters only had him to get the money the State paid. They practically starved him to death. The mom of that family went to jail for it. Denny probably would’ve died if Brikkleputti… I mean, Mom, hadn’t followed us all the way to Norwall with the medicine Denny and I both needed.”
“Is Denny still alive, you think?”
“Sure, Val. If Tommy’s alive, and I know he is, he wouldn’t have let anything happen to Denny. He loved him like a little brother.”
“He loved all three of you like that.”
“Yeah, he did. That’s why he left us here when he left for Dallas. He took Denny with him, but he left me with Cliff and Mom to be a family like I never had before. And the Dawes family wanted to adopt Terry too. He left us behind for our own good.”
“But why was Tommy running away to begin with?”
“Well… the last foster family he lived with, they… beat him. And when he finally got strong enough to fight back, the cops came and took Tommy and locked him up… not that crazy old man who beat him.”
“Yeah, Tommy told me about that too.”
“And what about you, Ricky?” Billy asked.
“Well, I… uh… maybe I ain’t ready to talk about that just yet.”
“The Teddy Bear Killer?” Val asked.
“Yeah, don’t even say his name, please.”
“I know what you mean. I… um… I can’t talk about Daddy Kyle, either.”
“But, Val, what did we even come here for, then?” Billy asked.
“We gotta talk about the hard things. All three of us,” said Ricky. “We all are hurting inside almost all of the time.”
“Yeah, and that’s why we’re here instead of trying to meet in Zoomboogadoo. This pond is touched by magic, just like the gazebo in Zoomboogadoo.”
“No, that’s not a real place. We didn’t actually meet Francois and his sister in dreams. That was all just us imagining it. And Ricky wasn’t even able to meet us in the Dreamlands… not even once.” Billy was visibly upset.
“You are never going to convince me that Zoomboogadoo wasn’t real. I remember it too vividly.”
“But dreams can be vivid sometimes, and still not real,” reminded Ricky.
“All right. But this place is magic too. I have come here more than once to talk to Clovis. You just have to be in the right state of mind.”
“Val, there is no Clovis. He’s just a story they tell in the Pirates’ meetings to explain the disappearance of Conrad Doble. You said yourself, it was old Mrs. Haire that scared him away for good. He didn’t turn into no naked kid with horns and a tail.” It was Ricky’s turn to look visibly upset.
“Yeah, well… we need to stay ahead of the depression and the suicidal thinking. We are not any of us ever going to hurt ourselves again. That doesn’t cure the problems that are causing us pain.”
“You’re right, Val,” said Billy.
“Yeah, we gotta talk it all out,” said Ricky.
“Yeah. And we’re gonna do it here, by the skinny-dipping pond. And we’re gonna do it naked. That’s the evil plan.”
“What?” Both boys were upset.
“You remember how it was in Zoomboogadoo,” said Valerie, looking straight into the eyes of Billy. “We all showed up there in our dreams with no clothes on. Like we were born into it. Innocent as babes.”
“That was just a dream,” Billy insisted.
“Yeah, and it wasn’t cold fall weather either, I bet,” said Ricky.
“That’s true. But that’s what will keep us from being seen and watched by the other Pirates. They only come here during skinny-dipping season.”
“What if we can’t do it? Get naked here… I mean,” said Billy with a stutter.
“And what if we don’t want to do it?” Ricky added.
“Well, we’ll take it slow. It is not because of sex or wanting to see each other naked. It’s about being completely honest and open. No barriers. If we don’t help each other when the darkness returns to our brains, someone else will die. And I can’t lose anybody else in my life. I need to add people, not lose them.” All three of them saw the dark clouds coming on the horizon in the mind’s eye. At least, Val was almost positive they did. And the one advantage the Pirates had over other people who get darkly depressed and suicidal was that they had each other. These three friends, at least, actually knew each other better than most friends ever do. And soon they would be inside each other’s heads in ways that Valerie simply knew would help.
The baseball player in the upstairs sitting room where nobody sits, once spent an entire winter at the bottom of the swimming pool. That’s why his blue uniform turned a bit putrid green. He stays in this room with my Wish-nik Troll from 1967 and the Winkie Soldier from Oz, who is naturally green in the face and never took a swim.
J
