Little Boy Blues (14 page)

“OK, All Jones, come on over here and help me stir this pot. No, not fast like that. You got to do it slow and even, get all the stuff on the bottom up to the top. No, not that hard, you’ll beat it all to pieces. You stay here long enough, we’ll make a good cook
out of you yet, like your daddy there. You know your daddy’s a good cook, don’t you?”

“No sir.” I’d never thought of him as a cook at all, unless frying fish and baloney and scrambling eggs made you a cook.

“You don’t? Mack, I think you run a ringer in on me here. He doesn’t know you can cook. He don’t like buttermilk. I think we got an impostor. Who are you, boy? Where’d you come from?”

When I had mastered stirring to his satisfaction, he dismissed me. I found the shade in my father’s shadow, where I sat and listened to the murmur of their talk while I sucked on a piece of hard candy and watched a little frog hopping in the grass.

“You be careful there,” Uncle Richard said. “You get a wart on your hand you touch that toad frog.” I thought about arguing. Our doctor at home called that an old wives’ tale. But maybe the frogs in South Carolina were different.

“What we’d do when I was your age,” Daddy said, “was catch a frog and nail him to a board and then tickle his belly and see if he’d tear his arms off.” They both laughed. I laughed, too, even though I felt vaguely ashamed, as though I were betraying something or someone, although I couldn’t imagine who.

“Hard to catch a frog, though,” Richard said. “Now you want to have some fun, the easiest thing to do is get a barrel—you remember this, Mack—and find you a old cat and tie a string of firecrackers to his tail.”

“Two cats is better,” Daddy said. I could tell they were both eyeing me on the sly. “Throw ‘em in there and light those firecrackers and pop that lid on the barrel and then roll it down a hill to see which cat comes out first.”

I looked around for a cat. “We could do that,” I said, tired of being odd man out.

Now they were laughing at me. “No, son, you don’t want to be doing meanness like that,” Daddy said. “Your mother hear about that, she’d have a fit.”

“I won’t tell her.” That just made them laugh harder, and I could tell I was blushing. I wasn’t blushing because they were laughing. I was thinking about how easy it had been to betray my mother.

I adored my father, and I felt vaguely guilty about that, because I thought I ought to always take my mother’s side of things. She was the responsible one in the family. She was the one who took care of me—of all of us, really—no matter what, no matter where my father was, no matter how worried she might be about how she was going to make the rent payment or the car payment or buy the groceries at the end of the week. She made sure I knew who was keeping us out of the poorhouse. Depending on her mood, she was also my father’s champion. He was, she wanted me to know, a man of many talents: a decent carpenter, a competent electrician, good around cars and an excellent salesman (“Mack Jones could sell anything to anybody,” his boss at the department store told my mother). Sometimes she told me these things as a way of airing her perplexity at his inability to hold a job, or why he refused to teach me how to play ball. “I don’t know why he can’t be more like Al.” Al was a dad down the street who regularly made his son catch fastballs thrown so hard they made the boy cry. My mother thought this was the acme of fatherhood. Mostly she told me all these things as her way of trying, in my
father’s absence, to show me how real men behaved and what I should aspire to in that department. She never explained who I should learn these things from, since my father was so rarely around, but she did convince me of their necessity. As a result, I decided that the requisites of manhood were roughly as attainable as the surface of Mars.

In time, I stopped feeling guilty about adoring my father, once I saw that nearly everyone who knew him felt the same way, even my mother, who had the most reason to think otherwise. He could walk into a roomful of strangers, not do a thing, and in no
time the whole room would be in love with him. It wasn’t because he was especially charming or clever or even all that solicitous. He could be any of those things when he chose to, but the roots of his appeal were more obscure than that. In some ways, I suppose he fit the classic alcoholic profile: he was a psychological con man. He was also, like my mother, the baby of the family and spoiled accordingly. No matter how many times he lost a job, burned a hole in the sofa, crashed the car or merely failed to show up when he said he would, everyone overlooked it. My mother gave him more than his fair share of hell, but she was always the first to take him back.

“Here, Mack, try some of this.” I didn’t know I was being spoken to until my father gently touched my arm. Uncle Richard was holding out a big spoon of stew. I took it gingerly and sipped at it, and blurted out, “That’s good!”

“Air you go. You bet it is. Here, I’ll fix you a bowl.”

At one time or another, all my father’s relatives absentmindedly called me Mack, my father’s nickname. They didn’t do this to tease or confuse me, I finally understood, but because it made sense to them. I was a junior, after all, so why shouldn’t his nickname be mine as well? This was another sticking point between my mother and the Joneses.

“Did anyone ever call you Malcolm?” I once asked my father.

“Long time ago.”

“Mother said Malcolm is a beautiful name, and she hoped I’d never let anyone call me anything different.”

“You listen to your mother.”

“Yes sir.”

• • •

My father wasn’t much for explanations, which gave his utterances the force of an oracle in my head. Because I had so little to work with when it came to figuring out what he thought about anything or even what sort of man he was, I could walk around for days with a phrase like “long time ago” rattling around in my head until it took on the weight of revelation. I collected clues, half-truths, rumor, hearsay. The one aspect of his life that I knew much about—his service in World War II—was a small and perhaps not very representative slice, but it was so tailored to my martial obsessions that it became his biography for me. From my mother, I learned that he had been an Army captain who trained troops for combat across North Africa and later followed the Allied invasion up the Italian boot. I slept under his Army blanket and fingered the lieutenant’s and captain’s bars that he kept with his cuff links in the tray atop his dresser. There were carbons of letters of commendation that my mother saved and an album of photographs taken overseas in exotic locations. Every chance I got, I inspected the long, ropey scar that ran under one shoulder blade—evidence of a bout of pleurisy contracted overseas, the scar looked like someone had operated on his back with a can opener. None of my evidence came from him. He never talked about the war, never said what he saw or if it scarred him in some other, less obvious way. The only war story he told—every time we had spaghetti for supper—was about being invited to dine with an Italian family and finding a snail in his salad.

When I knew him, he was drinking himself out of jobs faster than most people change their motor oil. He sold appliances and televisions and stereos, he worked for the gas company, and for a
brief spell he even peddled encyclopedias door to door. He never held any job longer than a year. And it wasn’t lack of performance that spoiled his chances. One of his bosses hired him and fired him three times. The cycle was always the same. He’d take a job, do well for a while, and then go on a bender. When he was sober, he never drank. When he drank, that’s all he did for days.

I had no idea what to make of this. My mother was as steady as a clock, her routines unvarying. She was never not where she said she’d be. The consistency and continuity in my life were her doing. Likewise, the other men I knew—my uncle, my friends’ fathers—all held down steady jobs. They were preachers, gas-station owners, insurance salesmen. What they did was who they were, in my eyes. So I had no idea who my father was. All I knew was that he clocked a lot of time between jobs just sitting on the sofa in his boxers. When he was out of work, he did the cooking. And when he was around, the magazines in the house got a lot more interesting. On the coffee table and the back of the commode,
Reader’s Digest
and the sermons of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale shared space with
Argosy, True, Field & Stream
. Otherwise, life with him in the apartment was pretty much like life without him, but with more fighting.

Maybe he drank because he was depressed, or just bored. He never said so, never complained about anything. Maybe he saw something in the war that he never got over. He never talked about that, either. I’m told he drank more after he came home. I’ll never know. I never succeeded in getting him to talk about any of this, and he never volunteered anything. Conversations with my father rarely lasted longer than a couple of sentences.

• • •

On the way back from Richard’s store, I asked if we could shoot the .22 the next day.

“We’ll see,” Daddy said, but my heart did not sink. When my mother said, “We’ll see,” it meant no. With my father, there was no telling. We might take the .22 down to the pond or we might not. There was excitement in the not knowing, or not deciding ahead of time.

“Do you think we missed Flatt and Scruggs?”

“I bet we did. You like that show, don’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Some good old songs on there. You get it back home?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

At home, I spent every morning with the funnies, and this was one routine that did not change when I went to stay with my father. The only difference was that they had different comic strips in South Carolina:
Brenda Starr, Mandrake the Magician, Dondi
. I didn’t care. Comics were comics, and in fact the
Charlotte Observer
—the paper taken by most people just over the state line in South Carolina—had double the number of comics we read in the
Winston-Salem Journal
. I wasn’t crazy about
Brenda Starr
—everyone had those weird pupil-less eyes (even weirder than
Orphan Annie
, although Annie was a favorite, odd eyes or not), and I missed
Rip Kirby
, a detective who wore glasses (like me) and smoked a pipe (like my dad). Even as a kid, I recognized that Alex Raymond, creator of
Rip Kirby
and before that
Flash Gordon
and
Secret Agent X9
, was the best artist I’d ever seen (although by the time I started reading
Rip Kirby
, Raymond was dead and the strip was drawn by John Prentice—the style,
though, was the same:
noir
in 57 shades of black, each line inked precisely but with careless confidence). I copied a lot of comics and cartoons (I had my
Mickey Mouse
phase, my
Li’l Abner
period), but I knew better than to try to draw like Alex Raymond.

Narrative power, point of view, characterization, dialogue—the funnies were my introduction to the power these components had to cast a spell. I fell into them, dived into them, swam in them every day. I could spend the better part of an hour completely bewitched by the machinations of Evil Eye Fleagle or the way Augustus Mutt’s mustache curled like a wave away from his face. There was something hypnotic about even the badly drawn strips—what were those circles on Sam Ketchum’s face in
Dick Tracy?
Freckles? I never knew, though I pondered long and hard. And why did
Mutt & Jeff
take its title from Mutt’s last name and Jeff’s surname?

On the newspaper page facing the comics, most papers ran the word-jumble game, the crossword puzzle and the movie ads, and at some point I began getting lost in the pictures featured in those movie ads in the same way I’d gotten lost in the comics. Even as a pre-adolescent, I couldn’t stop looking at Mamie Van Doren writhing in the ad for
Sex Kittens Go to College
, even as I puzzled long and hard over the title, too. Six Kittens? What did they mean? And then Ann-Margret in
Kitten with a Whip
—more kittens! The better angels of my nature persuaded me to keep these questions to myself.

In the South in the late fifties and early sixties, there was a peculiar subgenre of movies that mostly played as part of a triple bill at the drive-in theaters. They featured country-and-western stars or actors who specialized in cornpone, such as Edgar Buchanan, and from what I could gather—never being allowed to
see trash like that—they stitched threadbare plots around occasions for the stars to perform their hits. One was called
Second Fiddle to a Steel Guitar
(even I got that joke). Another one, this one without music, was called
Chartroose Caboose
, a name so euphonious that I went around saying it to myself over and over and laughing every time.

At some point, I began to confuse the characters and images I saw in the funnies and the ads for movies with the people in my life. Some of these associations were obvious. I saw myself in Charlie Brown, out there in the high grass in right field. I saw a little of my parents in Jiggs and Maggie. In my uncle’s case, it was guilt by association. Uncle Tom had the corniest sense of humor of any adult I ever knew, and he loved
Mutt & Jeff
. Before I learned to read, I would sit on his lap and he would read the funnies to me—or at least the ones he liked:
Dick Tracy, Blondie, Mutt & Jeff
and
They’ll Do It Every Time
. Somehow in my mind, he became a character in the strip, or I began to think of him as a cartoon character. It was Uncle Tom, in fact, who put me onto the habit of associating the people in my life with characters in the funnies. In the years before I started school, when I would often accompany him on his errands around town—dropping off church announcements at the radio station, going to the cleaners or the hospital—when we walked through the door of any establishment where he was on friendly terms with the staff, he would boom out, “Here come Mutt and Jeff!” But by the time I was ten, the old Mutt and Jeff joke made me want to crawl in a hole and hide. This is the first instance I can recall of what I have come to consider the saddest part of childhood: outgrowing the people who reared me. Uncle Tom was the first to go.