—How a Mail Order Scam Nearly Turned Me into a
Peeping Tom in the 7th Grade.

I charged into my bedroom after school, and stopped at the sight of a small brown package propped on my pillow. I ripped open the package and a box labeled Amazing Illusory X-Ray Spex dropped into my lap.

The illustration of the man leering at a woman through his X-Ray Spex made this moment worth the six week wait. The man’s eyes bugged out, and the caption promised, “See thru clothing…blushingly funny!”

I rattled the box, which felt strangely light in weight. I pried open one end and removed an unconvincing pair of glasses with cardboard frames. I put them on and held out my hands. A blurred double edge appeared around my hands and arms. I walked around my room examining everything. If those were bones I was seeing in my fingers and arms, then my Y.A. Tittle football, my Yankees baseball, and even my arrowheads had bones inside them too.

I carefully folded up my glasses, tucked them into the back pocket of my jeans, and biked over to Knox Field. Perhaps they worked better in broad daylight. If they had looked more like real glasses, I might have watched the high school girls bouncing around on the tennis court. Instead, I parked myself out of the way on one of the benches at the top of the hill overlooking the football field.

Eventually a girl approached on the cinder path that snaked along the top of the hill. She was a ninth-grader everyone called Jacki, and she clutched a stack of books to her chest with one arm and carried a field hockey stick in her free hand. Strictly in the pursuit of scientific research, I popped on my X-Ray Spex after she passed. Daylight did nothing to improve the double image of one slightly less-heavy girl walking in lockstep, inside the real one. I took off the glasses and in a moment of spite briefly considered ripping them up. Remembering they cost me a full month’s allowance, I stowed them back in my hip pocket instead.

I forgot all about the glasses until the next day during recess. I was standing under the big pine tree off to the side of the playground when Kevin Knight snuck up behind me and pulled the glasses out of my pocket.

“Cool. 3-D glasses. Where’d you get these?” Kevin asked as he started to put them on.

“They’re not 3-D, they’re x-ray glasses,” I said, snatching them back.

“Hey, come on. Let me try ‘em.” Kevin said, reaching to get them back.

“Tell you what. I’ll sell them to you for a dollar,” I suggested, knowing he always had money from his paper route.

He took a step back, and held out his hand. “Let me try them first. If they really work I’ll pay up.”

I put on the glasses and held my hand up in front of my face. “Of course they work. I can see the bones in my hand.”

Kevin fished a dorky blue plastic change purse out of his front jeans pocket, squeezed it open and pulled out a dollar bill. “I’ll pay you if you let me try them first.”

“Yeah, right. You’ll probably take a long look at those girls over there,” I said redirecting my gaze through the glasses at the nearest circle of girls. I raised my eyebrows and opened my mouth in an attempt to mimic the leering man in the ad.

“You can’t see through their clothes,” Kevin said, shaking his head.

“It’s blushingly funny,” I laughed, stealing the line that had hooked me.

“Lucas,” Kevin whispered urgently. “Let me try them on and I’ll tell you an amazing secret.”

“Why are you whispering?” I whispered back.

“It’s about Mrs. Delancey,” he said even more softly.

I removed the X-Ray glasses and stared at him. Nancy Delancey, the divorcee who lived at the top of my street, was a legend in the neighborhood. Some referred to her as Fancy Nancy because of her revealing short shorts and halter tops. The gossipers claimed she sunbathed nude. The only proof seemed to be that she had an eight-foot high fence around her backyard. I sometimes overheard snippets of conversation from mothers in the neighborhood.

The joke was that on the sunniest weekend days, Mrs. Delancey’s male neighbors became uncharacteristically industrious, climbing ladders to clean gutters, wash windows, and fiddle with the roof shingles on their houses.

I leaned toward Kevin so our faces were close and asked, “Okay, what’s your secret?”

“Promise you’ll let me try your glasses if I tell you?”

“Promise.”

“And you won’t tell anyone?”

“Okay, okay. What’s the big deal?”

He inhaled and puffed out his cheeks as he held his breath, and then exhaled. “Okay, get this.” He took a step closer to me. “You know how I have a paper route, right?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well, Mrs. Delancey is on my route,” he continued.

“So?”

“So last week when I went to collect, I think I kind of surprised her when I came to her door.”

“Surprised her how?”

“Well I rang the doorbell and nobody answered. So I was standing there playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the buzzer. I figured no one was home.”

“Okay, okay, what happened?”

“I was about to leave, when suddenly the door opened and there was Mrs. Delancey standing in her full glory, if you know what I mean.”

I stared at him wide-eyed. “You mean…?”

Kevin urgently nodded his head yes, as if afraid to say it out loud.

“She wasn’t wearing anything?” I studied him for some sign of agreement.

Kevin kept the same solemn expression on his face, but changed his up and down head motions, to side-to-side ones.

If any other kid shared such a story, I would not have believed it. But Kevin Knight did not have it in him to make up something this fantastic. He wanted to be an Eagle Scout and spent all his free time tying knots and memorizing the states in alphabetical order.

“Do you swear on Scout’s Honor that this is really true?”

Kevin held up his right hand, made the Boy Scout sign and said, “Scout’s Honor.”

I grabbed him by his shoulders and looked directly into his eyes. “You must have been right at her chest level.”

“I wasn’t going to look there,” he said, recoiling, and pulling out of my grasp.

“You mean to tell me you were face to face with the most famous knockers in town, and you didn’t even look?”

“I couldn’t just stand there and gawk,” he protested.

“When do you go back to collect for your paper route again?” I asked.

“Next Thursday,” he replied hesitantly. He took a step back. “Why?”

“Let me collect for you next week.”

“No way,” he said, crossing his arms. “I never should have told you.” He turned to walk away.

But I grabbed his arm. “Wait, take them. I held out my X-Ray Spex as a peace offering. “A deal is a deal.”

Kevin donned the x-ray glasses and studied his hands.

“Say, about what time will you be at her house to collect again?” I asked. I wondered if he didn’t hear me, or didn’t want to answer.

Kevin looked up at me through the glasses. They were so dopey-looking, I was glad I had given them away. “Why do you want to know?” he asked.

“I could just hide in the bushes across the street before you get there,” I said. Kevin’s eyebrows pulled together so tightly I thought he was going to cry. “Come on,” I said, “No one will even know I’m there.”

Ultimately, I did reveal the plan to Woody, because he was the one friend who talked about wanting to see girls naked more than anyone. But I made him promise not to tell anyone. We figured the two of us could keep ourselves hidden as well as one.

The following Thursday while walking with me along a sunny section of Colonial Avenue, Woody rolled back his sleeve and held out his hand, as if checking for rain. “It feels like a perfect day for sunbathing to me.” Then he stretched his arms over his head and faked an exaggerated yawn. “Someone could get awfully drowsy out in sunshine like this.” He sauntered ahead of me, rolling his hips from side to side, and said, “So drowsy it’d be easy to forget to put on your clothes when you went to answer the door.”

Colonial Avenue normally saw little traffic, but on this particular afternoon, every time we approached our intended hiding spot, cars appeared. We slowed our pace to try to let the cars pass, but then the drivers slowed down even more to watch us.

Woody whispered, “It’s like we’re wearing signs that say we’re Peeping Toms!”

A nervous, guilty feeling nearly paralyzed me when we finally dove into the bushes across the street from Mrs. Delancey’s house. I parted the bushes slightly to open up a good view. We were more than a half hour early. Within a couple minutes we heard footsteps coming up the sidewalk from the direction of Knox Field. I held my breath as Abs Calhoun walked by so close I could have reached out and touched him.

Like many nicknames, most kids had long forgotten the origin of this one and associated Abs with his stomach muscles, which he always showed off. But his name had originally come about because of the abscesses in his teeth. Before his dentures, he used his tongue to hide his bad front teeth when he smiled, which had the unfortunate effect of making him look crazy and mocking, when he was trying his hardest to be friendly. This led to many arguments and fights, launching Abs’ current reputation as a tough guy and a bully.

After Abs passed by, I whispered to Woody, “What’s he doing here? He never comes to this part of town.”

Before Woody could answer, Abs spun around, and headed back our way. Nearing our hiding place, he looked up and down the street several times, put his head down with his forearms protecting his face, and charged like a fullback into the hedge, landing right next to Woody.

“Am I too late?” Abs asked.

“Too late for what?” Woody asked.

“For the peep show. This is the place, right?”

Soon, three more kids approached with so little stealth I hoped they were just passing through, but they joined us in the bushes. Within fifteen minutes the bushes were swaying with boys jostling for position. When Kevin scurried up Melrose Street looking nervous, his mouth dropped when he took in the scene of at least a dozen of us overflowing the bushes.

He shook his head, as if planning to abort the mission, but a chorus of pleas bleated out from across the street, “Do it…ring the doorbell!”

Slowly, he turned to look at the house, put his finger to his lips and walked up the steps and rang the bell. This instantly silenced the crowd as everyone strained for the best view. No one inhaled until the door opened, just a crack.

Someone inside appeared to be talking to Kevin, through the barest of openings in the door. Kevin handed the bill through the opening. All eyes strained to see; it appeared to be a woman’s hand. The hand withdrew back into the house, and Kevin surveyed the ceiling of the porch as he waited.

“You think she’s going to get her pocketbook?” I whispered to Woody.

“She’ll have to open the door wider to pay him,” Woody said.

“Hey, shut the fuck up down there. Ya gonna ruin it,” came a hoarse whisper from further along in the bushes.

Suddenly someone was back at the door. The collective yearnings of a dozen junior high school boys willed Kevin to back away, so we could see inside. Magically, he stepped back and the door opened wider, revealing Mrs. Delancey in a polka-dotted mini skirt with a revealing matching halter-top. She handed Kevin her payment for the newspaper. Then, as Kevin descended the front steps, Mrs. Delancey looked across the street, and blew a kiss. Then she spun around, causing her skirt to flare out just like Marilyn Monroe’s, stepped back into the house, and softly shut the door.

Two lessons learned from being caught white-handed on my first day of 6^th grade at Pleasant Avenue Elementary, 1960.

When we became the big kids at Pleasant Avenue Elementary, entering the sixth grade — we figured we knew the ropes. For example, we knew never to stray anywhere near Hank Riley and Walter Munson, especially in the cafeteria.

Hank was a sadistic fireplug of a kid with strawberry blonde hair and freckles. He held the school record for the softball toss. Then Walter Munson arrived at Pleasant Ave by way of reform school and smashed Hank’s record by forty feet. Walter’s advantage may have been hormonal; he was the only kid in the sixth grade sporting a goatee.

On our first day of school, we sat together at lunchtime making juicy noises by sucking up Jell-O through our straws. Malcolm laughed so hard milk ran out of his nose — the highest score on our humor barometer. I watched a nervous fourth-grader an aisle over, scanning the cafeteria for a friendly face. Hank Riley smiled up at the kid as he walked by. “Have a nice trip,” Hank said.

“Huh?” the kid asked, quickening his pace, just as Hank stuck out his leg. As Walter Munson shoved the kid he called after him, “See you next fall.”

Like the delay between the puff of smoke shooting out of the starter’s pistol at Knox Field and the crack of sound, I pointed and then the plates and silverware crashed across the linoleum. The place exploded with cheers and whistles — mostly expressions of relief it wasn’t one of us sprawled on the floor all covered with Sloppy Joe sauce.

Some kids took advantage of the mayhem by catapulting spoonfuls of Jell-O across the room. Our principal, Mr. Jewell, grabbed the big, silver microphone parked next to the stage. “Settle down,” he boomed over the PA system. The noise level fell as Mr. Jewell watched and waited. An errant spoon sailed end over end from the far side of the cafeteria and pinged across the floor. Mr. Jewell intoned into the microphone in a deathly monotone, “I am now taking names.” His threat sucked all the noise out of the cafeteria, except for the ticking of the big clock on the wall.

I counted seventeen ticks before Mr. Jewell finally announced, “Homeroom B-4 can now line up for recess.”

The girls huddled together on the playground, mainly for protection from the packs of howling boys darting everywhere like wolves on the hunt. Dondi, Malcolm, Woody, and I clung to a sliver of shade along the edge of the cool brick school building, rehashing the recent melee in the cafeteria.

“That kid flew in perfect Superman pose, with his lunch tray straight out in front of him,” Malcolm said.

“If he was Superman, then Walter Munson is Lex Luthor,” I said, referring to Superman’s evil archenemy.

“I heard Walter got sent up the river for knifing some guy,” Dondi said.

“His stepfather,” Woody corrected him.

“Say, do you think Superman needs to have his arms out in front of him to fly?” Malcolm asked, extending his arms overhead to demonstrate.

“That’s just for less wind resistance,” Dondi said, sounding exasperated for having to point out something so obvious.

“So could he fly in a sitting position if he wanted to?” Malcolm asked.

“Yeah, but that would just look stupid,” Woody said.

Bowing out of the discussion, I leaned back against the big plate glass classroom window behind me and my elbows sank deeply into something very soft and sticky. Startled, I turned around and discovered a thick line of fresh putty.

I scooped out a small handful of the pliable, white material, and passed it around to my friends. Its earthy smell and oily consistency must have cast a spell over us, because we were soon racing from one set of classroom windows to the next, mining out virgin strips. Within minutes, each of us held shot put sized putty balls.

By the time the warning bell rang, signaling three minutes until the end of recess, every window along the entire length of the school had inch-deep gouges scooped out of the frames. We couldn’t bring the evidence back into school. So we sprinted across the playground to heave it out into the neighboring field.

Walter Munson and Hank Riley appeared out of nowhere, blocking our path.

“What’ve you peckerheads got there?” Walter asked, raising his head and pointing his wispy-haired chin at us.

We held out our merchandise for him and Hank to see. “We’re going to see who can throw them the farthest,” I said.

Walter slowly reached out and took mine from my hand, as if daring me to pull it away from him. He raised it to his nose and sniffed. “What is this shit?”

“It’s cookie dough,” Dondi said.

Walter turned his head toward Dondi and smiled, revealing little crescents of decay between his front teeth. “What are you, some kind of wise ass, Duquette?”

I held my breath. The last hot bugs off in the distance buzzed a mournful reminder that summer vacation really was over. I wanted to be anywhere else, rather than staring down these two.

“These lunkers are probably too heavy to throw very far anyway,” Dondi said, offering his to Walter.

That was all Hank and Walter needed.

We stepped back to watch what was certain to be the world’s first putty-ball heaving contest. I figured it might even qualify for the Guinness Book of Records, right alongside the man with The World’s Longest Fingernails (they touched the ground when he was standing), or my favorite, The Metal-Eating Man who had eaten 18 bicycles.

As it turned out, Dondi was right; even the best softball throwers in school couldn’t throw fat putty balls far enough to make them disappear. They sat in the field like four lonesome snowballs that would never melt. But at least they were out of our hands and as the final bell rang we ducked back into the dark, cool halls of the school.

I forgot all about our putty episode until Mr. Jewell appeared in the doorway of my social studies classroom later that afternoon. He conferred with my teacher Mr. Robinson, who bore a disturbing, perhaps cultivated resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Robinson strode across the classroom to my desk and solemnly stared down at me. He paused dramatically as if preparing to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

“Mr. Jewell would like to meet with you in the hall,” he said. Thirty-two sets of eyes followed me as I made my way to the door. I placed one foot mechanically in front of the other, as if relearning how to walk.

It didn’t surprise me to find Woody, Dondi, and Malcolm already out in the hallway. What surprised me was the way they were holding their hands out in front of them, as if waiting to be cuffed. Their heads were bowed prayer-like, which suddenly seemed like a good idea to me. Mr. Jewell was holding his hands behind his back.

“Lucas, show me your hands,” he said.

When I held out my hands, I noticed fine lines of whiteness packed into every crevice around my fingernails.

“Do you boys know anything about these,” asked Mr. Jewell, as he produced four filthy, weed-encrusted balls of putty from behind his back.

The four of us stood silently.

“Did you boys dig this putty out of the school’s windows and throw these into the field?”

I was surprised to hear Dondi say, “No, we didn’t, sir.”

I supposed this was technically true. We hadn’t collected the putty and thrown it away.

“Well, who did throw these out into the field at recess, then?”

Again somewhat telling the truth, Dondi replied, “Hank Riley and Walter Munson did, sir.”

“If that’s the case, then why do you boys have putty all over your hands?”

I didn’t see any way around this question. But Dondi was on a roll so I let him keep going.

“They bet us they could throw those farther than we could. But we knew we couldn’t out throw those guys, sir,” Dondi said.

I noticed that the first part of his answer was an outright lie, followed quickly by a statement with which no one in school could argue.

Mr. Jewell stared at each of us for a long time, as if waiting for a better explanation. Finally he said, “Okay then. I am going to have a talk with Mr. Riley and Mr. Munson to see what they have to say about this. You boys can go back to your classes. I will follow up with you later.”

For the next week we traveled everywhere together, carrying Woody’s BB gun pistol in a gym bag for protection from Walter and Hank. But we gave up on that idea when Woody accidentally shot Malcolm in the belly at point blank range. Malcolm immediately called out, “bagsies” — which was just his British way of claiming the right to shoot Woody to even the score. Neither of them even flinched.

In the end the whole thing just blew over and we wasted a lot of time worrying about nothing. That was my first inkling into the meaning of a Mark Twain quote that later in my life would emerge as a favorite. When he was quite old, Twain said, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

That episode was also the first time it occurred to me that Dondi’s ability to sidestep trouble wasn’t just beginner’s luck. It was survival skill honed from living in the same house with his father.

I may be crazy, but my 50^th high school reunion is calling me back. Mostly I  just want to see Woody again. He should be in rare form, given that for a long time he never expected to reach this milestone, with his diagnosis and all. Even before that, we shared enough dumbass stunts to preclude any notions of ever toasting such escapades in our old age.

Like the time on spring break when we tried to walk from Daytona Beach to Ft.Lauderdale, wearing only flip-flops, t-shirts, and our bathing trunks. No hats, no sun block, no underwear, and certainly no cell phones.

If we had consulted a map—free at any gas station back then—we might have realized there is no contiguous beach from Daytona to Ft. Lauderdale. We might have also learned we were biting off a two hundred mile walk.

After less than ten miles the beach simply ended. Backtracking would have been sensible, but instead we chose to battle westward through fields of saw grass and mangrove swamps until we came to a road and stuck out our thumbs. By then the heels of our flip-flops had completely worn away, forcing us to walk ballerina-style on the balls of our feet, which may have explained the difficulty we had in getting rides. So we accepted any ride, regardless of the length or the direction, taking a long, rambling inland loop through alligator swamps and dry landscapes crawling with armadillos.

“Race riots,” was all one driver said when he dropped us off in a section of Jacksonville up in flames. To be fair, we had told him he could drop us anywhere, so it may have been his idea of a joke. Forty-eight sleepless hours later we landed right back in Daytona Beach where we started.

Boredom drove us to Newton’s Auction House, with Woody brazenly bidding up items of jewelry at three and four thousand dollars a clip. Neither of us had the slightest idea of how auctions worked.

“Hey,” I whispered to Woody. “What happens if you win one of these bids?”

“Relax. I’m just playing these guys,” Woody assured me.

“Them?” I asked, inclining my head toward the Mafioso-looking guards in the back of the room in their black muscle shirts.

There were two auctioneers. One rallied up the bids while the other quietly showed upcoming items to the high bidders in the audience. The guy working the crowd introduced himself to us as George and said he had an “exquisite” man’s gold ring coming up, with diamond and tear-drop ruby insets. Woody tried it on and said he had to have it.

They started the bidding for Woody’s ring at one hundred dollars. The lead auctioneer called out in nasally, machine gun bursts, “Bid’s at a hunert, do I hear a hunert ‘n ten, a hunert ‘n ten, who’ll bid a hunert ‘n ten?” At this point George leaned over to Woody and whispered, “Say one-hundred-ten and leave the rest to me.”

Woody raised his hand and called out, “One hundred and ten.” His bid felt completely safe—given that this ring, like the ones before it, would surely sell for thousands more.

The auctioneer at the front of the room was just revving up his sermon about the value of the ring and how it had been owned by Dean Martin…or at the very least Dean Martin owned the matching “twin” to this ring.

Just when the head auctioneer was reaching the climax of his pitch, George interrupted him and said, “Tony, the gentleman back here has tried on this ring. He really admires the design. I say we let him have it for a hundred and ten bucks.”

Tony argued that the ring was worth fifty times that amount, but eventually relented — too quickly, in my opinion — and slammed down the gavel, shouting, “Sold to the young man in the back of the room, for a hunert ‘n ten dollars!”

The auction house required a twenty percent deposit on winning bids, but they called it square at eighteen dollars and a handful of change when that was all Woody and I could scrape together. Woody carefully tucked the receipt in his wallet.

Later that night Woody stepped under a light next to the door of a seaside condo to pull a cactus spine from his finger. He was lucky it was only his finger. After we had downed several beers, Woody had stepped into an abandoned lot filled with cactus to take a leak.

If we hadn’t been such cactus virgins, I might have known better than to break off a pad and toss it toward my friend to check out, and Woody definitely would not have tried to catch it.

As he leaned against the door of the condo trying to get in the best light to examine his wound, the door suddenly opened, pitching Woody into the arms of a stunning blonde. Our luck seemed to be turning when she and her two girlfriends invited us in for dinner. Woody poured gin and tonics, and attempted to charm the pants off the shortest, dark-haired girl.

“So Rosie, are you a riveter?” he asked her.

I had no idea what that meant, and I don’t think Rosie did either. But like a lot of Woody’s banter, it felt flirtatiously suggestive and seemed to be working.

“What would you like me to rivet?” she asked him.

I took the helpful, serious approach, stirring the risotto, while Shelly leaned lightly against me, streaming sauvignon blanc into the rice and mushroom mixture.

But the evening’s promise was shattered when Audra — the blonde — revealed that her boyfriend George would be arriving as soon as he got off work at the local auction house. That news threw Woody into a theatrical frenzy, claiming he had a score to settle with that “bastard,” which promptly cost us our dinner invitation.

That was the last time Woody and I traveled together for many years. Shortly after our return from Florida, everything changed. Woody’s girlfriend announced she was pregnant, he married her, dropped out of college, and went to work shaving skins for the next seven years, snorting leather dust by day and blowing dark, stringy mucous into his handkerchief at night.

I moved out of the area and Woody and I saw each other less and less. But whenever we did get together, Woody always produced the dog-eared receipt for his ring from his wallet. He spoke with regret of his failure to claim the ring — as though the ring was a talisman and by forswearing it he had somehow altered the trajectory of his life.

I finally lost contact with Woody altogether, hearing rumors that he had moved to Florida. When he reconnected with me ten years later with news of his diagnosis, he joked that he had caught the disease — an aggressive form of leukemia — while vacationing in Mexico.

He shrugged off my suggestion that his illness may have had more to do with the skins he had once shaved.

“Don’t even go there,” he said, waving me off. “The doctors say I have a defective Philadelphia chromosome.”

“Right, I said, “but those skins were soaked in benzene and benzene is known to cause DNA strand breaks like those detected in your form of leukemia.

Woody just shook his head, rejecting my theory.

“As Yogi Berra said, ‘you can look it up,’” I added.

In fact, I had looked it up. Benzene was first reported to induce cancer in humans as far back as the 1920’s. But the chemical, leather, and rubber industries denied any link to cancer until 1979. By then, Woody had already fled the leather mills before they got the best of him (or so he thought). Maybe his brain somehow detected the chromosomal breaks in his body and silently whispered to him, “I can’t tell you why, but you must leave this place…leave your wife… leave your five year old daughter…leave now before it’s too late.”

Luckily Woody had enough time left for me to shanghai him for one final trip — to England to find our old childhood mate, Malcolm. It was a raucous, happy, and at times tearful farewell tour.

More than fifteen years have now passed since that epic “last” trip. Since then — after abandoning all medications out of sheer stubbornness due to the extortion of the pharmaceutical companies, and to the total puzzlement of his doctors — Woody’s leukemia simply disappeared.

So, I look forward to toasting memories with Woody at our 50^th high school reunion — a milestone neither of us expected him to reach. I am certain he still carries the receipt for his ring. I hope to touch it, caress its feathered edges, and absorb its good karma through my fingertips.

Back in the early 60’s my boogeyman didn’t come tap dancing out of the shadows of some past lifetime trauma; he threatened me from the future. I knew he would surprise me with a light tap on my shoulder. Turning to see who was there, my eyeballs would melt out of my skull by the flash of a thermonuclear blast.

Call me paranoid, but who could escape the signs? There was Nikita Khrushchev on the evening news, taking his shoe off at the U.N., pounding it on his desk and screaming, “We will bury you!” To me he looked and acted a lot like Curly on The Three Stooges, which was not reassuring.

At school, sirens regularly sent us ducking under our desks. We knelt there on the gritty linoleum floor as if praying — and I suspect some kids were. Our sixth-grade teacher walked around our classroom demanding silence, and instructing us to cover the backs of our necks with our hands—as if that might bump up our odds of survival.

The part I never understood was why we had to be quiet if we were about to be incinerated anyway. Wouldn’t this be the best possible time to crack a joke that everyone could savor for eternity?

As our teacher patrolled the far side of the classroom, Woody whispered to me, “Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.”

I’d have rather kissed Bethany Larson’s ass goodbye, but saved that line for when I thought the world really might be ending.

During one hallway drill, when we were sent out of the classroom to lean our heads against our lockers, Malcolm celebrated his last few seconds on earth by unleashing what he liked to call in his weird British parlance, a Drifter.

“More tea, vicar?” he whispered to me, which was his way of claiming ownership.

A wave of throat-clearing retching sounds rippled down the hallway. Sensing unruliness in the face of nuclear attack, our principal Mr. Thompson race-walked our way.

“Quiet!” he commanded in a hoarse whisper, trying not to alert any enemy aircraft roaming the skies. Little did he suspect that the real enemy bomber was working from inside the school. When he got within the Circle of Doom (as Malcolm proudly called it later) Mr. Thompson executed a perfect about-face, and marched back as if he had forgotten something.

We spent several hours hanging out on Malcolm’s front porch after school that day, hoping Malcolm could summon the urge to drop another Drifter into an empty Skippy peanut butter jar. He clammed up with a rare case of stage fright, and we walked home disappointed in the failure of our science project.

But Malcolm brought the Skippy jar to school in his lunchbox the next day with reports of success. We agreed to unleash the doom jar in the cafeteria at lunchtime.

We should have simply opened it and walked away. Instead, we tossed it around, as if it were a hot potato. Dondi held it up to the light and claimed it had a purple tinge to it, which got us all laughing.

“What’s in the jar, boys?” Mr. Thompson asked, appearing out of nowhere.

“Nothing sir,” Dondi said, holding up the jar to prove his point.

“Well I don’t see why an empty jar should create this much interest then,” Mr. Thompson said, taking the jar from Dondi’s hand. He too held the jar up to the overhead fluorescent lights, and peered inside while rolling it around in his hand.

“Who brought this to school?” he asked.

“I did,” Malcolm admitted.

“And for what purpose?” Mr. Thompson asked.

“Ah, it was for a science experiment,” Malcolm said.

“And did this science experiment involve smuggling alcohol into school?” Mr. Thompson asked, sounding like Perry Mason when he pops the surprise question that makes the defendant crack on the witness stand.

“Whaa—aat?” Malcolm stuttered. He sounded guilty even to me.

“If you are lying to me I will know,” Mr. Thompson said. He moved one hand to the lid of the jar, as if to open it.

“Don’t do that,” Malcolm blurted out — loudly enough to hush the entire cafeteria.

“Oh really?” Mr. Thompson said as he made a big show of doing just the opposite, unscrewing the lid, and plunging his nose into the jar.

In my memory, what happened next was remarkably uneventful. Thompson backed his face away from the jar and screwed the lid back on in one quick motion. Then he said, “That’s some bad peanut butter,” and slid the jar back across the table to Malcolm.

In retelling the story forty years later, when I kidnapped Woody (after his leukemia diagnosis) and cajoled Dondi into joining us on a quest to England to find Malcolm, Dondi retold the story of Principal Thompson opening the peanut butter jar much differently…

*           *        *

“A great magenta cloud swirled out of the jar and filled the cafeteria,” Dondi recalled, raising his arms and looking skyward in a Charlton Heston, Moses kind of pose.

“I’m not remembering this part,” Malcolm said.

“Don’t you remember?” Dondi persisted. “Kids trampled each other, running for the exits and Thompson fell face-first onto the floor?”

I knew Dondi was exaggerating mostly for effect. Still, the insistence in his voice suggested to me that regardless of the history we shared, memories mutate in our brains until after four decades all that’s left is the enjoyment of arriving at a new version of the truth.

Clearly not buying Dondi’s story, Malcolm shrugged and said, “Must have been me pre-curry phase.”

“I just want to expose Sir William Johnson
as the Tory, swindler, rapist, and terrorist
that he was,” I said.

Continue reading →

Anticipating what’s ahead in 2017 has me feeling a bit like I’m eight years old again, staring down Melcher Street hill in my Radio Flyer Wagon…

I knelt in my old red wagon, with one foot anchored to the ground, weighing my odds. The wagon’s D-shaped handle had broken off years prior, leaving the sharp, jagged metal digging into my chest.

So instead of sitting, I placed one foot in the wagon, then the other, and began coasting downhill standing up. The stockade fence flashing by on the left reminded me of the words in the song “Hot Rod Lincoln:”

“Now the boys all thought I’d lost my sense.
And telephone poles all looked like a picket fence.”

The muscular roots of the giant elms lining the street had pitched the sections of concrete sidewalk at crazy angles. The bump — pause — bump cadence slowly increased as the front, then the back wheels hit the cracks.

“They said, Slow down! I see spots!
The lines on the road just look like dots.”

By the time I reached Dead Man’s Tree, the bump–bump of the wheels rattled a constant staccato sound with no pause in between. The tempo increased as I shot down the sidewalk, faster than I ever traveled on a sled. As my eyes darted around searching for a soft landing spot, the wagon went airborne, launching off one of the sidewalk slabs angled upward like a ski jump.

“My fenders was clickin’ the guardrail posts.
The guy beside me was white as a ghost.”

For a split-second I imagined I could land on my feet in the wagon and keep right on going. But when the wagon hit the sidewalk, the front wheels violently jerked to the side at nearly a ninety-degree angle. The wagon pitched onto its side, catapulting me in a long, clawing arch through the air until I landed and bounced on the concrete. I lay in a stunned heap, the final lines of the song, which my friends and I always shouted out in unison when the song played on the radio, running through my brain:

“Son, you’re gonna drive me to drinkin.
If you don’t stop driving that Hot Rod Lincoln!”

The next morning I awoke to discover that overnight my New York Giants pajama bottoms had stuck and dried to the gigantic raspberry covering my right buttock. It hurt way too much to pull the fabric away from the wound. So, I pulled my jeans on over my pajamas and walked the three blocks to school with portraits of Alex Webster, Frank Gifford, Rosey Grier, and Sam Huff hidden underneath. I felt bogged down by the extra weight and heat of the flannel during recess. Walking back into class, I caught a cluster of girls stealing glances at me, and whispering to each other. That was unusual enough to prompt me to glance down to check my fly. What I saw was even worse. My pajama bottoms were hanging out well below the cuffs of my jeans.

After school, in the privacy of my bedroom, I examined the damage. The flannel was so thoroughly embedded in my skin it sounded like plywood when I rapped on it with my knuckles. I snipped away the fabric around the perimeter of the wound, leaving behind a portion of Y.A. Tittle’s face. But without his helmet or the other players around him, the bald quarterback wasn’t even recognizable. He just looked like a wizened old man — a creepy thing for a kid to be walking around with on his butt.

The next day I sensed doom. Our gym teacher, Mr. Collins, brought the class outside for a monster tug-of-war contest over the little stream that ran behind the school. Both sides of the stream were slick with wet clay. Normally I loved this kind of free-for-all, but Mr. Collins would surely patrol the locker room, enforcing showers after this mud bath. After hauling the other team slipping and sliding through the mud, I pretended to celebrate with my teammates.

“Okay, everyone hit the showers,” Mr. Collins shouted causing thirty-two mud-covered boys to scream like monkeys as we ran for the locker room. I sprinted to the front of the pack, stripped down to my jockey shorts, wrapped a towel around my waist, and headed toward the showers ahead of everyone else. At the stainless basin sink I stepped on the pedal to turn on the water and dunked my head under the stream. By the time I got back to my locker and was toweling my hair, the other boys were just heading toward the showers.

I had seen far too many kids branded forever with unfortunate nicknames to risk baring my behind in this crowd. Alex Snyder, who was plagued by allergies in the first-grade, was still Snot Rag Snyder. A kid with asthma was renamed Wheezer. The one born with a harelip became Mumbles. Kenny Deerfield who lived one block up the street from me was simply Moan. His mistake in life was being born to parents who were Christian Scientists. When Kenny tried to do the pole vault in his backyard and the bamboo pole snapped, his parents believed that God would relieve their son’s back pain. All these names were ingenious in their simplicity and cruelty. I even had a pretty good idea what my new name would be if my secret were discovered — I would be forever known as Butt-Face.

I could sense Mr. Collin’s presence as I went through the motions of drying off.

“Showered already, Lucas?” he asked.

I turned to look at him. “Yes sir, I already washed up,” I said, which wasn’t entirely a lie.

“Looks like you missed a few spots,” Mr. Collins said, pointing at my leg.

I looked down at the mud smeared from one thigh to my ankle.

“You better get back in there and use soap this time.”

I shrugged and began walking back in the direction of the showers.

“What, are you going to shower in your jockey shorts?” Mr. Collins called after me.

I walked back to my locker and stalled, hoping he would leave.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

I looked up at the man, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ve got a cut I’m not supposed to get wet, so how about if I just towel off at the sink?”

“Son, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. If you want to play sports you better get used to showering with a bunch of guys.”

“It’s not that, honest.” I stared down at my feet for a long time before mumbling, “I’ve got this cut that I can’t get wet.”

Mr. Collins inhaled deeply and looked up at the ceiling. He looked back down at me impatiently. “Look, I don’t like getting the run around, Parker. Unless you have a note from home about this so-called wound, get in there and shower up like everyone else.”

I heard the voices of several boys heading back into the locker room and knew I didn’t have much time. “Okay, I’ll prove it to you.” I turned my right butt cheek toward him, and hiked down my shorts on that side for a quick look. I turned back to Mr. Collins, and stared up at him stone-faced, awaiting his reaction.

His eyes conveyed a bewildered, almost frightened look. “Is that a tattoo?” he asked, clearly trying to make some sense of what he had just witnessed.

“No, it’s my pajamas,” I said.

“Your pajamas,” Mr. Collins repeated blankly.

“Yeah, my New York Giants pajamas — what’s left of them. Y.A. Tittle stuck to the giant strawberry I got when I skidded on the sidewalk.”

Four kids noisily rounded the corner and immediately stopped talking when they saw Mr. Collins standing over me.

Mr. Collins looked at the boys, then back at me. His face changed from anger to confusion, and then seemed to soften just a little.

“What are you guys waiting for? Dry off and get yourselves dressed,” Mr. Collins said to the group of boys. “And you, Mr. Parker,” he said, turning back to me. “You don’t have time to shower up again. Just take your towel and go back to the sink and wash that mud off your leg.”

When JFK announced his Presidential Physical Fitness Awards, I unfortunately sucked at chin-ups. Four or five honest pull-ups were my limit, with one more leg-pumping, neck-stretching cheater thrown in at the end. But my salvation was the 600-yard run.

For this event I secretly perfected a new running technique that involved two normal length steps, followed by a bounding, energy-saving stride. I got the idea by watching antelopes on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. While evading cheetahs, the antelopes occasionally catapulted themselves into the air where they hung suspended for an unnatural length of time. I figured that was their rest step.

When my technique made me famous, I would call it the Antelope Running Technique, or ART for short (which I particularly liked with its double meaning and all). As I trained, running circles in my backyard, I could hear the sports announcers on ABC’s Wide World of Sports narrating my race:

“Leading down the final backstretch in the 800-meter finals is New Zealand’s Peter Snell. Closing quickly from the back of the pack is Lucas Parker, from the United States, employing his unique Antelope Running Technique. It may not look like ART, but that’s what they call it and that’s the result! Parker is gobbling up the track, passing Snell for the lead. The new Olympic 800-meter gold medal winner is Lucas Parker — The Antelope — from the USA!”

On the first day of gym class I was ready to unveil my new running style. But instead of taking us out on the track, our gym teacher — we all called him “Prof” — sat us down for a lecture about the importance of jockstraps. Our assignment for the following week was to purchase one. “Prof” specifically mentioned Bike as a reputable brand.

Purchasing a jockstrap at Ahearn’s Pharmacy was socially risky, because packs of girls frequented the record section, milling through the latest Chubby Checkers and Bobby Rydell releases.

I wandered up and down the aisles for so long that a matronly female clerk finally cornered me. “Can I help you, young man?” She studied me intently through her rhinestone-studded eyeglasses.

“I’m just looking, thanks,” I said, pretending to study the laxative labels in front of me.

She frowned, but didn’t move away. So I drifted around the store, pausing at denture adhesives, then wart removers. Finally, the male pharmacist behind the counter was free.

“Do you have any Bike Supporters?” I whispered.

He looked up at me and scrunched his mouth to one side, thinking. He held a yellow, Ticonderoga number two pencil between his fingers like he was holding a cigarette, and bounced its eraser on the counter. “I think we’ve put those away for the season.”

This caught me totally off guard because I didn’t know there was a season for jockstraps. He surprised me even more when he shouted over to the rhinestone eyeglass lady, “Charlene, would you go down in the basement and see if you can find one of those Bike Supporters for this young man? Look in the back corner, next to the inflatables.”

I felt my face burn as several people turned to check out the jockstrap shopper.

“Hey Lucas, what are you doing here?”

My heart stopped. It was Bethany Larson, and as usual she looked perfect.

“Oh hey, Bethany, are you buying something?”

She held up a single 45-rpm record of Chubby Checker’s Limbo Rock. “I just love this song,” she said. “Are you in line?” she asked, motioning toward the counter and the cash register.

“No, they didn’t have what I needed.”

But before I could escape, I heard the sales lady with the eyeglasses say, “I hope you really want this young man, because it took some digging.”

Bethany cocked her head to the side with a puzzled look as she stared at the woman. I spun around. In the woman’s hand was a bicycle kickstand. Naturally I purchased it on the spot (carefully circling back several days later to exchange it for a Bike Brand Athletic Supporter).

The following week, “Prof” lined us up for the start of the 600-yard run and started his stopwatch. I settled into my Antelope stride-stride-bound rhythm on the Knox Field track. I settled into third place, waiting for the two in front of me to tire from their orthodox, energy wasting gaits.

As I went by him after the first lap, “Prof” glowered at me and barked, “Parker, what the hell are you doing?”

Startled, I began sprinting conventional-style, passing both of the guys in front of me. Though I secretly attributed my blazing finish to how much energy I had saved doing the Antelope up until that point, I never dared display my new running technique in public again.

Rather than improve on running, which humans had been doing for thousands of years, I decided it might be easier to invent an entirely new sport. That’s when my thoughts drifted toward figuring out a new way to fly.

I showed up at Dondi’s back door one night with a twenty by forty-foot sheet of plastic bundled under one arm and my Woolworth’s football helmet under the other. The wind was blasting so hard it tore the aluminum storm door out of my hands, slamming it into the aluminum siding where the handle left a sizeable dent.

“What’s with the tarp?” Dondi asked.

“It’s not a tarp,” I said. “It’s a flying machine.”

“Your ass. Who’s going to fly it?”

“We are,” I said. “Grab your helmet.”

We stood at the top of the bank at Knox Field, each holding two corners of the giant plastic sheet. The sail yanked and pulled us, making great snapping sounds, as if it were an enraged beast. We ran down the bank, holding the sail high over our heads.

Instead of lifting us up, the wind catapulted us down the bank, forcing us to run at twice our normal speed. Our maiden flight ended in a twisting fall entangled in plastic, before thudding and sliding across the cinder running track below.

That night my dreams took me over Knox Field, suspended by a harness from something above that I could not see. There was no risk of falling, so it was beautiful just watching the twinkling lights below.

The next day in school I shared my dream with Dondi.

“What were we thinking?” he asked. “Trying to fly.”

“The problem is the plastic sheet,” I argued. “We need something that will hold the air better.”

“What do you mean we, Kemo Sabe?” he asked, distancing himself from future flights.

The limitations of plastic led me months later to Vrooman’s Army Surplus in Fultonville. Vrooman’s was full of so much cool military stuff it was easy to imagine you might discover an old bazooka in a dusty corner—or at the very least a live hand grenade.

I did find a silk parachute, with the lines still attached. It was a steal for three bucks. And the big wind I wanted arrived one Sunday afternoon in January. The snow on the ground at Knox Field had been thickly glazed over with ice. Sitting on a flying saucer in the northern end zone of the football field, with the silk parachute tucked under my butt, I carefully tied the chute’s lead lines to the belt loops on the front and sides of my jeans. Then, I unfurled the chute, casting it in front of me. At first nothing happened. My theory was that the wind would fill the chute, and with so little friction between the icy surface and the flying saucer, I would hit flight speed by the time I reached the spot where the football field terraced down ten or twelve feet to the level of the baseball field. If everything went according to plan, at this instant I would become airborne.

A gust snapped the chute open with a resonant “thunk” and the acceleration nearly flipped me backwards off the saucer. I hadn’t accounted for steering though, which was of increasing concern as I rocketed toward one of the steel light towers on the east side of the field. Dragging my hands and leaning my body had no effect on my direction. I could have reached out to touch the tower as I blew by.

When I dropped off the terrace to the baseball outfield I did become airborne —just long enough to lose my flying saucer. I slid toward the infield in Superman position, with the chute taut in the wind and the lead lines tied to my pants. I slammed headfirst into the chain link fence backstop behind home plate, producing a bright red checkerboard of lines on my face.

That officially ended my attempts to fly. Not that I stopped thinking about it. The same peaceful image of floating over our town kept coming to me in my dreams. It was always nighttime, the air was cool and fresh, and the twinkling lights of the town below were beautiful and reassuring. Eventually the lights grew smaller and smaller as I drifted away until everything below turned black.

Giddy with the anticipation of summer vacation, we walked home from Smalley’s Theater after watching Elvis punch his way to glory in Kid Galahad.

Dondi careened into Malcolm harder than he needed to. In his best Elvis voice Malcolm said, “Watch it Willie. I may be a grease monkey, but I don’t slide so easy.”

Dondi wrapped his arm around Malcolm’s neck and pulled him close. “I don’t slide so easy,” he said, drawling the word “slide.” “Elvis is from Memphis, not Manchester.”

“All right, all right,” Malcolm said, squirming out from underneath Dondi’s headlock. “Lucas, do the Hamburger Haven one again. You do that one the best.”

I looked over at Dondi who just shrugged. “Aw Willie,” I began, in what I felt was the best Elvis impersonation of our group. “You have got a dirty mind, haven’t you Willie? I’ll tell you what I did to your sister. I’ll tell you right to your face. We went to the Hamburger Haven and held hands on top of the table for half an hour — is that so bad, is it Willie?”

Dondi cut in, “I’ll tell you another thing Willie. I’m getting out of this fight game as soon as I can.” Dondi veered into Woody and asked, “You know why Willie?”

“I dunno,” Woody said, refusing to play along.

Dondi cut the opposite way, crashing into Malcolm. “You know why, Willie?”

Already laughing as he anticipated the punch line, Malcolm barely spit out, “No, why?”

“I’ll tell you why, Willie,” Dondi said, leaning over with his face up close to Malcolm’s. “Because it stinks.” Except he said it like Elvis, so the word came out as “Stinsh.”

High above us the black branches of the doomed elm trees reached toward each other from opposite sides of the street. No streetlights lit this stretch, making it a dreaded section after horror movies. The big colonial houses on both sides of the street loomed out of the darkness. Flickering silver light from black and white TVs danced in the windows of some of the houses. As Dondi completed his Elvis delivery, a motion on Miss Myron’s front porch caught my eye. A silhouette rocked silently, taking in the cool night air.

Ethel Myron was our spinster school librarian. You would think that someone who was forever telling us to stop talking would be less of a town gossip. I imagined her telling her neighbors over coffee, “They sounded like southerners, shouting and picking fights with each other. One accused the other of doing Lord knows what with the other one’s sister!”

Fortunately, we were well past Miss Myron’s house when Woody brought up the kissing scenes in the movie. “They were sucking tongues like there was no tomorrow,” he said.

“It was disgusting,” Malcolm said. He made a face and drooled a long hank of spit onto the sidewalk. “Swapping spit with a girl.”

“I’d do it in a minute,” Dondi said.

“Me too,” said Woody.

That’s when Malcolm divulged the amazing anatomical secret that girls have nuts in their breasts. His only proof was Sally Schultz’s reaction to getting drilled in the chest with a hardball during a neighborhood baseball game.

“Remember? She was doubled over just like she’d been kicked in the goolies,” he said. He grabbed his right breast and staggered as if he’d been shot. “Except she got hit right in the baps.”

“What’s that prove? Sally Schultz doesn’t even have boobs, anyway,” Woody said.

Whatever Malcolm lacked in scientific discovery was more than made up by the fact that he had an older sister who was in high school. That was enough credibility to cement this biological fact about girls in our minds. We walked together in silence for a full block, digesting our new knowledge.

As we ambled up the William Street hill, Malcolm finally broke the silence. “You know that Sawyer girl?”

Of course we all knew the red headed girl who was two years younger than us and lived next door to Malcolm. She always jumped rope and played hopscotch on the sidewalk. Sometimes we would find her on Malcolm’s front steps, talking to Malcolm and the other neighborhood kids.

“What about her?” Dondi asked.

“I can’t stand her,” Malcolm said.

I looked at Malcolm skeptically. “What do you have against her? She seems nice enough.”

Malcolm sighed deeply as if his list of complaints was too long to consider. “Well, for one thing, she’s as flat as a board.”

We stopped walking and stared at Malcolm.

“What the heck are you talking about? She’s only like ten years old,” Dondi said.

We were at the corner of William and First Avenue where we always split up to go our separate ways home. Woody parroted back Malcolm’s words, “I can’t stand her…she’s as flat as a board.”

Malcolm said, “Hey Dondi, do the Hamburger Haven routine one more time.”

“Aww, Willie,” Dondi began. Then he stopped.

Malcolm had walked away, in the direction of his house. He called back over his shoulder, “You have got a dirty mind, haven’t you Willie?”

That’s when we all knew the truth — that Malcolm liked the Sawyer girl.

We walked the seven blocks to Smalley’s Theater every Friday night, unless there was a night football game. When the theater jacked up their admission price from twenty-five to thirty-five cents, Malcolm declared it the biggest gyp joint in town. His boycott gained support from the rest of us for six days. But when the following Friday rolled around, our resolve crumbled. Smalley’s was just too magical to resist.

The theater looked tiny from the outside, but it was cavernous inside with hundreds of plush, red velvet seats. Originally built for the vaudeville circuit, its art deco fixtures were as exotic and far-fetched as the images flickering on the big screen, from movies like The Blob and The Time Machine.

The usher, a high school kid we called Paper Thin for his hair-do that was greased into a sharpened wing overhanging his forehead, patrolled the big balcony to keep kids out. More than anything, Woody wanted to sneak up there with a container of cooked oatmeal, make loud, retching noises, and dump the whole mess onto the crowd below.

“My cousin’s friend did it in the town where he lives,” Woody said as we walked home after seeing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Dondi skeptically raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

“What, you don’t believe me?” Woody said. “You can call my cousin up. He’ll tell you.”

But of course Woody couldn’t produce a phone number. And even if he did, it was long distance, and we weren’t allowed to make long distance calls. So, it became part of our code that we accepted each other’s stories about far away cousins.

The most famous of these friend-of-cousin legends involved a high school girl who constructed the perfect beehive hairdo. To preserve it, she slept with her head elevated and never washed her hair. She just kept coating it with hair spray until it was entombed in a solid shellac-like coating. Eventually maggots ate through the protective coating into her brain. Here the legend mutated into two different versions, depending on whether your cousin was from upstate or downstate New York. In the upstate version, the girl tragically died from the maggots eating into her brain. In the downstate version, she became a living vegetable. Lots of famous people, who were supposed to be officially dead, like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, were rumored to be living vegetables during this period.

The candy counter in Smalley’s Theater glowed in the darkened lobby like it was the control board of a space ship. It contained wonderfully weird stuff you couldn’t find anywhere else. There were flavored wax lips, which were a three-in-one candy. You could wear them for a while, chew the flavor out of them, and then chuck the remaining wad of wax at other kids in the theater. Or, for five cents, you could get a whole six-pack of little wax bottles, filled with colored, sugar water. Those were good for chewing and throwing too.

The best projectile candy hands-down was Jujubes. They tasted oddly like soap, so you only kept them in your mouth long enough to soften up the outside. Then they would stick to almost anything they hit. These candies, which looked like the prehistoric drops of amber that trapped insects, would suck the fillings out of your teeth if you bit down on them.

Adults normally avoided Smalley’s as if it were a war zone, which on most Friday nights it was. That’s why Malcolm, Dondi, Woody, and I felt as if we were trapped behind enemy lines, as grown-ups mysteriously surrounded us before one show.

“What’s playing anyway?“ I whispered as we sat waiting in the darkened theater.

“I don’t know, but if they’re showing Children of the Damned again, these people are sure going to be disappointed,” Woody said.

As Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess lit up our faces, the woman sitting two seats to our right stared at us wearing our oversized wax lips. “You boys should be ashamed of yourselves, mocking these Negroes like that.” Dondi and Woody immediately ditched their wax lips onto the floor.

Malcolm dropped his into his shirt pocket where his mom discovered them weeks later as she ironed. Malcolm continued to wear the shirt despite what looked like a bloodstain over his heart. “I could keep me matches in here and they’d never get wet,” he always bragged as he’d peel the pocket open.

I kept wearing my lips. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, especially since our chorus teacher had staged a minstrel show for the winter concert that year, painting all our faces black and having us sing songs like “Mama’s Little Baby Loves Short’nin Bread.” I felt especially bad for Anthony Jefferson. Mrs. Lippiello chose not to paint Anthony’s face black, which was embarrassing enough because it made his milk chocolate face really stand out in our sea of licorice ones. What was even worse was when Joey Kavarvic got up there on stage in blackface, and sang the lead solo to an audience of adoring white faces. All of us kids knew that Anthony had a way better voice than Joey, so it was kind of unfair that Joey got the lead solo. Still, I was thankful Mrs. Lippiello at least had enough sense not to make Anthony sing the lyrics:

“I’s a little pickaninny,

blacker den a crow.

But I’s as sweet as lasses candy,

Mammy told me so.”

Imitating the falsetto voice of the lady on the screen, Dondi softly cried out “Crawdads, craw-da-uds.”

A long, drawn out shhhhh hissed ominously from the woman directly in front of Malcolm. She flung one end of her fur wrap over her shoulder as an angry exclamation point. The wrap was the type that had an animal head attached to it. The head landed pointing backwards, staring directly at Malcolm with its beady black eyes.

Up on the screen, Porgy was singing, “Bess, you is my woman now, you is, you is! An’ you mus’ laugh an’ sing an’ dance for two instead of one.”

“What is it?” Malcolm whispered to Dondi, as he pointed at the animal head.

Dondi leaned close to Malcolm and whispered in his ear, “It’s a rabid squirrel, and if you don’t shut up, it’s going to attack your nuts.”

Malcolm gagged on his coke as he tried not to make any noise. At that moment, Paper Thin in his gold-trimmed, burgundy usher’s suit, that made him look like an escapee from the circus, appeared behind Dondi and bonked him on the head with his flashlight. Little squeaks escaped from Malcolm as he held his breath. But the laughter had to go somewhere, and like a pressure relief valve, coke exploded out of his nose, sending a mist in the direction of the fur stole lady. Her husband whirled around in his seat, pointed at us and growled at Paper Thin, “Either they go, or we go.”

As we walked home, chewing the flavoring out of our wax bottles, Woody said, “The movie wasn’t even half over. They should have at least given us twenty cents back.”

“We’re regulars. We’re the ones butterin’ their bread,” Malcolm added. “Then some squirrel-infested lady comes in one time to see some lame musical, and gets us thrown out?”

Then Dondi called out “crawdads” again, sounding like the lady in the movie, and we all doubled over in laughter.

On the night we saw the movie, Sink the Bismarck, we marched home in unison discordantly belting out the theme song.

“We’ll find that German battleship that’s makin’ such a fuss,

We gotta sink the Bismarck ‘cause the world depends on us.

Hit the decks a-runnin’ boys and spin those guns around,

When we find the Bismarck we gotta cut her down.”

To us, World War II was more than a lifetime in the past. It seemed even more distant to us because our fathers who had served in the war never discussed it. Snooping through the U.S. Army pins and ribbons in my dad’s desk one day, I discovered an amazing piece of war booty — a large dagger with a carved wooden handle. On the handle there was a silver eagle with spread wings and talons sunk into a round emblem below it. I rubbed my finger over the tiny embossed metal swastika in the middle of the emblem. Removing the decorated metal scabbard revealed a sinister, foot-long blade, oily and sharp on both edges. Engraved on one side of the blade in fancy script letters were the words, “Alles fur Deutschland.”

In the bottom of the desk drawer I found a plain manila envelope, stuffed full of photographs. Some of the photos showed railroad boxcars piled high with human bodies. The bodies appeared to be slathered with mud. In other photos, rows and rows of hundreds, maybe thousands of naked bodies lay face-up on the ground, with their eyes and mouths wide open. Their arms and legs were so thin and their ribs were sticking out so far, at first I thought they were skeletons. I returned to that drawer many times, studying each face with a magnifying glass, searching for any expression that might provide a clue of what had happened to these people. The despair captured on each face haunted me. On the outside of the envelope was the one word, “Dachau.” It was decades before I learned that my father had been one of the first into the death camp when it was liberated, which explained a lot about my dad.

As kids — perhaps because the topic was so squelched — we craved information on the war. Judging from the nearly empty theater, Sink the Bismarck’s raw, semi-documentary style with grainy, black and white footage of actual naval battles probably repelled most adults. But for us, it was mesmerizing. It traced the story of the flagship of the German Navy, which had guns with a range of over nine miles, well beyond the range of Britain’s ships. We watched in disbelief as the Bismarck sank the HMS Hood in the Battle of the Denmark Strait. The Hood was the pride of the Royal Navy. She carried 1,415 crewmen. Most of those who made it off the ship before it sank were machine-gunned in the water by German U-boats. Out of the entire crew, only three survived. In the dark, Malcolm whispered to us that his father had known some of the guys who died on the Hood.

When Winston Churchill issued the order in the film to “sink the Bismarck at all costs” we were ready to volunteer on the spot. The movie then wasted a lot of time with the British Navy cruising around, trying to locate the Bismarck, which we all agreed was the most boring part of the whole movie. But when the Brits finally located her and damaged the ship’s rudder with torpedoes dropped from airplanes, we started screaming and hollering and slapping each other on the back. When the Bismarck finally went under, we fell silent.

When The Great Escape arrived at Smalley’s Theater, we all agreed it was the best movie ever made. We didn’t goof around and throw Jujubes on this night. We stared silently, mouths agape, as Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, and David McCullum outwitted the Germans at every turn. The captive soldiers dug a secret tunnel, with the goal of freeing several hundred prisoners.

For weeks after The Great Escape, we were obsessed with digging a tunnel somewhere, anywhere. We eventually settled on tunneling out from under the lattice-enclosed front porch of my house. We chose a spot at the farthest end of the porch from the access door, figuring this would be the least likely place to be discovered. We planned to dig down vertically, take a ninety-degree turn, and then head toward my side yard. There we would excavate out an area for an underground clubhouse.

Whenever my parents left to play golf, I called Dondi, Malcolm, and Woody to come over to work on the tunnel. We developed a system using one person to dig the hole and another to load up my red Radio Flyer wagon. A third person dragged the wagon over to the access door with a rope. In the movie, the prisoners filled their pockets with dirt, and dumped it, one pocketful at a time, in the prison courtyard. At first, Malcolm insisted we deposit the dirt in my mother’s perennial garden next to our garage in the same manner.

“It’s too slow. Besides, I’ve always got dirt in my pockets,” Woody said.

“Steve McQueen never complained about that,” Malcolm said. “What’s the point of doing this if we don’t stay true to the movie?”

“Then why don’t we string up some barbed wire around my backyard while we’re at it?” I said. “That’d be more realistic, too.”

“And we could bring in some guards with Tommy guns,” Dondi added.

“If you guys just want it to be easy, why don’t we just hire a backhoe?” Malcolm said, throwing his shovel down in disgust.

“The difference is the guys in the movie had months to work and we’ve just got the time it takes Lucas’ parents to play nine holes,” Woody pointed out.

Finally we decided to shortcut the principles of the movie on this one technicality, and roll full wagonloads of dirt around to the back of the garage and dump it there. We dug a three-foot diameter hole six feet down, using a stepladder to get into it. We began striking out horizontally, but only got a few feet before losing interest in the project forever.

Years later when our tunnel was long forgotten, my father came into the house one Saturday morning, looking pale and agitated. He had been stowing some lumber under the porch when he ventured into the deepest bowels of the space and discovered the remains of our Great Escape diggings.

Now, if a thousand fathers made such a discovery, it’s unlikely that any would jump to the conclusion that their son and his friends had been trying to tunnel out from underneath the front porch. Some, like my father, might fear foul play.

As much as I wanted to ease my dad’s worries, I couldn’t help thinking that if I told him the truth he might get even more worried — about me. So, instead of confessing, I watched with interest as two of Johnstown’s finest arrived, and after cordoning off the crime scene, duck-walked under the porch. They came back out with their dark blue uniforms and glossy black shoes covered with a dust the consistency and color of chocolate cake mix. They announced with authority that the digging under the porch was a test hole dating back to when the house was built, over sixty years prior. This news was a relief to my father, who reasoned that a body buried under his front porch would put a real damper on the resale value of the house.