When
Jesse began firing that day, Mr. Lynch pulled out his pistol and fired three
shots at Jesse, right between the eyes. The kid jumped out of his skin
and fell backward to the ground in shock.
Crying
and rolling around in the dirt, feeling all over himself for bullet holes, he
reached Mr. Lynch’s feet and crawled up the man’s leg, bawling and groveling
and asking for mercy. I thought this was quite funny, of course, and
began to laugh at my brother’s over-acting. But Mr. Lynch judged that
Jesse was seriously frightened. The postman felt terrible, he said, and
interrupted his duties to take the boy down to the drug store on the corner and
buy him a milkshake. I was not invited. That should have been a
life lesson for me, to hold my cards closer to the chest.
So
I headed back to the bedroom to plan how to spruce it up. Mom said if we
weren’t done by noon,
Dad would back the car up across the lawn to our bedroom and open the trunk.
Mom would start throwing stuff out the window. I was pretty sure
Dad would not back over his precious grass, but Mom was less predictable in
those days before they found her the right meds.
Dad
was very predictable. He was born Catholic, raised Catholic, would die a
Catholic and wanted me to be a priest.
“Why
me?” I asked. “Why not Jesse?”
“You
get the best grades in school.”
“I
want to be a playboy when I grow up,” I told him.
“How
will you earn a living?”
“Maybe
as a bartender, maybe a microscope salesman, maybe—“
“You
have to earn your keep in this world,” he said.
“I’ll
be a juh-Guy-low.”
“That’s
gigolo,” he said. “and you certainly don’t—“
“I
read about them in a magazine my friend Georgie has.”
“What
the heck kind of magazine—“
“Boys
Life,” I said.
“Boys
Life?”
I
had him going now.
“Or
something like that,” I said.
Jesse
arrived back around eleven o’clock, burped loudly and blamed our mess
squarely on me. “And your stupid brochures,” he added.
I specialized in brochures and ephemera
from the great American West. An earnest eleven year old, I became
convinced my entire future lie in the state of Arizona. I don’t quite remember why,
except I was sure a lot of cowboys lived there. To me, a cowboy’s life
was surely ideal, but that was before I fell face first into a cow plop in the
field behind my cousin’s house. And decided I’d rather grow up to be a
playboy.
Of course, most of the cowboys I admired
weren’t in Arizona anyway. I was unaware Hollywood faked everything, including
location. I suppose I should have guessed that after watching movies
scenes from Mars.
. My father said he should have
charged me rent for the use of our mail box when I was a kid. I probably cut
out every advertisement in the back of Popular Mechanics, Boys Life and The
Saturday Evening Post. I filled in the
tiny boxes with my name and address and mailed them off to one company or
another. I anxiously waited for the “free offer” to arrive in a couple of
weeks. I don’t remember ever getting much of a return for my efforts,
usually colorful brochures and invitations to spend money. Oh, and a fire
extinguisher
The railroads constantly ran magazine ads
and sent out brochures tempting easterners to go west and, for all I knew,
westerners to come east. The aim was to sell tickets to the farthest
destinations. My collection of Arizona, Montana and California brochures and maps soon
mushroomed. Piles grew higher on top of my dresser, the only space left
in the bedroom I shared with my little brother. My quest for the west was
not a tidy affair. The walls were already decorated with two by three
foot weather maps that arrived daily from the U.S. Weather Bureau in Washington. That’s right … an updated map every
single day adding to the pile in our mailbox and filling up the walls.
All for only seventy eight cents per month. Uncle Billy said we had more
maps than the War Department. Dad bought a second mail box. Mr.
Lynch became grumpy again.
The bottom drawer of my dresser was
filled with Stamp Collector Bargains. For only a dollar, a company mailed
me 1,000 valuable stamps from countries I’d never heard of. “Spend your
evenings sifting through them and you might discover a rare stamp worth
thousands!” I had as much chance of discovering a rare stamp as a new
planet.
I was hoping to discover gold,
however. Although I no longer have the paperwork to prove it, I was
convinced I owned one square inch of real property somewhere in Canada’s Yukon Territory. So did everyone who got one of
the 21 million deeds printed in 1955. A marketing promotion sponsored by Quaker
Oats, people for some reason remember it as the “Square Inch of Alaska”
program. Most Americans have never excelled in geography. I was
spellbound by the thought of actually finding gold in my little parcel. I
worried about standing on someone else’s inch while I dug for riches with a
teaspoon. So, in my imagination I saw myself on a platform
supported by a single pipe jammed into my square inch of earth. I hoped
air rights would not be an issue.
No matter where the land was, I doubt if
its climate matched the snowy fields and half-frozen Eskimos standing around in
my imagination. Today the 19 acres of tiny square inch parcels are part of
a golf course.
I got good grades in school and was
pretty impressed with myself, so I decided it was time to “make big bucks in
electronics.” Numerous correspondence schools stood by to aid me in my pursuit
of higher education. Used to a free education, I had no idea they would
want money. I mailed away to all of them and soon both mail boxes
exploded with brochures, course catalogs and loan applications. Many of
the envelopes had electrical symbols printed on them. My grandmother, who
lived with us, thought these were Satanic icons and told my mother I was being
sought after to join a coven. Her imagination was as overworked as mine.
Grandma answered the phone in the kitchen
one night and a man asked to speak with me.
“What do you want with him?” I
heard her say.
She listened to him for a few seconds as
I began to slither away toward the back door in an attempted escape.
Grandma’s free hand snapped out as though
it was on the end of a lizard’s tongue
and caught my shoulder. She spun me into the crook of her elbow and held
me in a headlock. Gram was an experienced child sitter and home
jailer. A bit heavy handed at times, she was nonetheless in demand by the
parents of unruly children..
“I don’t think he’s able to come to Chicago,” she said into the phone.
I could hear the man ask a question..
“No, he’s not …” she began to say and
paused. “That is … he’s not crippled at this very moment, but he certainly will
be when I get off the phone.”
I sensed there would be no future in my
use of the U.S. Mail if success depended upon my family’s cooperation. So
I struck out on another path. No more hiding behind a three cent
stamp. I was by then eleven and a half and ready to meet the public face
to face.
I made the liquor store a regular stop on
my way home from Our Lady Of Lourdes School once each week . On Friday
afternoons the staff replaced the window displays. In with the new
and out with the old. Most of the stuff did not go back to the ad
agencies. Instead it was thrown out. But not while I was
around. In the 1950s some of the displays made terrific toys. A
miniature theatrical stage about three feet tall and constructed of poster
board originally featured bottles of Gordon’s gin. I modified it by
tearing a hole in the top. It became a theater for my brother’s Howdy
Doody puppet.
A three foot long reasonable facsimile of
the Yacht America came home on my shoulders one Friday afternoon. It too
was made of lightweight poster board, which was helpful because there wasn’t
much space left in the bedroom and I had no shelf on the wall for the
boat. My brother and I just taped it up on the wall with the weather
maps. It stayed put most of the time, but often fell down in the middle
of the night and woke us up. There was no way I could squeeze it among
the brochures on my dresser. My brother’s bureau was already filled to
capacity with model airplanes and his rock collection, which to me didn’t appear
any different from a handful of gravel, so small was each rock. I would
lay them out to spell bad words and he got blamed. We weren’t allowed to
use nails on the walls. So we taped the Yacht America, sleek with
“Schenley’s” writ wide down the hull from stem to stern, back up on the wall
and threw a dart at it for extra support. Within the letter of the law,
we never received a complaint.
Mom was embarrassed the night my brother
told Aunt Sue I stopped at the liquor store on Fridays after school to stock up
for the weekend. Dad finally put his foot down the afternoon my friend
George and I used his Radio Flyer wagon to truck home an honest-to-goodness bar
from the liquor store, with a brass foot rail and teak top. All made from
cardboard, of course. At half scale to fit in store windows, it was just
about kid size. We set it up in the basement after my mother refused to let us
put it in the dining room. I guess it didn’t match the furniture.
Then too, alcohol was getting a bad name
in our household as the family began to deal with Grandma’s sister, tipsy old
Great Aunt Eusebia. I still remember the Thanksgiving dinner when she fell into
the bowl of mashed potatoes. She was talking a blue streak … telling on one of
her neighbors in Oriskany … when her elbow slipped on the table cloth and she
flopped over into the bowl, coming slightly out of her seat at the table. She
never stopped talking, but hauled herself up and wiped the potatoes from her
face with the napkin she pulled from Dad’s neck as he sat there stupefied,
holding the dish of asparagus he was passing to my mother.
“Are you all right, Great Aunt?” he
managed to ask Aunty Eus.
“I’m terribly sorry,” the elderly woman
answered with a slur in her voice, “but I seem to have gotten a bit clumsy
lately, ever since I began to take Dr. Messerschmitt’s Elixir of Life.”
“Perhaps,” offered my father, “you should
take it only before bed.” “Oh,” she said, “I’d never be able to finish the
bottle each day if I waited that long.”
So my cardboard bar wasn’t very popular. However, Dad agreed Jesse and I could keep it
in the cellar down by the furnace, but for me there would be no more stopping
at the liquor store. The place was now off limits, he said, and he drove
there himself to tell the salesmen to kick me out the next time I came in. I
tried to enlist Mom’s support but she stood firmly behind my father. She
didn’t mind the cardboard junk so much, but she did mind the mock plastic
liquor bottles and cocktail glasses Jesse and I removed from the
displays. They were quite life like. My brother and I had been
taping them on the window panes in our bedroom and the next door neighbors had
quite a laugh.
No one laughed at my short career as an
advertising salesman, when I tried to sell ad space in the Baltimore Catechism.
The book of Catholic questions and answers was owned by every Catholic school
boy and girl. It did not carry ads, of course, until I printed them up on my
rubber type printing press and proposed to glue them on the back covers.
I could fit up to five ads on the Catechism cover and reap a quick $25.
Mr. Czurperna, the tailor and pants
presser on James
Street,
was my first prospect.
“It’s only five dollars for a 2 by
2 ad,” I explained. Next I planned to call on Pete’s Barber Shop, two
grocers and the hardware store.
“How you gonna get these on the
Catechisms?” asked Mr. Czurperna.
“The kids will glue them on their own
books,” I said.
“Why would they do that?” he said..
“Because at the bottom of the sheet I’ll
be printing Catholic jokes.”
“Tell me the jokes,” he said.
“I haven’t made them up yet.”
"It could take forever to think of
anything funny," he said.
Mr. Czurperna said he’d take some time
and think about it.
Pete the Barber’s reaction was more
immediate. He called Father Mahlarkey who called my father who locked my
printing press up in a trunk in the attic. When only a few years later churches
began to run advertising in their bulletins I felt vindicated.
Father Mahlarkey wasn’t finished with me,
however.
“You’re going to need to perform some penance,
young man, for your little larceny,” he said.
“But I never actually took any money, not
really, Father.”
“I want you to think of something to
build up the Church, some project that will take up some of your time and be a
benefit to us all.”
I always wondered why there was no Block
Rosary on my street, where neighbors got together to pray the Rosary out loud
in a group in someone’s living room. I told Mom I’d help her start one
for my penance, but she kind of looked at her shoes and then at my hair and
told me to go comb it. So I asked Dad, probably the most enthusiastic Catholic
on Cornhill.
"Great idea," he said,
"you should start one."
So, I asked my friend George if the two
of us could start a Block Rosary, but all he could think of were the girls we
should invite.
“Of course, we’d have to turn all the
lights out,” he said. “That way it would be much more spiritual.”
A girl in our neighborhood named
Rosie had sat in the front row of my classes at school and when she heard about
my quest for prayer she offered to go in the closet with me and "say
whatever you want." But at ten years old I wasn’t interested.
Finally, after Father Mahlarkey continued
to bother me about my Penance Project, I suggested a Church-wide pilgrimage to
St. Lucy.
"You mean the island in the Caribbean?" he said, his eyes lighting up.
"No, Father, St. Lucy the patron
saint of eyesight."
"I knew that. I'm a priest."
"For all us kids who wear
glasses," I said.
"Where is her shrine?" he
asked.
"I don't know. Tell everyone she was from Utica and she lived on Eagle Street."
"David, that's not the truth. We can't do that."
"Ask for ten dollars from each
family," I said. "Call it a Special Injunction for the Expiation of
Cataracts."
"Ten dollars?" he said.
"Times 400 families is four thousand
dollars. Skim twenty percent off the top
for your expenses and I'll take just $25."
"There is indeed that old convent on
Eagle
Street
...."
Just before the year my interests turned
to social activities and then girls, one final foray into the world of free
offers through the mail led me to more durable goods.
A magazine ad promised a career with
ample compensation and exciting work as a fire extinguisher salesman.
Everyone needed this product, so it would be very easy to sell and the work
could be pursued part time. That was just right for me, having to spend
most of my day in Sister Purgatorious’ fifth grade classroom. Here was my
chance to outpace my older brother’s income from his paper route. I
planned my sales pitch and even my clothing to help me look older. The ad
emphasized getting started right away. Older or younger salesmen were
encouraged to apply. You couldn’t start too early, the ad said. However,
an eleven year old fire extinguisher salesman wearing a Spike Jones suit and
his uncle’s discarded fedora may have set a record.
To get started all I needed to do was
fill out an application and in two weeks the U.S. Mail would deliver the sample
fire extinguisher. Plain old discretion convinced me to say nothing of this to
Mom or Dad. Plus, my older brother advised me of a tactic gleaned from
his on-going teen age experience: He called it Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell.
It was pretty warm that July as I waited
for the mail man to call with my equipment. As a future salesman I planned
to answer that call like a grown-up, wearing my suit and a school shirt
that still had most of its buttons. I needed to retrieve my tie from its
summer job of hanging a plastic model of a jet fighter from the light fixture
in our bedroom. I hoped I was strong enough to grab hold and carry the
fire extinguisher to a hiding place when poor old Mr. Lynch the mailman brought
the thing to our door. I’d seen them on the walls at school and, unlike modern
devices, they were twice as large in the 1950s and made of thick brass plating.
They were very heavy.
I missed Mr. Lynch the day he brought my
free offer, but found a small package sitting below the mail box when I got
home. Inside was a six inch high plastic replica of a fire
extinguisher. I was disappointed, of course, but relieved to no longer
agonize over where to hide a seventy pound fire extinguisher. Fitting it
under my bed among the lumber pieces I was collecting for a tree fort might not
have worked out.
Thinking about how to use a fake tiny
fire extinguisher to its full advantage, I realized research would be
necessary. We had the remains of a 14 volume encyclopedia in our bedroom
and I often consulted it, but it was never easy to use. Most of the
volumes were employed as structural support for projects like my brother’s
perpetual motion machine or under the front of the tropical fish tank to keep
it from tumbling out of the old easy chair Grandma had given us. Every time I
wanted to look up anything on the Medieval period we were studying in school, I
had to pry Volume 7 from under the broken back leg of my bed against the
wall. In the only fight Jesse had ever won, my bed did not fare
well. But although many of the books were put to good use in ways the
publisher had never intended, volumes in frequent demand dealing with sex,
explosives and the paranormal were always kept handy on the discarded washtub
we used as a desk. I found an article that said extinguishers were at one
time powered with nothing but baking soda and water. The little plastic
model looked like it would be water tight if I forced a sink stopper in the
top.
When the kitchen was empty, I loaded the
little thing with baking soda, poured water in from the sink and quickly jammed
the stopper on. Grandma used baking soda all the time and although I
expected a little fizzing, I had no idea how explosive it could be when
combined with water. In any case, I reasoned it would make an excellent
demo to use in all the grocery stores I planned to visit where I’d make a
killing.
My parents were out and Grandma was
safely asleep, taking a nap in her bedroom off the kitchen. I’d already written
a sales pitch, so I stepped to the kitchen table and began my spiel to an
imaginary green grocer across an imaginary counter. I had a good presentation,
but without any pizzazz since my older brother talked me out of lighting up a
sheet of newspaper in front of the prospect in his store. So for emphasis
when I declaimed, “And what will save your business from the eternal fires of
happenstance?” I slammed the model extinguisher down on the table
surface.
POW! The stopper shot up to the
ceiling and shattered the glass shade on the light fixture. The
light bulb exploded and all the lights throughout the house went out. The errant model extinguisher flew from my
hand into the clock on the stove, bounced back and took off on a powerful line
drive right through the kitchen window and out into the driveway as if it were
headed for Neptune. Slivers of glass fell from the ceiling
and the window pane was now no more than a gaping hole. Slippery baking
soda solution had sputtered all over the table and chairs, stove and counter
tops..
Grandma came running out of her bedroom,
hand to her throat, her face approaching purple. Gasping, she surveyed
the launch site, rolled her eyes and sat down on a wet chair. She slid
sideways, almost off the seat, but caught hold of the table and hung on for
dear life. I glanced at the light fixture and the window. Close to
tears, I said. “What’ll I ever do?”
As she tried to catch her breath, between gasps she
croaked,. “You could always join a coven.”
“I’m sure I’d need a letter from my mother or
someone.”
“Get me a pen,” she said.
David Griffin copyright 2015
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
www.windsweptpress.com
Of course this was
years before the season in