There's a Man With a Gun Over There (6 page)

Nineteen fifty-nine was the year my father had a nervous breakdown.

Yes, a nervous breakdown was the fact of that matter.

9.

D
own in the basement at 863 East Memorial Drive, I had my own world.

There was my dark room, where I loved to watch the images I'd seen weeks ago in my camera viewfinder reemerge on the paper floating in Kodak's Dektol developer beneath the red glow of my safelight.

Here was my father with the reflection of my flash in the lens of his glasses—I remember how he jumped when the flashbulb ignited, as if he were much more agitated than his serious face revealed. Here, too, was my mother blurred as she tried to wave my camera away. My brother with Down syndrome smiled and held up a cracker. My aunt offered a cocktail glass and winked. My uncle turned a steak on the grill. I had images of our house and pictures of our good car and my dad's work car.

I hid out in the darkroom after my father had his nervous breakdown. Unlike the people around me, those appearing in that chemical bath seemed mostly happy. I printed their images over and over, as if that act would keep things from going wrong. I began to cry. It wasn't a very big world in that developing tray, but in there my father wasn't stabbing at imaginary monsters crawling toward him across the kitchen table.

In 1959, my mother got a part-time job as a census taker for the US government, and I discovered that I could disguise my voice and call in sick from school on the days when she was out working.

“He's not feeling at all well,” I said to Miss Morgenthau, the secretary at Marshall Junior High School. I deepened my voice into that of an adult. “Little Rickie needs to take the day off.”

Nineteen fifty-nine was also the year that Charles Van Doren admitted to Congress that he'd been given answers ahead of time on a television quiz show.

But, hey, who cared? It was all good, clean fun on television, right? So what if contestants lie. We all lie, don't we? What's a little fib when entertainment's concerned? The important thing—the really important thing—was that we could be whoever it was we wanted to be. Facts—why, facts were what we said they were. They didn't have to be true, did they?

10.

J
ust last weekend, I went back to Janesville. My family house on East Memorial Drive is for sale.

“That's quite a place,” Patsy Apple, the real estate agent, said when I called to make an appointment to see it. “It's one twenty-four nine.”

“That's a big price for a house in Janesville,” I said.

“Well, it's a big house,” Patsy Apple replied, as if she were reading from a script of real estate agent answers.

While 863 East Memorial Drive was many things, it was never big—no more than 1,000 square feet, but then, they're all tiny, aren't they, the houses of our childhoods when we go back? That's the cliché, sure, but 863 East Memorial was even smaller than that. It hardly had enough room to turn around in. Long ago, four of us and a large dog lived there. That ten-foot-by-ten-foot kitchen barely held the cabinets, the appliances, the kitchen table, and the four of us all at once. When Patsy Apple and I got there one Sunday afternoon to look over the house, Patsy stood where the kitchen table had been. Her full hips took up most of the space. I closed my eyes and saw the paring knife my father held cutting its way through the air and into the table.

“Charming, don't you think,” Patsy Apple said. Holding her real estate agent's clipboard, she spun around, like a model on a runway.

“Not exactly what I'm looking for,” I said, a discriminating buyer.

“What till you see the upstairs,” Patsy Apple said. “That's where the real charm is. Charm squared.”

As we go up the stairs to the second floor, the steps creak in exactly the places they did fifty years ago, and there, to the left, is my little room where I told my dreams to the night before drifting off to sleep. I wonder if those dreams are still there, the way the misaligned woodwork is, the way the hardwood floors—with their gray and black sticky residue, probably a mixture of skin oil, tobacco, and dirt—are. The floors have hardly changed after all these years. I kneel down and touch them. The grime has been varnished there by time. It will probably outlive me.

When Patsy Apple walks into another room, I stand up and try to touch my younger self, asleep on the now invisible upper bunk in the empty room with dust witches in the corners.

“Rickie,” I whispered. “Get up. Get out of here.”

Back there, in 1959, when I stayed home from school, I spent the mornings watching soap operas.

Even in college I seldom missed an episode of
Days of Our Lives.

“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the
Days of our Lives,
” the show begins, the gentle voice of Macdonald Carey speaking that ominous warning. How seductively he invited us to let our own lives trickle away while we watched television, our real and actual lives evaporating while we wasted our time on illusions.

Back in 1959, I set up this little pretend television studio in the basement, beside my darkroom. I had a stage and a TV camera made out of a shoe box. I sat on the stage and talked into the shoe box camera. I was on stage with my little life, all alone, talking to the wide world. The
Today Sho
w of 863 East Memorial Drive. I took sips of Mogen David wine my parents had hidden in the basement. Pretending to be an adult, I figured I should have an adult drink by my side.

Hidden in another part of the basement was a box of .22 bullet cartridges, so I decided to incorporate a little gunplay into one of my dramas.

Alcohol and ammunition. That's the stuff of real life, isn't it?

With pliers, I plucked out the lead bullets from two shells and put the gunpowder-filled casings into an empty Maxwell House coffee can. I filled the can with loose pieces of newspaper.

I pretended that I was sitting in a haunted house where dark deeds were afoot and talked my heart out to that shoe box. A minute later, I took a match and lit the newspapers in the coffee can.

Deafening—the explosion was deafening. Literally.

Blam!

All I could hear in my ears was a ringing sound, and the basement filled with smoke and the smell of exploded gun-powder. I went to grab the can, to stop the second explosion. Luckily, it went off before my hand touched it.

Blam!

The second explosion seemed louder than the first, and the shock of it threw me backward, and I knocked over my glass of Mogen David, turning the old rug that was the floor of my TV stage a faded purple, as if from the reign of a kingdom that didn't work out.

“How was your day at school?” my mom asked when she got home.

“Fine,” I said.

“Well, you look tired. I think that paper route is wearing you out.”

I didn't have to pretend. It was a haunted house all right. Some kind of ghost had gotten my father and was now after me as well.

I forgot to tell you—I was a paperboy in 1959. Yes, just like the boy in the Don McLean song.

But in those days I didn't know the story of Buddy Holly dying in a plane crash.

Although I probably danced to his songs at those teen dances on Friday nights, I didn't know exactly who Buddy Holly was back then. What's more, plenty of songs still played on WLS in Chicago while I folded the papers for my own paper route.
My
music didn't die.

I sat on the backstairs of 863 East Memorial Drive with the stack of forty-three
Rockford Morning Stars
that Sid Grinker, the route manager, dropped off. He came by seven days a week, at around four
A.M.,
in his old Buick Estate wagon with its back springs collapsed from the weight of all the newspapers he carried. The car's grill pointed upward, as if it were ready to take off, hot fire pouring out of his rocket-like rear taillights, its stubby tail fins ready to guide it through the air.

Sid Grinker had emphysema. I could hear his congested wheezing as he got out of the car and heaved the papers up against our back door. When I went outside to pick up the stack of papers wrapped in string, I could see the hot coal of his cigarette inside the darkened windshield as he backed out of our driveway.

“He's Got the Whole World in His Hands” was the song I remember from that time.

It was fading from the Hit Parade but still played on the radio at four thirty
A.M.
while I sat folding the papers once across their width and then tucking the ends into each other and stacking them in my white bag soiled with newsprint. The fresh papers smelled vaguely like fish, and the lines of my fingerprints were filled with ink, as if I were marked by the
Rockford Morning Star
.