Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting

Table of Contents

 

 

 

AMY EINHORN BOOKS
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Copyright © 2010 by Eric Poole

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Poole, Eric, date.

Where’s my wand? : one boy’s magical triumph over alienation and shag carpeting / Eric Poole.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18778-4

1. Poole, Eric, date—Childhood and youth. 2. Saint Louis Region (Mo.)—Biography. I. Title.

CT275.P6812A3

2010

2009051233

977.8’66043092—dc22

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and
Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes
any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the
publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility
for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

 

 

 

 

To my big-hearted father and sister, for allowing me
to be who I was, even against their better judgment.
And to my beloved and much-mellowed mother,
who has
never
let me forget that she loves me,
even after reading this book.

Thank you . . .

To my family, who has cheered me on relentlessly, all the while knowing they were being immortalized in ways not always flattering.

To my agent, Rebecca Oliver, who, upon first meeting, flung her arms around me and exclaimed, “I love your book!” And from that moment on, I have loved her back.

To my editor, Amy Einhorn, who gently and patiently and brilliantly forced me to create a better book than I ever could have without her.

To the gifted Terry Wolverton and all my beloved writing buddies at Writers at Work, for their support and inspiration and velvet-knife criticism. Without you, I wouldn’t have a book.

And to my partner in life and crime, whose patience and willingness to sacrifice so that I could pursue my dream mean more to me than he’ll ever know.

I love you all.

A
s God is my witness,” Mother shouted, “I will not live in this chaos!”

It was a muggy St. Louis summer night in 1969. As our mother screamed at our father behind the closed door of their bedroom—“Did you even get
halfway
through this list?” she hollered, slamming the daily checklist of duties she made for him onto the dresser—Val and I focused on the faint electrical buzzing of the Black & Decker bug zapper hanging over the patio, as it systematically executed unsuspecting mosquitoes.

It was ten P.M. and no one was outside, but our mother kept the zapper running twenty-four hours a day as a silent screw-you to Mother Nature. To offset the cost of this outdoor insect patrol, she set the air-conditioning of our suburban tract home at a toasty eighty-four degrees, so we all slept in small pools of perspiration, secure in the knowledge that those bugs knew who was boss.

I clung to my twelve-year-old sister Valerie, both of us sweating profusely as she climbed into her canopy bed fringed in multicolored hippie beads. She squeezed my hand tightly.

“One day,” she whispered, “we’ll look back on this and laugh.”

“I will not be married to a sloth!” Mother thundered as I quietly reached for Val’s dictionary to look up what Dad had just been called.

The bedlam Mother referred to was that created by our father opting to play Kerplunk with Val and me that afternoon, instead of completing item #7, alphabetizing the Christmas decorations stored in the garage, or #13, washing the lightbulbs on the dining room chandelier.

The hippie beads shimmied as Val, my only sibling, settled between the sheets. She was a petite but bossy brunette who spent hours each day ironing her long hair Marcia Brady- straight—in an effort, she told me years later, to distract from the nose that made her appear to be the love child of Karl Malden and Barbra Streisand. As she attempted a smile and turned to switch off the lamp that I had just traded her for the Diana Ross and the Supremes
Greatest Hits
album (thus unwittingly sealing my sexual identity at the tender age of eight), I began to ritualistically rake the shag carpeting around the bed with an avocado-green plastic carpet rake, vigilantly erasing all signs that anyone had trod upon her floor. The carpet slowly became a pristine meadow of brown, white and gold, a lush, undisturbed wool and nylon Astroturf.

With the well-rehearsed precision of hundreds of nights’ practice, I worked my way down the hall, slowly approaching the closet where the rake would be stored upon completion. Fortunately, the closet door—along with all other doors in the house—could be closed without disturbing the integrity of the finished job. Following an apocalyptic moment after the carpet was installed—when our mother discovered that entering a room created the shag version of snow angels—Dad had planed each of the doors, sawing off a full inch of wood at the base, rendering them so high-water that each doorway now appeared to be wearing wooden capri pants.

As I passed the bathroom, Val stuck her head out of her bedroom. “Don’t forget to pee!” she whispered, reminding me that I would need to go now or hold it until morning, since Mother tolerated
no
disruptions in the placid waters of this sea of shag once the requisite raking was finished. I had learned not to consume large amounts of liquid before bedtime, ever since the night I had drunk an entire quart of Coke and, in desperation, had tried to pee out the bedroom window screen.

My pursuit of a flawlessly raked floor did not strike me as odd, since perfection was not optional in the Poole family militia; it was compulsory. It was also the means by which I attempted to maintain control over the rapidly shifting ground beneath my feet.

Our family had just moved from Iowa to Missouri for a new and better life. Dad had accepted a job in contract administration with a major aircraft company, and Mother was to become the executive assistant to a corporate chieftain, and together, their new careers were to be the start of a prestigious change of life for the Pooles.

What transpired instead was a series of matinee and evening performances of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
sans the Edward Albee script and intermissions, as our parents’ relationship seemed to be disintegrating before our eyes, and my sister and I attempted to determine which of us was responsible.

As I worked my way down the hall with the carpet rake, closing in on my parents’ bedroom, the level of Mother’s voice rose. “How I married someone so completely devoid of competence,” she barked, “is an absolute mystery. I had my pick of any man in Kansas City—”

Outside the door, I carefully coaxed each carpet strand into absolute alignment. There would be no defectors in my Carpet Crusade, no errant soldiers in this battle for perfection.