Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting (14 page)

I pictured a hospital room filled with fresh flowers, and matching beds with freshly pressed pillowcases, in which sat the two victims from the Pinto—a loving husband and wife. They were bruised a bit, but smiling gratefully at their good fortune to have survived intact.

“We must have just passed out from fright,” the woman said brightly.

“Uh-huh,” the man replied. “I mean, it wasn’t like we were really hurt or anything.”

“Actually,” the woman responded, “I got a nice nap in.”

When I opened my eyes, I saw an ambulance and a fire truck roaring up. Traffic had been stopped on the other side of the highway. Firemen rushed up to the car, shouting orders to one another that I couldn’t hear. Passengers on our bus crowded around the windows, trying to see what was happening.

“They can’t get the car doors open.”

“They’re breaking the rest of the glass.”

“Oh my God, there’s so much blood.”

The hippie woman began to softly play “My Sweet Lord” on her guitar. I glanced at Dad. Our church pastor recently had informed the congregation that this song was the work of a heathen who believed in the wrong God. Since that time, it had understandably been banned in our house, so I dutifully plugged my one good ear.

No longer able to hear anything, I just gazed at the faces of the people around me as they stared, transfixed, at the scene outside. Their shocked expressions startled me, and for a moment I wondered—what if the people in that car had been Mother and Dad?

I imagined the two of them slumped inside a crumpled Pontiac Catalina. I imagined throwing myself on the hood and sobbing, almost oblivious to the fact that I had messed up the part in my hair. I imagined Val and me meeting our new foster parents, grifters who would insist that we accompany them on a cross-country crime spree.

A lump formed in my throat. I shook my head quickly, trying to clear this horrifying image. Dad is right here, I thought. And Mother is safely at home, waiting for us to return. In this moment, the thought of raking myself into my bedroom every night didn’t seem quite so bad after all.

Wait, I reminded myself, the people in that car might be
somebody’s
parents. I’d better keep working.

Another bus arrived, which had been deployed to transport us to the nearest terminal. As we lined up to board the new bus, I was almost afraid to look while the bloodied car passengers were carefully loaded onto gurneys and rushed into the back of the ambulance. I took my seat on the new bus and closed my eyes tightly in order to continue my magical ministrations.

In my mind’s eye, I watched as the children of this couple rushed into their parents’ hospital room. The son—a creative and talented young man of about twelve who was startlingly handsome—hugged his mother and dad joyfully, as his sister—a loudmouthed and bossy but reasonably good-hearted girl who wore too much makeup—flipped through the TV channels looking for
Bridget Loves Bernie
.

“I don’t know how we escaped that mangled car with nothing but a few bruises,” the father said.

“Me either,” added the mother. “It’s a miracle.” She patted the hand of her beloved son. “Obviously, someone helped.”

A tear came to my eye. They’ll never know who their angel was, I thought. But that’s okay. I’m not in it for the glory.

 

 

AS DAD AND I and the three dozen other passengers sat in the dingy Quincy, Missouri, bus terminal, awaiting a new bus to finish our journey, I stared with anticipation at the television screen in the corner of the room, certain we would make the news.

Hippie Chick pointed to the television. “That’s a T. . . V,” she said, enunciating slowly as if encouraging me to repeat after her, as a voice came over the PA.

“Attention, please. To those waiting to continue their travel to Cedar Rapids . . . as a thank-you for your patience, Midwest Bus Lines would like to offer you a special gift. You may select,
free of charge
, any two items from the vending machines, for a maximum value of one dollar. Enjoy!”

A stampede ensued, as people jockeyed for position, vying for the free Snickers and Little Debbies. I stood back, smiling beneficently at the assembled group. Little did they realize that I had likely saved two lives today. And in doing so, I had been rewarded with the opportunity to feed the masses. It was my personal version of the loaves and fishes.

As I selected a two-pack of snack cakes and a Butter-finger from the machines, footage of the crash scene suddenly flashed on the TV.

“Turn it up!” someone yelled. A skinny male bus station employee, whose reddish-brown toupee gave him the look of someone sporting fresh roadkill, obliged.

I briefly debated whether I should inform the group of my magical intervention, but thought better of it. In doing so, I would be mobbed with requests, and could never accommodate them all in the several hours we had left together.

“—en route to Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” a newscaster said as the TV audio suddenly blasted across the room, “struck a passenger car this morning on Interstate 380, resulting in the deaths of the two people in the vehicle. . . .”

The crowd moaned. I nearly dropped my Ding Dongs.

It felt as though the bus had hit me. Dead? I had summoned all my powers to stop their deaths. Why hadn’t they lived?

There had certainly been moments in my life when my magic hadn’t come out quite the way I had envisioned it, yet it had felt like magic nonetheless. But there was nothing magical about innocent people being killed.

 

 

WHEN WE ARRIVED at the Roosevelt, Dad handed me the ice bucket.

“You wanna?”

I shook my head and climbed into bed.

I had been looking forward to watching a special with Dad, a TV concert starring Marlene Dietrich. I had no idea who she was, since in the commercials she appeared to be foreign, roughly nine hundred years old, and unable to sing her way out of a paper bag, but she wore furs and long gowns and was rumored to be a legend, and that was good enough for me.

Dad turned on the TV. I stared at the image of the old woman in an evening gown, and wondered if she, too, would die in a car accident. There was, apparently, little I could do to stop it, if so.

Dad turned to me. “Something wrong?”

“No,” I said flatly, turning on my side to face the wall, which, conveniently, was only about four inches away, since the rooms at the high-class Roosevelt were roughly the size of a casket. I was silent for a moment. “I just don’t get why those people died.”

“Me either,” Dad said.

Of all the words of comfort and reassurance I somehow hoped he would offer in this moment, these were absolutely not it. They filled me with anxiety.

“I guess it was just their time,” Dad said gently, as he tore open a bag of pork rinds and offered me some. I pushed the bag away.

“But how do you know when it’s your time?”

“You don’t.”

“They were probably bad people, right? So God decided it was time to send them to Hell?”

“We can’t know for sure. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.”

“Well, that’s not very fair. What if those people had kids or something?”

“I guess they’ll go to an orphanage,” he replied. “Or maybe there’s a relative who can take them in.”

I envisioned having to move in with my aunt and uncle and five female cousins in Kansas City. One sister was bad enough, I thought; six would be hell on earth. My mind reeled. Could this really happen to just anyone, for any reason?

“God has a plan,” Dad said. “But he doesn’t fill us in on it. We just wouldn’t understand.”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“’Cause there are too many things that are just beyond our human comprehension. God loves his children very much, and sometimes he sees fit to bring them home. When we get to heaven, we’ll understand.”

I was silent the next morning we began the three-hundred-mile drive back to St. Louis. Dad beamed with pride at our now pimped-out Pontiac Catalina, its shiny new rotors, pistons lathered in grease, and freshly waxed paint giving it, in his eyes, the look and feel of an Oldsmobile 98.

But I couldn’t muster up his enthusiasm. Two people were dead. How is it that the world could just go on functioning as though nothing had happened?

Dad looked at me. “Are you still upset about the accident?” he said kindly.

I nodded as I sat turned away from him, staring out the window at the leafless passing trees, and the few lonely cows roaming about a pasture that was little more than slushy snow and matted brown grass. But I wasn’t upset for the reason he thought.

I did indeed feel bad for the people who had died, and for those they had left behind to suffer without them.

But I felt even worse for me.

I had suffered a loss of power, of jurisdiction over the boundaries of my own life. In the past, my magic had always been able to transcend God’s plan. When I didn’t agree with what he had in mind for me, I had changed it.

So why hadn’t it worked this time? Had I not tried hard enough? Had I quit my incantations too soon?

Or had magic somehow abandoned me?

W
e are Ambassadors for Christ.”

These five simple words were proving to be something of a problem. As a member of the Royal Ambassadors, the Baptist church group for boys, I was charged with a number of vitally important duties on behalf of Jesus, who was apparently swamped and needed some part-time help.

Some of those duties were a snap. At age twelve, I had been a “well-informed follower of Christ” for years, having learned to judge non-Baptists with swift and impressive condemnation. I had a “Christlike concern for others,” particularly those who were stupid enough not to accept him as their personal savior. I “carried the message of Christ around the world” by thoughtfully assuring my Hindu pen pal that he was going to Hell. And I frequently “worked with others in sharing Christ” by explaining to non-Baptist Christian friends that allowing Jesus into their hearts didn’t mean crap unless they also got shoved underwater in the baptismal.

The final tenet of the Royal Ambassadors Pledge, however, was considerably more difficult. Although I had always striven to “keep myself clean and healthy in mind and body,” I was suddenly, thanks to Billy Foster, dangerously close to dishonoring myself and Jesus.

Billy Foster attended our church, and our families had been churchgoing friends for years. He was also a Royal Ambassador. Billy had many selling points, not the least of which was his supercool Bible-In-A-Can, a full bible bound into a blue-painted metal can shaped like a bible (which protected God’s word from insects, moisture and, one presumes, nuclear holocaust). Recently, thanks to our mutual membership in the RAs, Billy and I had struck up a tentative friendship, and for reasons not quite clear to me, he had chosen me as his confidant.

This special attention was thrilling, if a bit mystifying. Billy was good-looking and athletic and popular. Since the moment I had confronted my bully Tim Turkel several years earlier, I’d worked to develop an air of masculine confidence—no easy feat when I knew all the hand gestures to “Stop! In the Name of Love.” Needless to say, I was not exactly Joe Namath. Yet here was the golden god of North County Baptist Church selecting me for friendship.

It began simply enough, with a Royal Ambassadors outing to the local putt-putt golf course. This was apparently an attempt to teach us good sportsmanship and to illustrate that even Jesus liked a little R&R, although this is merely conjecture since the RA leaders spent most of the afternoon ignoring us, huddled in a circle by the concession stand furtively passing around a cigarette.

For me, most activities involving a ball resulted in humiliation and disgrace, yet somehow, I excelled at miniature golf. Billy was wildly impressed, as were several of the other RAs.

Darren Pulaski, the group’s felon-in-the-making, whistled as I made a hole-in-one. “Gee, I figured you’d be really lousy at this since you’re lousy at everything else.”

“Aw, it’s nothing,” I replied, reveling in the moment as I neatly folded up my scorecard. “But I guess I’ll have to bring this home. Mother and Dad have a thing about putting ’em up on the refrigerator.”

This, of course, was a bold-faced lie, since nothing was allowed to mar the pristine Harvest Gold surface of the Amana.

“Your parents are really cool,” Billy said with admiration, his blue eyes sparkling beneath the bangs of his bowl haircut. “My mom won’t let me put
any
of my Little League trophies in the living room.”

The bond between us was building.

 

 

AT THE NEXT RA MEETING, our leader, Mr. Templeton, a slight, balding man whom we referred to as “The Swoop” because of his dramatic comb-over, set up the film projector for a special audiovisual presentation.

“Okay, boys,” The Swoop announced, “today we’re gonna talk about some changes that you will soon begin to experience. These changes are completely natural, but the thoughts and actions that can accompany them are
not
.”

As Boys Grow
explained the process of puberty. Once we were able to get past the hilarious early sixties fashions and haircuts, we found the film highly informative, since most of us knew virtually nothing about sex. Afterward, The Swoop provided an informative addendum to the film by explaining the drastic and permanent consequences of personally pleasuring oneself. I reassured myself that I was not about to indulge in such an act, since blindness, insanity and the A Train to Hell were far too high a price to pay for whatever pleasure might be elicited.

“These changes in your body,” The Swoop continued, “might tempt you to want to seek ‘physical pleasure’ with girls. This pleasure can take many forms, including over-the-sweater touching and inappropriate rubbing. But that temptation is the work of Satan. You must be vigilant and monitor yourself around those of the female persuasion at all times.”