Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn (9 page)

I don’t mind the glass cage, but I miss Gary. When I get out he is gone. He left a letter that a nurse read to me.

“And here’s his address on the bottom, so you can write to him.”

I started hiccup-crying.

“I don’t know how to write.”

“You tell me what you want to say, and I’ll write it.”

“Dear Gary.”

I pause for a long time.

“Um.” Thinking. “I miss you.”

More thinking. “Um.”

“Is that all?”

“No…. Um…. A Tyrannosaurus rex is big.”

“Is that it?”

“Really big. The biggest. That’s all. Love, Sandy…. Oh. P.S., when I go home my name is Kevin.”

I feel better.

Dr. Tippy tells me now that my measles are over, I can have my operation. All I remember is going to sleep and waking up with my own cast. Gary was right. This also prevents The Little Prince Charmin from hurting me for a while. Not even he can get away with beating a man fresh out of surgery.

Hippity Hop becomes my new best friend. I nickname him Hippity Hop because he was born with one leg and his mode of transportation is more vertical than horizontal. He makes everybody laugh because he is such a funny, goofy guy. You couldn’t talk to Hippity Hop without wanting to laugh one of those lying-on-your-back tickle-laughs. And when I laugh, he laughs, and it can go on for a long time.

One morning I approach him and say, “Hippity Hop, I’m breaking out tonight. Are you with me?”

Yeah, he’s with me, and Craig overheard, and he’s with us, too. Craig will be a bit of a problem because he is in a body cast, so we tell him when we make it to safety, we’ll get jobs and send for him.

“Okay.”

That night, ten o’clock, nobody could still be awake. I slip over the bars of my baby bed and over to Hippity Hop’s bed. He slides down, carrying his leg for silence.

“I’ll need it in the real world,” he whispers.

We sneak out into hallways of Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, following exit sign after exit sign.

Finally. The front door.

“There it is, Hippity Hop, the front door. We’re home free.”

We creep toward the door on our bellies when … white shoes, followed by white tights, with little black hairs sticking through them, followed by white dress, then …

“Nurse! It’s a nurse! Run, Hippity Hop!”

And Hippity Hop tries to escape, but they nail him right away. I can see him in the arms of two nurses, hopping up and down wildly.

“Save yourself,” he yells. “Save yourself!”

Now it’s up to me, running through Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, running as fast as I can. I know to keep low. I saw a nurse try to catch a kid with no legs one time. The kid could move like greased lightning by running with his hands and dragging his body, especially on a freshly waxed hospital floor. The nurse could not catch this kid because she couldn’t run and bend over to snatch him at the same time. So I’m running low and they are having a terrible time reeling me in. Finally, there it is, the front door again, freedom, home, Mom, Dad, Steven, Laura …

BAM!

They net me. They throw a net over me. And I’m inside this net, poking my fingers out the top like a strange slow-motion go-go dancer, and as I struggle, I remember watching a movie that had sailors who ended up on an island of giants. When one of the giants threw a net over one of the little sailors, they did this same strange dance, and I’d think, why are they poking their fingers up doing this strange go-go dance? Now I know, that’s what you do in a net. I’m doing the strange go-go dance as the nurses wrap the bottom of the net around my legs and take me back and put me in the baby bed. But now they tie the net over the top so I can’t get out.

The next day my grandmother comes to visit and when she sees her little one in that cage, boy, does she ever let Dr. Tippy have it. “Grandmother, the net has to stay for my own good.” Grandmother cries as she leaves, and I retie my own strings. What she doesn’t know is that the net is the only thing between me and The Little Prince Charmin’s henchchildren.

Every time Grandmother visits she brings another tiny plastic figure for me to play with. Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, Pluto, she hands each through the bars. I dream of Disneyland, paradise. And Pluto is my favorite because he has this thin plastic tail that’s really difficult for my four-year-old fingers not to break.

Dr. Tippy got wind of this, I think. One day he said, “Kevin, we’re going to take the stitches out of your arm, and it’s going to hurt.”

“Well, I’ll scream and I’ll cry.”

“No, because if you scream and cry you might move suddenly, and we could make a mistake. You wouldn’t want that, would you? For us to make a mistake because you were screaming and crying?”

“No.”

“Besides, if you don’t scream and cry, I have it on good authority that Pluto will visit you after you get out of the hospital.”

I hold out my arm.

“Do your worst, Tippy.”

So, one at a time, Dr. Tippy takes out the stitches that run from where my thumb was supposed to be, to my elbow, and I don’t scream, I don’t cry, I don’t make a peep.

And when he is done, and it is time to go home, they read me a letter from my mother.

And then there’s a drawing of our wiener dog, Stella.

On Sunday Grandmother and Granddad come for me with the new suit. This suit is mine. I am the first child to wear it. We drive to my home and there are my mom and dad and sister and brother waiting for me. My brother is as big as I am. He says, “Hello, Kevin,” in perfect English. I go into my room, climb on my real bed with my Lone Ranger blanket, and wait for Pluto.

EASTER  

At six o’clock on Sunday mornings, I woke up to the sound of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass blaring on the living room stereo. My dad’s idea of reveille was
Whipped Cream and Other Delights
. I’d look over at my brother lying on his twin bed, just like my twin bed, with his Lone Ranger blanket that used to be my Lone Ranger blanket, and his charred headboard. That charred headboard from the time I said, “No, Steven, beds don’t burn. A bed is too com-plex. Paper burns and wood burns, because they’re simple, but a bed has too many com-po-nents.” To illustrate my point, we wadded up three Sunday newspapers, comics, ads and all, and shoved them under the bed. Whoosh. There went that theory. My dad dragging the burning mattress to the front yard where he could get the hose on it and all the neighbors could see. We really got it for that one. Oh, the price of scientific inquiry.

This Sunday morning as we get out of bed, it suddenly hits. It’s Easter—the Easter Bunny!

We rush into the living room for the egg hunt. To the untrained eye the room looks exactly as it should: nothing touched, nothing different. But we know better. The Easter Bunny has been here. The Easter Bunny took great care in hiding his precious eggs where no mere mortal could find them. Over the next hour, in order to excavate our treasure, we will have to crawl into the Bunny’s mind, think his thoughts.

We empty sugar bowls, check edges of molding by hand (never trust the fallible eye). The Easter Bunny is the master of camouflage. Eggs the color of walls, couch covers, even trim. Eggs so well matched to the frames of paintings that they were only discovered years later as other artwork was being hung. One year the Easter Bunny shelled a bowl of peanuts, replaced the nuts with jelly beans, then gently re-glued each peanut shell. Every year the Bunny used a different kind of egg, so if an egg from another year was discovered, it could be dated and recorded. The Bunny was clearly proud of his work.

One autumn, our stereo stopped working. I remember the repairman standing in the kitchen with an Easter egg, circa 1962: “Here’s your trouble, lady.”

If you didn’t approach Easter morning with all your senses on high alert and a screwdriver, you would come up short.

We knew this wasn’t the only way to get eggs. One year our grade school announced that the Saturday before Easter, there would be an egg hunt in a flat field behind the school. We arrived to find hundreds of kids, kids we didn’t even know from other towns, lined up and ready to take our eggs. The event was very poorly planned. You could see all of the eggs from the starting line, lying neatly in little green nests. Clearly this would be a “survival of the fittest” experience. The whistle blew, and it was a bloodbath. Crying children, dressed like bunnies, dodging the hordes. Rival gangs systematically taking out every quadrant of booty. Skirmishes on the pitch. When the smoke cleared, there were contestants refusing to leave the field, hoping against hope there was one overlooked egg. Children wandered blankly, like
The Night of the Living Dead,
until concerned parents ran to collect them. That was the only year the school sponsored an egg hunt.

But this Easter morning we’ve come up big, as the Easter Bunny was very generous. I am so happy the Easter Bunny didn’t have that stupid naughtiness clause that seemed to put a damper on Christmas. With our newfound eggs hidden under the beds where no one would think to look, my brother and I put on our identical suits and go into the bathroom, where my dad has his hands held head high, palms in, in the “scrubbed” surgical position. But his hands are not scrubbed. No, they are laden with Brylcreem. Saturday night is bath night and we’d gone to bed with wet hair. We awoke with some pretty wild ’dos, and Dad is going to tame our heads with the little dab that did it. So into the tops of our heads he flies, rubbing in the Brylcreem, I can feel it burning my scalp. Feels good. Then out comes the black, personal, plastic, pocket-size comb. “Owwwww.” Dad was a farm boy, plowing little red furrows in the tops of our heads. Then away with the comb and on to the top button of my white shirt, his stubby, farm-boy finger jammed between my neck and the shirt button. As he struggles with the button, he effectively shuts off my air. The edges of the world grow dim. As I inhale, my lungs are flooded with Brylcreem fumes. And off I go, off into the ether, off into the place I’d try to get back to many times in the seventies. Upon reentry, Dad scoops me up, then my brother, runs us out to the car, sits us in the back seat next to my sister, Laura, climbs in front, looks at his watch, rolls down his window, and …

Honk, honk.

“Gol-dangit, Dora.”

Honk.

“Gol-dangit.”

Dad’s in a hurry because our church is in town, we’re running late, and it takes over forty-five minutes to get there in time for the service. My mother is in the kitchen, frantically putting on the potatoes, putting in the Easter ham, setting the timer (
honk, honk
), making sure the dinner will be piping hot and ready just as we pull in after Sunday School (
honk
). She quickly checks herself in the mirror, jiggles the handle on the toilet (
honk
), and emerges through the front door—I’d swear on a stack of children’s storybook Bibles—the most absolutely beautiful mom in the world, the stained apron wrapped around her waist that shows to Dad she’s worked right up to the last minute. She stands a moment, a statue, unties the apron string, and lets the apron drop, then deliberately moseys over to the car, climbs in front, shoots my dad a look, and … we’re in third gear by the end of the driveway.

Now I don’t know if we are barometers for tension in the morning or if it’s just being in a confined space. Whatever the reason, my hand wads into a fist and starts pounding my brother in the ear. Boom, boom, boom!