Knots in My Yo-Yo String (2 page)

We were moving to the West End.

The West End became more than my home and neighborhood. It became my New World. No coonskin pathfinder ever explored his patch of earth more thoroughly than I explored mine.

The address was 802 George Street, second house in from Elm. Another brick row house, another brick sidewalk. For ten years I would live there, from ages six to sixteen.

The 800 block was the last block on George Street. It was a dead end. Beyond the last house the asphalt stopped. A three-foot-high wooden barrier made it official. I learned that “dead end” meant two different things. To a grownup it meant Stop—Turn the Car Around. To me, a kid, it meant Go—Your Territory Starts Here. Before the wooden barrier was the structured, orderly world of grownups, the neat grid of streets and houses that gave shape to their lives. Civilization.

Past the barrier was frontier. Climb over the fence or simply walk around it, as a car could not, and you found yourself in knee-high weeds. Then came the railroad tracks, then the woods, then the creek (pronounced “crick” in Norristown). This
swatch of undeveloped land featured not one but two dumps, plus a swamp, Red Hill, the spear field, the stone piles, and a black and white pony. Who needed playgrounds? And lucky me, the portal to this kid-size continent was the dead end of my new street named George.

I spent much of the next ten years in this houseless, streetless wilderness and in the park on the other side of the creek. Sometimes I was with others, sometimes alone. By the time the ten years were up, I had caught a handful of salamanders, hit a home run, raced against my stopwatch, searched for the Devil, kissed a girl, and bled from an attack of leeches.

But I did not go to sleep on the frontier side of the dead-end fence, or wake up there, or go to school there. And that was okay, because the civilized side also had something that seemed expressly made for me and my playmates, geographic features that appeared on no map, had no names, yet were intimately familiar to all kids in the neighborhood. Seen from above, they would appear as a second, nameless grid overlaid on the public one. I speak of alleyways.

To me and the neighborhood kids, the back of a house was more important than the front, and we happily roamed the alleyways that bordered our backyards. Alleys were sized to make us comfortable—with a running start, you could practically broad-jump across some of them. In an alley it was the car, not the kid,
that was the intruder. Alleys were for sneakers and bikes and trikes and wagons.

Alleys had no rules, no signs. Danger and parental interference were minimal. You could lie on your back in the middle of an alley (if you wanted to) and close your eyes for five minutes and not be run over. You could hang the frame of an old wooden chair from a telephone pole spike and use it as a basketball rim. In an alley you could practice riding your new bike in peace, then ram it into potholes and get yourself thrown, like a bronco buster. You could check out other people’s garbage cans. If you wanted.

If you ran away from home, or planned to, you would go by alleyway. The network of nameless alleys mimicked the town’s official layout. You could go anywhere—for all I knew, clear across the country.

With the frontier and the park and the alleys available to us, you might think we would stay off the streets. We did not, of course. If it pleased us to get up a football game in the middle of the street or hide from seekers under parked cars, that’s what we did. Because, in truth, our territory was wherever we happened to be. Whichever side of the dead end we were on, whichever side of the door, we confiscated the turf and made it our own.

And so, if we felt like resting, we would alight like a small flock of birds onto the nearest front steps. Except for those at the house directly across the street from
802. For reasons too vague for words, we were afraid of the man who lived there. His front steps were never sat on, his sidewalk never hopscotched, his doorbell never rung, his backyard fence never climbed. The truth was, he was simply a widowed barber who preferred to keep his shades down all the time, but try telling that to us.

Ten years, from six to sixteen. Ten years in the West End. Ten years of twin Popsicles and Bonomo’s Turkish taffy, hightop Keds and a plaid cummerbund, Howdy Doody and Willie the Worm and Uncle Miltie on TV Tuesday nights, salamanders and snakes and candy cigarettes, coal dust on the clothesline, baseball cleats swinging from my handlebars, Ovaltine in my milk, knots in my yo-yo string.

I hate war. But when I was little, I loved it. War was a game, guns were toys, death an amusement ride. The first card game I ever played was called war.

I also played with little green soldiers, maybe two inches high. I loved their perfect, tiny helmets that reminded me of cereal bowls. Even the faces of the soldiers were perfect and green. Their tiny mouths and eyes were forever locked into a battlefield moment that I could only imagine.

I read G.I. Joe and Combat Kelly comic books. Then, down at the creek, I would poke a stick into the powdery bottom silt, pop it upward, and go “Boom!” I pretended the resulting brown underwater cloud was an atomic bomb explosion.

And of course, I played war with my friends. Beyond the dead end, there were two major arsenals: the stone piles and the spear field. The stone piles were on the other side of the tracks, between the main dump and the creek. There were five of them, each about ten feet high. The piles no doubt belonged to a construction company, but as far as we dead-end kids were concerned, they were there strictly in answer to our instinct to fling a stone.

Yet the one real stone battle I recall happened not there but at the creek (another inexhaustible source of stones; it wasn’t called Stony Creek for nothing). We divided ourselves into two platoons and took up positions on either side of the creek. We loaded up and fired away.

The creek at that point was hardly wider than an alleyway. Across the water Johnny Seeton was firing from behind a tree. I waited till he poked his head out. He was looking right at me. I fired. I was aiming to hit him in the eyebrow. This is not as malicious as it sounds, for we were only playing at war—we were pretending, and everybody knew you didn’t get hurt pretending. Besides, Johnny Seeton was one of my two best friends. And double-besides, who ever actually hit what they were aiming at?

The stone hit him in the eyebrow.

He screamed. He wouldn’t stop screaming. Blood streamed down his face. He galloped across the water, ignoring stepping stones, screamed up the creek bank, and screamed all the way home. As for me, pretend did not give way to horror instantly. For several seconds of fanciful confusion, as Johnny Seeton thrashed wildly past me, I felt surprised that our relationship as best friends did not seem to count in this matter, as if a stone thrown by me should hurt him less.

Neither Johnny nor his parents ever said anything to me about the incident. They didn’t have to. The two-week patch on Johnny’s eye punished me every day.

Spears were safer.

Go to the dead end, turn left, walk up the tracks past Red Hill and the other, smaller dump, climb the trackside bluff, and you were in the spear field—so named for the plants growing there. Strip one of them of its leaves, and you were left with a sturdy four-foot-high stalk straight as a pool cue. Pluck it from the ground, shake off the root dirt, and bring on the enemy.

As I passed through the grade-school years, war became less about machine-gun chatter and spectacular explosions and more about people.

I read about war, about the bodies of soldiers, even enemy soldiers, whose lifeless hands clutched photographs of loved ones back home.

I read of the torture of captive troops. I especially cringed over the fingernail torture, in which a pair of pliers pulled out the victim’s fingernails, slowly, one by one. Such things happened to spies and to people who knew too many secrets. I resolved that if I was ever in a war, I would be a dumb nonspy.

But I could not resolve not to be a soldier. Every passing day, every February 1—the date of my birth—prodded me closer to the ominous cloud that hung over my future. It was called the draft, and it meant that when I (and all other boys deemed healthy enough) got out of high school or college, I would have to join the armed forces whether I wanted to or not.

As if to prepare me, my daydreams placed me in grim
wartime situations. I saw myself, apparently a failure at avoiding secrets, in the hands of enemy interrogators.

“Tell us,” they growl.

“Never,” I say firmly, for I am a good American soldier.

Then I feel the pliers grip the end of the nail on my right index finger, and cold sweat pours from me, and I feel the tug of the pliers and then the pain begins—and I sing. I sing like the Vienna Boys’ Choir. I empty my head like a box of cornflakes. I tell them everything from our deepest military secrets to my shoe size.

And I anguish. Because, though I realize this is only a daydream, I am afraid that if such a thing ever really happens, I will play my part poorly. I am afraid that I will crack during torture. I am ashamed that I cannot measure up to a captive spy I once read about, whose lips were still sealed after losing all ten fingernails.

Sometimes in my fearful fantasies my captors by-passed torture and simply marched me out to the firing squad. But I never got shot. Even as six rifle sights met at my trembling heart—“Ready! Aim!”—I call out to the commanding officer, “Wait a minute!”

The commanding officer pauses.

“There’s something you don’t know. If you shoot me you’ll never find out.”

The officer calls off the guns. He expects me to divulge vital military secrets, but the information I offer is purely personal. I tell him something about his wife, his family back home, something he could never have
known without me. He is overcome with gratitude. He dismisses the firing squad. And I have discovered something: Words can save me.

Despite all the attention I paid to warfare, I was never in a real fight. Around sixth grade this began to bother me. I saw other kids flailing and clubbing, tearing each other’s shirts to shreds, trading bloody noses, and I said to myself, “Hey, why not me?” I began to feel deprived because my right hand had never known the feel of fist on chin. I felt a growing need to hit somebody.

But who? I could think of no one I wanted to hit. And apparently nobody wanted to hit me. Every day I walked to and from school unchallenged. I was a bur in no one’s saddle. A likable bloke.

However, the prospect of going through life punchless was too strong to ignore. I looked around my classroom. Who was as small as I, or better yet, even smaller? Who was unlikely to hit me back? Who needed hitting?

There was only one answer: Joey Stackhouse.

Joey Stackhouse was skinny. Mash down his blond pompadour and he was maybe half an inch shorter than I. He had a narrow, foxy face. But his main feature was teeth. He was a walking warning against not brushing. When he smiled, you found yourself looking at all the colors in your crayon box. Plus his clothes were shabby.

For several days I hung close to Joey, alert for an offending remark or gesture. He remained obstinately
harmless, as friendly as ever. It became clear that I myself would have to manufacture the momentum for the punch.

I worked myself into a snit. I convinced myself that anybody with teeth like that was asking for it. One day he walked home with me after school. We were on the 700 block of George Street, close to my house. I picked a fight with him, accused him of something, I don’t remember what. Then I hit him. I balled my fist and swung, and when my knuckles landed—
thock
—against his chin bone, I was as surprised as when my stone hit Johnny Seeton.

As punches go, it was dainty, more tap than wallop, my intention being to match a punch’s form, not force. I’m sure that, physically, he barely felt it. But a punch has a double impact, as I was about to learn, and only the first lands on the chin. Joey’s eyes widened. He stood there staring at me with such wild astonishment that I knew at once he had not, not in a million years, been asking for it. He started to cry. He blurted out, “Why’d you do that?” and ran back down George Street.

If ever I had notions of becoming a warrior, they died that day as I turned the other way and walked home alone. It has been more than forty years since I hit Joey Stackhouse—the first and last person I ever punched—and it remains the only taste of war I ever needed.

Early on I learned, without anyone actually telling me, that in this world it is not enough just to
be.
You have to
be something.

So around the age of five I decided to be a cowboy.

Cowboys rode three trails into my life: (1) The Garrick Movie Theater downtown, which showed Western double features on Saturday afternoons, (2) comic books, and (3)
Frontier Playhouse.

Frontier Playhouse
came on TV every weeknight at six, right after
Howdy Doody
and right in the middle of dinnertime. I was not allowed to eat in the living room, where the TV was, but I was allowed to move my chair to the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. I placed my dinner on the seat, knelt down, and watched the nightly cowboy movie while eating on my knees. It’s a wonder I could see the platter-size screen at the far end of the house.

From TV and movies and comics I knew lots of cowboys: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Lash La Rue, Red Ryder, Tom Mix, the Lone Ranger, Tex Ritter, Ranger Joe, Tim McCoy, Hoot Gibson. And horses: Trigger, Topper, Silver, Champion, Tony, Buttermilk.

When my friends and I played cowboys, almost everyone wanted to be Roy Rogers. With his fringed shirts and silky neckerchief and white hat and golden horse, how could you not want to be Roy? I was usually the first to call out, “I’ll be Roy Rogers!”

But when I was alone and my secrets came peeping out from their hiding places, I knew there was a cowboy I wanted to be even more than Roy Rogers. I wanted to be Lash La Rue. From hat to boots, Lash La Rue dressed all in black. But that wasn’t what made Lash La Rue special—it was the whip. He carried it coiled at his belt, and with it he did most everything the others did with their six-shooters. Was a bad guy reaching for his gun? Lash was quicker with his whip. A flick of the wrist, the whip uncoils—leather lightning!—darts ten, twenty, thirty feet across the dust to snatch the gun, barely clear of its holster, from the bad guy’s hand. Is the bad guy running away? The whip catches him at the ankles, trips and hogties him, ready for the sheriff. The rawhide tongue could lick the spit from a horse’s lips or kiss it on the ear.