Nested Scrolls Page 6

  To make it up, Embry privately gave me a switchblade knife and some playing cards with pictures of bare-breasted women—special treasures drawn from a little metal lockbox he kept in his room. Actually his gifts to me had to stay in his lock-box, lest Mom find them, but Embry now entrusted me with the box’s combination.

  I could never stay mad at him for very long. And, after all, I was the one who’d made him fall down those steel stairs on the ship. Come what may, we were brothers.

  Mom signed me up for art lessons with a Louisville artist named Lennox Allen. He was an eccentric young man from a wealthy local family. I remember seeing an exhibition of his seascapes at a local pottery warehouse, and he made portraits of people—in fact my parents once hired him to do a color pastel portrait of me.

  He took what seemed to me like ages on the portrait, going on and on about how hard it is to depict a nose. Mom didn’t mind how slow he was—I think she and Lenox enjoyed being around each other. Each of them was, in their own way, a fish out of water in 1950s Louisville, Mom as an aristocratic German expatriate, and Lennox as an impractical artist.

  Lennox always wore a suit, but with smears of paint on every part of it. He had a scraggly beard and a rapid-fire, breathless way of talking. When a few other kids and I would have our art lessons from him at one of our houses he’d tell us crazy stories.

  For instance there was a recurring dream that he had about his dead mother. A voice would wake him in his bedroom in the family mansion, calling him to hurry and come outside. He’d walk down the long hall, heading towards the grand staircase, with a pale green light shining ahead. And then, when he’d reached the marble balustrade of the stairs he could see the source. It was his mother’s head, grown to the size of an automobile, resting on the front hall floor, luminous, with her blank eyes staring at him.

  Even though we were a co-ed group, Lennox would tell us smutty stories, too. Like about the time when he’d noticed a woman stopping her car and going down a path near a country bridge. “I had a feeling about what she was up to,” gloated Lennox. “I followed her, and—sure enough—she was taking a pee. I got a real eyeful.” He cackled, his Adam’s apple bouncing in his paint-smeared neck. What a guy. In retrospect, it occurs to me that he resembled Jack Kerouac.

  I was in the choir at St. Francis in the Fields Church from 1954 to 1957. I enjoyed choir, as it threw me together with a different group of kids than school. And it was nice to be doing something with girls, and to be however tenuously involved in their intrigues.

  One of my friends at choir was a wry kid called Roger Smith. He had a crewcut, heavy frames for his glasses, and a sarcastic attitude that I admired. There was this one hymn we were rehearsing, with the chorus, “Jesus loves you, why not serve him?” And Roger would make his voice sweet and gentle, and sing an obscene variant.

  In those days, if a boy farted, you could yell “Pokes,” and begin counting, and he had to yell “S.O.E.” This supposedly stood for “Save Our Ends.” If you were the first to yell “Pokes,” you got to punch the farter in the arm for as many times as the number you counted to before he called, “S.O.E.” Once at choir practice, a truck on Route 42 outside made a huge, gaseous noise, and I shrilled, “Pokes!” and everyone laughed, especially Roger Smith.

  “You’re great, Rucker.”

  But our choirmaster, Mr. Graves, was mad at me, maybe not mad exactly, more like stern and disappointed, while at the same time forgiving me and expecting better.

  One summer, Mr. Graves got my parents to send Embry and me to choir camp. Before each meal the campers had to sing a particular song that went: “Hey-ho, nobody home. Food, nor drink, nor money have we none. Fill the pot, Hannah!”

  I disliked the song, as its heartiness seemed so…uncool. And who was Hannah? The cook who worked in the kitchen?

  Inevitably, we boys began thinking of “fill the pot” in a vulgar way. At first this was funny, but as we continued having to sing the song before every single meal, the joke became a burden, overlaying the serving dishes with chamberpot images.

  Instead of a swimming pool, the choir camp had a pond. I’d walk out onto this one particular fallen tree, and jump into the sun-filled green water. It was lovely.

  But some of the older boys claimed they’d seen copperheads and water moccasin snakes in the water and on the banks. I worried about those snakes a lot. If you saw one kind you were supposed to dive under the water, and if you saw the other kind, you were supposed to climb out, but I couldn’t remember which was which, and I didn’t know what those kinds of snakes looked like anyway.

  My mother played only classical music on our hi-fi set. But in our driving groups, the mothers often had the radio on, and thus I began to learn about popular music. I was glad to be soaking up knowledge of the modern world. In the car we heard singers like Dean Martin and Doris Day.

  Even though we were in Kentucky, I don’t remember hearing much country music at all—although later, in high-school, Embry got hold of some bluegrass records that I loved. In those mid-1950s years, pop music was pretty much Tin Pan Alley corn—but then came Elvis.

  The night that Elvis made his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show—this would have been September 9, 1956—my family was having dinner at some friends’ house in an older part of Louisville. It was a hot and humid autumn evening, and we kids were running around the front lawn, catching lightning bugs under low-hanging trees, and putting them into jelly jars. You could shake up your jar and all the bugs would flash at once. We didn’t worry much about how that was for the bugs.

  The grown-ups called us when Elvis came on. Everyone had been talking about his impending appearance. He sang “Don’t Be Cruel.” The grown-ups were variously disappointed and outraged—but we kids could see that Elvis was great.

  Embry began wearing pink shirts and black pants, and affecting a hillbilly accent. He said he was a hood, a bad ass, an outlaw. He went to see Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock at the Vogue movie theater in Saint Matthews and—he claimed—helped to start a riot that brought the police. I wished I’d been there.

  The tract homes were still growing up behind our house, with two houses butting onto our lot now, one of them done, one still under construction.

  One gray spring afternoon in 1957, I noticed a boy solemnly playing around a large sandpile in the unfinished house. He was wearing a knit wool cap. He looked thoughtful and lonely. I was too shy to talk to him.

  A few weeks later, Pop got me to go out back to throw the baseball, something we almost never did. But Pop had a plan. The new boy in the house behind us appeared in his yard, eying us. Pop handed his glove to the boy, and set us boys to playing catch together. The boy’s name was Niles Schoening. We were both ten years old. He was going to public school.

  After Pop went inside, Niles and I set down our gloves and talked. Neither one of us was much interested in baseball. We kept on talking through that summer and through the coming years, up until high-school graduation would separate us.

  On My Own

  All during 1957, Niles and I spent our Saturdays exploring the new houses under construction in our neighborhood. The workmen took Saturdays off, so we had the houses to ourselves.

  We’d search for the metal slugs that were punched out of the electrical boxes, hoping to pass them off as nickels in Coke machines. We’d feed discarded lunches to Muffin until she threw up. We’d pee on the blueprints. We’d climb around the giant mounds of dirt from the basement excavations, and throw clods at each other.

  Once we climbed a long ladder to the half-shingled roof of a new house. I went second, and when I hopped off the ladder onto the roof, the ladder teetered and toppled to the ground. Niles and I were stranded and the sun was going down.

  A neighborhood kid we called Danny Dogbutt chanced past.

  “Push up the ladder, Dogbutt,” called Niles. “We’re stuck.”

  Danny offered no response whatsoever. He stared at us as if he were deaf, the sun glinting off
his thick glasses.

  A little later my father appeared, walking down the road in his shirt-sleeves. Dogbutt had squealed on us. But Pop thought our predicament was amusing. He pushed up the ladder, gently admonished us not to climb on roofs again, and led me home.

  We were glad it wasn’t Mr. Schoening whom Danny had fetched. Niles’s father was stricter than mine.

  Once, in the summer of 1957, Mr. Schoening got quite worked up when he found Niles looking at pictures of naked women in his attic. He burned the pictures in the furnace, even though it was summertime. I’d loved one of those pictures in particular, of a long-haired naked woman holding a violin.

  Niles and I had found the pictures at a quarry that was a couple of miles from our house. This was a fascinating place, with sheer limestone walls over a hundred feet tall. It wasn’t much in use, so we could poke around there as much as we liked, particularly on weekends. There was a good path to the quarry along a stream that ran through the Keiths’ pasture.

  When we were at the quarry, Niles loved to sit on the bulldozers and cranes and pretend he was driving them. He’d slam around the gearshift levers and make motor noises with his mouth.

  The dirty magazines on the site had been left there by the workers. It may have been that they were tearing out pages for toilet paper. Niles and I salvaged a few dozen good photos. I was scared to bring any of the pictures home, as my Mom knew every square inch of our house at all times. But Niles, whose mother was equally observant, had taken the reckless chance of keeping the precious documents in his attic.

  One day, coming back from the quarry, Niles and I made our way up one of the cliffs and found a new way home. We passed through an amazing, spooky zone that we never managed to revisit again—as it was so difficult to get there.

  In this curious region, the limestone had been irregularly eroded so that we were walking as if in a labyrinth, the smoothly worn walls reaching up to our chests or even over our heads, the passageways branching and merging.

  “This is so cool,” I told Niles. “It’s like science fiction.”

  For Christmas in 1957, Niles and I both got Erector Set kits, red metal boxes filled with struts, little nuts and bolts, wheels, and a real engine that you could plug into the wall. The kits came with instruction pamphlets filled with detailed drawings of things you might construct. After some preliminary projects, both of us set to work on the largest item in the book: a Parachute Ride, which was something like a merry-go-round, but with dangling seats.

  We had endless consultations over the details—which weren’t all that clear from the pictures. Eventually I managed to build a Parachute Ride just like the one in the pamphlet, but Niles wasn’t quite so patient as me, nor so inclined to follow detailed instructions, and his looked a little—different, not that it didn’t work just as well. I was intrigued by the evidence that you could in fact ignore instructions and still get something to work.

  Niles and I also spent a lot of time playing games: Parcheesi, Mensch Ärgere Dich Nicht (a German game similar to Sorry), and, above all, Monopoly.

  We’d keep a Monopoly game going in Niles’s room pretty much all the time. When I had to go home, he’d slide the game under the bed, out of the way of his younger sister and his two younger brothers. Niles always had a strong sense of the ironic, and when he’d get on a winning streak during a Monopoly game, he’d begin trumpeting and making oompah sounds, and he’d chant, “Get on the Schoening bandwagon!” Inevitably, his luck would change after he started doing this—so much so that “the bandwagon effect” became part of our vocabulary.

  Niles and I joined the Boy Scouts together. Although we shared a rebellious attitude towards the Mickey-Mouse goody-goody aspects of the Scouts, we enjoyed learning camping lore and, above all, going on camping trips, led by Mr. Keith. Some other misfits joined forces with Niles and me, and we made our own patrol, which we called the Porcupine patrol.

  Nothing ever went the way it supposed to on the camp-outs. Sometimes it would rain, and most of the tents would leak. Other times there might be a cold snap, and we’d have to huddle over our camp-fires—fires which, always, we had great difficulty in lighting.

  As long as Mr. Keith was the scoutmaster, it was fun, but later some more officious guys took over, and we drifted out of Scouts. Near the end, one of the boys’ fathers insisted on coming along with our patrol on our campout, and it turned out he wanted to order us around. Niles and I refused to do some make-work task that he’d dreamed up. To pay us back, the unwelcome father wouldn’t let us have any supper. Niles and I stole a can of tomato soup and heated it over a tiny fire on the fringes of the encampment, feeling like bums, savoring our bitterness.

  As well as science fiction, I sometimes read the boy scout magazine, Boy’s Life, although, even then, I could tell that the Boy’s Life stories were written by hacks who thought their readers were stupid children. A lot of the stories were about Catching the Big One—they were almost like a pornography of fishing.

  My father liked fishing, and he had a tackle box that fascinated me. It was made of bare gray metal, with rows of little shelves inside. He had quite a range of fishing lures that he called plugs. They were about an inch long, painted in garish, iridescent greens and reds, with sparkles in the paint, and with dangling triple hooks at the front and the rear.

  He took me fishing in the woods or at ponds a few times, although there was never much prospect of Pop and me Catching the Big One. If we caught anything at all, no matter how small, we were happy.

  Occasionally we’d fish or swim at a faded country club called Sleepy Hollow that Pop had joined—I doubt if the dues were more than thirty dollars a year. We didn’t have the money to join the fancy Louisville Country Club or the classy Boat Club on the river.

  Sleepy Hollow featured a funky concrete dam that had created a swampy lake. They had some rotting rowboats that you could maneuver into the overgrown waters. A deserted club house from the 1920s loomed over the dock, with empty wood-paneled halls and ballrooms—and no staff on duty. When we’d play shuffleboard on the shining wooden floors, I’d sense the ghosts of flappers and bootleggers.

  One of Pop’s pet peeves when fishing there was that he’d lose his pricey fishing plugs by having them snag on submerged trees and logs. The problem was that if he pulled hard enough to be sure of dislodging his plug from the log, he was likely to break the fishing line.

  Pop had studied civil engineering in college, and he had some facility at designing and producing things. As a solution to the lost-plug problem he invented a special device that he called the Retrieve-O-Ring.

  The Retrieve-O-Ring was a weighty doughnut of metal with a slit cut into it, and with a hole drilled through it. The accompanying twine was tied to the ring via the hole, and the slit was there so you could slide the ring onto your fishing line. The idea was that you’d let the Retrieve-O-Ring slide down your line to clunk against the snagged plug, and hopefully one of the plug’s hooks would snag onto the ring. And then you could use the sturdy twine to yank the plug loose, with no danger of breaking the line.

  We had several hundred of these items in our basement, each in a box with a coil of twine and a printed sheet of instructions. Pop placed tiny ads for his Retrieve-O-Rings in Field and Stream magazine, managing to sell a few dozen of them by mail order.

  Unfortunately, more often than not, the Retrieve-O-Ring didn’t work. It would fail to engage the plug or the snag, or the twine wouldn’t be long enough, or the ring wouldn’t slide all the way to the trouble spot. Nevertheless I was proud of my dad for having an invention to his credit.

  And it was handy throughout my childhood to have all those rolls of shiny unused twine in the basement. Niles made fun of the Retrieve-O-Ring, but I liked to imagine that, deep down, he, too, was impressed.

  In 1957, Embry and I were in a Country Day driving group, along with Paul and Jimmy Stone from across the street. It was often interesting when their mother Faith would drive us, as she rarely stopped
talking. She nursed a grudge against Mr. Sauter, a new English teacher at Country Day.

  “What is wrong with that man! He wears his hair so long and slicked up. I think he’s a fruit!”

  I wasn’t sure what a fruit was, or why Faith was against them. I didn’t necessarily go along with everything she said, as by now I’d come to realize that she thought I myself was an oddball—I suppose our estrangement went back to the time when I’d accidentally left that turd on her bathroom floor.

  As it happened, I didn’t mind Mr. Sauter’s class. He’d gotten us to do dramatic readings of some absurd educational plays he’d found in multiple printed copies. One of the plays featured The Parts of Speech as characters. I played the part of The Adverbs.

  There was a strange collection of boys in the driving group. An older boy named Kenny was something of a thug, always wanting to pinch and slug the rest of us. He talked about how, on the day after school had ended last year, he’d lined up his Latin and Algebra textbooks and shot them with his .22 rifle.

  Another boy, saddled by his simpleton parents with the nickname Skeeter, was a radio buff, and one day in October, 1957, he entered Faith’s car in a state of high elation. He’d been listening to the radio beeps of Sputnik, the tiny new satellite that the Russians had put into orbit.

  “It’s so…spooky and wonderful,” rhapsodized Skeeter. “To hear that little thing calling down to us from up above the sky.” My mind drifted off with Skeeter’s, contemplating the miracle of a human-made object floating in outer space.

  “Ow!” yelped Skeeter.

  Kenny had swung his plastic trigonometry triangle like an axe, bouncing its corner off the boy’s short-haired scalp.

  One of the things that Country Day did, by way of being a college prep school, was to have all of us students take huge batteries of aptitude and achievement tests every spring. That way, by the time we got to the standardized college-admission tests, we’d be used to them.