The Nuthouse Boogie

 

Dear Caelan,

Today is your eighth birthday.  I was in the shower when your mother called this morning at 6:58, was sorry I missed the call, and sorriest of all that you didn't get on the phone yourself so that I would have at least heard your voice.  However, according to the rulebook, I can still blame your mother instead of you for these things until you're twelve.

The chapter about eight-year olds is one of the longest chapters in that rulebook.  Your list of responsibilities is subjective.  It varies from day to day, from person to person.  Worst of all, according to the rulebook, being nice and being what others expect you to be is more important than learning and enjoying what you want to learn and enjoy on your own.  You get more points for going outside and playing a game with your neighborhood friends when you'd rather be reading in your room than you get for doing that reading, even though there are people all around you saying that reading's about the best thing you can do for yourself.  It doesn't make sense.

At least, it didn't make sense to me when I was your age, and so, for neither the first nor the last time, I decided note to play by the rules.  I read.  I read Gone With The Wind, The Foxes of Harrow, assorted works of Kipling, Twain and Dickens, and comic books.  On Saturday morning, I'd walk up the bayou bank to Shreve Island Drug and buy two comic books.  They cost twelve cents apiece in those days, and my weekly allowance was a quarter.  I could have bought five candy bars or any number of other things, but comic books were my habitual purchase. 

They were also my habitual theft, especially between August and late December when I was saving my allowance for Christmas shopping.  Spiderman, Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos, Captain America, Fantastic Four, Mighty Thor, Iron Man, Submariner, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Daredevil and Dr. Strange all found their way under my sweater, astoundingly unobserved by the clerks.  Maybe it's because I stole them that I, unlike most men of my generation, rarely bemoan getting rid of those riveting pulps, which would today bring exorbitant prices from collectors.

Marvel comic characters were much more real than their neighbors over at DC.   The DC guys were all healthy, wealthy and wise, and there was no way to tell them apart until they got into their costumes.  At Marvel, though, Spiderman had his aging Aunt May to take care of, Daredevil was blind, Iron Man had a heart condition, the Hulk was completely out of control, the X-Men were special school geeks, Thor was lame, Dr. Strange had migraines, Captain America never got over that son of a bitch, the Red Skull offing his sidekick Bucky back in WWII, Submariner was super-prejudiced against all surface people and the Fantastic Four's Ben Richards hated being The Thing.  These were three-dimensional beings, often pathetic.  They were much like the people one could meet in real life, except for the odd and positive effects of gamma rays, being run over by truckloads of nuclear waste, being bitten by radioactive spiders, etc.  One could like or dislike the Marvel characters' alter egos, whereas one could barely remember that goddam, namby-pamby Bruce Wayne.

I thought Peter Parker, Spiderman unmasked, was a nice guy from the first issue.  I was sorry about his ongoing problems with girls and financial struggles.  Many years later, I was appalled to hear that Aunt May had run off with the Rhino, Spiderman's first and worst enemy.  Captain Sawyer always seemed too rigid when he complained to Sgt. Fury about having so many shirts destroyed.  After all, those German tanks can be hard on the ol' wash and wear, and if Baron Von Strucker's metal hand is a little rusty and gets stuck on your shoulder when he grabs you, even after an all-capital-letter CRUNCH! to the jaw, it's not completely your fault, now is it?  Anyway, I knew these characters, liked most of them and liked knowing whether or not I liked all of them.  I went so far at age seven as to wish that my hair was brown rather than the jet black it still was at that time, because brown was the most common Marvel hero hair color.  In retrospect, I suspect that black would have bled through the comic book pages and smudged the other sides of the pages.

I was also surrounded by family when I was your age, and unlike my peers, I generally had a choice between spending time with neighborhood kids and spending time in any number of other pleasant ways.  I had grandparents next door and an aunt and uncle across the street.  Uncle Pete had a swimming pool.  To extend the immediate family that surrounded me in my childhood, we all had maids.   Furthermore, the park at 12-Mile Bayou across the street led to several possible adventures.

I had so many toy soldiers to happily spend solitary hours with in my own backyard that my sister Heloise, who lives in that house today, still finds them once in awhile.  Up to about the time I began reading, I could sit on the floor in my own large bedroom closet with stuffed animals and toy vehicles, creating adventures for them that seemed incredibly real. 

My grown-ups counted on one another ... if they didn't have me in view themselves, they figured that I must be next door, and so I was free to be wherever I wanted to be.   Many mornings, when Mom let Pixie and Nannette out, I just followed them, often trailing behind those fool poodles seven or eight aimless blocks before calling them and heading back home.  Fishing poles, rods and reels and tackle were available in all three family garages, and I often took some necessities over to the bayou in hopes of catching Old Charlie.  He was a legendary monster, a garfish whose crimes were sometimes actually seen.  Once, a duck I was watching put its head under the bayou's surface to feed, and it came up with no head.  That was Old Charlie's handiwork.  So were some three-legged dogs that had chased sticks into that still, soupy channel.  Even without an ambitious goal like capturing a known monster, one can contentedly lose hours to fishing.  With Old Charlie lurking among the cypresses, it was an exciting afternoon, and I didn't need anyone else around for it.

In summer, there was Uncle Pete's swimming pool, and Shreveport summers began in April and lasted through October.  I was, of course, instructed never to swim alone when I was a youngster, but I could go out the front door on Adger and hear the sound of a splash coming over the six-foot, staked fence across the street on most sunny days.  My sister, or a cousin, or somebody in the family was almost always using the pool, and so I almost always had the option of joining them. 

Year-round, there was reading.  We all had home libraries of at least a thousand volumes, not counting encyclopedias and magazines, plus the comic books with which I licitly or otherwise supplemented what was already on the shelves.  I liked to read lying on my stomach in any bed under a ceiling fan with the book on the floor.  Another favorite place was the guest bed under the shelves that housed thirty years of National Geographics in my grandparents' upstairs hallway.  My front steps on Adger were good for reading.  As an inherited obligation, I became familiar with the feeling of a particular tree that overhung the bayou against my back while I was first becoming familiar with Tom Sawyer and his circle of friends, because my mother had identified that tree to me as one of her favorite quiet places when she was growing up. 

I learned decades later that my maternal grandfather had wanted nothing to do with me when I was a toddler because he didn't want to be reminded of my father, who he detested.  Really, I don't remember Granddaddy at all before the stroke that made him finally give up practicing medicine after fifty years and, according to the newspaper article that announced his retirement, 50,000 baby deliveries.  After the stroke, I somehow became his favorite grandchild.  I spent whole afternoons with him, talking and listening, following him around the house, yard and outbuildings during his various chores.  In the workshop that had been a chicken coop and still had the little, square door cut into one wall to prove it, I watched him make repairs and create everything from tools to toys.  He made a sled for us the one time it snowed in Shreveport, and he made several of his own kitchen knives.  Nearby in the section of the backyard tucked away behind towering bushes of one kind or another were a greenhouse, a beehive, a grape arbor, a storage shed for produce from the garden, and the garden itself, which he plowed by hand. 

In the garden, we raised regular and Argentine tomatoes, corn, chili peppers, bell peppers, okra, squash, potatoes, yams, onions, carrots, snap beans, cabbage, lettuce and, in a separate redwood pyramid I helped build, strawberries.  Scattered throughout the yard itself were trees bearing pecans, walnuts, figs, peaches, pears, crabapples and pomegranates, all of which relied upon needed the attentions of a retired doctor and a small boy.  In late summer, I ran to the edge of the yard to get the afternoon paper and bring it back to my grandparents on their side porch where, screened and shaded from the sun by a hedge, they rocked quietly and shelled snap beans.  In early autumn, Granddaddy and I meandered around the front yard wielding coffee cans nailed to old broomsticks, with which we scooped up the pecans he would later deal with at an old school desk with a nutcracker bolted to it that was kept under a tarp by the garden, from which he could toss the broken shells directly into the fertilizer pit.

Mind you, I did not limit myself to solitude and the company of my family.  I spent a lot of time with Eddie, Lemuel, Ken, Lawrence, and Lawrence's little brother, Clay, digging holes and trenches in the vacant lot beside the Carmodys' back yard and making every sort of structure and weapon imaginable from the bamboo that sprouted thick and tall in several back yards on Adger, Ockley and Atlantic.  To hear my mother recount it today, I hid behind the door every time the bell rang and asked her to tell my friends that I wasn't home.  Yes, this did happen a few times, but not every time.  What kind of shallow-minded, puling sheep would I have been had I felt compelled to drop whatever I was doing for the sake of the society of other kids whenever it was offered?  I had plenty of other things to do!

Children's behavioral labels are defined by their parents' tolerances for those behaviors.  For example, I think that all four-year olds have bad table manners, because I have no tolerance for spilled and played with food, while my mother's greatest joy in my pre-school days was to take me and some cousins of similar years out to restaurants.  Hyperactivity is certainly in the eye (and ear) of the beholder.  To someone as conscious of the opinions of others as my mother has always been, my declining of offers to come out and play as a youth clearly indicated dangerously abnormal, anti-social behavior.

That, my daughter, is why your grandmother picked me up from A.C. Steere Elementary one day when I was about your age and taken across town to meet someone.  I don't remember what explanation she gave for this errand, but I remember that it was a yellow brick building with thick, smoked glass windows, a real parking lot with light poles and paint-designated spaces, chrome handled metal doors, and a smell like a Louisiana public school cafeteria on meatless Friday, when the budget Huey Long had left us dictated red beans and rice instead of fish.   I remember, too, that the spectacled man who was so interested in meeting me frightened me with his fascination with my childhood games and activities. 

Yes, my grown-ups had decided that psychiatric help was in order.  They hid that truth from me, and I can't blame them, as I would have no idea how to explain such a mission to a child, myself.  However, the cost of putting a child into a mysterious situation is that children are afraid of mystery.  It is, at best, uncomfortable to be put in a situation that doesn't make sense.  Being left alone with a strange adult who wanted to play ping-pong and Uncle Wiggly while repeating the same questions over and over even though he was writing down the answers to those questions was downright scary. 

I hadn't minded playing Uncle Wiggly with the A.C. Steere speech therapist, because she'd explained to me that the game offered a lot of opportunities to pronounce the "th" sound that all Shuey children of my generation had trouble with.  I recognized that difficulty as a genuine impediment, especially when my grown-ups had a few drinks and thought it was immensely funny to get me to talk about the dinosaurs I was fascinated with.  They particularly liked for me to tell them about the ichthyosaurus.  In any event, there was a difference between playing a game I didn't care about for gaming's sake for a practical purpose and hopping a plastic rabbit around a peanut butter-smeared, cardboard track through some goddam lollipop forest to a pointless destination with a grown-up because he nagged and cajoled and swore to me, a stranger who owed him nothing as far as I could see, that no other activity would satisfy him. 

The twice-weekly visits not only tore me away from my busy, wonderful schedule, but also made me increasingly nervous.  After about a month, I rebelled.  They found me a couple of hours later in the tall row of trees between the Carmodys' property and Uncle Pete's, correctly attired in a Confederate uniform from the toy department at Sears, plugging away at passing traffic on East Kings Highway with a cap gun.

Well, it wouldn't have upset my mother any more if they had found me crouched over the half-eaten body of Penn, my grandparents yardman in the fertilizer pit, and she went to her older sister, Johnette, for help.  Johnette talked me into going back to visit the scary man, accidentally giving me a bit more insight into the nature of those visits in the process.  I went back, but I did so grudgingly and warily. 

I began paying more attention to his habits, and to the locations of doors and windows in that building.  If they were going to make me stay there for any extended time, I fully intended to escape but that was my Plan B.  Luckily, Plan A sufficed.  Plan A involved only figuring out what answers the scary man wanted to hear to his repeated questions and giving him those answers so that he would quit asking.  Therefore, instead of bursting into tears of frustration and demanding to know what was wrong with him, I told him what he wanted to hear.

He wanted to hear me say that I thought I was one of those Marvel comic book heroes, separate from my peers by virtue of larger than life powers, tragedies and responsibilities.  Based on this cookie-cutter mold analysis, he gave the cookie-cutter diagnosis recommended by his training and reference books.  He told my mother that I was, indeed, anti-social, and that I would become more so unless and until she got me involved in some sort of group activity.  All these years later, I can still begin from six separate starting points to conclusively prove that he was six kinds of a stupid son of a bitch for that diagnosis, and that my mother was six-sevenths of one for paying any attention to him.

It was ridiculous.  In the first place, I benefited much, much more from the society I chose, that of relatives, historical novels, literary classics, comic books and my own soul than I would have from feeling obliged to spend every possible moment with the neighborhood kids.  Hell, I can remember a couple of those kids talking me into bringing a wagonload of my comic books into a bamboo fort we'd built and then stealing them as soon as my back was turned.  Another time, Lemuel convinced me that we'd get great joy out of setting my toy boats on fire and setting them adrift on my grandmother's fishpond, then picked one up on a stick and dropping it, flames, molten plastic and all, on my hand.  The scars are still plainly visible today.  In the second place, the group activity my mother decided on for me was karate at the YMCA.  If you think a kid's about to go off the deep end and become dangerous, you don't send him off to learn to hurt people more efficiently.

Don't worry, I got out of junior martial arts training as soon as I could, but did become happily involved in group activities later on my own.  I was a gang leader in high school, and I was a goddam literate one, too.

 

Love,