by William Poe
I could see Lenny’s reflection in the rearview mirror as he leaned against the side of the van and tried to collect himself. His heart had been causing him more trouble than usual. I didn’t want him to die, but I also couldn’t face sitting in class with Ernie.
“Don’t do this, Bubby,” Lenny pleaded. “You have to go to school.”
Principal Klinghoffer came outside to investigate the ruckus. He and Lenny thought they were out of earshot, but I heard them clearly. Lenny had not listened to Mr. Klinghoffer’s advice and he would not have me disrupting the school.
As we drove away, Lenny leaned from the window and hollered face-saving words in the direction of the principal, loud enough for my classmates to hear. “I didn’t realize he had the flu!”
Lenny ordered me to stay in the bedroom the remainder of the day. Mandy sat at the vanity, trying to understand what was going on. I drew pictures until Vivian came home. Right away, she and Lenny began arguing. I went to the landing and tried to make out their words. Eventually, Vivian brought me a tuna sandwich and some potato chips. She helped Mandy out of the room and took her downstairs to eat dinner.
When Vivian returned with Mandy, she found me under the Jenny Lind bed, barricaded behind stuffed animals. She left me there as she changed my sheets so I would have a “fresh start” and then, coaxing me out, sat with me on the bed.
“You’re about ready for a haircut,” Vivian said, raking her fingers through my hair. “Tomorrow we’ll stop by the barber.” She reached over to turn on my night-light, a revolving carousel that made horses prance across the walls. “Then we’ll see a special doctor.” She pulled the door almost shut as she left the room.
I visited a child psychologist for several weeks. At each session, the man wore a starched white shirt with a plain black tie and black pants. He would have on a coat when I entered the room, but always took it off and placed it on the back of his chair before saying anything to me. I could never make out the color of the man’s eyes through his thick glasses.
The routine was the same at each session. He would bring out a pile of board games and ask which one I’d like to play. When I picked one at random, he would set out the game and then explain the rules, making sure I understood by asking me to repeat what he had said. But no matter what game we played, I caught him violating the rules. He insisted that I had misunderstood if I challenged him, and often said that I was the one who had been cheating. The first few times, the accusation made me angry, but then I decided not to show any emotion. After that, he never got a rise out of me, no matter how outrageously he played.
Whatever the sessions were supposed to accomplish, I still refused to go to class and missed so many days that the school threatened not to promote me to third grade. Vivian woke me up one morning and asked if I would allow her to take me to school. I didn’t answer, but got out of bed and dressed. We ate breakfast, and I followed Vivian to the Chevy, hesitantly opening the passenger-side door and climbing inside. Though I saw his van parked in its usual spot, Lenny stayed out of sight that morning.
Vivian drove into the school parking lot and turned off the engine. I felt no pressure to get out of the car, but I knew I had to do it. We sat, silently, until I was ready. Finally, I pulled up the handle and pushed open the heavy door.
The other children, queuing for the start of class, paid no attention as I joined the line. I rubbed my lucky quarter, which I had taken from its box that morning, and dreamed of becoming invisible, thinking that maybe I already was and that that was why no one bothered to look at me.
Taking my seat in class, I didn’t see Ernie anywhere. Another boy occupied his desk. Mrs. Beauchamp kept a close eye on me all day, but also acted as if everything were normal. Somehow, I made it to the final bell and ran home to the safety of my room.
That night, I asked Vivian if she knew why Ernie hadn’t been in class. By then, Vivian had spoken to Mrs. Corley and learned that Ernie was finishing out the year at a private school.
Ernie’s absence made it easier for me during class, but I continued to see the child psychologist. One evening, Lenny and Vivian started talking about the doctor while I was in the room, cuddling my TV dog as I lay on the floor.
“He says that Simon should continue seeing him for a year,” Vivian said. “The man believes that if Simon doesn’t keep up the therapy, he may not be able to—what were the words he used?—socialize properly.”
“Goddamn shrinks!” Lenny railed.
Though it was difficult to comprehend the conversation, I understood that spending so much money on the shrink made it difficult to provide for Connie’s needs.
“Simon don’t need nothing that costs twenty-five dollars an hour,” Lenny said. “If that boy’s screwed up in the head, no quack is going to fix him.”
Screwed up in the head.
I went to the bedroom and took out my box of construction paper. I shredded the colored sheets and stacked them in a kind of lattice. Then I took the cornhusk doll from the cigar box and, with Aunt Opal’s quarter sitting in the middle of the colored paper strips, waved the doll over the pile while voicing a gibberish chant. I hoped that supernatural powers would prevail where the child psychologist had failed.
Legion must be vanquished and the screw taken from my head.
✽ ✽ ✽
Harris knew it had to be difficult for me to write about my experiences at such a tender age.
“When I look back, the emotions are stronger than I realized,” I told him. “I truly believed that something was seriously wrong with me.”
“What stands out in your story,” Harris said sympathetically, “is that no one was there for you. You were trying to figure things out on your own, taking comfort where you found it, and looking for whatever protection you could find—your collie dog, magical powers from Aunt Opal’s quarter and the doll. You clung to your TV dog and lost yourself in your drawings. All around you were forces that you couldn’t control. You represented them as bug-eyed monsters from outer space. You thought something evil was taking over you, and the Bible story about Legion seemed to explain it.”
“I wanted to be a good boy,” I said, a bit overwhelmed by Harris’s observations. “I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t like the other boys.”
“Losing one’s childhood is the worst kind of tragedy,” Harris said.
“What Ernie and I did together didn’t feel right, but somehow, I thought that Ernie needed me to go along. Does that make any sense? I thought that if I refused, Jay’s abuse would be even worse. I knew that Jay was hurting Ernie, but I said nothing. The memories are so confusing.”
“You were a small boy,” Harris said. “There’s no way you could have understood.”
“I had enough understanding to bloody the asshole when he destroyed our sand fortress! But I did nothing to protect Ernie when it really mattered.”
“And what would you have done? How would you have explained sexual things to the adults around you? You didn’t want to cause Vivian any pain, especially knowing how she suffered because of her brother’s death. The boys called you a sissy queer, and you knew from Lenny’s reaction to Liberace that he considered that a very bad thing. You must have been afraid of the way Lenny would react if you tried to explain about Jay and Ernie, much less Ernie and you. You were a little boy, Simon, dealing with adult struggles.”
I averted my eyes and nervously rubbed my thumbs together.
“I’m sorry no one understood and helped you,” Harris continued. “Especially that child psychologist. The profession wasn’t very good with children in the early sixties. It wasn’t your responsibility to help Ernie, and it wasn’t your job to figure out your problems.”
I looked up and said, “Don’t make me start crying.”
“And why not?” Harris smiled.
“Because when I start, I won’t stop, and I want to get on with my writing.”
“Fair enough,” Harris said. “It may not be the right time to let go.”
&
nbsp; I dreaded the moment when I did “let go.”
“People like Jay seed a lot of pain,” Harris said. “The other kids could brush off Jay’s cruelty because they probably had friends and family to talk to about him. Your friendship with Ernie was, at first, the best thing that had happened to either one of you. Playing out your fantasy adventures as ship captains and pirates was a healthy thing. In so many ways, it’s a tragedy that Jay began to abuse his brother. It damaged you as well as Ernie. It corrupted your very first friendship.”
“Sex has interfered with most of my relationships. The worst was failing as a husband. If only I had been born heterosexual.”
“We’ll get to that later,” Harris said. “Let’s focus on young Simon for now.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Though Vivian had coaxed me to attend class, there were still moments when emotion overcame me and I would run to the bathroom in tears. On a couple of occasions, I wet myself while sitting at the desk, but I wasn’t the only child with that problem. The resulting ridicule was bearable only because others shared it.
Mr. Klinghoffer continued to keep a close eye on me. Before moving to the public school system, he had been the headmaster of a Lutheran school in Little Rock. He had no patience for “nonsense.” I heard him tell Mrs. Beauchamp to report to him directly if she observed anything odd in my behavior. Mrs. Beauchamp clearly didn’t appreciate the interference and only told him about incidents she felt the other children would mention anyway.
If Mr. Klinghoffer had known how many times I broke down in tears, I may not have progressed to third grade. But between Mrs. Beauchamp’s judicious reporting and Vivian’s continuing to take me to school and, on occasion, picking me up for a lunch at home, I passed.
Mrs. Beauchamp, who taught first and second grade, introduced the class to Mrs. Beverly Deshaw, who would be our teacher for the next two years.
Ernie came home from boarding school for the summer. He had made no friends at the school and was overjoyed to see me again. I thought his home life would be better since Dr. Corley had taken custody of Jay, but Ernie had to deal with another problem. Since the divorce, Mrs. Corley spent her days beside the pool, drinking. I never told Vivian about helping Ernie walk her, sloppy drunk, into their house.
The touching games, mostly while pretending the other person was asleep, gave way to waking activities. The secrecy of the acts, their forbidden quality, made us think our friendship was special—private. Whatever guilt or shame had first been associated with getting naked and touching each other surrendered to frank playfulness.
The bauxite pit “blue hole” down the street became our secret hangout where we enacted new fantasies. Ernie read a children’s version of Robinson Crusoe that summer. We pretended to be marooned, having been thrown ashore naked. Another time, we cut our briefs so they became Tarzan-style flaps. We applied colored chalks to each other’s bodies as camouflage. It was important that we color every part of the body. The summer belonged only to Ernie and me. There were no sports to divide us, nor a Jay to wreak havoc on our games.
Mrs. Corley didn’t send Ernie back to boarding school, so we were again in the same classroom. I tried hard to seem like a normal child, but still became overwhelmed with emotion and would break down in tears for no apparent reason.
Where Mrs. Beauchamp’s patience had run short, Mrs. Deshaw had even less tolerance for misbehavior from the start. She was quick to report me. I usually apologized my way out of a spanking, until an incident occurred that involved the thing I cared about most—art.
Drawing and painting had become my refuge, even if Lenny insisted that art was for sissies. By age nine, anything Lenny disliked was something I wanted to know about.
I had even gotten Vivian to take me to a Liberace concert when he appeared at Barton Coliseum in Little Rock. I stood in a long line after the show to get his autograph on a publicity photo. Lenny went berserk when I put the signed picture on my wall. Vivian, not thinking it was particularly strange that a pianist would wear sequins and diamond rings and place a gaudy candelabra on his piano, defended my right to hang what I wanted to on the walls of my room. She had paid good money to take me to the concert and was happy that I had enjoyed it.
Our annual supplement to Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia arrived just before the fateful incident at school. That year, the main section was about how pop art had supplanted abstract expressionism. Pop art didn’t interest me. What did grab my attention were the color reproductions of paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. I cut out the images with a razor blade and taped them to the headboard of the four-poster bed I had inherited when Connie moved out of the house after marrying Derek. The pictures were so incomprehensible to Vivian that she never asked where I had gotten them. No one noticed the damage to the annual supplement, because I was the only one who bothered to look through it.
I developed an abstract language that replaced the stick figure images of bloated monsters and the flying saucers of my earlier efforts. Even if I didn’t understand the forces within the world of art that had led to abstract expressionism, I did comprehend the desire to bring order out of chaos.
From Vivian’s perspective, since art kept me occupied, it was a good thing. She managed to save enough money to buy me an oil painting kit from a mail-order catalog. From that day on, the organic odor of pigments and the aromatic waft of linseed oil filled the upstairs hallway. Lenny said the stink gave him a headache. Mandy actually fainted once as she stood at my door, knocking.
I can’t imagine what those first paintings would have looked like to a trained artist, but to my eye, they were in league with my heroes from the pages of Funk & Wagnalls. It was my goal to become a famous artist one day—a conviction that brought me into conflict with Mrs. Deshaw, whose expectations of art went no further than illustration.
One of our first exercises during “art period” was to reproduce the image of an elephant on graph paper. The exercise entailed the use of an overhead projector with a transparency of an elephant overlain by a grid with the rows and columns identified by numbers and letters. Mrs. Deshaw was only interested in our ability to trace the elephant’s contours.
“Use this as a guide,” Mrs. Deshaw instructed, pointing to the screen. “Match the lines of the grid with the graph paper and trace the outline. This will allow you to produce a scale image of the elephant.”
I had no idea what she meant, so I drew a freehand elephant. Taking liberties with my creature, I allowed the tusks to run off the page and, being a third grader, drew piles of dung on the ground under its tail.
Mrs. Deshaw was not amused. “I’m at my limit with you, Simon,” she said, loud enough for the entire class to hear. “You did not follow the assignment.” The woman ripped up my drawing and set down a clean piece of graph paper. “Now, do as I say! Draw by the grid method.”
I refused, folding my arms and sitting tight. A failing grade in art as well as deportment appeared on my next report card.
Although Vivian didn’t challenge Mrs. Deshaw about the failing grade in art, she didn’t believe it could be correct. Even the child psychologist praised the advanced quality of the drawings that I had produced during our sessions when compared to other children my age.
Lenny was more concerned about my failure in deportment. He punished me by demanding that I stay in my room for a week after coming home from school. I spent the time painting, except when Ernie visited. By that time, he had discovered a way to get into my bedroom by climbing the ancient wisteria that grew up a trellis pressed against the house. Since I now had my own room, he could be there and no one else would know.
After my grounding had ended, I was more inspired to paint than ever. I set up an easel in the dinette and sketched the withered sunflowers that drooped outside the window. Lenny arrived home when I was just beginning to apply color to the drawing. He threw his plumber’s toolbox on the floor with a loud crash. Vivian, who was busy chopping vegetables for our dinner, dropped her
knife, startled.
“Goddamn it, woman!” Lenny yelled.
Vivian yelped as if struck by a bullwhip. She had accidentally put too much salt in the string beans and was already on edge. Lenny stood at my easel and scowled. I dared him with my eyes to so much as touch my canvas.
Lenny turned to Vivian. “You’re going to turn this boy into a sissy if it kills you!”
Vivian broke into tears as smoke began to billow from a scorching pot of potatoes whose water had boiled away. That night, we ate TV dinners, something Lenny had grown to accept without Vivian trying to make him believe it was her cooking.
Mrs. Deshaw’s utilitarian view of art extended beyond reliance on the grid method as a drawing technique. One of her favorite tasks was to have students learn about color perception by altering the hue surrounding two squares of the same color. The exercise might have been useful to a graphic design student, but for a third grader, it served only to make art tiresome and boring.
Instead of following instructions, I drew pictures on my construction paper. Flipping the pages caused two animated characters to approach each other, one to kneel down, and then a stick figure penis to spring up. I didn’t anticipate Mrs. Deshaw roaming the room to monitor our efforts.
Mrs. Deshaw hovered over my desk before I had a chance to hide the drawings. She screamed as though a mouse had run up her dress, and fled the room to alert Mr. Klinghoffer. Within minutes, the two of them stood on either side of my desk and demanded that I fan through the pages.
Ernie knew what was going on because I had flipped the pages at him earlier, when Mrs. Deshaw wasn’t watching. He furtively made a circle with the index finger and thumb of one hand and poked through the circle with the index finger of the other hand. We should have been terrified, but we giggled. The other students, up to that point stunned by the ominous expressions on the faces of Mrs. Deshaw and Principal Klinghoffer, also giggled. The infectious laughter spread to the classroom across the hall.
