Weeds in Bloom

by Robert Newton Peck

  There wasn’t another American Hero Trojan ever vulcanized that provided more pleasure than this one. Neither a French Tickler nor an Arabian Stallion. Mine, by sheer rubbery endurance, stretched time into a championship of chastity.

  At age seventeen, prior to entering the Army, I considered taking it with me. For an enlisted soldier, it seemed that one American hero might luck out and employ another.

  Instead, I stowed it among my assorted souvenirs of youth, left it behind, and marched away to war.

  Upon returning, I found it. The aging process had taken its toll. My perennial American Hero had retired to little more than a puny parcel of dust. Perhaps, I mused, I’d offer it to the Smithsonian, finally to prove my manhood.

  Yet it isn’t easy to part with a cherished keepsake.

  Though I considered establishing an Old Trojan’s Home, I didn’t relish the thought of having either Mama or Aunt Carrie learn the sordid truth of my reckless and feckless past. So, with an appropriate ceremony, I dug a hole and buried it.

  There, beneath the pristine Vermont topsoil, an American Hero still lies, a silent tribute to my unintended innocence, a monument to an eventual moral revolution that I had inadvertently spawned.

  I had conceived Safe Sex.

  Joe

  NO ONE REALLY KNEW HIM.

  Or wanted to, because he smelled worse than a wet barn dog. Yet everyone in town recognized him.

  Joe was an orphan. If he’d had parents, they’d up and disappeared years ago. Few people knew or cared how old Joe Galipo was. Perhaps not even Joe himself. Bone scrawny, he was close to my size; I was coming up ten or eleven.

  Miss Noe, the constable’s sister, would sometimes feed Joe, scrub him, burn or bury his filthy clothes, and supply him with a fresh outfit from the back-room stockpile at the Methodist church. Her brother, whenever he could collar him, escorted Joe to our school. Miss Kelly allowed Joe to sit anywhere he wanted: in winter, near the black upright woodstove, and in spring, close to the door. Whenever her back was turned, he ran away.

  Joe lived anywhere and everywhere, surviving any way he could. People claim he stole food, yet few could righteously object.

  He tried to keep out of sight.

  Rarely would he appear on Main Street. His home, if it could be called that, was a back alley. Joe moved in shadows, darting from one hiding place to another. Rather than being a child, he was a stray cat.

  Miss Noe claimed that Joe would talk to her. But on any rare day when he was in school, he never spoke word one.

  Joe was considered simple. People used the word slow. Because he was thought to be the village fool, nobody offered to adopt him, or take him inside. Time and again, Joe Galipo was chased out of barns for fear he’d stupidly light a match in the straw. In cold weather, Joe added layers and layers of clothing items around his body. When frightened, he ran, his rags flapping like broken wings.

  A few of our local youngsters were cruel to Joe, cornering him to bully. To them, it was a kind of outdoor sport. Seeing this made me angry, but I was too small to do much about it. Except yell.

  Joe Galipo never talked to me until I started giving him eats. I wouldn’t walk up to Joe and hand him anything. But once I discovered one of the places where he slept, behind the boarded-up old Opera House, I’d leave an apple, a raw potato, or a tin can full of fresh milk nearby, where I figured he’d find it.

  Once I found the empty milk can with a penny in it. A silent payment.

  “Thank you, Joe,” I hollered behind the Opera House. “I’m Rob.”

  I sort of guessed, or hoped, he heard me. Soon after, he let me see him and didn’t run away. He just stood in his soiled garb and stared. I smiled at him, raised my hand to a howdy, and Joe smiled back. When I tossed him a cucumber, he dropped it, stooped to retrieve it, and scurried off.

  Perhaps, I reasoned, Joe wasn’t stupid. Just silent. Maybe because he might be deaf. I was wrong. Joe Galipo could hear, and speak. He just didn’t have any cause. When I asked Miss Noe about him, she told me that Joe could talk, and was possible smarter than a lot of our other citizens. But then she explained that Joe didn’t converse with a normal voice. He had a stammer. Miss Noe thought it was because Joe was afraid.

  Joe wasn’t the only Galipo in town.

  We had two families of them, living over by the lead mill, close to the crick. The Galipo kids, both families, weren’t very friendly. And to Joe they were meaner than a sin on Sunday. His worst enemies. Miss Noe claimed they considered Joe an embarrassment, giving any other Galipo a bad name. To them, Joe was just a dirty joke.

  Years passed.

  When I was thirteen, Papa died, and we lost our farm soon after. Then there was only Mama and Aunt Carrie, and me. A good neighbor stopped by with an empty wagon. We loaded what little we had and moved into town, into two tiny rooms above a feed store. Mama found work, taking care of two elderly women. I took odd jobs. Aunt Carrie took sick.

  We squeaked by.

  As often as possible, I still sneaked food to Joe Galipo. We got to be friends. I handled most of our conversations. Joe didn’t have anything to say, but I knew he trusted me. One afternoon, Joe got roughed up by some of our local thugs. I found him in the alley, alone, curled up on the gritty ground and holding his belly like it hurt.

  “I’m your friend, Joe,” I told him.

  He actual spoke my name.

  “Rob … you an’ Miss Noe. You’re … you’re my only friends.” His voice sounded puny. The words didn’t come out very plain, but at least he was saying something. “I got a secret,” he told me. “Do you want to see it? But don’t tell nobody about my secret thing. I never tell Miss Noe.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show ya.”

  I followed him.

  Behind the beat-up old Opera House, a place that hadn’t been open to the public since I could ever recall, Joe loosened a few rotted boards. We crawled inside. It was dark, spooky, and smelled musty. My face met a spiderweb. Secret or no secret, all I wanted was to leave.

  “I sleep here,” Joe said. “And it’s where I talk. Alone. I talk all the time. Like people.”

  Moving more boards, Joe allowed some light to sift inside. As my eyes adjusted, I saw we were on some sort of a stage. There were ratty curtains and hanging ropes.

  “Here,” said Joe. “Here it is.” I watched him remove a large tarp of canvas off what appeared to be a big box. He lifted up a lid. “It’s my piano,” Joe said.

  There it was. Joe Galipo had a piano but no family. I had a family and no piano. It made me smile. Nobody gets it all.

  “I can play it, Rob.”

  Blinking at him in disbelief, I asked, “You can?”

  He could. Joe sat on a bench, placed his hands on the black-and-white keys, and played a little song. Something I’d never heard. It sounded pretty as flowers. All the way through to the end.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s really good. How’d you learn to play a piano? Who taught you?”

  “Me.”

  “You taught yourself to play it?”

  Joe nodded. “It’s so easy. The hard part was fixing all the sour noise.” He showed me an old pair of pliers. “With these. Took a long time to tight up the wires inside. But I done it, so all the sounds mix together.” He grinned at me. “You wanna learn?”

  “Boy, do I.”

  “Watch. And listen. It helps to look at first. But now I don’t have to look no more. I can play at night.”

  “Show me again.”

  Joe’s left hand played a low note.

  “Down yonder,” he said, “is the father. See where my little finger is? Then, five notes up, is the mother. Press ’em down together and they get married.” It sounded like a bagpipe. Yet it was correct, as if Joe actually knew how to do it. And how to teach me. With his right hand, Joe played a few higher notes. Three, then four. “Up here. These are the children. All together, they’ll make up a family. They’re my family now. Hear
‘em? They all love each other.”

  The way he explained it, in such a sweet way, made me almost want to cry.

  As we stood on that dirty old stage, the piano wasn’t so important anymore. Joe sat there, moving his hands around, playing one family after another. The father and mother sounded so strong, and the higher-up kids so happy. They tinkled away like laughter.

  Day after day, Joe taught me how to play his piano. We made up our own melodies. He had given names to many of the notes on the keyboard. Below, fathers and mothers, plus uncles and aunts and grandparents. Above, his brothers and sisters, nieces, nephews. Some of Joe’s notes were puppies and kittens. And away up top sounded the mice and sparrows.

  I learned to play. By ear, the Joe Method. Today I can play anything I hear. Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Cole Porter, and my favorite, Scott Joplin’s century-old ragtime and blues.

  What happened to Joe?

  I don’t know. Returning home from the U.S. Army (an enlisted high-school dropout) after World War II, I scouted around for my former friends and located most of them. But no Joe. The old unused Opera House, originally built right after the Civil War, had been torn down and carted away to make space for a Piggly Wiggly. And now even that is no longer there.

  Miss Noe was elderly, bless her heart, and couldn’t remember either one of us. Or even her brother.

  Well, wherever you are, Mr. Joe Galipo, I hope you have music, and a home where there are songs of laughter and kindness. Plus a whole bunch of kin. Lots of notes with names. On that day long ago when I learned about Joe’s talent and brains, I also discovered his true secret, what he longed for most of all.

  It wasn’t a piano.

  PART II

  Early Manhood

  Mr. Gene Autry

  IT WAS 1945.

  I was a proud seventeen-year-old private in the United States Army. I’d enlisted but didn’t yet need a razor. About to be shipped overseas.

  There was another soldier in our unit, a corporal, who had a cousin who knew Gene Autry. I mean really knew him. Mr. Autry, even though many times a millionaire, had also enlisted and soldiered a few years in Burma. He now had an Honorable Discharge and was about to resume his astounding career in Hollywood.

  Corporal Smith told us that his cousin could persuade Gene to visit our camp.

  Nobody believed him.

  Until that unforgettable evening when we assembled, and guess who appeared. A gentleman who (before he retired) was a cowboy star in almost one hundred movies. As a child, I recalled seeing Gene Autry’s records featured in full-page listings in every Sears Roebuck mail-order catalog. And now here he was, in person. With us.

  Age seventeen, en route to WWII Italy.

  Mr. Gene Autry.

  He wore rather plain cowboy duds, nothing with fringe or spangles. Waving his guitar to a thousand cheering guys, he stood on some crates and boxes, a makeshift stage, and charmed us. Mostly with songs about home.

  He sang “Mexicali Rose.” It’s a waltz about returning to a pretty gal, a back-home somebody to love and miss, and maybe never to see again.

  “You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven” was next. More of the same. One heart longing to be true to another, far away.

  Gene told us that his raising was in a little old place called Tioga, in Texas. He liked baseball and attempted to play a saxophone, but switched to a guitar because he so enjoyed singing. His grandpa had been a Baptist minister. I’d lost my own pa when I was thirteen. You might understand how much I appreciated Gene’s song “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine.”

  In honor of his grandfather, Gene asked us if we’d mind hearing one or two of his favorite hymns. Nobody objected. He sang “Amazing Grace” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

  Plenty of big strong guys were sobbing.

  There was a shine in Gene’s eyes too. No one yelled, or hooted out any smart-mouth remarks. A war has a way of bringing men closer to God, and closer to one another. I recall placing a hand on the shoulder of a buddy who sat beside me and was wiping his eyes.

  Gene told us about Champion, his black horse. He called him Champ a lot. We listened as though it were a prayer meeting.

  In the front row, a young, small-of-stature soldier relaxed, closed his eyes, and drifted off to dreamland. Gene noticed him and grinned, placing a finger on his lips, asking us not to disturb him. Then he sang the slumbering little soldier a special lullaby: “Go to Sleep, My Little Buckaroo.”

  He told us that he couldn’t sing it near as well as another cowboy, Mr. Dick Foran.

  Listening, we were no longer stationed at an army post. Instead, we were little boys again, going to sleep in a familiar bed, hearing our mothers hum. Gene Autry let us fondly remember the purity of childhood, though none of us could ever return. To you, it may sound corny. But I was there, my dears, and that evening was as genuine as the corn on my father’s farm.

  Sweet corn.

  If you’re inclined, you ought to refresh your spirit sometime and listen to the music of Mr. Gene Autry.

  He was a lot more man than a war hero and a rodeo rider. For us, it was almost as good as a furlough. And it tasted better than any beer in a barroom.

  Gene also had an easy way of making us all laugh, especially when telling us about how he was first learning to pluck a guitar. A pal came ambling along, winced, and said to him, “Gene, unless you quit pickin’ that thing, it’ll never heal.”

  He told us about his comic sidekick and friend, Mr. Smiley Burnette, a chubby guy who was known on the screen as a character named Frog Mulhouse. One time, just for laughs, Smiley rode a white sway-back horse in a rodeo parade. Later he met up a pretty gal.

  “Did you see me in the parade?” Smiley asked her.

  “Yup,” she said, “I saw ya.”

  “Well, did I make a big impression?”

  “Yeah,” she replied. “On the horse.”

  Gene said it was all so amusing that they decided to include that bit in a movie, and did.

  Years earlier, Gene told us, another famous cowboy was one of the people who encouraged him. The cowboy’s name? Mr. Will Rogers. Will, according to Gene, could really spin a rope and make it whistle.

  Gene sang “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Carolina Moon.”

  He said that Smiley Burnette could sing too, and doggone well. Smiley could do a real funny song entitled “Oh, I’m Going Back to the Backwoods.” Gene wouldn’t sing it, though, because he claimed it was Frog’s highlight and he couldn’t do it justice. There was nothing uppity about Gene Autry. He admitted that he could ride and rope but couldn’t act worth a spit.

  But we knew one truth about that gentleman. He was a star!

  At the end of his presentation, Gene sang the song that most everybody remembers his doing: “Back in the Saddle Again.” If any cowboy tune could be a prayer for a bunch of homesick servicemen, and women as well, this was it. He sang it really slow. His benediction.

  “I’m back in the saddle again.

  Out where a friend is a friend …”

  I was seventeen.

  Now I am over seventy, but I can still hear the lyrics to the magnificent ballad, sung by the grandson of a Baptist preacher, and be baptized back into boyhood. A pity, but I never got to crowd forward and shake Gene’s hand on that special evening, to offer him my personal gratitude. Best I do it here and now, even though the star is in his Blue Heaven.

  Thank you, Mr. Gene Autry, for being able to make a lot of men feel like back-home boys.

  Dear Elliot

  I MET HIM AT THE TAIL END OF WORLD WAR II.

  Elliot was eighteen. And I was seventeen.

  He hailed from a hometown with a funny name. The Bronx. At first, I figured it had something to do with rodeo stock (broncs), until Elliot explained that it was mostly a zoo. His pa, Elliot told me, was a presser in the garment district. Mine had killed hogs.

  Were you to take a charcoal and paper and sketch a 4-F (an Army reject), you’d have Private Elliot L
eftowitz, a born civilian. Short, squat, behind fogged glasses with lenses thicker than the bottom of Coke bottles. His pupils were twin hockey pucks. Somehow, he’d been drafted and inducted. A military miracle.

  Between the pair of us, he was the one who shaved, but only following a very convincing request from Sergeant Malliniak.

  Elliot, I suspected, doubted my sanity and was forever asking me the same question: “You enlisted?”

  We endured Basic Training at picturesque Fort McClellan in Alabama, both of us in olive drab, in keeping with the current fashion that season. Elliot was issued an Ml rifle. They never got along. Everyone else stood at attention with heels together, toes apart. Elliot placed his toes together, heels spread. An only child, he’d never before been away from home. When marching, always at the rear of our platoon, he looked around curiously, blinking, squinting, bumping into things and apologizing.

  Sergeant Malliniak called him “the tourist.”

  Elliot often received a letter from his mother. He shared all of her letters with me upon learning that my mother was illiterate and wouldn’t be writing.

  Dear Elliot …

  Don’t touch any guns. Unless you plan to grow up and become a criminal. Be sure to eat. If you’re hungry at night, remind the sergeant that I’m a taxpayer and he should fix you a snack.

  Sergeant Emil Malliniak never fixed us snacks. He fixed bayonets. He was from a bayou in Mississippi, and when he barked out a nasal order, neither Elliot nor I had a clue as to what he wanted us to perform. So we both jumped around like crazy, pretending we understood.

  “Rob,” Elliot whispered to me in the barracks late one night, “I found us an interpreter.”

  “Can we eat it?”

  “No,” said Elliot. “I got us a guy from Mississippi, in the next bunk already.” (Elliot ended sentences with already, but don’t ask me why. He was rarely all ready for anything.) “He understands when Sergeant Malliniak snorts.”