I Was a Child

by Bruce Eric Kaplan

  • • •

  MY MOTHER gave out pencils for Halloween. And sometimes Trident gum. She didn’t approve of candy. “The kids tell me they appreciate it,” she would insist, despite how hard it was to believe.

  We trick-or-treated right after school and were home before dark. When kids came to our door at night, I felt bad for them. They seemed to be leading very dangerous lives in which things were terribly out of control.

  There was one candy that you always got on Halloween and that no one I knew ate.

  I still don’t know what a Mary Jane is, but I know it’s bad.

  • • •

  FOR AT LEAST five years, this paperback book sat on my mother’s bedside table:

  I am not sure if she read it.

  • • •

  MY PARENTS had this book in the living room:

  Every Jewish person we knew did.

  • • •

  I NEVER went to one birthday party where anyone was hired to do anything. For a friend’s birthday in second grade, his father took three of us to lunch at Burger King.

  I was only invited to that kid’s birthday once. I was in his class that year and was his friend. Then summer came, and the following year I wasn’t in his class, so I stopped being his friend. That’s a real life lesson, but I am not sure what the lesson is. If anyone knows, please tell me.

  • • •

  LIGHTNING BUGS came during the summer. We put holes in jars and ran around capturing them. Sometimes the lightning fell off the bug, and that was sad.

  I feel a little weird when people call lightning bugs fireflies.

  • • •

  IN THE SUMMERS, Tuscan school would have some sort of program in which teenagers would teach you things. I made tons of God’s eyes each summer. After a while, the yarn would droop.

  • • •

  THE PROGRAM at Tuscan was only for a few hours. So every afternoon we would go to the Maplewood Community Pool. It was so, so crowded in that pool. It was like living inside a Richard Scarry book.

  Then some kid would have an accident and the pool would quickly get evacuated.

  It had been total noise and chaos, and now it was all quiet and very still as a lifeguard fished a little brown turd from the bottom of the kids’ end of the pool. I don’t know why it stayed at the bottom instead of floating, but it did.

  We watched the lifeguard like people watching a doctor perform a surgery.

  Then the pool would go back to being a Richard Scarry book.

  • • •

  IN THE SUMMERS, three movies would be shown outdoors in Maplewood Memorial Park. The names of the three movies and the three dates they would be shown would be posted on a colored flyer on a community bulletin board in the park.

  Thoroughly Modern Millie was usually one of the movies. And they showed The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming more than once.

  We dutifully went to every one of the movies, getting there early, sitting on our blanket, and waiting for nightfall. Then the movie would start and you would never be able to hear anything. It was like they were talking through water. Drive-in movies were the same way. The sound was never right. You sat in your car, straining to figure out what the actors were saying. “What did he say he was going to do?” someone would ask. “I don’t know,” someone would answer.

  I remember one drive-in movie where I was struck by the fact that we were all pretending that this was a good experience, but it wasn’t. That became a very familiar feeling.

  The most exciting moment of the occasional night-time drive home from Grandma Rose’s was being on the highway in Newark and seeing the Bruce Lee movies playing on the drive-in from afar.

  I never liked going to drive-in movies. I loved going to theaters, which were like magical temples. They were the most beautiful old buildings, with incredible moldings I would run my fingers over. The walls had murals, the ceilings were ornate, and the lighting was soft, coming from delicate wall sconces.

  As soon as you entered a theater, you were enveloped with the most soothing old smell, mostly of popcorn.

  • • •

  THERE WERE very few Disney movies, only old ones that would come back. And no new animated ones, just occasionally a new live-action one with Kurt Russell, like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. One summer I saw a commercial on TV for The Parent Trap. It was about Hayley Mills suddenly learning that out there, there was another her, which seemed like the greatest discovery of all time.

  I begged and begged my father to let me go see The Parent Trap. I guess he really didn’t want to go, because he finally said to me one day, sadly, “I wish I could take you, but it’s rated X.”

  “Oh,” I said, and dropped the subject. I knew that to take a kid to a movie rated X would be the worst thing anyone could ever do, actually against the law.

  Years later, The Parent Trap came on TV and we watched it together. He loved it.

  • • •

  MOST SUMMERS, we took a two-week vacation where we would drive around New England and go see tourist attractions. We never missed a cavern.

  When things got crazy in the backseat, my father would say, “I’m going to pull over to the side of the road unless everyone stops that right now!” It was as if nothing could be worse than pulling over to the side of the road. But to tell you the truth, I do believe nothing could be worse. If you pull over to the side of the road, then you can’t get to where you want to go.

  I remember being in a gas station and looking at other families parked at the other pumps, studying them. They seemed like real families and we seemed like we were pretending to be a real family. They were always in a station wagon.

  • • •

  WE SPENT a lot of time wondering if the motel rooms we would stay in would have Magic Fingers, which was a little box you put a coin in, then the bed shook for a few minutes.

  • • •

  SOME OF the rest stops had Moo-Cow Creamers at the tables. You could buy Moo-Cow Creamers at the cash register. I begged for a Moo-Cow Creamer, but my parents wouldn’t get one.

  Once I found a Moo-Cow Creamer up the street, magically sitting on a pile of someone’s trash on junk day. I grabbed it.

  When I came home with my Moo-Cow Creamer and told my mother where I got it, she said, “That’s disgusting,” and made me put it in our pile for junk day.

  • • •

  SUMMER NIGHTS you would watch reruns, but also summer TV series, which were more casual than regular TV shows. There were a lot of variety shows starring couples.

  My favorite was The Melba Moore–Clifton Davis Show, which began magically on a rooftop set.

  The summer variety shows were light and fun, sort of sexy, almost drunken—they were what all summers should be.

  When I was a little older, I watched That’s My Mama, starring Clifton Davis, which I loved, but it just wasn’t the same.

  • • •

  IN THE SUMMER, networks would show the pilots of series that didn’t get to be fall TV series. I loved those pilots and watched every one. You always understood why they never got to be a real TV show.

  I loved TV. I wanted to crawl in the TV and stay there permanently.

  I guess in a way when I grew up and became a TV writer, I finally did.

  • • •

  AT THE END OF SUMMER, we made a trip to Maguire’s, a small store in Maplewood, to get new clothing for school. It was as if that was the only time you grew. And we went to Millburn to Stride Rite to get Buster Brown shoes. I never understood who Buster Brown and his dog were, or what Buster was winking about.

  • • •

  IN SECOND GRADE, I was singing a song onstage in a Tuscan school assembly when suddenly I felt a heavy weight on top of me. It
was the kid above me on the riser, who had passed out.

  It was the first time I realized anything can happen—anything.

  • • •

  I THINK it was in second grade that I saw a production of Hansel and Gretel at Maplewood Junior High. The witch was played by my brother Michael’s friend Cathy Payson. As soon as Cathy Payson came onstage, I was driven mad by fright. I cried and cried at how scary she was. I had to be taken out to the junior high lobby. Nothing could console me. Afterward, my mother thought it would help for me to see Cathy Payson without her witch makeup and nose so I would know that the witch wasn’t real.

  It didn’t help. The truth is, I was experiencing the genuine horror of the story of Hansel and Gretel. Seeing Cathy Payson wasn’t going to do anything. The horror contained in the story still existed—it was much bigger than Cathy.

  • • •

  THERE WAS a commercial on in the mornings during Green Acres or Petticoat Junction in which a beautiful woman takes a bus to the Ritz Thrift Shop. A narrator explains some women sell their used furs there, others buy them. The woman tries one on and looks at herself in the mirror, happily transformed into a more moneyed person. She exits the store in her new coat and the narrator says, “You don’t need a million to look like a million.” The woman turns and says, “Oh,” with incredible delight, then, “Thank you.”

  Every time it came on, I was mesmerized by it. It was a very powerful message—this idea that you could change your situation, you didn’t have to settle for what you had, you could become more than what you were.

  • • •

  WHEN I was in third grade, my mother went back to work, and now my father was working from home. So he was in charge of my lunch. The options became a little more limited. Every day I had the exact same thing—one can of SpaghettiOs, into which I would dip several pieces of Wonder bread to soak up the tomato sauce.

  I got fat.

  • • •

  MY FATHER hated a woman named Regina Schnitzer. No one knew why, not even him. Apparently, she had never done anything to him personally, but he despised her. We talked a lot about Regina Schnitzer, but now I don’t know how we knew her or who she was. Maybe she lived in Maplewood, maybe she was someone he had worked with once—I just don’t know and never will.

  • • •

  WE SPENT an inordinate amount of time at Tuscan talking about Thanksgiving, almost as if that was the only thing we spent time on. Each year we relearned Thanksgiving.

  • • •

  NOW, each year my kids relearn Martin Luther King.

  They know more about Martin Luther King than anyone or anything else.

  • • •

  TUSCAN LOOKED like every other elementary school in Maplewood and South Orange. I suppose they were all Tudor. I thought it was very beautiful. The halls were enormous and the bathrooms had high ceilings. We would fold paper towels into squares, wet them, and throw them up at the ceiling, and they would stay there.

  • • •

  THE GYM at Tuscan had the most wonderful orange wood floor. The light in there was always orange, which, now that I think about it, was because of the floor. At the time, I didn’t realize that. I just knew at the end of gym, it would be sort of sad to come out into the world where the light was normal. I hated gym, though, of course. I never got all the way up the knotted rope that didn’t feel like rope because I guess it was covered with some kind of plastic. It reminded me of my uncle Martin’s couch, which didn’t feel like a couch because it was covered in plastic.

  • • •

  THE DESKS at Tuscan were covered in carvings, and people had written things on them. There was hardened gum and glue and other things stuck underneath them.

  Each desk had a hole toward the upper right meant for an inkwell, which we didn’t have. We just threw things into the little hole.

  Every classroom had a cloakroom, where you would put your coats, since no one had cloaks.

  • • •

  MRS. SARNO was my fifth-grade teacher. She was angry and seemed to hate children. She smelled bad when she came back from her cigarette break down the hall.

  • • •

  WHEN YOU watched Channel 13, the public TV station, you had to play with the antenna more than usual. But nothing ever really helped. You always got a double image. Everyone looked like they had a ghost.

  There were a lot of televised plays, most of them on Channel 13. Televised plays had an ominous quality. They were always on tape, not film, so things echoed. And people wandered around on what were clearly sets instead of life, and this made them all seem a little like they were trapped in a Twilight Zone episode.

  One play I watched on Channel 13 was called Monkey, Monkey, Bottle of Beer. It took place in the waiting room of a clinic, where four or five mothers sat talking while their kids were inside being examined by doctors. All the kids were mentally challenged in some way, and the doctors were going to figure out which ones would be selected for a magical treatment that would cure them. Or something like that.

  The pain of Monkey, Monkey, Bottle of Beer was almost too much for me. I remember barely being able to walk once it was over. I still think about those poor mothers, hoping their children would be different. I wonder if on some level, I felt that that was what my mother wanted for some reason.

  CBS aired a play called 6 Rms Riv Vu, about two married strangers who meet in an empty apartment they are both looking at. It was very poignant and starred Carol Burnett. It was so strange to see her not be Carol Burnett.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER was now a career counselor at Kean, a local community college. She brought home people’s résumés every night and sat in the living room, rewriting them for hours.

  Everything seemed to weigh on my mother. Anything at all was a burden.

  • • •

  WE DIDN’T have an electric lawn mower. Our lawn mower got older and older and rustier and rustier until finally you had to be a superhero to mow our lawn.

  Thankfully, there was only a tiny front lawn. Nothing really grew in the backyard, so a truck came and dumped woodchips over the part that wasn’t cement.

  We had a clothesline in our backyard.

  • • •

  Everyone did.

  • • •

  WE GOT Green Stamps with our groceries at King’s Market. Once or maybe twice a year, my mother sat down at the kitchen table with the stamps. I helped her lick them and put them in square books. They tasted awful. Sometimes my mother would put out a dish of water and we would sponge the back of the stamps instead of licking them.

  Then we would go to the Green Stamps store in South Orange and trade in the books for some household product, like a mixer.

  All our dishes came from Green Stamps, and they were ugly.

  Come to think of it, most things from Green Stamps were ugly.

  We got a digital clock from Green Stamps. It had numbers that flipped down every minute. The clock hummed at all times, then ticked as the numbers flipped. I stared at that clock as if it were a TV show. I just couldn’t believe it. My mother put the clock on the dresser in my parents’ bedroom, and it stayed there for more than three decades.

  Every clock in my parents’ house was fast. One would be eight minutes fast, another could be five minutes fast. Then we would have to spring forward or fall back and the numbers would change by a minute or two. You looked at the clocks, but you never really knew what time it was.

  • • •

  WE WENT to a grown-up movie every weekend or almost every weekend.

  My mother always bought Jujyfruits, like a child.

  • • •

  Some movies had a theme song with a name, then, in parentheses, it would say it was the Love Theme from the movie
. Occasionally the lead actress would sing the Love Theme, which was particularly satisfying.

  The Poseidon Adventure had a great love theme called “The Morning After.” Maureen McGovern sang, “There’s got to be a morning after,” which is true.

  I loved The Poseidon Adventure so much that I got the book out of the library. Movies either came from books, or if they didn’t, then they had novelizations that came after. I read books of many of the movies I saw and some of the television shows. The Poseidon Adventure was a little mature for me. There was a part in the book where the Stella Stevens character tells the Ernest Borgnine character how when she was a kid, all the neighborhood boys took her behind a fence and took turns. That was all it said. They took turns. I rolled that around and around in my head. I knew it was sexual. But what exactly did taking turns mean? It occurred to me it might mean they each had intercourse with her, but I dismissed that as it just wasn’t possible. I finally decided they all took turns feeling her up. It was all very exciting in a way, but also confusing, since I lacked confidence that I really had figured it out. The one thing I knew was because it was about something sexual, I definitely couldn’t ask my parents.

  So first you saw the movie, then you read the book, and ideally, a little later, you read the MAD magazine version of the movie.

  They had a great Poseidon Adventure. It was called The Poopside Down Adventure.

  We went to The Sting, and the movie had already started. I was beside myself. I had missed the coming attractions, plus the beginning of the movie. There was no way I was going in that theater. Somehow my parents got me to agree to go in. But when the movie ended, I refused to leave. I made everyone stay until the beginning of the next show so we could see everything we had missed.