I Was a Child

by Bruce Eric Kaplan

  • • •

  I WAS a Cub Scout, then a Webelo, but never made it to a Boy Scout. Every boy I knew was a Cub Scout and every girl I knew was a Brownie. But only the weird ones became Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. That was like going into the army.

  • • •

  MRS. BIGELOW was our Cub Scout den mother. We did little projects each week in her basement.

  Once a year, there was the Pinewood Derby, where everyone took a tiny piece of wood and made it into a car, then they all raced and someone won. Fathers were supposed to help you make a Pinewood Derby racecar.

  It involved sawing the block into a carlike shape, sanding it down, painting it, and adding little car decorations plus weights to make it go faster. It was totally beyond my father’s capabilities. David Carcia’s father had to help me make mine. I sympathize with my father. If I had to deal with making a little car for the Pinewood Derby today, I would kill myself.

  • • •

  MY FATHER was always worried about “the thieves” who were coming to take the things we had that had no value that were in our house.

  “Did you remember to lock the door?” he would say to me or one of my brothers. “In case of the thieves.”

  I always had an image of a group of men that was waiting outside our house at all times, in case someone forgot to lock the door.

  • • •

  I GUESS he used the plural to mean one thief or another, because really our house would be a one-person job if it was any job at all. But in my mind, it was a group that all worked together in perfect unison, each assigned a complex task that only he could do, like in a heist movie.

  There was not one single thing in our house worth taking. My mother had a jewelry box with a few brooches and one or two necklaces worth ten cents.

  • • •

  BEFORE my father went to bed every night of his life in that house, he checked the lock on the front door and then he would go down the back stairs to check the side door. The side door had a normal deadbolt lock, but also had a little latch higher up. It was just a tiny little hook on the frame, that latched into an eyehole on the door.

  I am swearing to you that he did not spend one night in that house without also making sure that the little hook was always in the eyehole.

  I wonder how that latch even got there. It was meant to be on a bathroom door (like the one that was in the tiny bathroom off our kitchen) or on a screen door (like the one on the screened front porch in the front part of our house). There was no way this latch offered any protection from anyone. One big push and it would have come flying off the door.

  Yet he had to hook the latch every night, and later, when we were teens, on the rare times that we got to use our one family car at night and were the last ones to use the side door, we had to hook the latch, too, or he would be upset.

  • • •

  THERE WAS an annual school fair at Tuscan. Every year, I won a goldfish. It was always very exciting to carry it home in its bag and then very sad when you flushed it down the toilet a few weeks later.

  • • •

  MY PARENTS would never get TV Guide. They acted like it was beneath them. As soon as I was old enough to get an allowance, I bought TV Guide every week. I went every Tuesday to the stationery store to get it the day it came out. I got it before the people who had subscriptions to it got it. I pored over it, reading every word. Once a year, there was a really special issue of TV Guide.

  It was so thick. It was like a book. Every new TV show got a page with a picture and information about it. I pored over that thing for hours.

  I not only saved the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide. I saved every issue of TV Guide. I put them in boxes in the attic and would sit up there sometimes, lovingly rereading them. Sometimes instead of a photograph there would be a portrait by an artist on the cover, and that was special. I loved the portrait of Rhoda and Joe, one of television’s most compelling tragic couples.

  It was obvious that there was something big and exciting about each fall TV show. It wasn’t like that with the midseason shows. They were more like unloved children.

  Hot L Baltimore was a midseason show produced by Norman Lear, who was second only to Barbra Streisand in our house. We watched everything Norman Lear did. His shows were entertaining, but also, as my father would say, “they were about something.” I loved Maude but never understood why she wore what she wore.

  • • •

  I WAS vibrating with excitement for Hot L Baltimore. Saul Kirschner was sleeping over at my house Friday night. Hot L Baltimore was premiering at nine and we were going to watch it. We talked about it all week.

  Then my parents saw a commercial for it. At the end, it said that the show dealt with mature subject matter and parental discretion and judgment were advised. The male voice-over in the commercial was very serious, implying the severity of the harmfulness of not adhering to his words.

  There was no way Saul and I were allowed to watch it.

  “I am going to watch it,” I said to my mother firmly. She explained calmly about mature subject matter and why it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to see it. “I am going to watch it,” I said over and over again, as she became less and less calm.

  Finally, she just started crying.

  In the end, I didn’t watch it, and I don’t think Saul even slept over.

  • • •

  SAUL KIRSCHNER’S mother was an artist, unlike any other parent I knew. She was a ceramicist who displayed her work on pedestals in their living room.

  • • •

  EMOTIONS were a confusing thing for me, and still are. “I’m not angry!” my father would shout, when you asked him if he was angry.

  “I’m not upset!” my mother would say in an upset way, when you asked her if she was upset.

  “I’m upset,” I would tell my father, who would say firmly, “You’re not upset.”

  • • •

  I THINK I loved the clarity of emotions on television. Everyone was what they were. I loved how direct Ricky and Lucy were, even when they were not being direct with each other.

  Of course, I loved I Love Lucy and saw every episode over and over again. I found it heartbreaking that Ricky got to be famous and have an exciting life at the Tropicana while Lucy was stuck in that terrible apartment with the Mertzes. Her pain was too much for me.

  I guess I identified. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t think, Why did I get stuck in this house? It’s not that it was such a bad house or the people were so bad. It just seemed like life was elsewhere.

  I Love Lucy seemed to verify everything I could see around me and on other TV shows. New York held excitement, having glamorous places to go, like the Tropicana.

  Los Angeles definitely was exciting because you could meet famous people. Those Hollywood episodes were like going to Heaven. Finally, Lucy was in a beautiful living space having fun with people like Harpo Marx, who was one of my biggest obsessions.

  There was so much truth and beauty in the sequence where Lucy is dressed like Harpo—where do you begin and I end?

  • • •

  AND IN THE END, just like life, I Love Lucy got boring once Lucy and Ricky moved to the suburbs, which seemed the most accurate statement of all. They just sat in that big Connecticut farmhouse and nothing was happening, nothing at all.

  It was just a lot of corny furniture.

  • • •

  THERE WAS a commercial on TV starring Madge the manicurist, who would be talking to her customer about how soft the dishwashing liquid Palmolive was on one’s hands. In fact, she would tell the unassuming customer, “You’re soaking in it right now,” and the woman would pull her fingers out of the liquid with a start.

  So much was happening in the Palmolive commercial. First, there was a lot of fear th
en about dishpan hands. You heard about it a lot, and you didn’t want it. Second, the idea that something that was supposed to be harsh on your hands was instead soothing was mind-blowing. Last, there was the betrayal that Madge, someone you could trust, could have you soak your sad hands in dishwashing liquid. And she was so damn happy about the betrayal, she really was.

  Maybe it had such a strong effect on me also because my mother had the saddest hands, as if she had done hard field labor her whole life.

  My mother was always smiling, but her hands were the truth.

  They looked like red claws. They often had white bubbles on them from where she had burned herself. “Careful! That’s hot!” she constantly said to us. Yet she was the only one who ever got burned.

  My mother spent so much time in the kitchen but was never at ease there. She was just getting through it.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER made us the thinnest sandwiches of all time—two pieces of white bread, a tiny bit of mayonnaise, and one slice of deli meat, usually bologna.

  • • •

  IN THE BATHROOM at the Maplewood Memorial Library, there was graffiti in the stall. It said “For a Good Time call . . .” and then there was a girl’s name and number. I studied that name and number every time I was in there. There was also a drawing of a penis with a mustache on it for some reason.

  “For a Good Time call” this person or that was often in bathroom stalls. Once I got to high school, I occasionally knew the person the graffiti was talking about. When you saw her carrying her books down the hall, it was as if you saw someone who was famous.

  • • •

  NO ONE I knew had a knapsack. We just carried books in our hands.

  And you covered the textbooks you got for the year with a cut-up brown paper bag from the supermarket. Then slowly you covered every inch of that brown cover with doodles or words or whatever.

  • • •

  I WATCHED Summer of ’42 whenever it would come on. When I was little, I saw it on the Friday Night Movie. Then when I was older, it would be on the ABC Sunday Late-Night Movie, which began, freakishly, at 11:45, as if there were no rules.

  Summer of ’42 was about a teenager who is in love with an older married woman. They have a kind of friendship, but then she gets a telegram that her husband is killed overseas, and, grief-stricken, she sleeps with him.

  Nothing seemed lighter than the clothes Jennifer O’Neill wore in that movie. It was as if they were going to fly off her at any moment.

  • • •

  ONCE WHEN we were on vacation, my mother was sitting on the edge of the motel swimming pool and I saw strands of hair coming out of her bathing suit.

  • • •

  I NEVER understood my parents’ marriage. It almost seemed arranged. Marriages on TV seemed much more fun and sexy, like Bob and Emily on The Bob Newhart Show and Sally and Mac on McMillan & Wife.

  • • •

  THERE WAS a commercial on TV in the mornings that had pictures of extremely attractive couples doing fun things. A chorus sang, “Have a fine winter time in the Poconos, at your host with the most in the Poconos . . . Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge.” There were even red bathtubs shaped like hearts for the couples.

  The people who got to use red heart-shaped bathtubs seemed to be leading very different lives from my parents’.

  • • •

  WE HAD only one working record player in the house, and that was in Michael’s room. Michael got to pick his wallpaper, which had green geometric design with little mirrors in it. There were psychedelic posters on the walls. Over his bed, the members of Creedence Clearwater Revival stood in a forest, glaring at me. It smelled sort of dank in Michael’s room.

  I felt very adult when I sat in the big green chair that was positioned opposite the record player and listened to my music.

  Once the stuffing started coming out of the chair, a big blanket was thrown over it to solve the problem.

  When I sat in there I felt a little nervous, as if I were assuming the role of a teenager before I was really ready, and then one day I was.

  • • •

  “YOU NEED something to fall back on,” my mother said, when I was picking my classes freshman year of college. Both my parents insisted I take a computer class.

  No one I knew at college had a personal computer. You wrote your papers on electric typewriters, or in my case, a manual typewriter.

  You had to really hit those keys hard if you wanted to write anything.

  It was the same typewriter both my brothers had used at college and my father had used many years before. It came in a mustard-yellow case.

  If you made a mistake on the typewriter, you used a ton of Wite-Out or used correction tape, which never really worked.

  No matter how hard you tried to fix whatever you were trying to get rid of, you could always sort of see the mistake.

  • • •

  I LISTENED to my parents and signed up for a computer class the first week of college. Every night I went to the library that week and stared at my computer-class workbook. I am not sure what was in the workbook, because it didn’t involve actually using a computer. Whatever was in there, it drove me mad. I just couldn’t get my brain to understand it. Every night I left that library wanting to kill myself. Then I dropped out of computer class and felt much better. I took a course in French Surrealism instead.

  • • •

  NEITHER of my parents believed it was possible to get what you want. I had some painful conversation with them about doing something impractical with my life when I finally screamed, “If one person in the world is doing that job, why can’t I be that person?”

  Many years later, my children’s preschool teacher told me the main thing you should tell your children is that you can do it.

  She said, “Just keep saying those four words over and over to them. About everything. ‘You can do it.’ Because they can.”

  • • •

  A FEW YEARS AGO, in a yoga class, a teacher told us all to jump up and forward from downward dog, as if we were about to take off and fly. She shrugged and said in a matter-of-fact way, “Maybe you can fly. How do we know you can’t?”

  • • •

  And I agreed with her. We don’t know we can’t.

  • • •

  IN HIGH SCHOOL, I loved The NBC Mystery Movie, particularly Columbo. Often the villains were brilliant, creative, passionate people who were being tortured by some dullard intent on squelching their creativity or passion or essence in some way, so, like an animal, they lashed out and killed them.

  • • •

  I always understood and loved them.

  • • •

  I THINK I was petrified that I would never have a real life. Instead, I would be stuck in my parents’ house forever, like they were, like everything was.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T FEEL confident that I would ever get out, but then when I was seventeen, the simplest thing happened and it changed everything. People started getting driver’s licenses. I would be stuck in my parents’ house doing whatever, and then I would hear a honk, which would mean one of my friends was outside waiting for me.

  I swear that honk changed everything. You just got up and you left and you could go anywhere.

  • • •

  THE FIRST SUMMER after college I came home and worked in the Short Hills Mall in a children’s shoe store, where I sold Strawberry Shortcake shoes.

  • • •

  I NEVER spent another summer at home, and even stopped coming home for school vacations during the year. I loved being on campus when everyone was gone. I love being anywhere empty. There was a commercial for Coffee-mate, a nondairy creamer, when I was a kid about a man who comes to stay in someone’
s apartment and discovers Coffee-mate on the shelf.

  He was all alone, just him and his thoughts, and it seemed like heaven.

  • • •

  AFTER COLLEGE, I moved across the country to Los Angeles. The first week there, I found the palm trees unnerving, but now I think they are beautiful.

  • • •

  I LIVED in several apartments in Hollywood, but finally settled into one in a beautiful Spanish courtyard building, similar to where Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame lived in In a Lonely Place, one of my favorite Channel 9 Four O’Clock Movies.

  It was like I had been planning to live there my whole life.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER retired when she was sixty-five and promptly learned she had lung cancer. She immediately got one lung removed and then started treatment.

  When I was visiting her at Sloan Kettering, I took a wrong turn and I was in a hall where everyone around me had an oxygen tank.

  • • •

  AFTER a few months, the cancer came back and spread. It was sad that she retired then didn’t get to retire.

  I was visiting my parents when one night my mother had stomach pains and went to the emergency room of Saint Barnabas Medical Center. She never went home. The cancer was everywhere, and she quickly started to decline. Every day she looked worse and worse, until finally she was virtually unrecognizable from who she had been.