Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  As my mother wrote, “There is too much and nothing to say.” The murder of JFK painted America black. Yet on the very day – November 22nd, 1963 – something good happened too, an ocean away. On that day, Parlophone Records released an album by a new “pop” group titled With The Beatles. And on February 8th, 1964, the band flew to the U.S. on a Pan American jet to save the entire country.

  It was Kip who brought home the Beatles’ first American album. I remember seeing the Capitol Records logo going around the spindle, that gristly hiss as the needle found the outside groove and then in the opening two seconds all six of our lives changed. Because there was Paul McCartney timing the opening of I Saw Her Standing There with his British num-bahs: “One, Two, Three, FAH!” and everything changed.

  “Happiness, too, is inevitable,” wrote Camus and when Paul hit “FAH!” so it was. Happiness came as if from behind a cloud and shone on a nation wrapped in parkas and grief and suddenly it seemed okay, if just for a minute, to be happy again and that even Jackie might lift her black veil and smile at the sound.

  In that One, Two, Three, FAH! we discovered a quality of being which would change us and remain with us the rest of our lives. We had discovered Cool and its name, The Beatles.

  To fourth-graders with buck teeth (who looked like Ernie Douglas from My Three Sons) cool was something entirely new, surprisingly.

  Sean Connery was cool playing Double-O Seven, yes; so was Spider-Man. They did cool things, had cool powers and gadgets. But that’s just it – they had and did cool; the Beatles were cool. They were the embodiment of cool; cool given flesh, cool that drew breath, told jokes, created music, and made entire stadiums full of girls go all wobbly.

  The way they walked out on stage, the way they stood between sets on The Ed Sullivan Show, the cheek of their press conferences, their cigarettes at rakish angles. It was all so incredibly cool even Ernie Douglas’s like me were set to squealing in the sheer release of energy found in Cool. We’d never seen anything like it. The subtle rebellion of their tongue-in-cheek, their conspiratorial air, the ju-jitsu responses to questions from reporters with short haircuts – it all fascinated us as much the music.

  Q: “What do you call your hair style?”

  A: “Arthur.”

  Q: “How did you find America?”

  A: “Turn left at Greenland.”

  Until now, the most sophisticated comedy we’d seen was what we now remember as “Dad Humor” – Dean Martin in Vegas making shitty, thinly veiled jokes about big boobs, or Sid Ceasar’s seltzer in the pants. Beatle wit appealed to our intelligence. With the right turn of phrase and a deadpan delivery we could laugh up our sleeves at the adult world. The Beatles were, above all else, cool.

  The Beatles’ brand of coolness became our cosmology. Cool wasn’t binary, cool was quantum. You could be a little cool, kinda cool, or very cool. Each age bracket got you to a new level. In fact, discrete levels of coolness had been firmly delineated by the arbiter of cool, brother Jeff – in descending order it went: Studs, Aces, Princes, Sprinters, and Dolts.

  Studs were Totally Cool. The Beatles were Studs; so was Steve McQueen. According to Jeff, a stud was “never perturbed by anything, never asks for help, and the fact that women can’t resist a Stud simply doesn’t occur to him.” Studs were so beyond cool they didn’t even know they were Studs.

  Aces, on the other hand, knew they were Aces. Aces were cool guys but not the gods Studs were. Lucas McCain in the opening credits of The Rifleman – and the cool way he looked into the camera while reloading – was an Ace. The Beach Boys were also Aces, but only when they sang their fast songs. Though Jeff didn’t come out and say it, we little guys assumed Kip, Jeff, and their cool friend Chris Hallenbeck were all Aces.

  A Prince, on the other hand, was a self-conscious Ace – “an Ace who smiled about it,” according to Chris Hallenbeck. A Prince could conceivably do something as cool as an Ace, but then laughed and looked up for approval while doing it. Dick Van Dyke or Soupy Sales, they were Princes. So was our brother Chris, who was too young to be an Ace and too old to be the next one down the list, a Sprinter.

  I was a Sprinter. Irritating little kids pretending to be Spider-Man, running around the Millstone, stealing cigarettes, and air-strumming The Pagans’ guitars were Sprinters. Sprinters were just way too excited about everything. They were the wagging dog-tails of an Ace’s world, swinging wildly about and knocking stuff off the tables. Sprinters suffered from a syndrome known today as “Assumption of the First Person Plural;” a condition which made us tag along behind the Aces asking, “So, where are we goin’? What are we doin’?”

  Bringing up the rear were Dolts. The only example of a Dolt Jeff ever provided was Hoss Cartwright from Bonanza. (You didn’t wanna be Hoss.)

  Once we had seen the Beatles, being cool was all that mattered. The old icons were dead. JFK was gone. Elvis was in shitty Hawaiian movies. Even Paul Hornung, my halfback hero on the Green Bay Packers had fallen from grace (something about gambling that I never quite understood, but he was dethroned nonetheless).

  Copying the Beatles was all that mattered and the easiest part to copy was the hairstyle. Dad didn’t allow us to let our hair get as long as the Beatles’. But we occasionally managed to grow our bangs down to our eyes and that was all the length we needed to perform the coolest move in the book – the “Hair Flip.” Brushing hair out of your eyes with your hands was for Sprinters. Cool guys simply flicked their head very quickly to the right – WHIP – preferably while saying something in a flat monotone that conveyed, “Everything that I have seen or heard since waking up at noon today has bored me.”

  A monotone delivery of the wise-guy line was key to pulling off cool. Some of this ironic remove we learned from A Hard Day’s Night. Some we cribbed from old Laurel & Hardy movies.

  Jeff perfected Laurel & Hardy’s deadpan humor with his best friend, Chris Hallenbeck. Chris was the son of the Mayo Clinic’s head of General Surgery, the man recruited to remove LBJ’s gall bladder (surgery made infamous by the Life magazine photo of the President showing his scar to startled reporters). Jeff and Hallenbeck would mimic the comics’ famous deadpan as they visited destructive pranks on each other. Hallenbeck would walk up to Jeff, rip the pocket off his shirt and quietly hand it back to him. Jeff would look up at Hallenbeck, blink, and rip his shirt pocket off. Throughout the exchange there would be no knowing smiles, no twinkles in the eye – just cold retribution. Hallenbeck took one of Jeff’s prized silver dollars, opened the window on the top floor of the Millstone and threw his coin far down into the weeds near the forest. Jeff, channeling Stan Laurel, obediently watched the dollar’s arc into oblivion. A pause. Without a word, he’d produce scissors and cut the laces to Hallenbeck’s shoes. Hallenbeck would sigh and walk silently back to this home down the road from the Millstone, carrying his shoes.

  Even we little ones were learning the sublime joys of schadenfreude. At the stone barbecue pit down in the large half-acre of back yard we called the “Low Forty,” we enjoyed watching each other’s marshmallows catch fire and plop into the coals. To see your own treat browning to caramel perfection while your brother’s bubbled, blackened, and slid hissing into the flames was deeply satisfying.

  This cheerful disrespect for anybody that wasn’t you, and anything that wasn’t yours, applied to everybody – including our dad. Jeff remembers sitting on the back porch with Kip on a hot day in the summer of ’63, drinking iced tea. As they cooled their heels they could hear their hard-working father grudgingly mow the lawn in a distant part of the yard. The sleepy drone of the motor came to metallic hacking end as Dad ran over one of his own workshop tools, carelessly abandoned there in the tall grass by one of his sons.

  At the report of this sound, Kip and Jeff began laughing into the straws of their iced tea, producing bubbles.

  To hear your father run the lawn mower over one of his own tools was – in my family anyway – hilarious. Had we been standing right next to my father w
hen it happened, it wouldn’t have been as funny. But heard from a distance you could interpret an entire story in one hot-summer metal-on-metal sound – how one of the father’s prized workbench tools was borrowed without permission, left to rust in the rain, concealed by growing grass, and then ruined by his own hand, even as he dulled the mower’s blades. It was funny not just because we were all angry at Dad. It was more the graceful economy of its symbolism packed into one CLANG of finality. A sound of somebody “losing,” of somebody being further behind than they were a minute ago, reduced in some way. It was classic victim comedy.

  * * *

  Watching the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night gave us the idea of making our own funny movies. They were all victim comedies and we called them “The Ridiculous Films.” They were shot with an old 8mm movie camera that Dad had given up on and if they had a theme it was “Sprinters Getting Killed.”

  Their structure was classic.

  We open on our protagonist, a fourth-grader with buck teeth strolling along in front of the Millstone. In Act II, the antagonist is introduced with swift and economic story telling – brother Jeff comes around the corner with a baseball bat and beats the shit out of me. (A pillow hidden in the victim’s coat allows for the delivery of many cinematically robust and satisfying blows.)

  The fourth-grader collapses on the driveway.

  Had the film ended here critics might have rightly argued the work lacked finality; that the entire piece was ambiguous and left the audience asking, “What, ultimately, happened here?” But Act III ties up the storylines in a tidy denouement. Thanks to a cleverly wardrobed body double, when the camera rolls again we see Jeff driving Dad’s car over the crumpled form of the Sprinter. Fade to black. (Cut, actually; there’s no fading with a Brownie movie camera.)

  Audience test scores were off the chart. Squeals of delight filled the living room when the little 50-foot reel premiered on Dad’s projector. “More blood,” demanded the audience and a sequel was released the following month (after we talked Mom into getting us a new roll of film).

  What might now be called “Dead Sprinters II” built on the original’s success and used the same opening: fourth-grader stands in front of Millstone. But this time it is brother Dan who enters screen right, grabs the victim and throws him into the house through the open door. The camera, still running, pans seamlessly up to third-story window where a stuffed body double suffers the indignities of defenestration and thuds on the pavement below.

  Where’s this going? a savvy audience might ask. Will the narrative clarify the victim’s back-story? Who is he, really? What issues in his past led him to this development? Act III, while answering none of these questions does address the test audience’s earlier suggestion for “more blood.” A crowd encircles the protagonist, now lying unconscious on the concrete. They’re lining up to pay Dan a quarter. But for what, dammit, what?

  It’s the rental fee for the baseball bat, making its second appearance in the Ridiculous Films. As the curtain falls on Act III, the brothers pound the bejesus out of me.

  * * *

  “It’s all so very easy to laugh at oneself. What we must learn to do is to laugh at others.”

  So said comedy writer Michael O’Donohue and this ability to look down on others was held in high regard by the six brothers.

  Living directly to the south of us was a little boy, Jeffrey Hartman, five-and-a-half years old. Jeffrey was not only a Sprinter, he was a Momma’s boy. Almost all of his short visits to our yard ended within minutes of his arrival with the shriek of Mrs. Hartman calling him back home.

  “Jeffreeeeeeeeeeee?!?”

  It was the way Jeffrey’s high-pitched mother hung on the last syllable of his name that gave us the idea for The Jeffrey Game, which was all about lung capacity. Whoever could hold the last syllable of Jeffrey’s name the longest, won. The fact that Mrs. Hartman, no less Jeffrey, could hear us over in our yard playing The Jeffrey Game never once crossed our minds.

  “Jeffreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!”

  The Beatles had set true north on our compass of coolness. And now anything that wasn’t cool demanded our scorn; the way people dressed, the sound of their voices, their weight, it was all comic fodder.

  One summer we focused our derision on the babysitter. She was a kindly overweight old lady named – and this is the part we loved – Mrs. Buttert. This irony sent us into paroxysms of Sprinter glee. There was “Butt” in her name. There was also “Butter,” as in lard-ass. It was a rich comic vein waiting for our genius to be mined. Eventually, all you had to do to make a brother laugh was to point at something flat. Flat meant “Mrs. Buttert sat on it.” Flat frogs dead in the road were suddenly funny – “Mrs. Buttert’s pet frog.” The nickels we’d flattened on the railroad tracks were funny – “Change from Mrs. Buttert’s back pocket.” Kids are cruel, we more than most, and if there’s a Hell it’s likely there’s a reserved table for six there, with a helpful and instructive card waiting in the middle – SULLIVAN PARTY. In our defense, unlike The Jeffrey Game, we didn’t make fun of Mrs. Buttert within earshot.

  We did, however, go to great lengths to vex her. In metal shop at Central Junior High School, Chris discovered that 30 pieces of tin, cut to the size of a potato chip, would when dropped create a sound very much like glass shattering. We’d wait until Mrs. Buttert was settling in to a comfortable chair and then, in a distant room, drop the 30 pieces of tin.

  Mrs. Buttert would come bustling into the room to find Chris quietly reading, the tin now concealed under his shirt. She would look about, raise an eyebrow, and retreat to her chair again and just as her ample rear married with cushion – CRASH! – the sound would happen again. Chris reported later that after five repetitions the subject seemed to accept the idea that shattering glass was, in the Sullivan house, simply ambience and began to ignore it. Harder to ignore was the night we locked Mrs. Buttert in her room so we could watch TV.

  Lock isn’t actually correct. The Millstone’s ancient doors all locked with an old-fashioned skeleton key, cold and about the length of a cigarette in your hand; and Mrs. Buttert kept the only key in her apron pocket. So to keep her from discovering we’d all sneaked out of bed to watch Laurel & Hardy, we rigged a series of ropes around her bedroom doorknob, looped it through the stair banisters, and tied it off with one of Kip’s Boy Scout knots.

  As the six of us watched TV and talked, we discovered her name sounded even funnier when you burped it. We practiced this in chorus, drinking green bottles of warm Coca-Cola pilfered from the midnight pantry to fuel our effervescence.

  “Mrs. Buuuuuuuuu–tert.”

  On the houseboat in Winona, Minnesota, 1964.

  Collin, family friend Tim Desley, Chris and Luke.

  RAT HELICOPTERS

  If you were bad in a previous life, you came back as a bug in our yard.

  Any anthill inhabited by the stinging red kind was subject to, forgive me, “The Red Anthill Solution.” This usually involved a magnifying glass or peeing on the colony, and it brought more joy than pest control ought to bring. Fireflies, too, were sacrificed matter-of-factly to produce glow-in-the-dark war paint. We were kinder perhaps to larger animals, like Caesar, but sooner or later every living thing at the Millstone was a Comic Victim. One game involved a cat and a tire swing.

  One of us would hold our cat, Mr. Brown, in our lap and sit inside the tire’s arc. A brother would then slowly rotate the tire, which soon knotted the rope like a balsa-wood airplane’s rubber band, and then let go allowing the tire and its occupants to spin into a propeller blur. When it came to a stop, Mr. Brown was placed on the ground and the drunken zigzag our poor cat made was, to us, the zenith of comedy.

  One summer we realized our pets didn’t wear clothes. They were, in fact, naked. Just watching the dog walk to his water dis
h became funny. Watching Mr. Brown walk away, his tail high and that one eye winking back at you, brought us crumpled to the floor in laughter.

  Another day, while feeding a carrot to our horse Coppersmith, we noticed his lips didn’t quite entirely shut. In their resting state, Coppersmith’s lips formed a small circular hole which made the horse look like he was whistling. To bring this comic image to life, you stood in front of Coppersmith and looked at his lips while a brother stood behind you and whistled the theme from The Andy Griffith Show. We spent hours doing this.

  Another cruelty I blush admitting to was “rat helicopters.” To make a rat helicopter, you held a bed pillow with hands at either end. You put your pet rat in the middle of the pillow and bent it inwards, enclosing your rat-a-naut in its fold. Then, with a quick and hard outward yank the rat popped up about two feet in the air and, to stabilize its flight, the poor thing would rotate its tail round and round, completing the effect.

  “Hey guys, look! Rat helicopters!” (I know, I know. But we were kids.)