Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  Our littlest brother, Collin, was randomly named “Neil.” This made him mad for reasons we never understood but since it seemed to work we stuck with it. Even the oldest brother Kip was assigned a nickname: “Toe-Pay-Deh,” the scrambled pronunciation of potato, a shape Jeff maintained precisely described the silhouette of Kip’s head. Kip, in turn, noted that Jeff’s ears made his head resemble a taxicab with the doors open and dubbed him “Tax.” Jeff’s friend, Chris Hallenbeck, appreciated the poetry of “Tax” but referred to Jeff as simply “Debbie.”

  As for me, Chris decided I was “Buggen,” a name derived from “Flying Rug” (Sprinters flew through the house). It then became “Ruggen” and finally Buggen.

  Referring to a big brother by his nickname resulted in “chesties.” To give someone chesties you pinned them to the ground with your knees holding his arms out of the way, and rapped the knuckle of your middle finger on his sternum for ten minutes. It didn’t hurt at first but after five minutes of steady rapping it seemed prudent to call your brother by his given name.

  * * *

  Out in the front yard, we played games that hurt people.

  In the winter, our front yard became a Currier & Ives print done by Quentin Tarantino. We created a vicious brand of snowball pressed to the density of croquet balls. Creating such ordnance took fifteen minutes of packing and squeezing after which we misted them with water and put them in the freezer for an icy sheen. If a snowball could somehow be made in Hell, this was it. Parking one of these babies between the shoulder blades of a retreating brother was a satisfying experience and when one of us came in the house crying, within a half hour his parka was back on and he was out in the yard using his anger to squeeze a new snowball to the density of a diamond.

  In the summer, we played a short, rule-free version of football called “Smear.” The object wasn’t getting touchdowns, making passes, or even winning. It was about smearing the guy who had the ball.

  Five brothers lined up on one side of the yard and kicked off to a lone brother who – standing way down at the other end of the yard – appeared an inch high and extremely vulnerable. The single offensive player had one shot at getting a touchdown and this never happened because all games of Smear ended 0-to-0 with somebody crying.

  Smear wasn’t about the guy who had the ball anyway. The ball itself didn’t matter either; he could have been carrying a portable radio. In fact, even if he dropped the radio and tried to run into the house, the defense would pursue because Smear was about landing on a brother with great force. If there was any art or strategy to Smear it was in creating the dog pile that ended the game. Everybody (and his brother, in this case) piled on, sometimes leaping from six feet away until the ball carrier was pressed to groaning breathlessness at the bottom of the heap.

  As we grew older, the stakes went up. In 1964, one of us received a BB gun as a birthday gift. (We’d all whet our appetites for target shooting with Dad’s .22-caliber rifle.) After a chorus of whining from the unarmed brothers, another three or four BB guns appeared on the grounds of the Millstone and the Great BB Gun Wars of ‘64 began. Sometimes there were teams, but allegiances were built on sand. A brother who felt safely part of a group one minute could suddenly become “it” and be peppered with BB’s which stung like wasps.

  Somewhere in our sweaty little brains remained a small group of perhaps four or five brain cells which recognized the possible injuries from shooting BB guns at each other. So we called a truce while we designed eye protection. We fashioned masks by bisecting the round plastic tops of gallon jugs of ice cream and fastening the semi-circle to our heads with string. But in order to see, we cut eye holes. That these holes exposed the very thing we were trying to protect never entered our heads. Neither, fortunately, did any BB’s.

  The little brothers were content to conduct the Great BB Gun Wars in the horse pasture and Low Forty, but Jeff and Chris Hallenbeck took to staging their fights at an abandoned farmhouse. Jeff remembers dashing from window to window shooting at Hallenbeck as he tried to make it across the barnyard, up to the porch and inside. Out in front, Hallenbeck fell to his knees and screamed, “Oh, God! My eye!” Jeff, white in the face, ran out to help the crouched figure and at the sound of his footsteps, Hallenbeck brought up his rifle and made it rain copper.

  Their Three Stooges nyuk-nyuk-nyuk abuse of each other continued long after a truce had been called. Returning home in the car, Jeff shot Chris point blank in the ribs. Later, when Hallenbeck and Jeff were experimenting with methods to take the sting out of the BB’s, Jeff tried on a leather jacket, turned his back to Hallenbeck and told him to shoot. Hallenbeck shot him in the calf.

  The stakes were raised yet again when brother Chris discovered that a wooden kitchen match fit snugly down the barrel of a BB gun. The match flew a good 50 or 60 feet and on striking rock, popped like a cap and fell burning to the ground. Experimental launches at the back of a brother’s head, though satisfying, never struck fire and the fad soon passed. It did, however, spark a new idea: if a person were to quietly borrow Jeff’s bow and arrow and then perhaps tape a cherry bomb to that arrow, might it not make for a pleasant afternoon’s diversion? Thus, the Gemini space program was honored in the Sullivan yard with multiple launches of the sleek, exploding rockets. The supply of cherry bombs usually ran out before the arrows and the remaining arrows were recommissioned for a new game, “The Parabola of Death.” In this game, you shot an arrow straight up into the Minnesota sky and then stood there blinking at your brothers – Where will it land? – playing Chicken with ballistics, gravity, and skull trauma.

  The 80-foot fir trees along the east side of the yard were another source of ordnance. The cones that fell from them had none of the heft or distance of snowballs and so combatants simply paced off a distance of ten feet and pelted each other. In one cone skirmish (with a local kid named Chris but whom we called “Fudd”) hostilities escalated until Fudd retreated across the road from the Millstone and hid in the sumac. He was out of range of our cones so I switched artillery and lobbed a golfball-sized rock into the bushes.

  Most childhood injuries are announced after five seconds of complete silence.

  So it was with Fudd and about five seconds after my rock disappeared into the bushes, he began to wail loudly and when he came out he was holding exactly one half of his big front tooth in his hand. Fudd ran home, combatants scattered, and rice-paper-thin alibis were constructed.

  I was fingered and though I do not remember my consequences, I recall having a solemn little discussion with an insurance agent where I was deposed on the events leading to Fudd’s injury. I don’t remember what I said but looking back I wish I’d confessed, “Yeah? Well, a rock isn’t the worst thing I ever whipped at somebody’s head anyway. That would be the bowl of my own piss I threw in my brother Chris’s face.”

  All boys fight, but by 1964 the unhappiness and anger that ran through the Millstone seemed to amplify our confrontations. As Dad got sicker and drunker, our fights – once flurries of anger – fanned into day-long rages.

  Of the six of us, Chris and I were the most vicious adversaries. When he was thirteen and I nine, my age represented everything Chris had grown out of. He was a Prince. I was just a Sprinter.

  * * *

  Memory: I am “Little-Brother Man”

  Little-Brother Man’s power to create rage in his victims is legendary. Today he uses the popular Copy Cat power.

  Chris screams, “Stop saying what I’m saying!”

  “Stop saying what I’m saying!” echoes Little-Brother Man, now holding a finger one maddening half-inch away from Chris’s ear.

  Chris screams, “Stop touching me!”

  “I’m not ‘touching’ you.”

  “It doesn’t matter! Just stop it!”

  “It doesn’t matter! Just stop it!”

  * * *

  Little-Brother Man did not list force-fields among his powers and was pummeled regularly. Once you’d been beaten up and were crying,
it was the victor’s turn.

  “Oh, so you’re crrrryyyyyyying now?” taunts Chris. “Are you gonna go running in your diapers to Mommy?”

  As much as you wanted to go to Mommy, honor forbid it. You had to just stand there in the sun and bawl. You tried to move away to recover in private but a clever adversary would pursue. Just looking at you now as you cried would consecrate the victory, bring the rage anew, and through your tears you’d yell, “Why dontcha come closer so you can get a better look, huh?! YOU WANT A CAMERA?!”

  It was one of these exchanges that led to the Bowl-Of-Piss-In-The-Face Incident. Chris had enraged me with some horrible comment I no longer remember and I retreated to brood revenge. Some evil sister to the Muse of Creativity visited and whispered, “Hey, why not get one of those small metal cereal bowls, you know, the ones up in the cabinet over the sink? Why not get one of those, piss in it, and throw it in his face? … I’m just sayin’.”

  That this act seemed reasonable to me and that I carried it out is testimony to the level of anger that boiled in the Millstone by the summer of ’64.

  The same muse must’ve visited Chris a few weeks later because that was the summer he came up with the idea of “Poison Ivy Squirt Guns” – a horrid little invention that should only be spoken of in the classic mad-scientist cackle: “It’s aliiiiiiive!”

  To prepare Poison Ivy Squirt Gun solution, Chris donned his mother’s dishwashing gloves (“Playtex living gloves, so thin you can pick up a dime!”) and went into the hills behind the Millstone. There he harvested a bucket full of the shiny three-leaf plants and brought them back to his mad-scientist laboratory. Perverting a page from his Gilbert Chemistry Set, he poured rubbing alcohol into the bucket and boiled the whole mess down to a solution he hoped would be the essence of poison ivy venom. This he poured into the hole on the stock of a water pistol. The exact formula of Chris’s weapon and its effects on citizens has been lost to history and, considering the lessons of Los Alamos, perhaps that is best.

  The anger that burned in every room of the Millstone in the summer of ’64 was also evident in the black turn our humor took. The Ridiculous Films developed special effects that made deaths gorier. ’64 was the year my best friend, John Maynard, and I created the “Horror Club.” At school, members of the Horror Club tried to outdo each other drawing the grossest possible torture chambers and dungeons. (“Here’s the conveyor belt where you get chopped up and here’s where the chunks drop into the vat of boiling goat urine and rat guts.”) Hours and hours of this grim stuff.

  Grim, too, where the things we did to our G.I. Joe doll. Poor old Joe would represent some person who had offended us and for this he had to die. We found a hangin’ tree to string ‘im up and carefully measured the drop, cutting the string the exact length to stop Joe’s 10-foot fall one gory inch above ground. When Joe wasn’t “doin’ the Air Dance,” he’d find himself spread-eagle on a dartboard. Today, old Joe is in pieces somewhere in the landfill outside Rochester. But considering the risks taken in our other games, how we his tormentors survived is the mystery. Especially after we learned how to light our hands on fire.

  We’d discovered the lighter fluid for Dad’s Zippo made an excellent sort of sidewalk pyrotechnic. Spray a line along the walkway, set a match to it, and you had just the kind of movie-fuse that whooshed down the mineshaft towards the villain’s dynamite. When some fluid spilled on my hands and poofed to flame along with the fuse, the blue fire surrounded my hand and burned briefly on its own fumes before becoming painful. One-sixteenth of a second after learning how to set my hand on fire I learned it could be put out by slamming my hand under an arm pit. So armed with this new knowledge, I approached poor old Mrs. Buttert with my hand on fire just to see the look on her face and was amazed to see how fast somebody that overweight could move.

  With the Zippo fluid now hidden from us, we turned our scientific energies to other projects. We decided the big tree stump near the garden had to go. Heading into the garden shed for the axe, we came out with a shovel and a gallon of gas. We dug a moat around the stump, filled it with gasoline, and the job foreman struck a match.

  Wait, cried the job safety manager. Let’s water down the area around the gasoline.

  As we prudently doused the area with the garden hose and congratulated ourselves on our caution, we didn’t notice the gas simply spread out over the top of the water and now covered the entire garden. This oversight was soon brought to our attention.

  The whoooosh-explosion could be heard from inside the house and when Mrs. Buttert looked out the window she saw the four of us through a wall of flame a story high, our images bending like summer taffy in its heat.

  Whatever Mrs. Hartman and Jeffreeeeeeeeeeee thought of the huge plume of smoke next door is lost to history. Lost also were four pairs of eyebrows and any memory of how we walked over the lake of flame and escaped the Great Garden Explosion of 1964.

  A smaller explosion took place in the basement that summer. I’d determined the batteries to our toys needed to be recharged. All that was needed was for some enterprising young scientist with buck teeth to figure out a way to pour electricity back into the batteries.

  Thesis: If one were to snip off the cord of that old lamp in the basement, strip some insulation to expose the wires, plug it in and then touch the two live wires to either end of a battery, should not the empty battery simply “fill up”?

  Results of experiment: When the battery exploded, the seam of its silver casing was facing away from me and so it was the wall above Dad’s workbench that was spattered with hot battery acid, not me. Had the battery’s seam been facing other way, this book might well have been titled The Horrid Face With Buck Teeth.

  After a long day of torturing G.I. Joes, defoliating the garden, and playing with crackling workshop electricity, nothing quite hit the spot like a good cigarette. By 1964, I was in fourth grade and smoking regularly. With two friends, I formed the “LBJ Club” (for Luke, Bill and John, as well as a tip of the hat to the country’s new President). We’d steal our parents’ cigarettes and gather behind garages, in culverts or in barns to smoke.

  The act of smoking, of putting flame to dried weeds and taking the toxic gasses into my pink fourth-grader’s lungs was unnatural and the first inhalations produced wet coughs forceful enough to resemble regurgitation. Of all the insane things we did at the Millstone, this one came closest to killing us.

  I wonder what Mom was thinking when this shot was taken on a tense little family trip to north Minnesota in the summer of 1964.

  LEAVING THE MILLSTONE

  My father’s Mayo Clinic psychiatric record, November 17, 1964

  The patient Dr. C.R. Sullivan consulted me on this date regarding marital problems ... It would appear that he never drinks during the day but in the evenings when tensions rise, his drinking complicates the total situation.

  By fall of ‘64, Roger’s drunkenness reached a level that even Mom, thick of skin from years of abuse, could no longer bear. The night’s booze had begun to linger on Dad’s breath when he arrived at work the next morning. His boss, Dr. Mark Coventry, weighed in expressing concern and now with pressure from two sides, Roger grudgingly agreed to see a Mayo psychiatrist. “But he is very slippery about any promise to stay with him,” warned Mom in a letter to Florida.

  Two problems made this effort futile. Alcoholics are fabulous and convincing liars. And psychiatrists are not chemical dependency counselors.

  Roger lied to his psychiatrist, minimized the amount he drank, and attributed the few thimblefuls he did drink to having a hysterical wife. His psychiatrist believed the lies Roger told him and so his conclusion was essentially written backwards. Where the psychiatrist wrote

  But in the evenings when tensions rise, his drinking complicates the total situation.

  his logic flow should have been

  But his drinking in the evenings makes tensions rise and the total situation is not complicated … dude’s an alkie.

  Ther
e are no records of any subsequent visits Dad made to the psychiatrist and it’s likely he broke the promise almost immediately. Given the treatment model of the times, it hardly mattered.

  On Thanksgiving Day, 1964, just nine days after the psychiatrist made those notes, Roger’s drinking “complicated the situation” again; he went on a bender and we had to leave the Millstone, this time abandoning the holiday turkey on the kitchen counter. The seven of us had our Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant of the Howard Johnson’s hotel downtown and managed to have a good time of it. “It was classic us,” remembers Chris. “We didn’t know whether to weep or burst out laughing. So we laughed.”

  The Ho Jo dining room was empty except for one large nearly identical family sitting on the other side of the room. No father sat at their table either and we assumed they also were alcohol refugees, sharing what Chris described as “a sort of generic grief in our culture, but still calling it their family’s own.” There were stolen looks and the occasional eye-lock while we muddled through another broken evening telling jokes, making fun of Dad, and jabs at our own emotional itinerancy. We relished the dysfunction of it. Being different was cool.