CHAPTER TWELVE The end of summer opened the door into high school and the beginning of my ongoing battle with the school librarian.
Fred was the first place I had ever lived where there was no library. (Not counting the library in the elementary school, which barely had enough books to bury a rotund misanthrope on a go-cart.) Nobody else seemed to feel the lack of a ready source of fresh reading material as keenly as I did. I was certain that M also would have been appalled. Every time I scanned the meager shelves I thought of M and our reading sessions in the attic, and the library began to feel like a lonely wasteland. I avoided it altogether and instead turned to buying books in used bookstores. However, the high school library afforded a greater selection.
Strangely enough, given my love of reading, I had an adversarial relationship with the school librarian, Miss Thermopolis. I viewed her as a manuscript miser, a hoarder of books who was loath to let even one volume escape the confines of her domain. Perhaps my perception was influenced by the fact that I kept trying to check out books by British authors, which were reserved for the senior reading list.
I would skim through the stacks for interesting titles. When I finally found one that sounded promising, I would take it to the desk only to discover that the author was British. One reason I read so much Ray Bradbury, besides the fact that he was an excellent writer, was because he wasn’t British, so I was allowed to check out his books.
I tried several times to check out Animal Farm, but George Orwell was British. (It wasn’t his fault. Unfortunately for me, that’s just where his parents lived when he was born.) Even when I buried it under other books, the gimlet-eyed librarian, jealously guarding her reading lists, would snatch it from the stack with a withered claw. Actually, although she was an old maid, she didn’t really have a withered claw. I just came to visualize her in terms of the Wicked Witch of the West, so all my interactions assumed Ozian flavors.
“You can’t check that out. You’re a freshman and this is a British author,” she would say for the bzillionth time. However, I heard a nasal screech say, “Oh, no, my little pretty. Thought you could sneak it by me, did you? Well you can just die of boredom. And that goes for your little dog too!”
But my determination could not be thwarted by a mere librarian. Or even an exalted librarian. I orchestrated a daring mission to appropriate Animal Farm from her evil clutches. Actually, all I did was sneak a look at the schedule, come in during her lunch hour, and check it out from a library assistant who was less assiduous in guarding the rights of senior class readers. I was feeling pretty cocky until I took the book to one-act-play auditions. I was in the process of regaling a fellow thespian with the tale of how I had finally outwitted Miss Thermopolis when his face assumed a strangely desperate expression. I followed his gaze over my shoulder to find the W. W. of the W. herself standing behind me, staring at the copy of Animal Farm on top of my books. I had forgotten that she was also the one-act-play director.
“Did you check that out?” I heard a “my sweet” echo in the cold gloom of the auditorium.
Realizing my mistake, I gulped and nodded slowly, “Yes, ma’am.” I longed for a bucket of water with which to melt her.
She peered at me through her trifocals. I was afraid she was going to blast me in a shower of sparks, or at least impound the book, but instead she said, “It’s not about animals, you know. It’s a political satire.”
“Yes, I know,” I replied, a bit miffed at the slight to my intelligence. I guess it wasn’t her fault. I was probably the first freshman from Fred to stalk Orwell so vigorously.
Ultimately, in my efforts to satisfy an insatiable appetite for literature, I swallowed the bitter pill that began its diabolical work in my vitals—the seed of skepticism that splintered my foundation even more soundly than the AM radio.
Deep within the bowels of the stacks perched on edge between shelves in a back corner, I unearthed an ancient copy of The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories by Mark Twain. It was fifty years old and looked as if it had not been touched in almost that long. It had lain dormant for half a century, as virulent as the day it had been penned at the turn of the century. In my efforts to read everything by my namesake—a quest inspired by M on the historic day he met the Creature and preserved me from destruction by mail truck—I thought I had exhausted the meager resources of the school library. This book wasn’t even listed in the card catalog.
I carried it to the desk with barely suppressed exhilaration. The W. W. of the W. seemed to sense my mood. She scrutinized the book suspiciously but was forced to allow me to check it out. Twain was undeniably not British. I repaired to the Fortress, half expecting flying monkeys to appear and confiscate the book. Getting as comfortable as I could, I settled in for a good read to the strains of “Sympathy for the Devil” mixed with much static and “Poke Salad Annie.” The book opened tamely enough with the jumping frog story that I had read many times in literature anthologies for school. As it progressed, however, it became darker and more disturbing, until I at last came to the title story.
It was about a kid and his companions in the sixteenth century who met an angel named Satan. No, not the Satan, but his nephew, who was named for his famous uncle before he became the black sheep of the celestial family, as it were. The angel dazzled the kids with miracles, such as animating the clay figures they had made, but then dismayed them by “murdering” the miniscule creatures with careless ease as if he were killing an ant. The boys, and I, became more bewildered as the angel conferred a confusing mixture of blessings on villagers that resulted sometimes in wealth and happiness, sometimes in imprisonment and death. By the time I got to the last chapter I had become suspicious that this Satan was more than a namesake—he was the genuine article, incognito. I expected the last chapter to unmask the impostor for who he was and have him banished to his rightful reward in the place prepared for him. Instead, he told the boy that there is no God and that life is only a bad dream. The final page of the book left me aghast:
“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons, ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .”
“You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.”
“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought— a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.
I turned the page to see an e
mpty blankness. I flung the book from me as if it had burned my hands; it tumbled through the branches to the ground. We were a long way from Tom Sawyer now! I was ill-prepared for such vitriol from such a powerful writer. For all my devouring of his works, I knew nothing of his mercurial life, which had been filled with pain and had ended in solitude and bitterness. And, of course, I had never read any philosophy or apologetics, which would have enabled me to see the fallacies rampant in this tirade.
Despite the warmth of the afternoon, I shuddered as if a chill finger had traced a line down my backbone. What if it were all true? Dad, Mom, Heidi, Hannah, all nothing more than a dream? Did I dream Pauline Jordan? How could I have invented in my own mind something as foreign to me as Fred, Texas?
But then again, I was also just a part of the vagrant, useless thought. Something else was thinking it. What could that be? And how can an object of a thought be able to think about itself and the thinker? Trying to follow that paradox made my head feel like it was full of cotton wool. I abandoned the attempt, retrieved the book, and secured it in the ammunition case, sealing it as if it were toxic waste. When I got the overdue notice, I dipped into my Grit proceeds to pay the fine. For reasons unknown even to myself, I couldn’t part with the book. I kept it hidden in the Fortress of Solitude, stashed in the ammo case with Pauline’s Bible, like a worm hidden in the apple, or a snake lurking in the garden.
The disturbing thoughts plagued me in moments of doubt and weakness, but I didn’t speak of them to anyone. Certainly not to Dad. I felt as if I had already committed some kind of blasphemy just by reading the book. Not to Mom, Heidi, or Hannah. It wasn’t the kind of conversations we had. Not even to Old MacDonald, my Sunday school teacher, since I was now in high school. How would it look if the preacher’s kid started questioning the existence of God and everybody else in the room? I could only imagine what would happen if that got back to the deacons.
Not that Old MacDonald ever raised such weighty questions on Sunday mornings, which were typically exercises in tedium and self-amusement. There was a reassuring ritual to the Sunday school classes that Mac and Peggy taught. We typically self-segregated according to gender, goofing around until we were called to order with a perfunctory prayer, our lesson booklets and Bibles in our laps as we sat in the metal folding chairs. The beginning of the lesson consisted of a text read by some hapless designee, followed by a skit read from the booklet by cast members selected at random by Peggy. The theme of the lesson firmly established by these two didactic devices, the gender segregation was reinforced by the girls and boys separating to opposite ends of the room, a collapsible divider snapped firmly into place.
In the private sessions, we took turns reading verses of the Scripture and paragraphs of the accompanying commentary printed in the booklet. Questions followed, read by Mac and answered under compulsion by various laconic teenage boys. Sarcasm and non sequitur, offered sparingly by the PK, served to lighten the ennui. For the PK, at least.
Peggy may have led a much more stimulating experience behind the vinyl partition, but the venue simply didn’t lend itself to Mac’s personality. In spite of the torture we occasionally visited on him, we gave him an E for effort (does anybody know what that means?) because he made up for it in the various extracurricular events that were the real substance behind the show. These included swimming trips to Honey Island, fishing trips to Uncle Herbert’s camp house on the Neches River, and cookouts at the MacDonald family farm.
Mac and Peggy poured their hearts and lives into our frantic, confused, and often miserable teenage existences, celebrating with our infrequent victories and commiserating with our too frequent failures. They seemed to actually care about the outcome of those things that were so monumental to us but inconsequential to most of those around us, sometimes even to our families. It was as if they infused significance into our lives when we felt woefully insignificant.
Mac wasn’t much at preaching the gospel, but he was a pretty good hand at living it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN After a few weeks of high school, I decided that the time had come for drastic measures. In a bold move, I modified my wardrobe in one clean sweep to nothing but Levi’s. And, in a stroke of brilliance that I later regretted, I went directly to the office before first period, canceled my business class and transferred to Ag!
In band I was telling Jolene about my schedule change when I stopped in midsentence, unable to speak. Jolene followed my gaze across the room to a girl with short brown hair, green eyes, and a halo hovering over her head. Well, maybe Jolene didn’t see the halo, but I did.
“Hello?” Jolene looked at me. I didn’t say anything. “Is this the Warren Stare-Down Open? What’s yer handicap?”
“Wha . . .”
“That’s Becky Tuttle. Don’t you know her?”
I shook my head. The rest of the hour was a blur. In the hall I stood nonchalantly next to her and gauged her size. I thought my arm would fit very nicely around her shoulders. The very thought gave it spasms and I dropped my books.
Becky was a year younger, which meant we didn’t have any other classes together. A lesser man might have been daunted and abandoned the enterprise right there, but I was consumed with a passion that laughed at such petty obstacles. I made another trip to the office to change my art class to typing. This strategy ultimately proved to be a good one. Although it didn’t help me get to first base with Becky, I did learn how to type.
Actually, it’s amazing that I learned to type at all, considering the fact that I spent more time looking at Becky than the Gregg typing chart on the wall. The keys on the typewriter had no letters on them. We had to look at the chart on the wall to find out where the letters were. I never did memorize the keyboard, but I memorized every detail of every visible feature Becky possessed. When she wasn’t looking, I stared at her with such intensity that I’m surprised it didn’t change her hair color.
I studied her like I had discovered a new element on the periodic table. I memorized her full name, address, phone number, class schedule, birthday, social security number, favorite color, favorite perfume, shoe size, everything. I would have memorized her boiling point, melting point, specific gravity, and density, but the information wasn’t available. Through the journal entries I made while sequestered in the Fortress of Solitude, I practically kept a notebook on her. She was as documented as an endangered species.
But not all fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Some more cautious fools like myself simply tiptoe around the perimeter and stare through the fence.
Coward that I was, the thought of revealing my affection terrified me. Why would this beautiful girl who dated football players want to spend time with me, a pale, skinny nerd who couldn’t keep his hair out of his eyes? So, each day I sat across the aisle in class, burning with such passion that I began to wonder why my desk wasn’t reduced to a pile of ashes, with me sitting atop the smoldering heap like a Buddhist monk.
I got most of my ideas about love from the same source that I got my ideas about everything else, from literature. I gleaned examples of romance from tales of chivalry and unrequited love, noble deeds done in the name of fair maidens who only heard confessions of love from the dying lips of a chaste and pure knight. I was at least chaste, if not pure, since I had no other choice, but I couldn’t envision any noble deed to be done on Becky’s behalf. There were no dragons in the halls of Warren High (except for maybe the librarian), no black knights to capture her and prompt me to a heroic rescue. And if there were, what would I oppose them with, my slide rule? Plus, I hoped to experience the affections of the fair maiden in some context other than while dying. When it came to love, I preferred the requited variety.
I dismissed chivalry as unrealistic and turned to the Romantic poets for source material. Here was passion with a vengeance and in a context more suited to my personal style—effusive script. In the afternoon sanctuary of the Fortress of Solitude, I flooded my journal with freshets of sentimental scribbling. Fortunately, none o
f this material has survived or I might be tempted to include samples, which would get my poetic license revoked. It was maudlin beyond belief. I wouldn’t dream of boring you with it. You would be amazed and disgusted by it. Absolutely out of the question. Well, I guess a short, little sample wouldn’t hurt.
Dare I bid compare thee to a rosebud?
It would be a slight to thy fair beauty.
Though the bud would mayhap bloom and flower
And its beauty far exceed the former,
One day it must fain decay and wither,
Falling from the zenith of its glory.
Thy fair countenance by contrast only
May increase, more fair than flower living,
As thy bud unfolds into a blossom
And from glory unto glory further
Rise above the plane of earthly beauty
’Til thou rival all of heaven’s angels.
Pretty disgusting stuff. But, eventually, the Romantic poets also failed to meet the test of reality. The excessive hyperbole made me wince. No human female could match the standards they set in their verse. Or if one could, I would never have the nerve to ask her out. In their world, no girl ever burped or suffered from zits or had an accent so thick you could grease wheel bearings with it or went through half a day of school with an ink mark on her nose or stepped on her shoelace and tumbled in a cascade of textbooks down the bleachers. How could I write syrupy verse if I was in love with such a girl?
I moved on to ’60s psychedelic.
ykceb becky echo ohce
molten passion dripping into
outside flawlessness inside transcendence
contour quintessent form
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