by John McNally
“Clean it up?” I yelled. “You can’t make him clean it up. My dad’s a genius! What’s wrong with you people?”
The stocky wrestler-cop pivoted his torso toward me, sizing me up. He said, “The poor kid’s still delirious.”
My father, using a stage whisper, said, “Hank, take it easy there, pal.”
“He must have suffered some brain damage.” This came from Kelly. She was sitting in a corner, knees pulled up to her neck, wearing an army helmet I’d never seen before. Had she been there the whole time?
My mother said, “What about my son? What are you going to do about that?”
“Oh yeah. Right. Well, sounds like a bunch of teenagers from another town and, well, there’s not a lot you can do. If you see them again, though, give us a call.”
My mother nodded but her fists were clenched.
After they left, my father said, “Cops! I bet both they have their own houses entered in the contest. You just watch when the results come in,” he said, putting on his coat and heading outside with a crowbar. “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit, no sir.”
When I woke up the next day—the day that the judges were to visit each house—I thought that I had dreamed all that had happened the night before, but when I stood up and felt the bruised muscles, the ache in my ribs, I realized that all of it had really happened. I opened my curtains and gasped. Next to the curb were all the decorations that Dad and I had carefully selected. Piled the way it was, it looked like what it really was—junk.
Downstairs, I asked Mom where Dad was.
“Work.”
“Work?” I said. The idea of Dad doing something as ordinary as going to work depressed me.
“He gets time-and-a-half today,” Mom said. “That’s nothing to sneeze at.”
“I need to go somewhere,” I said.
“Oh, no,” Mom said. “Yesterday you had a temperature over one hundred. You’re not going anywhere today, mister.”
I wanted to argue, but I knew who’d win. The more you argued with Mom, the harder she dug in. Before you knew it, you’d be locked in a room and chained to a bed, wishing you’d kept your mouth shut.
“Okie doke,” I said.
I waited until Dad had come home, until we’d all finished eating, before sneaking away. While everyone thought that I was calling it an early night, I slipped out the back door and put on my snorkel parka, which I had dumped behind some bushes earlier that day. What I hadn’t counted on was the parka becoming frozen from being outside. The arms were stiff, and I was colder with it on than with it off. I might as well have tied it to a rope and stored it in Lake Michigan.
I kept it on, though, hoping that my shivering would generate some heat, which it did. I needed to see Ralph. He was the only other person who’d understand what an outrage it was that my father was forced to ruin his masterpiece.
As I rounded the corner of Ralph’s street, the first thing that I saw was Ralph’s cousin’s Nova. Both cousins, Kenny and Norm, were sitting on the trunk and drinking beer. They each lived in apartments that were furnished with things they’d made in shop class in high school. Kenny had a lamp whose shade was a Budweiser can with the top sliced off. Norm had a plywood coffee table that had been covered with pages from Hot Rod magazine and then lacquered.
When I got closer I saw that Ralph had decorated his mother’s house for the contest. What wasn’t immediately apparent was what holiday he had decorated the house in honor of.
Oil drums with ten foot flames shooting out of them lined the sidewalk. A glowing six-foot statue of Jesus held a Roman Candle. I was about to yell out to Ralph, but a Roman candle shot from Jesus’ hand and whistled into the sky. Ralph then removed a bedsheet to reveal a life-sized manger. Painted on the side of the manger was what appeared at first glance to be an angel but what, on closer inspection, was actually the logo that Led Zeppelin used for their Swan Song record label.
“I did that,” Kenny said, pointing.
Inside the manger was a statue that used to stand outside of a Big Boy restaurant. Next to it was a blow-up Frankenstein doll.
Norm said, “Now that’s the real spirit of Christmas, folks.”
“What’s it mean?” I asked.
Kenny said, “It means that life is screwed up. It means that life is weirder than any of us’d ever imagined.” He finished his beer, tossed the can into a neighbor‘s yard, and said, “Hand me another one, little man.”
Four more Roman Candles whistled into the night sky, but when one of the still-sizzling fireworks came spiraling back down and hit the manger, the whole thing went up in flames.
“Holy crap,” Kenny said. “Get a fire extinguisher.”
Norm said, “No, no, man. It’s working. This is the way it should be.”
By the time the firetrucks arrived, the manger had burnt to the snow and the fire had all but extinguished itself. Ralph stood next to me while the firemen hosed off the oil drums.
“I figured it’d come down to me and your father for first and second place,” he said. “Your old man’s stiff competition, though.”
“Not anymore,” I said, and I explained to Ralph what had happened.
I expected Ralph to get more worked up, but all he did was shake his head. Then he slapped me on the back and said, “At least it’s good to know that genius runs in your family. From what I’ve read it skips a generation, but think about your kids, Hank.”
Two cops, the same from last night, walked over to Ralph and handed him a ticket. “You’re lucky we’re not taking you to jail, pal.” The cop with the walrus mustache squinted at me and said, “Haven’t I arrested you before?”
“No, sir,” I said, but the cop didn’t believe me. Twice, on his way back to the patrol car, he turned to look at me, as if trying to remember my crime.
“Now what am I going to do?” Ralph said. “I sort of counted on that prize money.” He shook his head and sighed. “Give your old man my regards. From one genius to another.”
I nodded. “Will do,” I said. Ralph and I shook hands, then Ralph wandered over to Kenny and Norm, who were taking stock of the frozen but still smoking lawn.
On my way home, I passed house after house with their strings of blinking lights, the occasional illuminated Santa waving from a front stoop. I hadn’t realized until now just how dull people were, how utterly dull and unimaginative. I was so mad that I wanted to break every window sprayed with fake snow. I wanted to set fire to every wreath on every door. I started packing a snowball when I heard them—their voices glorious, angelic—and then I saw them: pudgy faces red from the cold but beaming, their eyes shining in the moonlight, these eight boys and girls at the height of their musical powers. Carolers! I was at one street corner; they were at the other. My arms went limp, and the snowball fell from my hand. I’d thought that they were going in my direction but then they turned, heading where I had just been, marching joyously toward the smoke and the smell of sulfur. I wanted to warn them about Ralph and his cousins, but as soon as one song ended, they began belting out another without pausing to catch their breaths. Their singing was mightier than ever, and the smallest of the eight children, ringing his bell loud enough to rouse even the shyest of ghosts, turned and waved at me, and I waved back.
10
The truth was that before Ralph, I didn’t really have any friends. Real friends. Until the middle of first grade, I’d had two imaginary friends, Raymond and Krogerly. Raymond was the friend who always did things I might get in trouble for doing, like wetting my pants. “Raymond did it,” I told my mom the first time it happened, as if I were stating something that was simply a fact and, therefore, out of my hands. “There is no Raymond,” she said, and I tilted my head and silently stared up at her, the way you regarded people who were clearly crazy. “Oh-kay,” I said, slowly backing away from her.
Raymond was also my middle name, but I chalked this up as nothing more than a coincidence.
My other imaginary friend was Krogerly. My mother di
d all of her grocery shopping at Kroger, and I suspect Krogerly was born during one of those torturously long and soul-crushing afternoons when I begged my mother to let me sit inside the shopping cart. “You’re too big,” she told me. “Plus, you’ve got legs. If you didn’t have legs, I’d let you sit in the cart, but you’ve got legs, so you can walk.” Krogerly was the good imaginary friend, the one who played Hot Wheels with me, who told jokes that made me laugh so hard I shot milk out my nose.
“What’s so funny, Hank?” my father asked one night at dinner.
“Krogerly just said something funny,” I said.
My father looked over at my mother, who shrugged and said, “It’s his imaginary friend.” My father, who didn’t have any friends, real or imaginary, nodded. He resumed eating but occasionally glanced up in case Krogerly happened to materialize.
My sister, Kelly, who was nine years old at the time, reached over and punched the empty space beside me.
“Hey!” I yelled. “You’re hitting him!” She punched again. And then again. “Mom,” I yelled. “Kelly’s punching Krogerly!”
“Both of you had better cut it out,” Mom warned, “unless you each want an enema.”
Neither of us knew what an enema was, exactly, but we’d seen the equipment under the sink—a giant deflated rubber pillow with a long tube. Mom knew that we didn’t know what it was, but she also knew that it scared us. I had assumed that the red rubber pillow would be filled with hot water and then, after the tube had been tied off so that water couldn’t leak out, Mom would chase us around the house, swinging it at us. At the mere mention of the word enema, Kelly quit punching my best friend and silently ate the rest of her TV dinner.
I wish I could say that their deaths, Raymond’s and Krogerly’s, were peaceful, that one day I woke up while they continued to sleep, drifting away into nothingness, but this was not the case. The real problems began when I started taking them to school with me, both at the same time. Even while Raymond was busy wetting my pants, Krogerly would tell a joke out loud, except his jokes had stopped being funny. In fact, they weren’t really jokes at all; they were insults, like “Look at his nose!” or “Good Lord, the face on that woman!” Krogerly must have been hanging around my father since these were the exact same things Dad always said about people. Where my father said these things out of earshot, Krogerly preferred saying them mere inches from the people he insulted, most of whom were my teachers.
“Mr. Boyd!” Mrs. Waterman yelled one morning before school, gripping my shoulder and pushing me to the side of the playground. “I want you to go to the principal’s office and tell him what you said about my—what did you call them?—my big, ugly feet.”
The ghost-pinch of Mrs. Waterman’s fingers remained on my shoulder all the way to Mr. Santoro’s, and by the time I reached his office, Raymond had peed my pants again.
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Rokitis, the office secretary, when I entered. “Poor little guy.”
“Who stinks in here?” Krogerly asked even as tears streaked my face. “Somebody’s perfume smells like a dead skunk.”
Mrs. Rokitis cocked her head, squinting, as if she too were hearing voices. “Okay, young man,” she finally said. “In the office. But don’t sit down. The chairs aren’t upholstered in plastic.” She resumed typing.
Standing alone in the principal’s office, face and crotch both wet, I felt betrayed by my imaginary friends. Why had they turned on me? What had I ever done to them? When Mr. Santoro finally came in, he took one look at me and said, “Who turned the fire hose on, son?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I started crying loudly. I cried so hard, I couldn’t catch my breath. Each time I tried slowing my breath, I would suddenly suck in all the air I could, sounding like something inhuman. It reminded me of the time I tried talking while breathing in and my mother ordered me to stop. My voice, she claimed, was making the hair on her neck stand on end.
Mr. Santoro took a step toward me, and I screamed. I was seven years old, and adults scared me. Not just teachers, either. All adults. The crossing guard lady who was going bald and touched my earlobe every time I walked by her. The employee at Certified Grocers who swatted at me with his broom when I took down a can of creamed corn to look at it. Old guys in New Castle Park who wanted me to sit with them. My aunts who pinched my cheeks too hard, leaving small bruises. My uncle who ordered me to pull his finger, which inexplicably caused him to fart loudly. I was even afraid of my own parents, who hated my aunts and uncles and who didn’t know about the old guys in the park or the crossing guard or the broom guy. It didn’t make a difference who they were. Adults were adults. They all said and did things that didn’t make any sense to me, each and every one of them, and they always looked mad, even when they laughed—a series of loud, barking haw-haw-haws punctuated by explosive coughs that turned their faces bright red.
“Okay, okay,” Mr. Santoro said. “That’s enough for now. Easy, boy. Easy.”
The next day, instead of going to Mrs. Waterman’s class, I was taken to a small office in the wing of the school where the older kids’ classes were held. There, I met a fat man in a dark suit. He had a thick gray-and-black beard and eyebrows that curled out from his head as if they were trying to escape the body from which they grew. He wheezed when he breathed.
“Hello, Hank!” My name came out high and pinched at the end, like a man stricken by an unexpected and sharp pain. I imagined someone hiding under his desk, punching him hard in the gut. “My name’s Dr. Stump. Like a tree.” When I didn’t so much as blink, he wheezed, “A tree stump.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about and wanted to cry, but I held back. “Tree stump,” I repeated.
“Good!” he yelled. “Good! Good!” Squinting, he put the tips of his fingers together and peered over them. He said, “I’m not the kind of doctor you go to when you have a cold, Hank. No siree. I’m the kind of doctor you see when, well, when you’ve got too much on your mind and need to talk.” He pointed to his head. “When your noggin’s all filled up and you need to let something out of it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Can we talk about your friends?” he said. “Raymond? Is that right? And who’s the other fellow with the funny name?”
“Krogerly?” I asked flatly. I didn’t see anything funny about Krogerly’s name.
“Ah, yes. It was Krogerly who made fun of Mrs. Waterman’s feet yesterday, wasn’t it? That’s what you told Mr. Santoro, am I correct?”
I nodded.
“She does have pretty big feet, doesn’t she?” Dr. Stump said.
“I think she’s beautiful,” I said.
“Oh, really? Hm. Okay.” He cleared his throat. “So, tell me about this Krogerly fellow. Unless you’d rather begin with Raymond. Are you better friends with one than the other? Do you spend as much time with Krogerly as you do Raymond? Talk to me, Hank. Don’t be shy. You can trust me. I’m sure I’m not as charming as Raymond and Krogerly, but don’t let that stop you. Tell me all about them, Hank. Tell me everything.”
And so I did. I told him everything about my two best friends.
“And then there was this time,” I began at the top of our third hour together, but Dr. Stump, whose eyebrows had begun to fold over, like two furry hands clutching the edge of a cliff, raised his palm up to stop me.
“I’ve heard enough, son,” he said.
My feelings were hurt, but I didn’t say anything. He was right. He wasn’t as charming as Raymond or Krogerly, and Krogerly wanted to tell him so, but I managed to stop him in time.
What Dr. Stump did was set up daily meetings with me. Every day, for the next two weeks, I trudged to his office and did what he asked me to do. I put round pegs into holes. I answered questions about everything I’d ever done or thought about in my life. I stared into his penlight, following it with my eyes without moving my head. When he showed me a blotch of ink on a sheet of paper and asked me what came to mind, I told him that it looked like a
spider. When he showed me another one, I told him that it, too, looked like a spider. He showed me three more. Spider, spider, spider, I told him.
“Are you afraid of spiders?” he asked.
“Nope.”
He leaned toward me. “What does scare you, Hank?”
“You,” I said, and Dr. Stump leaned back quickly.
“I thought we were friends,” he said, sounding hurt.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You opened up to me. You told me all about Krogerly and Raymond.”
“Do you have friends?” I asked.
“Not many,” he confessed. “Not as many as I would like.”
“Is Mr. Santoro your friend?”
Dr. Stump snorted. “Ha!” he said. “Who’s asking, you or Krogerly? Hey, listen, I could tell you a thing or two about that man. You want to talk about your delusions of grandeur? You want to talk about your displaced anger? He’s a walking time-bomb. He’s a human landmine.” I was nodding, trying to take it all in, when a dark look crossed Dr. Stumps’s face. “No, seriously,” he said. He leaned forward, fat arms stretched across the desk, and said, “I used to be his shrink. I did.” He wagged his head. His double chin jiggled. “How do you think I landed this sweet gig? Knowledge is power, Hank. Knowledge is power.” He quit talking and stared at me for a good while, the only sound in the room his tortured breathing. He finally leaned back and said, “But why am I telling you all of this? Who’s the doctor here? You or me?”
I shrugged.
“You’d better go, little man,” he said. “I think we’ve covered enough for one day, don’t you?”
I opened the door to leave, and there stood Mr. Santoro. He put his hand on top of my head then moved it to the space between my shoulders and said, “Go back to class, Hank.” He didn’t look down at me. He was staring into the dark, tiny room at Dr. Stump. “Go on now,” he said, gently shoving me away.
