Diesel Heart

by Melvin Carter Jr

  I got an invitation from the Board of Education to perform an operation on a girl.

  I stuck the boner-a-tion in the separation and increased the population of the worl(d).

  We played hard like river otters, worked like army ants at having fun, rode bicycles better than cowboys rode horses, built clubhouses and forts in backyards and vacant lots, then spent the nights in them. We made “chugs,” commonly known as go-carts, and skateboards (using roller skate wheels). But slingshots made from coat hangers, heavy-duty rubber bands, and a soft patch of leather were my thing, especially with all these old abandoned windows that needed smashin’! I could line up empty pop bottles and shatter ’em, mow down pop cans, one by one, like a machine gun, hit fleeing squirrels, not to mention towering streetlights.

  A routine heavy-duty day consisted of biking, running, building clubhouses and tree houses, and wrestling. King of the Mountain was a brutal wrestling mania free-for-all. The goal was to be the lone occupant of the top of a hill or incline, with no punching, biting, or kicking. There never was a formal winner, because whoever made it to the top was automatically ganged up on and thrown hard down to the bottom. We’d have skinned-up knees and elbows, grass in our hair—we were covered with grass stains with possibly a little blood trickle, totally filthy, and completely exhausted. We held informal foot races, played football and baseball, and held backyard, back-alley, basement boxing matches. But in our little corner segment of St. Paul, we considered basketball, tennis, golf, and hockey to be “white boy sports” because Blacks were so rarely seen playing them on TV. So we never played them.

  Fatso, who I played with the most, wasn’t fat at all—in fact, he was rather lean and athletic, and like everyone else was slightly taller than me. He had a unique golden complexion, with orange hair and greenish eyes. Our houses were located back-to-back, across the alley from each other. We were both responsible for taking out the daily garbage and burning trash in big cylinder barrels.

  The back alley was our sanctuary. Trash burning was a therapeutic escape from indoor big family drama. Just going outside, stacking the pile, striking the match, brought me into a focus that was unavailable in any other way.

  “Mine’s gonna be better!” The voice came from across the alley, just a half house width away. The trash war was on.

  “No, man! Mine’s better!” Fatso’s eyes squinted back and forth. “Secret ingredient!”

  Well, his fire had mine beat that day (probably because he had more trash). But it just so happened that I knew my dad kept a .32-caliber handgun and some bullets in his dresser drawer. So the next day I threw a handful of bullets into a blazing-hot barrel. Me ’n’ Fatso ran and dove behind a big tree in my backyard for cover, popped-up heads watching and listening. Actually, the booms were no louder than run-of-the-mill cherry bombs or hammerheads. Nevertheless, I won—for the time being.

  But Fatso knew where his father kept shotgun shells. So the next day, he put shotgun shells in with the trash and struck the lit match to it. We ran and dove for cover behind the big tree; lay still watching, listening, and waiting. The fire gradually grew, leaping skyward. Then all of a sudden, Leslie, Fatso’s oldest brother, came out of the garage, walking close to the fire. Fatso jumped from the hiding place, signaling for him to turn around, screaming, “Go back! Go back!”

  Leslie jumped back just in time. BOOM! The top of the huge cylindrical trash barrel was shredded. No one was hurt. But Leslie snitched, and Fatso got punished.

  The very next day we were right back there in my backyard. I held a bullet with a pair of pliers in my left hand, striking it with a hammer in my right. Fatso gave it a try. Then one of us held it while the other hit the back of the bullet with the hammer. Never did get it to detonate. Thank God.

  ’Bout the same time every day: “Melvin, take out the garbage and burn the trash and get back in this house! Do you hear me, boy?” I always meant to come right back. But back-alley life, alone with myself, was my classroom. Mesmerized, I watched my cat Felix beat up other cats and even big dogs. How many swarming flies could I take out with a single fly swatter stroke? Stalking, then catching a fly with bare hands proved something, especially if it was flying!

  But when Fatso was already out there waiting, we’d drift where the action took us and return after sunset.

  The first clubhouse wars started when me ’n’ Fatso spent the night in a tent made out of a couple of army blankets thrown over the clothesline in his backyard. The next thing ya know, the Japanese guys next door, the whites down the street, and everybody else pitched real store-bought camping tents. The clubhouse wars were on. “That-a-way to Mataway’s” was the slogan of a tiny neighborhood department store around the corner over on University. They’d often dump heavy wooden crates behind the building. Like army ants, we’d pick them up and march them to Dungeon Number One. (In St. Paul in those days, there were still virgin lots with trees, natural woodlands, bushes, ravines, and landscapes that had never been built on. We called them dungeons.)

  As if on cue, all the other kids in the neighborhood teamed up against us and built their own clubhouses. The Moto brothers got busy. Fatso and I scavenged our materials, and our clubhouse was makeshift, inexact. But the whites and the Japanese, with the help of their dads, drew up designs, purchased wood and hardware, used angled and precise measuring devices. Everyone always tried to outdo our clubhouse, and everyone always did because ours was always the raggediest. But the true test of a tent, clubhouse, or fort is made by spending the night in it in the midst of a thunderstorm. Surprisingly, the homemade blanket tents pinned to a clothesline stood up to torrential rains pretty well, better than a waterproof sleeping bag. (But the slightest touch on either side would create a water flow.)

  The Reed boys, Duane ’n’ Ronnie, were good athletes as well as builders. It wasn’t that they were so much better than we were in all sports, but they’d almost always beat me ’n’ Fatso in two-man back-alley football because they knew how to get under our skin. They were experts at torturing the losing team, making us dysfunctional due to anger.

  But we always had the most fun because we always moved on to the next thing, starting the next neighborhood frenzy—slingshots, chugs, homemade skateboards, bottle-cap guns.

  Inside a clubhouse or under a tent, we talked about important stuff.

  “Ever kiss a girl?”

  “Nope. Well, almost!”

  “Whaddaya mean, almost?”

  “One time Helen Hunter chased me around the playground and kissed me on my face.”

  “Man, when you see all them pretty girls, it’s hard to imagine that they must dookey, but they must the same as we do.”

  “Yeah, I wonder. I dunno!”

  “Think you’ll ever take a dookey in front of your wife when you get married?”

  “I dunno.”

  Ronnie Reed ’n’ me, about seventh grade.

  “Last night my dad called me to hand him a roll of toilet paper through the bathroom door, and I could tell my mom was in there with him. Just made me wonder, that’s all.”

  “Did you ever get any?”

  “Any what?”

  “You know … some premiums?”

  “No, but I heard Calvin did it to Sharon over on Maxfield playground.”

  Eventually we’d doze off, to be awakened bright and early by swarms of flocking birds.

  But as much as we organically buddied up from the start, me ’n’ Fatso bickered over everything there was to possibly squabble about—who had the best hair or the best shoes, whose bicycle was the best, who had received the best birthday or Christmas present. Competition extended even to cleanliness, though most of the time we were perfectly happy to be absolutely filthy. But Saturday was bath day whether we needed it or not. So every Saturday’s routine competition was “Who’s the cleanest?”

  “I am!”

  “No, I’m the cleanest!”

  “What time did you get out of the tub? Well, I stayed in longer!”

/>   “Yeah, but you didn’t rinse off!”

  Fatso’s dad, Mr. Nins, kept boxing gloves and a heavy punching bag in his basement. Sometimes our hanging out in his basement evolved into ongoing boxing matches we called Boxing Wars. Fatso and I would put on the gloves and box to a standstill, then argue over who won. Truth is, he probably won most times.

  One day Mr. Nins (aka “Challenger Dynamite Dave”), previously a professional boxer, came downstairs and gave me a crash course in boxing. “Here’s the stance. Hold your hands like this. Read his mind. Watch ’em! When he does this, then here’s what to do!” In just one lesson, he taught me precious secrets and gave me tools that I would draw on for the rest of my days, tools that would save my life. I tried to remain calm, anxiously absorbing every morsel of his lesson. I was extremely grateful. I couldn’t imagine why he’d give me so much—a foundation for my identity, perhaps even of a future career.

  5

  Growin’ Pains

  That day the sun was shining as it rained at the same time, almost like an omen. My sister Terrie said that always means that the devil is beating his wife. When Momma came home, something special was in her eyes as she looked at me.

  She sat down, pulling off her shoes. “Bernie Brooks was riding his bike and was run over by a truck.”

  “What hospital is he in? … Momma, let’s go see ’em.”

  Mom sat still stoically, eyes watering. “He’s not in the hospital, Melvin.”

  “Then he’s at home?”

  She sat looking the truth into me, shaking her head.

  The word slowly kindled up, whispering from somewhere deep in my throat. “Killed? Bernie’s dead?”

  Mom nodded.

  Bernie and I were nine years old.

  I was devastated. He got killed on the exact same bike I used to ride with him, directly in front of the house I had just moved from, right where he and I used to play together. Plus the fact that “Brooks” just happened to be the name of the only Black funeral home in St. Paul, which just happened to be a couple houses away from where the accident happened. Something had told me never to ride with him again, and I never again did.

  For whatever reason, his death earmarked the time, the totality of the era, for me. It was the death of Rondo.

  ’Bout this time, me, Henry, Gregory, and Jeffrey had figured out this cousin thing, especially me ’n’ Henry. Things were always the same with us, no matter how they were constantly changing. In fact, the more things changed, the closer we clung together. We isolated ourselves and dissolved into one another’s worlds and experienced life through each other’s observations.

  One late summer Minnesota afternoon, the sun stopped and hovered in the same exact spot for hours. Me ’n’ Henry, after riding through the condemned ruins of the extinct Rondo civilization, parked our bikes in the front yard of the old abandoned Chatsworth Inn and climbed an apple tree. We sat up there for hours, picking and eating apples right off the limb. At nine years old, looking out into the vast future was like looking down the tubes of a double-barreled shotgun. One barrel was exciting, exuding joy, opportunities, and all the great things life promised to offer. The other barrel was just a gun with big dirty devastating bullets. But to reap the fruits of one, you had to stand in front of both barrels. You couldn’t just stand in front of one.

  Already at nine, situations grabbed and defined us. As big brothers, Henry and I could tease ’n’ torture the little kids, but no matter how much our younger siblings irritated the daylights out of us, if someone else dared to do the same, we would fight to defend them. We were both natural-born protectors of our siblings and of each other.

  I told Henry about the night my whole illusion of life became a delusion. Mom and Dad had been out drinking, came home fighting, woke up all us kids, put us in the middle of a full-fledged family domestic, consisting mostly of hostile verbal rage. Dad paid the price for being gone from home. Although it was never said, his absence picked the scabs Mom had from Charlie Harris abandoning her when she was thirteen.

  Dad ordered us to go back to bed. Mom reversed the order. “No, you stay right there! Now say it, Chick! Say what you said to me in front of them! Chick, tell them what you did!”

  “Now, Sweetie!” Dad tried to calm her by displaying the palms of his hands. She’d vent and say hurtful stuff.

  Stalled and stunned, trying not to disobey either, I succeeded in disobeying them both. That’s when she’d inflict, “You’re a CARTER, just like your dad and the rest of ’em.” Well, to tell me that I was just like my dad was the most validating thing a person could say to me.

  “Now, Sweetie … !” Dad was always backing away or trying to help her control herself. Both were careful not to really injure one another, even though it got physically rough. Police were called. One night we were taken out of the house and had to spend the night at the Reeses’.

  As the oldest male, instinctively I tried to absorb the brunt of it, bring resolve and restoration. But in truth, my older sister Terrie took the hardest hits, cushioning the rest of us from heartbreaks.

  Ironically, as much as my mother sometimes tried to hurt my feelings in order to get a point across, she never could, because I always knew that she cherished me for life, no matter what she said. I was her first son, somehow a Charlie Harris replacement.

  I felt the reverse about my father. His way of expressing love was mostly by feeding, clothing, sheltering, and guiding me through my most dangerous and ridiculous stages of life. Sure, he took me fishing and swimming and gave me trumpet lessons—trying to be considerate, trying not to hurt my feelings. But trumpet lessons just interfered with running, jumping, climbing, and “boys will be boys” stuff. So when he was upset with me or when I’d get caught doing something bad, I’d get trumpet lessons in place of punishment. Dad was very patient. He did a better job teaching than I did learning. But he was somewhat aloof and gone quite a bit, and his sudden and unpredictable disregard felt like violent blows to the belly.

  He was tall, dark, and handsome, never talked about his problems, hardly ever lost his temper or argued or fought, rarely expressed his feelings, worked his fingers to the bone, never cried, and, most of all, was extremely practical. No one ever saw or heard of my dad doing anything that could be remotely interpreted as impractical.

  As for myself, while I was tough as nails, I was ill-tempered and kind of a crybaby. One time Terrie had friends over. A girl began to agitate me. Terrie warned her to stop because I was getting mad. Looking into my eyes, the guest suddenly realized that I was seething, and she was shocked that I’d get so mad over such a trivial thing (whatever it was). Terrie said I was too sensitive. A seemingly slight thing could hurt my feelings, and I’d go from zero to mad in an instant—and I never could hide my reactions.

  Dad dismissed me as a momma’s boy because I was so much like her. Mom dismissed me as a daddy’s boy because of my hero worship for him.

  But I ain’t blamin’ nobody for nuthin’! He gave me what he had, the best he could. (Besides, as time passed, I’d have enough blame to blame myself.) Dad simply interpreted life as a matter of key signature, syncopated rhythm, and performance. He had been neglected as a child himself, and music was both parents, his best friend, his first mistress. And as far as me and Dad were concerned, we were in different key signatures, different songs, different concerts.

  But my daddy took me fishin’ better than Andy took Opie. My greatest, most favorite, most significant joy in life was Dad waking me up at five in the morning to be the only one to go fishing with him at Goose Lake, our secret sacred fishing place. An enlarged rustic storage garage containing a fleet of wooden rowboats for rent was the only man-made object in sight. The lake was surrounded by trees, brush, and tall grass. Birds sang, bees buzzed, fish jumped, and dragonflies landed on my bamboo fishing pole. It was so quiet, so private and serene, that if anyone else was there, we could hear their whispers clean from across the other side. At times we had the whole lake to ourselves.


  Something about rowing a rowboat fed my spirit in a way that’s hard to explain. Dad steadied the boat while I jumped in and took the oars, then he gave the boat a shove and jumped in back. As the rower, I had to sit facing backward, so with Dad sitting in the back, we’d be face to face with each other. He’d prop his feet against mine to give me rowing leverage while offering me instructions and directions.

  Somehow by some unknown internal radar, he knew exactly where the fish would be bitin’. Sometimes we’d catch fish, pull over to shore, and clean ’em, cook ’em, and eat ’em right then and there, which overwhelmed the fact that I hated the very smell and taste of fish.

  Not only did I always feel honored to be named after my father, but it seemed unfair to Mark, Mathew, and Larry that I was the one. Dad, the lone family breadwinner, worked job to job, playing music gig to gig. On Dad’s way out the door, carrying either his railroad suitcase or his trumpet case, he often stopped, stalled, and turned to me.

  Family portrait, December 1962. In the back, me ’n’ Terrie; in front, Larry and Mathew; and in the middle, Dad, Paris, Mom, and Mark.

  “Now you, as my firstborn son, are the man of the house when I’m gone. Take care of your brothers and sisters and help your mother.”

  As sincere as I was when I agreed, and as much as I tried to live up to the charge, I’d go torture my siblings the instant the door slammed behind him. Everything spontaneously stabilized upon his return, especially my behavior. Sometimes when he came back, I had my siblings weeping loudly in unison. Even though I knew I’d be in trouble, I waited by the door, rejoicing internally when I saw him.

  Before even saying “Hello” as he was entering the house, Mom jumped in his face. “Chick! You’re gonna hafta do something about that boy!”