The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  It got so bad Aunt Nancy drove over one Sunday. I was mowing the lawn when Nancy burst out of the house and grabbed me by my collar.

  “Do you know what today is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s Mother’s Day. And you did nothing. No card, nothing! What is wrong with you? This has to stop.”

  I stared at the ground while she drove back to her perfect home on the perfect golf course with the perfect kids who remembered Mother’s Day. I tried to apologize to Mom, but she was already sequestered in her room.

  There were times when the only frayed strand holding our family together was Christine. She was now five, with big brown eyes perpetually dazed in a state of wonder. Her innocence could make you cry; there was joy in her every move, in her recitation of her favorite Smurfs. The rest of us could agree on nothing except our love for her. We found happiness playing Candyland or taking her for vanilla chocolate swirl cones and watching her dribble ice cream down her shirt. It was blessed light amidst all the darkness.

  My grades continued their long slog to the bottom. I wouldn’t show up until third period some days, clutching a poorly forged note composed by the Dodson girls claiming extensive dental work. No one seemed to notice I never wore braces. I wasn’t getting stoned in the parking lot; I was at the Flint Public Library, reading back issues of Rolling Stone and Melody Maker, devouring stories about New Romantic bands. I wanted to be part of a different world, any other world.

  The school was complaining to Mom about my behavior on an almost weekly basis. The problem was the old story: I’d sit in the back of class and daydream or bullshit rather than add anything constructive. The calls usually came late in the afternoon. I’d hear Mom pick up the phone and I’d eavesdrop. She’d hang up the phone and come looking for me, her voice breaking as she started swatting at me with backhands that were more comical than brutal. I’d laugh and she would lose it.

  “I don’t know what game you’re playing, mister, but this is going to end. You’re going to leave this house and I’m not going to feel bad about it.”

  She slammed my door. I came home the next week to military school brochures scattered on my bed.

  We agreed on that one thing: the idea of getting me somewhere far away. Mom saw me in a uniform getting screamed at by some tyrant. Me? I wanted to be somewhere like the places I read about in the piles of magazines and books that filled my bedroom.

  That fantasy world I dreamed about was vaguely British for some reason. I’d become an Anglophile, which in early 1980s Flint made me a jackass. I blamed it on Gordie and another buddy named Jim. Despite the fact that they both grew up on the not always happy-making streets of Flint, the two of them had developed an obsession with the United Kingdom. Gordie even looked like Sebastian Flyte as played by Anthony Andrews in the BBC’s Brideshead Revisited. Except he wasn’t gay and it’s doubtful Sebastian ever placed his face against a yellow legal pad and said, “Man, look how greasy my face is!” Jim’s take was more rock ’n’ roll, perhaps most tragically summed up by his insistence on wearing a Clash T-shirt from their Cut the Crap tour, which was actually just crap.

  Somehow, the American version of Anglo mutated into preppiness. We all wished we went to a prep school. They just seemed cooler. Jim and I almost picked up two blondes at a Catholic teen dance by saying we were lacrosse players from nearby Cranbrook.

  No human being better personified the American prepster-as-Brit than William F. Buckley Jr., Firing Line host, spy novelist, and former New York City mayoral candidate. Buckley spoke in a clipped, hesitating manner accentuated by arching eyebrows. This was quite exotic to us. We worshipped him from our Conservative Liberation Organization days.

  That spring, the Flint chamber of commerce disregarded the double-digit unemployment rate, pooled their savings, and announced that they were paying Buckley to speak at the Whiting Auditorium in downtown Flint. Afterward, he would attend a cocktail party at the home of a University of Michigan–Flint professor.

  We scored tickets to the speech and reception, but that wasn’t enough. We gamed the extremely limited flights arriving at Flint’s Bishop Airport from New York City and cut our afternoon classes to meet Buckley at the airport. Some guys blew off class to get blow jobs. We cut out of choir class so we could accost an old man in a Brooks Brothers suit at the airport.

  It seemed right at the time. This was celeb-free Flint and three camera crews showed up at the airport. WFB, as his friends called him, made some brief remarks, none of which touched on his 1960s support for segregation. He was rushed away after a few minutes, declining our offer of a ride. We barely touched the hem of his trench coat.

  I don’t remember much from his Whiting speech. He used a lot of words I’d never heard before. The reception was held in a professor’s drafty, rapidly depreciating Tudor. It was a momentous night for me: my first cocktail party. Now I know every cocktail party is exactly the same—intolerable made bearable by creeping drunkenness—but at the time it seemed like something out of, well, an Evelyn Waugh novel.

  Buckley was pounding vodka and grapefruit and had a frozen look on his ruddy face that I now realize was half public persona, half get me the hell out of here. Waves of assistant professors shook his hand and asked him what he really thought about Gore Vidal, whom I’d never heard of. I don’t know if it was the spring weather, the open bar, or just middle-aged smart folks starved for a little intellectual glitter, but all the grown-ups got stinking drunk. After an hour or so, Buckley had had enough. His blue eyes began searching for his designated driver. He found him, but the hapless professor was wasted beyond even the lax Michigan DUI standards of the mid-1980s.

  He then turned to us and stage-whispered.

  “Say, are you boys still good for that ride?”

  It was pronounced rhiiide. We nodded yes. Then Buckley grabbed his coat and muttered, “Let’s get out of here, then.”

  He said good-bye to no one, which seemed quite British and awesome. We went out to my car. Buckley blanched for just a moment when he noticed it was a two-tone Chevy Chevette. He piled into the passenger seat and placed his black loafers down on a sea of Taco Bell wrappers and a boom box holding a Smiths cassette. I lurched the car into drive.

  Gordie asked a complicated question about Reagan and Thatcherism. Buckley answered with a bon mot drenched in alcohol and a plummy American accent not known to common men.

  Overstimulated, I floored the Chevette through a blood-red light. Buckley didn’t lose his cool, offering just a cautionary stuttering of “Ah, ah, ah,” as he pointed his patrician forefinger toward the next potentially lethal intersection.

  Maybe it was luck, maybe it was Buckley’s Yale-educated and old school Catholic God waving off the traffic, but we didn’t get broadsided by a Chevy Blazer. Buckley was staying at the recently opened and soon to be shuttered Hyatt Regency. As we pulled into the circular drive, I screeched the Chevette to a stop and shut down my V-4. Buckley smiled at me.

  “Now, now, that was an adventure.”

  I asked him if he could sign something as a memento for me.

  “I, I think I can do better than that.”

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, blue velvet case. His manicured fingers popped the case open. Inside was a gold key. The inscription read, “From the Citizens of Flint, Michigan.” Buckley pulled out a fountain pen and a scrap of paper and signed, “To Stephen, Best Wishes, William F. Buckley.” He shook my hand, gathered his trench coat and stepped out of the car. He quickly disappeared into the revolving doors.

  The next day, I told my government class about my night. My teacher overheard and told me he didn’t believe me. I went to my locker and returned with my blue velvet trophy. He squinted at the handwriting and sadly shook his head.

  “Rodrick, how do I know this isn’t fake?”

  I didn’t say anything. Inside, I knew the Buckley encounter me
ant something. There was a whole world out there. Maybe I really could find it.

  Fortunately, a mugging and a quiz show intervened on my behalf. One afternoon in history class, I was providing unwanted commentary to a filmstrip discussing the root causes of World War I when Mr. Winchester had enough.

  “Rodrick, you’re not helping here. Go across the street and get me some cigarettes.”

  I jumped up. There was a 7-Eleven across the street from school and I headed there with Winchester’s $20 bill in my hand. The 7-Eleven was a hangout for lowlifes and minor thugs who nominally attended the public high school next door and spent their days playing Asteroids. I tried not to make eye contact. I bought the cigarettes and some Hostess cupcakes as my tariff. I’d barely crossed the street back toward Powers when three Asteroids kids jumped me and threw me down on the grass. I popped up, disoriented. The ringleader jabbed me in my palm with a rusty jackknife just enough to draw a drop or two of blood.

  “I’d like your money.”

  I gave them my change and they pushed me back down again. Then they sprinted away. I staggered to my feet and walked back toward my class. The filmstrip was just ending. I paused for a second and smeared some extra blood across my ripped yellow button-down shirt. I was ready for my close-up. I stumbled into the room and slammed the smokes on Winchester’s desk.

  “Here are your cigarettes.”

  Winchester’s face went white. He marched me to the nurse’s office where a Band-Aid was placed on my very minor wounds. The principal called Mom. She immediately threatened a lawsuit. We were a united front, if only for a moment.

  The school offered to drive me home, an out that I would have jumped at on any other day. But today was tryouts for Quiz Bowl, an academic extracurricular activity that required no study but merely a reservoir of useless information and a twitchy trigger finger. A moderator asked semi-intellectual questions, and you could buzz in as soon as you had an answer even if he was still talking. I rolled up the sleeves of my ripped shirt and bashed through questions about Roger Maris and William Henry Harrison. In the end, I was the only underclassman to make the four-man team.

  Finally, something I was good at! Every Saturday, four eggheads and a chaperone headed off in a van to nearby Alma College for the state tournament. By the time the host read “It is held every April in Augusta, . . .” I was ringing in “The Masters.” This was not really a marketable skill, but it did bring our school glory and provide me with a get-out-of-jail-free card. I was close to being drummed out of school before Quiz Bowl, but now I was essential to Powers’ delusions as the Notre Dame of Flint.

  We won the state championship and earned Powers $8,000 in scholarship money that, inexplicably, wound up completely in the hands of a tobacco-chewing quarterback who tortured me in trigonometry. The Quiz Bowl team was introduced at a pep rally, and everyone went nuts when one of my tall teammates dunked a dictionary. Sure, they were laughing at us, not with us, but I didn’t care.

  It’s not an exaggeration to say Quiz Bowl changed my life. Mom put the military school brochures away. She now viewed me on sporadic occasions as not being without some merit. At school, teachers rolled their eyes a little less. I could have taken the change and built on it a more mature version of myself. That didn’t happen. Instead, I analyzed the situation and saw myself now as untouchable by Powers’ management. I decided to press my luck.

  In my senior year, Gordie and I were trapped in the English class of Ms. Otten. English was a dangerous place for us. We fancied ourselves young men of a literary bent, largely based on our consumption of back issues of Harper’s stolen from the library. In European history class, our knowledge of the Black Prince would never match that of Mr. Richardson, so he had our respect. But this was not the case with Otten. We already believed ourselves more learned.

  She quickly sensed our condescension but did not concede the premise. Possibly born in plaid slacks, Otten had black Spock bangs and reading glasses that swung back and forth across a rotating flat-chested foreground of unisex turtlenecks. She was on to our game early and placed us at opposite ends of the classroom. She also made regular sly remarks about the crummy colleges we would be attending, that is, if we managed to avoid the state pen in Jackson.

  Otten was an odd duck. In addition to her classes, she was adviser to the Powerline, the school’s newspaper. We didn’t write for the paper—that would have been too constructive—we just made a series of cracks about its suckiness. The school’s colors were blue and orange, and Otten had a similarly colored, shaggy-headed stuffed animal perched on a shelf above her desk. For reasons lost to history, it was named the Moofla.

  Moofla was the paper’s mascot and Otten’s closest confidant. During class, she would address her fuzzy friend with asides like “The Moofla doesn’t like dangling prepositions.” As the semester wore on, the conversations became more frequent. Once, when a hapless student suggested an unsuitable essay topic, Otten turned to the creature and asked, “What do you think, Moofla?” She paused, apparently considering his reply, and then declared, “We don’t think that will work.”

  This was disturbing. Most of our teachers tuned out our bratty prattle and counted the days until we were out of their domain. Otten engaged us in a long-running low-intensity conflict. She reveled in mocking Gordon’s writing in front of the young women he was trying to woo. One day, I turned in an essay extolling the virtues of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It was quite late. This I blamed on a confluence of mononucleosis and an implausible automobile accident. Otten went into investigative reporter mode. She ferreted out my lies and called my mother.

  “Your son is the most manipulative student I have had in all my years of teaching.”

  Mom’s response was succinct.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Gordie and I were pissed but powerless. Then Otten made a crucial mistake: she called in sick. On an early winter afternoon, her class descended into anarchy. A substitute sat at Otten’s desk with her face in her hands. Crime and Punishment paperbacks whizzed through the air. Gordon went on an extended walkabout with a bathroom pass. I plotted how I could interest the impossibly tall Sarah Torri in any of my romantic scenarios.

  This depressed me so thoroughly that I put my head on my desk and began to doze. Then Gordon returned. I awoke to see him frantically snapping his fingers in the doorway. He mouthed one word.

  “Moofla.”

  I immediately understood. Casually, I rose from my seat and made my way to the shelf holding our raggedy nemesis. A couple of hockey players wrestling on the floor in a homoerotic way provided a diversion. I grabbed the Moofla from behind the near-tears sub and pivoted toward the door. I then tossed the blue-orange fur ball sidearm to Gordon. He tucked the creature under his sweater and stashed him in the safe house of his locker. That night, the Moofla was smuggled to Gordon’s home in an L.L. Bean book bag.

  The next day, Otten returned. She eyed us coldly as we smirked into her classroom. She had an announcement.

  “The stealing of a teacher’s property is grounds for expulsion. Those of you who know what I am talking about should act accordingly before it’s too late.”

  We chose a different path. Gordon had an unhealthy interest in the Red Brigades’ 1978 kidnapping of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. He had an idea: ransom the Moofla back in exchange for a public apology from Otten for not acknowledging our literary greatness. Like most radical kidnappings, this was bound to fail. Still, we hatched a plan: we would photograph the Moofla at various Flint locations and mail the Polaroids to Otten, whose home address was unwisely published in the White Pages.

  It was now mid-December. We set upon our mission with a zeal that could have perhaps been better utilized conjugating the verb être. On a succession of Fridays, Gordie and I bought a bottle of Riunite at a Flint bodega, put the Smiths on the boom box, and set out in the most unsubtle of ve
hicles: Gordie’s 1963 Buick LeSabre.

  We logged many miles. There was Moofla on a chairlift at the local ski hill. There was Moofla being ravaged by other stuffed vixens on Gordon’s bed. There was Moofla reading Playboy. There was Moofla holding a current edition of the National Enquirer to prove he was still alive. And our favorite: Moofla spooning the baby Jesus in St. Paul Lutheran’s nativity scene.

  We mailed the photos. Soon after, Otten began a class with another announcement.

  “It is a federal offense to send threatening items through the mail. These are serious crimes.”

  This seemed particularly unrealistic in a place like Flint; the FBI was going to pursue the kidnapping of a Muppetesque animal while the entire city was a Beirut-style war zone and drunk driving was considered a civic right? Not likely.

  Still, things were getting too “hot,” as they said on Starsky & Hutch. It was time to unload the Moofla. We would return him to his mama—with one significant alteration. The Moofla would be hairless.

  Why? Who can say? It seemed right at the time. One snowy evening, Gordon brought the Moofla into his living room, lovingly placed him on a towel, and broke out his brother’s electric razor. Then he proceeded to mow off his synthetic blue-and-orange hair with the sideburn trimmer. Gordie’s mom walked by, prepared to speak, gave a sigh, and went upstairs to bed. His older brother then made a cameo. Matt asked if that was his electric razor. Gordon said yes. His brother shook his head and whispered, “You’ll be sorry, chump.”

  These were more words than I had heard Matt utter in three years. Our original idea was to stick the shorn Moofla in Ms. Otten’s mailbox. But then Heineken intervened. We stopped at a hardware store. We bought some rope. We drove over to Otten’s apartment complex. We drank more beer. We stepped out of the car into the cold, hard Michigan night.

  I put the rope around Moofla’s neck and tied a sailor knot I almost learned in Webelos. Gordon finally put his athleticism to proper use. He lassoed the excess rope like a rodeo cowboy. He then skillfully hurled the Moofla high onto an upper branch of an oak tree by the building’s doorway. Moofla swayed gracefully back and forth under the starlit sky. He didn’t look like he was in pain.