by John Rowell
But this summer, for some reason, it’s not as easy as it used to be to go blank in front of Batman, especially when a villain ties the Caped Crusaders to a plank, where they struggle against each other, bound, helpless … in their tights. You keep watching, but you keep reminding yourself: Ray is here. Go Blank, Go Blank, Go Blank …
“No more music?” asks Connie, in the other room now, where she is spraying Niagara onto a shirt collar and steam-pressing whoosh! She pokes her head around the door: “Oh, I can’t stand that Batman show.”
“We watched all your girl shows, hon,” says Ray, draining his third drink. “Gotta have something manly for us men now. Right, sport?” He doesn’t wait for your response, he just shakes his tumbler in Connie’s direction, which means: “Get me another one, babe?”
In tonight’s opening segment, the Dynamic Duo are being lowered by a thick rope from a large ceiling pulley, which will slowly submerge them into a pool of hungry, snapping alligators. Batman and Robin are tied together, back to back; their legs, their calves, their feet kick together, their heads slide and knock against each other; if they were tied face to face, it seems to you, they could quite possibly … kiss. Batman and Robin kissing each other … the way Connie and Ray kiss? The way Rock Hudson and Doris Day, in the movies, kiss? Why would you think about such a thing? Why does your head suddenly feel light and balloony? Why does Ray have to be here? Why is Going Blank not working?
“Lawrence Welk is on the other channel,” you offer quickly, turning to Ray but keeping the TV screen in the corner of your eye. Much as you want to, you’re too afraid to watch it straight on. Oh, wouldn’t it be great to have your own television set in your own room? Memo to Santa Claus …
Connie returns with Ray’s freshened drink.
“Wouldn’t you rather see Lawrence Welk, Mama?” you say. It’s a rally cry; you have to change this channel.
“Well, yes, I would,” she says, sitting down.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ray says. “Just change it then, and stop talking about it.”
And that’s your cue at last. You twist the channel dial on the Zenith back to the music. It’s better this way; you’ll just have to imagine the conclusion of Batman later for yourself, after you’re in bed. You can do that; already, you’re an expert at coming up with alternate endings.
What a relief to be back with Lawrence Welk and his orchestra! Mr. Welk is leading his musicians in the love theme from A Summer Place. You glance over at Ray—he’s starting to nod, as he usually does after a few gin and tonics; perhaps it didn’t even matter that you switched channels. You’re listening, Connie is listening, Ray is half listening. The three of you sitting there, doing nothing but breathing and staring at the set, listening to an old romantic movie theme. And even though there’s music filling the room, no one is commenting; there’s just silence between the three of you.
And you’re not a fan of silence. You prefer to keep conversation going, as if at a cocktail party; if you can keep your parents talking, and talking about themselves, they won’t have as much time to notice you and ask you questions. You ask the questions, you get them to reminisce about themselves and the old days. These are the skills of segue, and you possess them in abundance; you have studied at the feet of Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas. Merv and Mike have taught you how to move guests along, how to fish for information, how to prompt a certain response. Also: How to cut to a word from the sponsor. How to thank everybody for watching. How to say good night.
“Does this song remind y’all of Chapel Hill?” you ask. You’re aware that Connie and Ray would never recognize that query for what it is: a prompt. They don’t watch Merv and Mike as often as you do.
“It does,” says Connie automatically. Connie has no idea that ten years ago she gave birth to a small variety-show host, that she has a variety-show host living in her home. “Doesn’t it, Ray?”
“Sure. I guess,” he says.
The music on The Lawrence Welk Show often has the effect of making Ray and Connie nostalgic for the days when they first started dating as students at the University of North Carolina, and you’ve learned how to encourage that. It thrills you to hear the story of how they first met at the Autumn Ball where Kay Kyser and his orchestra provided the evening’s entertainment. You have listened over and over to the tale of how Ray stood nervously behind Connie in the punch line, she in a blue-green taffeta party dress with sweetheart neckline, he in a white dinner jacket and waxed crew cut. Their first dance: “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along,” and this number was also recently featured on Lawrence Welk’s “Great Outdoors” show. You know it by heart now; quite possibly, you think of it as one of your signature songs.
On rainy afternoons this summer you have opened up Ray and Connie’s wedding photo album, which contains in its broad binding a tiny music box that plays “Here Comes the Bride” if you stick a penny in the slot and twist it all the way around. You’ve studied the photos of your aunts and grandmothers in taffeta party dresses and sparkly jewels; you’re especially fond of the ones of Connie in her big white wedding gown and Ray in his tuxedo. There they are, frozen in glossy, black-and-white Olan Mills perfection: Ray and Connie kissing at the altar, hurtling down the aisle, dodging rice, feeding each other cake, the cake where the tiny bride and groom dolls stood. (They now reside on your comicbook shelf; you’re convinced this lends your room a touch of glamour.) Connie and Ray are the handsomest couple ever, everyone says so, and the fact of that makes you so proud.
Other photos in the album seize your attention, too: the snapshots—or are they portraits?—of Ray’s groomsmen and ushers, his former fraternity brothers. You’ve memorized the photos of the “boys” grinning drunkenly at the camera, their ties gradually becoming more and more loosened with each subsequent flipped album page, the expressions in their eyes growing glassier and glassier, as they loop their arms around each other, shag each other’s hair, corral one another in jokey chokeholds. There’s even a shot of one brother pouring champagne down the throat of another brother. Their raucous, prankish spirits jump off the page at you from the slick Fotomat surfaces; if only some fairy-tale genie could grant you your wish to jump into the pictures as if by magic and enter those black and white scenes, to become instantly twenty-two, instantly one of them, an accepted, popular member of a good-looking boys’ club, a prized VIP guest at Ray and Connie’s wedding. You would be their instant new/old buddy, and you would suddenly share their entire history of friendship and fraternal brotherhood. You know all their names already anyway, and even their nicknames, the way they’re described alongside the class photos in Ray’s yearbook: Kip Carruthers “Esquire,” Johnny “Meet Y’all Round the Corner, Girls” Armstrong, Hutch “What’s Your Handicap, Fella?” Hutchinson. You’ve memorized these, too. You recall them more quickly now than Ray does.
But Connie and Ray always say: “That seems like such a long time ago.” Perhaps it was. Yet in the photo album, it seems like it could have been yesterday. What you love about photographs and movies is that in them nothing changes; no one gets older, the images stay frozen and preserved between the album covers. You know you can always look at a photograph and plug yourself into that moment. You understand the lure of nostalgia. One day, you may even be nostalgic for Right Now: for these intimate evenings at home with Connie and Ray, for these hot August nights of Batman and Lawrence Welk which the three of you share; you look forward to someday reminiscing with Connie and Ray about these days and nights, in the manner of old friends gathered at a reunion. By then, you’ll be old enough to knock back gin and tonics with them; the three of you will toast to your good old days.
For August will soon be a memory, and September will come along to carry you back to school. Oh, how easy it is in the depths of July and August to forget about school! These nights spent with Connie and Ray have nothing to do with fourth grade, fifth grade; these nights are the anti-school. How natural it is for memories of the last school year
to fade out over the summer, even for a highly academic child like you. On these humid late-summer evenings you don’t dwell on the rejections and slights and hurts of the playground, the frustration of math (language arts are so much more important to you), or the rides home on the school bus when you sit alone, or maybe with one of the unpopular little girls.
Yes, you are damaged, but in the safety of your Early American family room, you are also one swinging little romantic guy, you with your upstanding, church-going, Good Neighbor parents, you in your beloved Underdog pajamas and crew socks, with your champagne flute and makeshift canapés, you with your ability to turn the family living room into the studio of your very own variety show, in which your guests for the evening are the glamorous Connie and Ray, the closest thing you have to Rock and Doris, perhaps even to Burt Bacharach and Angie Dickinson; Connie and Ray are the icons who happen to live in your home.
You can even dance. On the Zenith, Mr. Welk and his orchestra have begun to swing into a sassy, up-tempo jitterbug, and you recognize that it is time to offer your hand to Connie, to Iced-Tea Lady, which she girlishly, blushingly accepts, and the two of you jitterbug with great enthusiasm to that old favorite, “Cow Cow Boogie.” Your steps aren’t accurate, and there’s the height discrepancy, of course, but the performance is, as always, genuine in its eagerness to please and entertain, and you are exhilarated by it. Any chance to perform. In the background, on the TV screen, you and Connie are shadowed by Bobby and Cissy, the professionals, the Fred and Ginger of the Lawrence Welk program; they’re the dream dancers now, you and Connie are the real live ones.
And Ray is the audience.
Ray, your father, but also a dashing and good-looking former fraternity boy, is your audience of one, and he looks on, as audience members do. What perhaps you don’t see, however, in the frenzied rush of your hard-working dance act, is that he doesn’t so much look on at you and Connie—dance partners—but rather studies you, as if you were up there by yourself, as if you were a solo act and she was a prop. He doesn’t need to study Connie, he knows Connie. But he studies you, and as he does, he sports a difficult smile, an aging fraternity-boy smile that endeavors—really, it does—to beam out delight and encouragement in your direction. But at the corners, the smile turns down, and that encouragement evaporates, and soon that smile, indeed his whole expression, morphs into something that is distinctly not a smile. It is a horror movie face of open-mouthed, frozen panic.
You and Connie bow, out of breath, of course, but flushed and beaming, and you look to Ray, confident that he will gratefully applaud, as audiences do, certain that he will bequeath that mysterious approval that audiences give to performers. The two of you wait, panting and watching: Is Ray a satisfied ticket buyer? Did he get his money’s worth for this evening’s show?
But after more beats of silence than an audience usually holds for, Ray only gives a couple of halfhearted claps and stands up, shakily, to get another drink, brushing past the two of you and turning off the television set as he makes his way to the kitchen.
“Go to bed, sport,” he says, under his breath, looking away.
Oh.
And that’s what you get for all your hard work. Ray is not only a disgruntled audience member, he is a surly talk-show guest. He didn’t even give you the chance for the sign-off, the exit line that is always reserved for the host, which is:
That’s our show for this evening, folks. Good night!
You are the host, right?
But it’s OK with you, really, to be packed off to your room by yourself; in some ways it’s a relief. You close the door behind you and stand looking around at your dimly lit room: alone at last. You remember reading in Photoplay something Judy Garland said: “An Oscar doesn’t keep you warm in bed at night.” You wondered what she meant by that; you weren’t aware that Oscar winners took their Oscars to bed, though you’re sure if you had one, that’s what you would do. Of course, you don’t need an Oscar to keep you warm; you have parents for that, parents who make sure you’re covered up with blankets, safe in your single bed, in your darkened, hushed, boy’s room.
No need for protective blankets now, though; no need for extra heat on an August night. Under a thin summer bedspread of generic cowboy-and-Indian scenes (Connie’s choice, not yours), you lie awake, and you hear the faint sound of your mother’s and father’s voices in the living room, the occasional clinking of ice in their glasses, and from outside your window you hear the rumblings, skids, and honks of cars passing on the road, punctuated by the occasional whoop of rowdy teenagers, possibly fraternity boys, in convertibles, no doubt, approaching in the distance, then close, then loud, then farther away, then distant, then gone.
You turn over on your side, basking in the small, flattering yellow glow of your Rocky and Bullwinkle nightlight, a pin spot. Their bug-eyed cartoon faces intertwine around each other with the same Saturday-morning grins that grace your favorite cereal’s box top; you had to collect four of those box tops, in fact, to send off in the mail just to get this very nightlight. Rocky and Bullwinkle stare at you all through the wee hours. You close your eyes and try to go to sleep, but what you count instead of, say, sheep, are Ray’s fraternity brothers, and your mind jumps back to the image of Batman and Robin tied up together, stretched out, straining, twisting against each other, and then the Joker—was the Joker tonight’s villain? You didn’t watch long enough to find out …
Fine. Create it for yourself.
It’s the Joker, standing over them, laughing, hysterical, as if he were himself a crazed, mischief-minded fraternity brother in weird costuming at the Campus Halloween Ball. And Batman, struggling against the Boy Wonder, implores the Joker to be released, begging him with his eyes but begging none too convincingly, and Batman begins to sing in a raspy, desperate baritone: “Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree.” You toss and turn underneath the sheets, unable to sleep under the big burly cowboys and Indians. You kick the covers off. You are still dressed like Underdog, and Rocky and Bullwinkle still stare at you, unblinking and unanimated. And somewhere in the background, on a distant Hollywood soundstage, but also in your living room, a vocalist has stepped up to a microphone to thunderous applause and has begun to sing. You can’t make out the words to the song, but the music is lush and dreamy, and you thrash around and listen … and think … and conjure up pictures in your head … and thrash some more, until, well … until you can actually imagine what it would be like to be a real, live Overnight Sensation.
It’s September, you’re a fifth grader now, and—good news—you got into Miss Kenan’s class. She is the youngest and prettiest of the three fifth-grade teachers at Linden Hills Elementary, and, to top that off, last year a rumor went around the school that Miss Kenan had once worked as a trapeze artist with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus before turning to elementary teaching. You try to imagine Miss Kenan in white tights, busty and big-haired, with huge swipes of stagey blue eye shadow painted across her eyelids, swinging upside down over a net, dangling, then upright again, right arm high above her head: sexy, confident, and full of herself, while below her, a lusty, common crowd cheers in unanimous Big Top delight, greedy and hungry for all that she has to give them.
But now Miss Kenan is just pert and pretty in a simple white blouse and navy skirt, instructing you and your classmates to open up your tablets and, with your metallic red, tubey Number 2 pencils, write in big, blocky letters: “My name is _____; Today is_____; Our president is_____; Our principal is_____.” This disappoints you; you resent the act of writing reduced to a mere exercise in penmanship. After all, this summer you authored a full-length play about your family, written in a week with ballpoint pen on yellow legal pads. You have never been one for pencils, preferring the look, smell, and feel of ink. It occurs to you that writing instruments, specifically pen versus pencil, are not something the other children in your class concern themselves with. Neither are they concerned with forging a special, secret understa
nding with Miss Kenan. But you are, and why not? You’re a playwriting, champagne-loving ten-year-old, and she is a Teacher With A Past: loose-living, canapé-eating, martini-swilling, all woman. Miss Kenan is the type of dame—lyes, dame-that you’ve read about in quick, secret perusals of True Detective down at the drugstore. You know, as the writers of True Detective would know if they laid eyes on her, what Miss Kenan really is: a shadow-dwelling refugee from the circus, a game-playing, lusty, busty babe, a juicy tomato, a hard-hearted mantrap. How many fifth graders are fortunate enough to have this for a new teacher? Miss Kenan may be outfitted conservatively in a plain blouse and skirt set, but you, and only you among the collective fifth grades, can see that that’s really a disguise. You know this is not the true costume of swinging high-wire trapeze artists whose lives have been kissed by scandal …
You are so lucky. You and Miss Kenan will be a clandestine team. And if she doesn’t comply with your request to be allowed to write in ink, you might even blackmail her with the secret information that you—and you alone—possess about her.
You develop a friendship with another boy, a new kid in your class named Eric Tuthill, who has moved to North Carolina from upstate New York. You suspect Eric would rather have been taken in by the popular, jocky boys, but they are selective and don’t readily exhibit the gracious and welcoming ambassadorial skills that you extend to new schoolchildren. You figure Eric is probably glad anybody picked him to hang out with; plus you will talk to him about the state of North Carolina and reveal secrets of your town and clue him in on various shadowy intrigues of Linden Hills Elementary. He will feel, in turn, that he has been let in on something, guided, eased into his new situation by an unusually generous and giving host, and in gracious response, he will offer his loyal, lifelong friendship. What piqued your interest most specifically about Eric was his origin, upstate New York, which makes him something of an exotic in your area. It occurs to you that Eric’s being from New York State perhaps means that he has had occasion to go to Manhattan, which, along with Hollywood, California, is one of your two favorite places in the world, despite the fact that you’ve never been to either.
