Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (27 page)

From out of the wind tunnel of my mind, a commanding voice dramatically intoned: “Fellas and gals, with the Official Jack Armstrong Pedometer, you can tell just how far you walk every day, how far it is to school, how many miles it is to the store or the scout meeting. You'll never be lost if you wear your Jack Armstrong
Pedometer at all times. For just one Wheaties boxtop and twenty-five cents mailed to Jack Armstrong in care of this station….” This was an important find. I examined the pedometer closely, ticking the counter lever with my thumb. It still worked. It still made that telltale click at each revolution. I remembered great herds of kids wearing corduroy knickers drifting schoolward through the boondocks, clicking as they went. The whole neighborhood sounded like an enormous flock of crickets, day and night, as kids measured how far it was to everywhere. I could still see the funny look on Miss Shields' face as, one day in fourth grade, I got up, on direct orders, to go to the blackboard to demonstrate my grasp of the multiplication table.

“What's that clicking?” asked Miss Shields.

“I'm measuring how far it is from my seat to the board,” I said.

“Give me that,” is all she said as she stuck the eighth pedometer of the day in her bottom drawer.

Pulling up my pajamas, I strapped the pedometer to my right knee, got up and carefully paced the distance to my bar, returned to my seat and took a reading. Hasty calculations revealed that six martinis would result in traveling one twelfth of a mile. Happy as a clam, I dug back into the box and unsuspectingly unearthed a shadowy horror out of my past that caused me to rock back in my chair in a wave of terror. My God! The evidence still exists! The crime had lain dormant in the back of my mind for years, gnawing at my conscience like some dry rot in the foundations of a haunted house.

Furtively, I examined my find, shielding it in my hand so that if by remote chance there were onlookers, they would not see the incriminating cellophane envelope that I held. That old sick nausea of fear of discovery, of the unmasking of my calumny, the exposure of my rottenness, hit me again. I am not proud of what I had done, but I was young and unformed. Youth is always immoral, but if I had it to do over again, I know I would do the right thing. I held it up to the light, and there they were within the envelope—yellow and green, light blue, triangular-shaped, the collection of “Rare exotic hard-to-find Foreign stamps,” which, in a headstrong moment of criminality, I had once sent away for—on approval. On approval meant you sent them your dime
after
you got the stamps. I do not have to tell you that I not only never sent in the dime, I never intended to. I remember the letter that came from Kansas City a month later, threatening my father with jail and me with a criminal record that would last throughout my life if I didn't ante up. I almost passed out when I read that; and after carefully burning it in the furnace, I decided I'd better pay. But I never did. I never heard from them again, although for years I had fleeting impressions of men in dark coats and Homburgs shadowing me wherever I went.

I tucked the stamp collection well back under the middle sofa cushion and moodily sipped my drink. Maybe that was the first misstep, I thought. Maybe if I had paid for those stamps, I could have marched through life clear-eyed, clean, honest, straight to the
White House. I'll bet Lyndon Johnson paid for
his
stamps! On second thought, however….

It was with an effort that I returned to my investigation, fishing up next a collection of thin sheets of paper bound together with a crusty old rubber band that broke in my hand immediately, spilling the crinkly slips out over the floor. Cockamamies! I had unearthed some unused gems from the precious collection that I had bought over the years at Old Man Pulaski's. He really hated the times when we would come in to buy these tissue-paper tattoos that dissolved in water.

“All right, you kids, I ain't got no time for foolin' around. Either ya want pictures or ya don't.”

Schwartz, Flick, Kissel and I, peering in through his glass case, would finally, after great soul-searching, decide on which magnificent artistic views of Old Faithful we wanted. I picked up from the floor a cockamamie showing a Marine in a green helmet sticking a bayonet into the thorax of a bright-yellow Jap soldier. A great fountain of crimson blood squirted out over the M-1. The Jap's eyes were slanted evilly, his mouth contorted as he hurled an Oriental obscenity at the square-jawed Marine. The caption read: “
GUNG HO
!” It was a beautiful picture, and I remember the day I bought it, my mother wouldn't let me put it on.

Here was my chance. I licked the ancient decal, tasting the old familiar glue flavor that I knew would not leave my mouth for a month, and meticulously smoothed the soggy cockamamie onto the back of my left hand, blowing on it expertly, as I had done so often in the past,
to dry it off. Now for the delicate part. With the skill of a surgeon, I slowly peeled off the moist backing. There, in four beautiful colors on my left hand, was as magnificent a representation as I have ever seen of a Jap corporal going to his just rewards. I wondered what the gang at the office would say to me
now?
I knew that I would be the envy of all eyes and that it would especially impress the typing pool. I held my hand out admiringly, knowing that if I didn't wash my hands, I could keep it intact for at least a month.

By now, I must admit, I had been sucked bodily into this sobering and edifying dissection of my yeasty formative years. Old excitements and cravings, fugitive passions and desires crowded in upon me. With gusto, I drained off what remained of my bloody charlie and prepared to push on through the undergrowth of my childhood, little realizing the pitfalls and traps, the traumas that lay ahead.

My cockamamie had hardly dried when I found myself holding in my hand as sinister an object as I had ever owned, an object with a history of the sort that is rarely whispered in mixed company and that could and did make strong men weep. It was a penknife, but a penknife with a difference. Shaped like a lady's leg, no less—a lady's leg wearing a chromium-plated high-heeled shoe. The mother-of-pearl calf bulged enticingly and tapered off just above the knee. It carried two blades: one for ordinary cutting, the other for snipping off the butt ends of long black cigars. As I inspected it, the
vision of an early but decisive humiliation sprang out from the knife directly into my consciousness.

My knees cracking warningly as I arose, I carried the grizzled weapon to the window. Holding it at the proper angle as I had done in the past, I looked for the silver shield embedded in the mother-of-pearl calf. Ah, yes, it was still there. I raised the knife to eye level, peering deep into the tiny hole in the shield, upward at the watery sun. There she was. My old paramour, who had contributed to many a sweaty evening and feverish dream, her grass skirt provocatively parted at mid-thigh, her roguish gypsy eyes glowing as brightly as ever, her ample and bare bazooms still in full, magnificent, flesh-colored bloom. She was the lady who had caused my disgrace and eventual court-martial from the Moose Patrol, Troop 41, Boy Scouts of America.

For months I had whined and cajoled, trying to pry out of my parents the price of an official Boy Scout knife. No one in our troop had a complete uniform. Some wore only khaki knickers; others sported only the broad-brimmed campaign hat; one or two had just a canteen; I owned only my purple neckerchief with the gold letters B.S.A. I wanted a knife to hang from my belt, like Flick had. My Uncle Carl, who spent the entire Depression playing his banjo and going in and out of poolrooms, hearing of my burning desire, one day fulfilled my wish. I distinctly recall the conversation. He wasn't wearing his false teeth that day, but he did have on his straw hat.

“I hear ya want a knife.”

“Yeah.”

“How would ya like this knife?” He fished out of his pocket the lady's leg in question. “WOW!”

“Wait'll they see that at the Scout troop. That's better than any old Boy Scout knife,” said Uncle Carl.

I held it in my hand for the first time. He bent over and whispered into my ear, his beery breath enveloping me in warmth and suds. “Look into that hole on the side. And don't tell your mother.” That was the beginning. The next week, she was an instant smash hit at Troop 41‘s meeting. And two weeks later, I was drummed out in disgrace when Mr. Gordon got wind of what the Moose Patrol was cackling about.

I put my trusty knife into the pocket of my dressing gown and returned to the fray. An angry gust of December wind rattled my window as I wallowed among Christmases past, days of Ovaltine and morning-glories. I found myself holding a singular object that at first I did not recognize. In fact, it was so grotesque that it was hard to believe that the human mind could conceive of such a surrealistic
object d'art—a
gently curved, warted, plastic, winged golden pickle, imprinted with the cabalistic symbol “57.” The number had a curiously familiar ring: 57 what? Operative 57? No, that didn't sound right. And why the pickle? Then it hit me. Heinz' 57 Varieties! Sponsored by the pickle company, Colonel Roscoe Turner and his famous Flying Corps, of which I was a fully licensed and qualified member, had appeared in a comic strip that ran under
Tillie the Toiler
back in
the days when Jiggs was hitting the corned beef and cabbage hard and Maggie was hitting Jiggs even harder. Turner's creased, intrepid face with the dashing Enrol Flynn mustache had been the very embodiment of flying. His only passenger was a lion cub named Gilmore. I pinned the wings over my left breast and decided to have an extra shot of catsup with my hamburger that night, for old time's sake. There was a time when I devoutly believed that when I grew up, I would not only be a pilot but would own several pairs of beautifully tailored, whipcord pilot-type riding breeches. With puttees. Here I am, grown up as much as I'll ever be, and all I've got are a couple of pairs of baggy Bermuda shorts, and I don't even know where I could lay my hands on as much as a single puttee if I had to. They don't even
name
guys Roscoe anymore. He did more for the canned-soup and piccalilli industries than Billy Graham has done for evangelism.

The next15 minutes I spent happily working the plunger on my Captain Midnight Ovaltine Shake-Up Mug, which I immediately saw would be handy in whipping up a batch of gibsons. I next blew several high, piercing blasts from my Captain Midnight Three-Way Mystic Dog Whistle, causing 17 mutts in apartments as far as two blocks away to howl and bark frantically as I communicated to them in Captain Midnight's secret code, the same code that I had used to send secret messages across the back yards and alleys to Flick and Kissel.

Unexpectedly, I then ran across a veritable fortune
in unrealized assets. Here, for years, I had been moderately wealthy and did not know it. I discovered seven—that's right,
seven—
unredeemed Good Humor Lucky Sticks, each good for one free Good Humor bar any time I cared to cash them in. I could not figure how I had let them go by the boards when I was a kid; but then it slowly came back to me—the summer I had hoarded them for my old age. I had read a story in a comic book about an old man who didn't save when he was a kid and now was reduced to begging on street corners. The moral was to Save For A Rainy Day. It scared me so much that I began to lay away uncashed pop bottles, Lucky Sticks and slugs for free games on the pinball machine. Vestiges of chocolate syrup remained on the valuable premiums. I wondered briefly whether I could cash the whole lot in with Emile, the bartender at the Existentialiste du Morte, for an Irish coffee.

With moist eyes, I riffled through my prized collection of Fleer's bubble-gum cards, illustrating great moments in American history. There was good old Washington still crossing the Delaware, Paul Revere galloping over the countryside on a green horse, Abraham Lincoln making a speech. Dog-eared, thumbed, well worn and faithful, my collection—one of the world's most valuable of its kind—was completely intact. As I glanced at them, my jaw hinges ached dully from countless pounds of obscenely pink bubble gum that I had pulverized to get these cards. One card, in particular, told a story. It showed Robert Fulton waving a flag from the deck of his steamship. That card had cost me four fillings
in one chomp of the gum; the sickening crunch of a mouthful of silver as the bubble gum did its deadly work is a feeling not soon to be forgotten.

The next item plunged me into such a funk as to necessitate an immediate trip to the sideboard for two fingers of the straight stuff. At first glance, it was a supremely innocent artifact. But to me, who lived through it, who suffered with it and was irrevocably scarred for life because of it, it was far more than a ten-cent package of nasturtium seeds. I looked at the brilliantly colored picture of gigantic prize-winning blossoms shown on the slender envelope of rattling seeds. It all came back—that grim week long ago that began with such high hopes and that ended in a black despair that had forever made me quail at the word “salesmanship.”

Miss Shields that spring had enlisted us to sell seeds in the neighborhood in order to buy a set of World Books for the Warren G. Harding School. Her stirring, impassioned speech—exhorting us to get out and sell the seeds to “all your friends and neighbors who are waiting for you to deliver them”—had stirred me to sign up for a whole box of 12 envelopes. I ran all the way home, eager to hit the trail. My first jaunty knock was on the door of the gray house by the corner. A haggard, sleepy lady peered out of the darkness at me.”

“What d'ya want?”

“Uh—d'ya want to buy any seeds?”

“Any what?”

“Seeds. I have marigolds, pansies, hollyhocks….”

“Seeds!”
The lady's red eyes glared out at me.

“… Nasturtiums, morning-glories.”

The door slammed shut. Miss Shields had not mentioned this possibility. At the next house, a large brown dog, closely related to the jaguar, chased me around the garage four times before I made it over the fence. Next door, a lady holding four babies and surrounded by a moiling thicket of wailing urchins peered dimly out at me, shaking her head silently.