Baby Boom Page 6
Not to go off on another digression (although the Baby Boom has always been inclined to wander from the main subject whenever we can get a hall pass), but unfounded objections to tract houses, DeSotos, and Beaver Cleaver make you fear for the mental well-being of intellectuals. We are not a highly intellectual generation and who can blame us.
Baby Boom girls didn’t mind the boredom as much as Baby Boom boys. Girls could see into the future. This was evident in the way girls played with dolls that had dollhouses full of sinks, toilets, bassinets, and other items of real futurity plus doll clothes and somebody’s older brother from down the block who’d rip Barbie’s blouse off to look at her breasts. Meanwhile boys were playing with one-legged lead soldiers that were French.
Girls knew that the tedium of school was a necessary preparation for the tedium of home and family. And Baby Boom girls had an intuition that their tedium would extend beyond home and family to professions, corporate management, and the State Department. They’d better get ready to be bored.
Boys were driven crazy—literally crazy, as defined in the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The “diagnostic criteria” for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder include:
makes careless mistakes in schoolwork
does not seem to listen
is often easily distracted
fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat
runs about or climbs excessively
has difficulty playing or engaging in leisure activities quietly
These boys have been accurately diagnosed as boys. Now there are drugs to treat it. The medications are what Baby Boomers would call uppers. The recommended therapy for ADHD is, essentially, dating fat girls to get their diet pills to study for exams.
It’s a shame, although not because Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta, and whatever lead to a lifetime of drug dependency and squalor. I came of age in the 1960s. A lifetime of drug dependency and squalor has its points. But kids are sitting still after the bell, engrossed in their schoolwork, and being denied the benefits of the fantasy life induced by utter boredom.
Our school’s classrooms and halls had two-tone paint based on some theory that was current about what was good for eyesight: a pale bile green above a nose-high watermark with a darker cheese mold green below. The school is filling up with water, right to the watermark level. Miss Burbage’s big wooden desk and chair are floating away and Miss Burbage with them. We have to tread water or we’ll drown. “Get back in your seat,” says Miss Burbage.
Our school is indeed a fortress. Other kids from other schools are attacking it. We rain Miss Burbage’s potted African violets down upon their heads. They break through the girls’ entrance with a teeter-totter battering ram. We fence with wooden rulers. They throw blackboard erasers. Our only hope is to retreat to the auditorium and barricade the stage with cardboard straw, cardboard twigs, and cardboard bricks from the first grade’s performance of Three Little Pigs. “Get back in your seat,” says Miss Burbage.
My desk is a helicopter. Mary Ritter sits in front of me. Her dual braids spin, whup, whup, whup. Jack Gertin sits behind me, a round boy, the tail rotor. I have twin .50-caliber Number 2 pencils. Oh no, ack-ack at twelve o’clock high. Good thing I’ve got a parachute in my book bag. “For the last time,” says Miss Burbage, “get back in your seat.”
And every couple of months we’d have a real air-raid drill and get under our desks to protect ourselves from nuclear holocaust. Nowadays the kids, their minds made literal by drug-induced obsession with doing long division, would be scared they were going to die. But we, in the sure and certain hope of fantasy life, knew that atomic bombs only killed grown-ups and probably caused school to be let out early. Billy and I and Johnny and Steve and Bobby and Jerry would survive, like in Lord of the Flies but without the flies. Not that I’d read the book, or heard of it. But when I did read it I was impressed anew with the capacity of adults like William Golding to spoil things.
One boy is almost as good as a man. Two boys are half as good as a man. Three boys are useless.
—New Hampshire saying
5
MERE ANARCHY IS LOOSED
Adulthood, however, pursues the most evasive child. And he stumbles upon such trip-ups as the facts of life. These were put in my way by cousin Stuart on a visit from Chillicothe. Stuart was a forthright and plain-minded sixth grader not known to tease or fib. I had previously imagined—with the help of parental vagueness—something like a bacterial infection communicated by love and marriage. Mom’s tummy got a germ, which was in the air, from Dad.
Stuart told me what part of Dad went where in Mom (or approximately where). I was an unbeliever, firm in my sexual atheism. Stuart protested, “It’s true!” Then he added, more sympathetically, “You’ll get used to the idea.” He said, “Eventually you’ll even want to do it yourself with your wife.” Although he didn’t sound fully convinced about this last part.
I was puzzled by the mechanics of the thing. How did this limp member get stuffed into that appointed place? (A prescient concern, but I was getting ahead of myself by half a century.) I had erections at the time but I didn’t connect them with sex. They seemed to be some pleasurable version of an injury causing stiffness and swelling. I worried a bit about erections. We had a leg-humping toy fox terrier called Pee Wee with a penis that was rigid and ready two-thirds of the day. I asked my mother what was wrong with Pee Wee. “He’s nervous,” she said. Then I worried a bit about what was making me nervous.
It wasn’t the facts of life themselves, although these did present a conundrum. Mothers and fathers performed the business to produce a baby. My sisters were twins. Had my parents done it twice? Or had they done it three times?
Such questions were not cleared up by the sex education of the day, of which there was none. Looking into contemporary sources such as the supposed bible of 1950s parenting, Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock, I see a call for giving children frank and factual information about sexual matters. Women’s magazines, newspaper advice columnists, teachers, and parents seemed to agree. They also seemed to agree not to listen to themselves. Thus, for boys at least, Dad took us aside and mumbled, “Boys and girls are different, and your mom and I are the same. That is, I mean, we’re different too, and . . .” After that he pretty much ground to a halt. There was a long pause. Then he blurted, “Isthereanythingyouwantmetotellyou?”
To which we answered, “No.” This, translated from boy-speak, meant, “Oh, God, no! No, no, no! Please shut up!”
Mothers must have had more substantial conversations with daughters, if for no other reason than that the girls would be bleeding from a surprising place every month. Or perhaps moms were no better than dads. My high school girlfriend told me she learned all she knew about menstruation from the back of her mother’s Kotex box.
At any rate the details of screwing were obscure. The dirty word itself was confusing. I don’t know what the girls were saying to each other, but the boys were engaged in various debates. There was, for example, the “How many holes?” argument. This was conducted atop Steve Penske’s backyard swing set, which had been relegated to a place to climb up and perch on because we considered ourselves too mature to use the swings.
The debates were brief and halfhearted. Sex was disgusting but not disgusting enough to pique a boy’s full interest. A “sail cat” was really disgusting. Sometimes in hot weather on a busy road a cat would be hit by a car and repeatedly run over until it was flattened and baked dry on the asphalt. Then the cat could be peeled up and sailed through the air. Toward the end of the 1950s the Wham-O company began marketing the Frisbee, or “Pluto Platter,” as it was originally called. The patent holder, Walter Morrison, claimed he got the idea from pie tins he used to toss around on the beach in the
1930s. Any experienced boy could have debunked that story.
Since sex and the Frisbee would become totems of the Baby Boom there must be some connection. I can only say that the whole use and entire purpose of the sail cat was to toss it at girls.
Nowadays the first glimmerings of puberty lead to the behavior for which puberty was naturally and organically designed. This is a cause of shock and horror to modern parents who are otherwise worshipful of all things natural and organic. Or so I gather from the media. My wife and children are tactfully mum on the subject.
Back then the first glimmerings of puberty led to mayhem among boys, the sail cat being just the beginning. I suppose this was sublimation. Sublimation doesn’t exist anymore, or so I gather from the media. But it was still extant in the 1950s when we channeled forbidden sexual impulses into acceptable activities. The activity we accepted with the most enthusiasm involved another product from the Wham-O company, its slingshot. A good slingshot loaded with a half-inch steel ball bearing was, at close range, potentially as lethal and probably as accurate as a 9mm Glock. And every boy was licensed to carry.
In fairness it should be said that it never occurred to us to use our slingshots to settle personal grudges let alone rob drugstores. And half-inch steel ball bearings were hard to come by and heavy in the pocket. Our usual ammunition was the cat’s-eyes, mibs, and clearys left over from our marbles-playing days. And we only shot at each other for fun.
A particularly good game on summer nights was for one of us to crouch in my backyard while the other boys with their slingshots were stationed four doors down on the second-floor airing deck above the Stumfs’ back door. The solitary hero had to climb over our chain-link fence, belly-crawl through a weed-strewn empty lot, do a broken field run across the open space behind the Inwood and MacKay houses with only Johnny’s aging German shepherd for cover, then make his way over the hedges and through the elaborate gardening of the crabby old people who lived next door to the Stumfs. The old people must have had a hundred rosebushes. Fortunately wearing shorts was unthinkable for any boy over eight. Meanwhile the airing-deck defenders kept up a continual barrage, and their attacker returned fire as best he could until he reached the protective overhang at the Stumfs’ back steps. His last act of bravado was to step out from under this revetment and loose a Parthian shot, which broke a window, and we all caught hell.
Breaking a window was the great taboo for the armed boy. According to modern adult lore the constant scold of our childhood was “You’ll put somebody’s eye out!” I don’t recall parents ever saying so. They were too worried about us breaking windows. And rightly. Windows seemed to break more easily in those days. Every ball sport was accompanied by the sound of shattering glass. I even managed it while pretending to play football. I was in our upstairs hall kicking the winning extra point against Notre Dame after the fourth-quarter-and-seconds-to-go Ohio State touchdown. My shoe came off and went through the window at the top of the stairs.
The window situation got worse as boys advanced in their projectile capabilities. We had slingshots and BB guns and artillery of our own invention such as the firecracker-powered frozen juice can and the discovery that a Louisville Slugger could send a half-inch steel ball bearing about a mile.
The boys from one block over were more enterprising. They took expended metal CO2 cartridges, the kind used in seltzer bottles, and packed them with match heads. Then they found a length of pipe with a suitable diameter and crimped one end. The result was a spectacular little rocket launch with a charred CO2 cartridge reentering the earth’s atmosphere two or three neighborhoods away where it doubtless broke a window. The twelve-year-olds buying four or five hundred books of paper matches at the local cigar store were regarded with equanimity by its owner. One young man went too far, however, and broke open a couple of his dad’s shotgun shells and replaced the match heads with gunpowder. He was treated in the emergency room (we all knew the place), and I believe he had to go without TV for a week.
If someone had asked us—and no one did—why we went everywhere carrying slingshots, BB guns, Scout knives, M-80s, and other weaponry, we would have said we were hunting squirrels.
This was an acceptable premise. The bowl of human compassion had not yet overflowed and begun to shower its blessings on nature in general and certainly not on squirrels. It was a crueler age.
Concentrating the sun’s rays on an anthill with a magnifying glass and watching the ants pop was regarded as a wholesome pastime, like tennis. Our favorite use for tennis rackets was to swat wasps, though not the kind that build big paper hives and have a lot of angry compatriots. We took our tennis rackets to the scruffy lawn of Johnny MacKay’s cement block church where sand wasps made their solitary nests between tufts of chickweed.
The sand wasp lives down an ominous hole and grows to an immensity, nearly two inches in length and thick as a finger. Billy Stumf, a convincing boy (he grew up to be a boat salesman), claimed its sting was lethal. We would hover as though hung upon a slender thread over the bottomless pit full of fire and wrath and a sand wasp. Then—no doubt improving our serves and backhands—we’d volley the bug into oblivion.
What went on with frogs and fireworks does not bear description, but I have a friend my age who is convinced that when he arrives at the Pearly Gates an immense bullfrog will be there brandishing a huge bottle rocket and staring with grim relish down my friend’s throat.
We never did get any squirrels, the scampering jerks. They were too hard to hit even when we resorted to the explosive slingshot team. One boy would grip the slingshot handle in both fists. A second boy would put a cherry bomb in the sling and pull back the elastic to its fullest extent. And a third boy would light the wick. Jerry Harris was a fumbler with matches and slow to yell, “Fire!” I had some explaining to do about the singe holes in my T-shirt. Ruining your clothes was considered grave misbehavior.
We had our moral limits. We would never harm a dog. Even the mangiest stray excited our sympathy. We immediately went to our respective kitchens to get something to feed it, causing all our mothers to rush out waving brooms and flapping aprons to chase the poor thing away. It was gospel among midcentury adults that the first thing a dog did when it got lost was catch rabies.
And we wouldn’t hurt a cat. In the daytime. Any cat found out-of-doors after dark was an enemy to boyhood and sworn prey. We hunted them with our Wham-Os, Daisy air rifles, and firecrackers down alleys, over garbage cans, and between garages. But our incompetence equaled our evil, and I think the most we bagged was an outraged caterwaul. Actually, the cats got the better of us. Having chased a tabby into the eighteen-inch-wide passageway separating the Stumfs’ garage from the Penskes’, Johnny MacKay let fly with a whole string of lit one-inchers that ricocheted off the eaves, landed at his feet, and left him deaf for a week. Not that his parents noticed since all a boy ever said to his parents was “Huh?”
We had better luck hunting lawn ornaments. Birdbaths, garden gnomes, and glass gazing balls were deemed a challenge to our honor. What kind of timid, weakling boys did people think we were to leave such quarry unguarded in their yards? What sort of clumsy poachers and bad shots did they believe us to be? There’s a joyful ringing clash and a beautiful splay of mirrored shards when a glass gazing ball gets a half-inch steel ball bearing smack in the middle on a moonlit night.
People, as well as animals and things, were fair game, as long as they were defenseless. Crabby old people who lived by themselves were tormented. Their doorbells were stuck to a permanent buzzing with thumbtacks. Their windows were soaped. And in the most extreme case I remember, involving the rose-growing Stumf neighbors, a paper bag full of dog poop was placed on a front porch and set on fire with the idea that the crabby old people would come out and stamp on the flames. But the dog poop was wet and the blaze died.
It was not a good time to be a younger brother. Although parents k
ept that particular torturing somewhat in check by making our backsides fair game too. It was truly not a good time to be an unusual kid. There was a slight boy at our school, precise in his speech and fastidious in his manners, whose mother had him in a ballet class. His life was hell. Being fat was an offense, unless you were friends with the fat kid, and even then, if Jerry Harris goofed up, it was possible for all of us to turn on him.
Fatty, fatty, two-by-four,
Couldn’t get through the outhouse door.
We’re proud of ourselves, as a morally attuned generation, for creating a kinder society, more empathetic and caring, more accepting and less judgmental. And it’s fair to say we’ve done so. But we were careful not to become better people until we’d had our fun.
When not wreaking havoc on the pets, possessions, or persons of others, we endeavored to wreak it on ourselves. All sports were contact sports. Tackle basketball was the norm beneath the hoop mounted over every garage door. In baseball it was considered unsporting to steal second without sliding at full speed, cleats first, straight at the second baseman even if he was nowhere near second base. The point of sandlot football was to knock everybody to the ground. Carrying, throwing, and kicking the football were beside the point. Jerry Harris ran me down (the sedentary nature of childhood obesity had not yet been discovered), tackled me, and broke my arm while I was playing defensive linebacker.
We cherished our bicycles as a way to get around but also, at least as much, as a way to get hurt. A careless dismount could do the job, smacking our testicles against the crossbar. That crossbar marked our bicycle as a “boy’s bike.” There were boys, burdened by older sisters and frugal parents, who rode a “girl’s bike,” with a step-through frame. They might as well have been wearing the skirts the step-through frame was designed to accommodate.
We rode our bikes down the steepest slopes (not very steep in our part of the Midwest). We rode our bikes around corners at the highest speed (about ten miles per hour on our single-sprocket Schwinns). Our favorite way to hurt ourselves was playing “chicken.” Two furiously pedaling boys rode toward each other to see who would swerve. There was, however, a tacit agreement between us that each had flinched last. Imaginative as we were, we lacked the fictional skill to invent a story for parents explaining how we both managed to wreck our bikes at the same place at the same time. Nonetheless we considered ourselves daredevils, a term of great approbation.