Mean Dads for a Better America Read online

  We of course had an old schoolhouse desk in our basement, too, the wooden kind with the tops that open up, and it even had a hole for an inkwell in the right-hand corner. I dragged it out to the curb, put the jug on top, put the cups inside, and hung a sign on the front, written in my best block letters, ICE COLD LEMONADE. I set the price at a very reasonable two cents per cup. Even considering the value of a dollar in the early ’70s that was an almost unheard-of beverage bargain.

  “Where’s the ice?” asked John Sullivan, circling around my stand on his bicycle.

  “It’s cold,” I said. “I had it in the refrigerator overnight.”

  “But you’ve got to have ice—it says ICE COLD LEMONADE. Plus, the ice takes up space in the cup . . . you’re going to be giving away too much lemonade if you don’t have the ice in there. Don’t you know that’s how these businesses make money—it’s almost all ice in the cups, so they’re able to give you less of the drink.”

  I went in and got the ice—we had the old ice-cube trays with the handle that you had to crank back and forth to break up the cubes, while being careful that your other hand didn’t get stuck to the metal tray. I put one tray of cubes into a trash bag and kept them beside my desk. Sully was right—one cube took up most of the space in the cup.

  I did a brisk business. I thought I’d only get foot traffic and kids on their bikes, but to my surprise people would pull their cars over to the side of the road for a cup of lemonade. Most people didn’t want any pennies back—they would give me a nickel, a dime, or even a quarter and tell me to “keep the change.” I was refilling my jug all day and I went through all the ice cube trays in our freezer. By the end of the day I had between five and six dollars. I’d never in my life possessed such a large sum of money.

  As I counted my day’s receipts John Sullivan was straddling his banana seat beside me looking on. “What are you gonna do with the profits?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve got to reinvest the profits—that’s what business is all about. You make money, you reinvest the profits in product for the next day’s business.”

  “I was just gonna save it.”

  “You can’t save it!” said Sully. “You’ve got a business now. You’ve got to reinvest it. You should go to Dacey’s and get more ingredients.”

  He was right—I had a good thing going and I should continue it. I felt like a real businessman all of a sudden. I got on my bike and John Sullivan and I raced to Dacey’s variety store to reinvest the profits.

  “Here, look . . . grape and cherry flavor Hi-C. You can offer a new type of drink to your customer.”

  I bought two jumbo packets of powdered drink mix for three dollars, and took my new product excitedly home to show my mother.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “I reinvested the profits.”

  “Why? That’s a rip-off! Those cost a dollah-fifty apiece! I could get ten times as much for that price. And look—on the label, it’s nonsweetened. You have to add your own sugar! I’m going to have to buy a big bag of sugar just to make this. It was a total waste! You wasted all your money!”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. My mother valued thriftiness more than money itself. She would rather supply me with cheap, clumpy product than have me spend my own money on overpriced goods. I didn’t blame John Sullivan for the terrible advice—in theory he was right about investing in my business, but I didn’t live in theory; I lived in my house. I went to bed discouraged and never made another lemonade stand.

  Kids are always being told they don’t know the value of a dollar, but it’s all a matter of perspective. Most adults think of the value of money in terms of things like real estate or educational expenses. But kids really appreciate a dollar’s value because they think about small-ticket items. Back then, if I looked at a dollar, I’d see ten candy bars. And yes, you could get ten real candy bars for a dollar when I was eight years old.*

  My mother was always teaching her children about value. But what if you get something for free? That’s the best value of all, right? No, not-quite-two years earlier I had learned the lesson that there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or snack). Especially if your goods have been ill gotten.

  E.J. Shattuck Elementary School was an old-fashioned schoolhouse with one class per grade. Forget the 1950s, this place was closer to the Victorian Era. The school had a principal, but we never saw him; the real headmistress was the sixth-grade teacher Miss Gavin, who walked the hallways in a gown and pearls, and addressed the boys as “master” as in “Master Shillue, stop that running and tuck in those shirttails posthaste!”

  The schoolyard was divided into boys’ and girls’ sides, for play before school and at recess. Both sides had equal real estate, but were used differently. The boys were spread out over every inch of their side—running, chasing, pushing, fighting. On the girls’ side, they were clumped together like bees, around a thick iron bar. “The Bar” was about twenty-five feet long and ran parallel to the ground at the height of about three feet. Girls could play on The Bar anyway they liked, although it was too thick to get young hands around and too slick to sit or stand on. Girls would mostly hang on to it and chat.

  I used to go to the border of the girls’ side and watch them, clumped onto The Bar, buzzing. There I formed some assumptions about the difference between the sexes: boys like to spread out while girls liked to cluster; boys like to fight and girls like to talk. Was this the natural order on display or a pre–Title Nine America shunting children into oppressive roles? I think it was a little of both.

  The main hallway of school featured a massive antique oak bench. The Bench was where they sent the bad kids. A visit to The Bench for the day meant being watched, and judged, by all the other kids in the school. There was a flaw in The Bench as a disciplinary tool, however. Humiliation only works if one is humiliated. Because it was usually occupied by the older boys, and the tougher ones at that, most boys saw The Bench as a badge of honor. I was sent to The Bench only once, after engaging in a recess “snowball fight” using crushed beer cans (they were everywhere in the ’70s) with two other boys, Johnny Heyn and John Mitiguy. My afternoon on The Bench with these two tough guys was a bonding experience, and we soon became best friends, with many more misadventures to follow. It seems The Bench, which was supposed to reform us through guilt and forced humiliation, was more of a door—to a world of hooliganism!

  One day in my first-grade classroom at Shattuck Elementary School, Mitiguy turned around in his seat in front of me. (Most every boy in Norwood was referred to by his last name, maybe because so many of them were named John or Johnny.) With a devious smile on his face, Mitiguy held out a shiny coin. “Hey! I’ve got a quarter! I took it from my mother’s purse. You want to go to Dacey’s after school?”

  A quarter could go a long way at Dacey Brothers variety store.

  “You sure we can?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be. Of course we could. I mean he had already committed the crime of theft; now he had to get rid of the evidence. And he needed an accomplice.

  So right after school we headed over to Dacey’s, which was directly across the street. It was the afterschool hangout of many of the upperclassmen, the fifth- and sixth-grade paperboys with money to burn. Mitiguy and I got their attention when we approached the corner store.

  “Hey, kid . . . you want a sip of my Mountain Dew?” a deep (to me) voice said.

  “No, thanks.” I answered for both of us.

  I knew what was up. There was a sixth grader who stood outside of Dacey’s every day and offered any younger kids who walked by free sips of Mountain Dew, as long as they allowed him to pour a little on their head. I had fallen for his trick once myself.

  “Just a little, you can take a sip, and then I’ll put a tiny little sip on your head . . . you won’t even feel it.”

  I knew it was a trap, but I didn’t want to refuse because that could get me labeled a sissy and something worse could happen. I took the sip, and,
of course, he dumped not one, but several sips of Mountain Dew on my head, which dried sticky, and stayed in my hair for the rest of the day. It was definitely not worth the sip.

  So Mitiguy and I went in and headed straight for the penny candy. We could fill our pockets with sour balls, Mary Janes, and Squirrel Nut Caramels, and still had money to buy a Hershey bar to split since they were only ten cents. Then we both bought a set of wax lips.

  We stood outside Dacey’s laughing and chewing. I tried to eat our haul fast because we’d spent some time in the store deciding what to get and I’d already be getting home later than usual. I didn’t need my mother asking where I’d been. I finished up and probably didn’t even thank John Mitiguy for treating me to that mound of candy, because kids don’t really thank each other unless an adult is around.

  I walked home at a brisk pace and told myself if my mother asked, I would say I walked home with Barbara Clarke, and that girls take a long time to walk home because they stop and look at things. When I walked in my mother immediately said, “Were you eating candy?”

  I was completely unprepared for a yes-or-no question. I was sure it would be an open-ended, “What took you so long?” or “What did you do after school?” which would allow me to riff. But I couldn’t riff on “Did you eat candy?” Not at all. I clearly had. I probably had chocolate smeared from my eyes to my chin from inhaling it so fast.

  “Yes.” I said, “Me and John Mitiguy got candy at Dacey’s.”

  “Where did he get the money for that? He probably took it from his mother’s pocketbook.”

  My mother was like Poirot and Nostradamus combined, and yet she never left our kitchen. Where was she getting her information? And why did I bother to fabricate excuses in advance, when she knew everything by the time I walked in the door?

  “No more candy with John Mitiguy,” she said.

  The next day in school, Mitiguy turned around in his seat. He was grinning and holding two shiny quarters this time.

  “Fifty cents!” he said, brimming with excitement.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got to go home.”

  “Are you kidding? Fifty cents!”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We went over to Dacey’s again and doubled our booty of goods: penny candy, the chocolate bars, plus bags of chips and baseball cards with gum. I hurried through eating it, said good-bye, and ran home. I don’t know why Mitiguy liked spending time with me; I was obviously an ungracious dining companion. When I got home I made sure to wipe my face and brush off any crumbs from my clothes before I opened the door.

  The second I entered the kitchen my mother said, “Did you go to Dacey’s with John Mitiguy again?”

  It was ridiculous. I still don’t know what gave me away.

  “No more Dacey’s with John Mitiguy! I know he is taking that money from his mother without permission,” she informed me.

  The next day at school, Mitiguy turned around in his chair, slowly . . . holding . . .

  “A dollar! I’ve got a dollar!”

  It was inconceivable. I’d never seen a first grader with a dollar bill at school before.

  “We’re gonna buy so much stuff! This is it! One whole dollar’s worth!”

  I looked down to my desk. I decided I couldn’t go through with it. I was fully intending to walk out the door of the school that day and run straight home. But all day John Mitiguy kept repeating “A dollar! A dollar!” and I never had the guts to tell him I wasn’t going, so when school got out, he walked me over to Dacey’s and I was an accomplice to a heist once again.

  We got shopping bags full of stuff: Marathon Bars, Funyuns, potato sticks, and Lik-M-Aid. It was endless. We got onto the sidewalk and I started eating furiously, I wasn’t even paying attention to Mitiguy as he shouted, “Can you believe this? A dollar’s worth!”

  I looked up from my bag of Funyuns and saw the Volkswagen bus coming down the street toward me. My mother and all her clairvoyance were behind the wheel. The gig was up. Without thinking I began to try to destroy the evidence. I threw the whole bag of Funyuns to the ground and started stomping on them. John Mitiguy stopped celebrating.

  “What are you doing?” he asked incredulously.

  I knocked the Marathon Bar out of his hand and onto the sidewalk, then stomped on it and twisted my foot, grinding it into the concrete. Mitiguy was aghast. He must have thought a demon had taken hold of me. I threw everything on the ground and started stomping on it, making a ground-up mix of chocolate and candy powder and chips and gum.

  As Mitiguy screamed, “Why!!??” I saw the Volkswagen come upon us . . . and then drive right by Dacey’s. I spotted my sisters in the back seat singing, and my mother was distracted by the cacophony inside her vehicle. She drove right by and didn’t even see me.

  I stood there on top of a mountain of snack-mush. John Mitiguy backed away from me, confused, and then turned and walked away toward his house, shaking his head in disbelief.

  When I got home that afternoon, I kept waiting for my mother to confront me, but she never did. She really had missed the whole thing. I wondered how she could be so omniscient and yet miss my heinous crime being flaunted right in front of her.

  The next day I told Mitiguy that if he ever took money from his mother again, I’d turn us both in, although I don’t think I needed to—he’d had enough of me when I stomped all over his candy like a boy possessed. I’d gotten off scot-free, but my actions haunted me for weeks. I would lie in bed at night and think long and hard about the value of a dollar and the price of all those snacks that I was so shamefully unable to resist, and even more shamefully wasted when I ground them into the street. For years I thought I had dodged justice that day because of my mother’s uncharacteristic lack of awareness. But looking back, I realize it’s more likely that there may have been a method to her negligence. She had stealthily put another one of her favorite aphorisms to work on me, teaching me a lesson more valuable than the biggest sack of candy.

  A guilty conscience needs no accuser.

  BEFORE CONSOLES AND GADGETS, THERE WERE just balls and bats; before gaming, there was just games. We played the backyard games that had been passed down for generations, and if we grew tired of those, we made up our own. And, there was a spirit of violence in our play. A game like Kill the Kid with the Ball was uncomplicated in description: you simply beat up whoever had the ball in his hands. Once he went down, the ball was taken from him and the next kid was ready to be “killed.” Even the gentlest of games involved some type of jail that you had to escape or be freed from. Playground games have a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, where there were always winners and losers, and it became quickly known who was fittest, whether by skill or by ruthlessness.

  We’d play the classic neighborhood games like Tag, Hide and Go Seek, and the greatest of all the tag games, Relievio. When deciding who was “it” in any given game, we’d stand in a circle and hold out our fists and recite the rhymes that every kid had absorbed through playground osmosis. Most of the rhymes involved some type of misfortune:

  Engine engine number nine

  Going down Chicago line

  If the train goes off the track,

  Do you want your money back?

  Y-E-S or N-O spelled out on our fists determined who, through the process of elimination, would be “It.” Sometimes it took most of the game time just to do the whittling down.

  My mother and your mother were hanging out the clothes,

  My mother punched your mother right in the nose . . .

  What color was the . . . blood?

  Blue?

  B-L-U-E spells blue and you shall not be . . . it!

  It’s amazing how these rhymes are passed from one generation of kids to another. I don’t ever remember anyone teaching them to me; we all just seemed to know them.

  All hiding games had a “ghouls,” which had nothing to do with evil spirits. Maybe you had a “base,” or “home base”; where I grew up, it was a ghouls. Ghouls was
usually a tree or a stump, but it could also be a bulkhead or a picnic table. In our yard it was our big oak tree. In Hide and Go Seek, the ghouls was where you’d do the counting when everyone went out and hid, but it also acted as a safe zone. If someone who was being chased could get back to ghouls, touch it, and yell, “My ghouls 1-2-3!” they were safe for the time being. You couldn’t tag them—you had to go out and seek others. Then when you were away, they were free to leave the ghouls and hide again. But you had to be careful about using ghouls too much. Someone who was always lurking near the ghouls was labeled a “ghouls-sticka!” which was just about the nastiest epithet any kid could be labeled. Kids were called names of all sorts, but in the caste system of suburban children, it was understood by all that there was nothing lower than a ghouls-sticker. There were no hard and fast rules about what constituted overreliance on ghouls; it was purely subjective. The idea was, you knew a ghouls-sticker when you saw one. That’s what made it such an insult.

  Buck Buck was a game of strength and stamina. There were two teams; one is the horse, and the other mounts the horse. The object is to collapse the horse. The first kid would be the pole, and then the next kid would bend over and grab his waist, and each kid would follow, grabbing on to the waist of the kid in front of him, making a long “horse.” Once the horse was formed, the kid who was the pole would call out “Buck Buck number one!” and the other team would send their first player barreling toward the horse to launch themselves upon its back. You could use your hands on the backs of the first few kids to launch yourself as far as possible toward the pole. When the horse withstood the first mounting, they would call for “Buck Buck number two!” Kid after kid would jump onto the horse until it collapsed. As a member of the horse team it was crucial to crook your neck right up against the waist of the person in front of you and create a tight seal, lest someone land on your neck. And they would, too—that was the surest way to cause a cave-in because there are only two choices when a flying kid lands on your neck, collapse or have your neck broken. While it was the horse team that was ostensibly the ones who were “in danger,” it was almost always the mounting team that got injured. Pretty much every game of Buck Buck ended with a bloody nose after their face smashed against the back of the head of someone in the horse.