King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography Read online

  The morning after the election, a large sign was posted on the bulletin board at the head of the stairs just inside the entrance to the school: ALL FRESHMAN BOYS REPORT TO THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE BEFORE FIRST PERIOD. DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE OF FAILING TO APPEAR. It was signed by our class adviser, Mr. Payne. That would be Mr. LeRoy Payne, better known as Mr. LeRoy Pain.

  We had teachers at Cascade High School who could write nearly well enough to be published; we had teachers who could shoot the eyes out of the basket from what would now be NBA three-point land; we had a teacher showing paintings in an art gallery in Boise. We had a teacher who could play the piano or the clarinet well enough to turn professional. Mr. LeRoy Pain could play the ten-hole beveled paddle in the office like some kind of hardwood maestro. He couldn’t have been five feet, nine inches tall, and I doubt he weighed 150, but he had wrist action that lifted you a good six inches off the ground with only a half swing. Once, when a rumor sprang up that the Hell’s Angels were to pass through Cascade on their way to a motorcycle-gang gathering in Boise, Payne sat in a kitchen chair with a shotgun on his lap out on his lawn just off Main Street and threatened to “pick them off” as they passed through. He was a thirty-year-old ex-juvenile delinquent with a D.A. haircut (ask someone over fifty what the D.A. stands for), whose sense of humor and temper were equally quick.

  Suffice it to say Payne didn’t bring his sense of humor with him to the teachers’ lounge the morning after Janice had become our class royalty. One by one we knocked on the teachers’ lounge door, entered, and gazed around the small, dark, smoke-filled room. It was the only time any of us saw the inside of the teachers’ lounge, before or since.

  “Have a seat, gentlemen,” he said. “And I use the term loosely.”

  We sat. At the uneasy murmur, Payne said, “There will be no talking.”

  We sat there like the Hell’s Angels might have had they actually dared ride through our small mountain logging town in which LeRoy Pain had suspended all civil rights.

  Payne brought out a baseball cap from a shelf above the coffee percolator and held it upside down just above eye level. “There are slips of paper with numbers from one to eight in here,” he said. “Each of you will draw a number. Number One will ask Janice Winthrop to the carnival dance before this school day is out. The rest of you will dance with Janice at least three times that evening. I will be there as a chaperone for no other reason than to count. You do not want to be the guy who dances with her twice. Are there any questions?”

  Danny Zimmerman raised his hand.

  “I said there would be no talking,” Payne said.

  Danny Zimmerman put his hand down.

  “Good.” He passed the hat around; each of us drew a number. The same God who turned His back on Leonard Irwin during the Olive Race now turned His back on Gene Gestrin, who hadn’t even been present for the vote. When someone found the courage to bring that up, at our fifteen-year class reunion, Payne said, “The emperor of Japan wasn’t at Pearl Harbor, either, but I still hold him responsible.” For the first time since it had happened, he smiled about the subject. “I wasn’t about to get into an argument with any of you guys about who may or may not have masterminded it,” he said, fixing his gaze right between my eyes. “I was just going to correct the problem.”

  Though none of my small band of election frauders provided any of it, some good things may have happened in response to my demonic act of cleverness. The Queen Booth was considered one of the big moneymakers at the carnival, and the other classes had, of course, elected their most popular girls. The voting was particularly heavy that year. Remember, the entire population of the town was registered to vote, since the boxes were placed in virtually every retail outlet, and a visible running tally was kept daily. While members of the other classes stuffed the ballots to support their candidates, the town’s adults took up Janice’s cause in order to at least keep her in the running. When it was all over, the Queen Booth had made more money for its sponsoring class than during any other year. The universe must have a quirky sense of humor, because we were that class. I still feel fortunate that LeRoy Pain didn’t think to make us donate our ill-gotten gains to the John Birch Society’s war chest.

  When the carnival itself wound down, all we freshman boys, most of whom normally would have headed home to watch “Friday Night Monsters” on TV, descended into the boys’ locker room in the gym and donned sports jackets and ties (another avoid-Pain requirement), slicked down our hair, and returned for our requisite three dances.

  Most of us sat in the darkness of the bleachers, discreetly flipping coins or playing rocks and scissors to see who would go next, then dutifully danced at arm’s length, two jerky steps forward, one jerky step back, having to pass up the fast ones due to coordination deficit. I was the last to go in the first round. I took a deep breath, blew out hard, and approached. It wasn’t the dance that bothered me; I’d taken square dancing and ballroom dancing from Mrs. Griffith since third grade, and she had always required every male student to dance with every female student at least once before we left our lessons. It was that I thought Janice knew. This shit had Chris Crutcher written all over it.

  “May I have this dance?” I put out my hand. Janice smiled, reached out, and took it; Gene Gestrin looked relieved. It was turning out that the guy who brought her danced with her the least. We knew the rest of the school was watching; no other girls would dance with us until they’d seen each of us dance with Janice at least twice. The counterconspiracy was enormous. This was way less funny than I had imagined.

  After a couple of false starts, Janice and I were in sync (which also hadn’t been invented yet) and she placed her white-gloved hand on my shoulder. She probably looked better than on any day before or since. My aunt Nori, famous for making all the popular girls’ prom dresses, had donated time and material to keep Janice from having to wear the dress her mother was married in. Some of the senior girls had helped with her makeup, and though she was still Janice Winthrop in our heads, there was the outline of what she might have been, had her life not been written all over her face.

  “I know this was a joke…,” she said a few verses into the song.

  “Naw, it wasn’t a joke,” I said. “We just thought you hadn’t…”

  “I know it was a joke…,” she said again, and I was hot and flushed from my failure as a liar. I knew once and for all why this wasn’t funny.

  “…but this is still the best night of my life.”

  I actually pulled her closer, just so I wouldn’t have to look into her eyes. Later—much later—I would write a short story about an overweight kid with two sets of gay parents, who took nothing but shit from his peers, being voted Winter Ball king at his high school and coming away with a moment with the girl of his very bold dreams, a moment that would last a lifetime. I think I gave that story a happy ending out of wishful thinking; I’d be surprised if Janice’s moment lasted a week. But at least she had the courage to turn it into one.

  I look back over forty years. Janice dropped out of high school the next year and married a logger in his early forties. I think of that, knowing what I now know from walking arm in arm through private hells with people who have been savaged, and consider what her life must really have been like. I wonder about Janice’s night as our carnival-queen candidate. The intent was insensitive and unkind, no question about that, but I have slim hopes about the effect of the result. I think of those lessons of relativity, how my father’s coal furnace was freezing, and how warm, three-month-old Limburger cheese smells like roses under the right circumstances, and I trick myself into hoping that out of it all might have come a tiny oasis for a girl with the courage to find something special sifting through the rubble of my adolescent cruelty.

  Conversations with Gawd

  8

  MOST OF THE KIDS I KNEW GROWING UP, besides the Catholics and Mormons, attended the Red Brick Church because it had the best Sunday school; for all I know, the only one. You could get y
our kid Bible lessons and get him or her out of there before they got to the incomprehensible adult Bible lessons delivered later in church. It was a kind of come-one-come-all place with, I now see, a decided fundamentalist flair and about a fifty percent casualty rate on preachers who got involved with other people’s wives or teenagers.

  My parents weren’t avid churchgoers, but they were more than willing to get rid of us for a couple of hours on any given Sunday, and my mother had a good enough alto voice to be a standout in the choir on special occasions. They always gave us a choice whether or not to attend, but for many of my early years I was consistent.

  In fact, between my fifth and sixth year, my shiny face showed up exactly fifty-two times. I wanted the Prize; the mysterious, oft-alluded-to, never described reward for perfect attendance. It was very special, they said. You couldn’t buy it in stores, they said. Be the first and only kid on your block to have one, they said. Only those who showed up every Sunday, for better or worse, in green-slime nose-running, projectile-vomiting queasiness and in health, would walk away with the mysterious, coveted Prize. Out of probably twenty-five or thirty kids, three of us made it. On Sunday of that fifty-second week, we stayed after Sunday school for grown-up church, to be celebrated and embraced for righteous tenacity before the entire congregation. The Reverend Pardee told the rapt parishioners that from among us might spring the next Billy Graham.

  The perfect attendance award was laid in soft cotton inside a small, white, expensive-looking box. Inside, mounted on a brown plastic base, were thick greenish white plastic letters reading JESUS SAVES.

  I had hoped for one of those little plastic frogmen you could send away for from Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. You filled a little compartment on his foot with baking soda and when the baking soda soaked up water, he would actually dive deep into your bathtub.

  JESUS SAVES.

  My disappointment was brief. Reverend Pardee instructed the three of us to hold our trophies high for the rest of the congregation to see, then made the entire fifty-two weeks worth it. “These children, these lambs of God, will never be without this message,” he said. “Spring or winter. Summer or fall.” His intensity built. “Good times and bad. Sickness and health.” We fidgeted now, swaying from foot to foot. And then he sprung the Good News, pointing at a church deacon to douse the lights. “Day or night.” There was a slight gasp from the audience, and we looked up. JESUS SAVES, JESUS SAVES, JESUS SAVES was glowing in the dark.

  I couldn’t wait to get it home, flashing it briefly to my parents and brother on my lightning trip from the front door to the downstairs bedroom I shared with John. I pulled the curtains on the one small high window and turned out the lights.

  The dim greenish glow of that same plastic they use to make glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth said it all: JESUS SAVES.

  My brother came down to tell me Sunday breakfast was ready. Sunday morning meant link sausage and waffles. My favorite.

  I said I wasn’t hungry.

  “How come you’re sitting in the dark?”

  I nodded toward the shelf from which glowed the message of the lifeguard Jesus.

  “You gonna sit here all day and look at that thing?”

  “Yeah. You can come down if you want, too. We could put on our pajamas.”

  He picked it up to take a closer look and I yelled and jumped up, snatching it from his grasp and knocking it to the hardwood floor. I snatched it up. ESUS SAVES. The J glowed back at me from the floor.

  Stunned, I stepped into my imaginary telephone booth, whipped off my imaginary glasses and suit jacket, and out stepped…bawlbaby. Fifty-two weeks of coloring the bearded, robed men and veiled women of Nazareth. Fifty-two weeks of memorizing the names of the disciples, never understanding whether or not they were the same guys as the apostles. Fifty-two weeks of singing “Jesus loves me, this I know…”

  There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. “I’m tellin’!” I convulsed. “You’re really in trouble now.”

  “I didn’t mean to break it,” he said.

  “You’re s’posed to keep your hands off my stuff. You never let me touch your stuff.”

  He looked around the room. “You can touch anything you want.”

  “No, sir. Too late.”

  He reached into his toy box. “Here,” he said. “You can break some Tinkertoys.”

  Those Tinkertoys belonged to both of us. Plus, I was not about to even this up so easily. I had been wronged in a serious and spiritual way.

  “No, sir, I’m not breakin’ anything. I’m tellin’.”

  “I’m not the one who broke it,” he said. “I just picked it up to look at it. You’re the one who grabbed it out of my hand. What a stingy guts anyway. God probably had you break it because you’re a stingy guts.”

  I shook my head hard. “Huh-uh. You’re not s’posed to put your hands on my stuff.”

  “Stingy guts.”

  “I’m tellin’.”

  “Did you know Jesus had a big brother?”

  “No, sir, Jesus did not have a big brother. And even if He did, I bet He made him keep his hands off His stuff.”

  “I’m not kidding. He had a big brother. That’s where He got most of His big ideas. I even know what his name was.”

  Don’t even try it, John. I’d been going to church for fifty-two weeks straight, and there had been not one mention of Jesus’ big brother.

  “Nobody knows about him, at least not very many people. But he was actually smarter than Jesus. He wrote some of the stuff in the Bible for Him.”

  “Okay, if you’re so smart, what was his name?”

  “Not tellin’,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe me anyway.” He picked up the Tinkertoys he had given me to break and put them back in the toy box.

  Man, I had one short attention span. “I might believe you. What was his name?”

  “You have to promise you’ll believe me.”

  Even this early in life, this many years before I would be brutally gunned down with a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, this should have had a familiar ring; but if this was true, I could take it back and be the smartest kid in my Sunday school class. “Okay,” I said reluctantly. “Promise. I’ll believe you. Tell me what was his name.”

  “Esus. And you’re the only kid who has a glow-in-the-dark sign of him.”

  “Jesus had a big brother named Esus? He did not. You’re a liar.”

  “You promised you’d believe me.”

  “That’s no fair,” I said. “There’s nobody named Esus.”

  “Cross my heart,” my brother said. “But he wasn’t famous like Jesus, even though he was smarter. One of his eyes was poked out. That’s why nobody talks about him. He wasn’t famous.”

  “I’m still tellin’.”

  “I know,” he said. “But if you do, they’ll take your ESUS SAVES away from you because nobody’s supposed to know about him. You’re probably the only kid in the world who has a sign about him. Too bad you’ll have to give it away.”

  “How come I have to give it away?”

  “I told you, dummy, nobody knows about him. When you tell that I broke it, they’re going to take it away. Nobody’s supposed to know about Esus, even though he had most of the best ideas.”

  In order to maintain its glow, the plastic trinket needed to be held up to the light intermittently, so I plucked it off the shelf again and reached as high as I could toward the bulb burning in the middle of the ceiling. My brother, relieved that he may have just avoided the need to explain to my parents why he was touching my stuff, took it gingerly from me and held it the difference between our heights closer.

  I don’t know why I always felt the need to educate my friends when I learned some new bit of information most of the rest of the world didn’t know, such as the secret existence of Jesus’ older, smarter brother or, later, that you could crawl into our coal furnace and freeze or that the water coming out of our C tap was actually warm. But I did, and ended up on the wooden bench outside Mr. Mautz�
��s Sunday school classroom the very next Sunday for what would become the first in a long string of blasphemous statements. John had his internal distant early warning system turned on high that morning, with which he intercepted me coming into the house, my lower lip quivering like an eggbeater, ready to tell my parents how I’d been wrongly banished from my Sunday school classroom. John reminded me that if I told them I got put out of the room I’d also have to tell them why, which would mark the last day of my special relationship with Esus.

  That night before I got under the covers, I knelt next to my bed and prayed to Esus that Mautz would not remember to tell my parents about our Sunday school difficulties when he saw them on the street during the week. Esus answered my prayers.

  My brother is a successful Seattle accountant now (hopefully not acquainted with any top-notch libel attorneys). It is rumored that a neon sign above his office reads ESUS SAVES…BY DOING BUSINESS WITH JOHN M. CRUTCHER, C.P.A. I haven’t personally seen that sign.

  Once I discovered the Red Brick Church would hold out on information as crucial as the existence of Jesus’ older, smarter brother, I became skeptical of other information they were sending my way and, as I got older, found myself perched on the wooden bench outside my Sunday school classroom more times than a budding evangelist ought to, for demanding the answers to questions boys my age should not be asking. For instance, what kind of protective rain gear was Jonah wearing in the belly of that whale? The acid in my stomach, I had recently learned from my father, could and would dissolve a cherry seed. Certainly a big old fish like a whale put out a lot more acid than I did. Wouldn’t whale stomach acid burn holes right through about anything a guy could get at a regular sporting-goods store? What material is tougher than a cherry seed?