MY REAL NAME IS James Archer Jones, but everybody calls me Archie. Up until about a year ago, our family was pretty normal. We lived in a house in Ansley Park and did things together in the same place at the same time, like regular people.
Then, one day, Dad kind of moved out. Pretty soon Cyndi came along and they moved into this apartment complex over on Summerville Avenue. So Mom sold our house and got another apartment about four blocks away on Dyer Street. The neighborhood wasn’t that great, but the rent was low, and we could keep going to our same school.
It might seem crazy to a lot of people, but after that, Oggie and I had this schedule we had to follow. It went like this:
Sunday night: 87 Dyer St. (Jupiter)
Monday night: 1129 Summerville Ave. Apt. #4 (Saturn)
Tuesday-Thursday nights: 87 Dyer St. (Jupiter)
Friday-Sat. nights: 1129 Summerville Ave. Apt. #4 (Saturn)
Then we’d start over.
I wrote it out for Oggie. He kept a copy of it on his person at all times so people would know where to take him in case of emergency. The telephone numbers were on the back. I was usually there for him, but you never know. The way things were, we had to be prepared for anything.
You’re probably wondering what the Jupiter and Saturn in parentheses mean. Well, one time, just after we moved, Oggie was over at the house of this new friend, Danny DaSilva, playing a video game Danny had called Mystery of the Solar System. It’s little kid stuff mostly, but still kind of interesting. These astronauts shuttle around to different planets in space. They land on the moon, then go to Jupiter for a while, then they land on Saturn, then head off to Pluto or somewhere.
The idea is, you’re supposed to unravel the mystery of the solar system from clues you pick up in each place. You can never settle down and get comfortable in one place because almost immediately you have to head out to pick up more clues somewhere else.
I watched Oggie play this for a while and it suddenly struck me how it was like what we were doing in real life. So I kidded him when it was time to go home—actually, I was there to pick him up—and said we had to go to Saturn now, but we were due over at Jupiter for dinner. He thought that was hilarious. It got to be part of this whole joke we had.
Jupiter was Mom’s apartment, and Dad and Cyndi’s was Saturn. If something wasn’t going right, I’d say stuff like, “Psst, Oggie. The air is getting pretty thin on this planet, good thing we’ll be on Jupiter tonight.”
Or Oggie might whisper, “Hey, Archie, I found out something about Saturn. I bet you don’t know it.”
Actually, Oggie did say this exact thing to me one night. We were on Jupiter watching a video and eating Chinese. Mom had gone in the kitchen.
“What don’t I know?” I asked.
“They’re having a baby over there.”
“WHAT?” I turned up the sound on the remote so Mom wouldn’t hear. “How’d you find that out?”
“Cyndi said it.”
“She SAID it?”
“Yeah.”
“She told you?”
“Not me. Her girlfriend Francie. You know that one with the pink hair? They were talking out on the porch.”
“What’d she say?”
“That it was making her throw up.”
“Oggie, are you sure that’s what you heard?” Sometimes he misunderstands things.
“Yes!”
The old sinking feeling that comes over me sometimes came over me.
“Well, don’t tell anyone, okay?” I said. I had the remote turned up to about one million decibels by this time. Well, maybe not one million decibels, but as high as it would go. “Just put a block on it, you know what I mean?”
Oggie nodded because that’s what Dad always says. We’re supposed to put a block on all this stuff he doesn’t want Mom to know. It’s what they call it at his job when they shut down one line to fix another one.
Mom started yelling from the kitchen to cut the racket on the TV, so I did. But later, when I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about this baby. I mean, Dad and Cyndi weren’t even married. It was kind of a shock because I’d always had this idea that Mom and Dad might get back together, even though they were supposedly getting divorced.
For one thing, they were still living pretty close to each other. What I thought was, if they’d really given up, they’d have moved to different cities or states, right? And Oggie and I wouldn’t have this crazy life of going back and forth.
The way it was, we had to have two of everything: two toothbrushes, two drawers full of pj’s and underwear, two boxes of Frosted Flakes, which is what we eat for breakfast.
We even had two Bunny-Wunnies for Oggie so he could go to sleep at night without having to drag Bunny around with him all day.
What happened when he dragged Bunny around was, he’d lose him somewhere and end up staying awake all night, crying. Mom found Bunny Two on sale at Wal-Mart, just by pure luck. They’d stopped making them. Oggie didn’t like him at first, but then he changed his mind and LOVED him, just like Bunny One. That was about the happiest day of Mom’s life. The Bunny-Wunnie problem had been driving her crazy for weeks.
It was during this terrible period in our family, when Dad had moved in with Cyndi and Oggie kept losing Bunny One, that I started telling him the story of the Mysterious Mole People.
For as far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Not that I ever wrote much, but ideas for stories were always coming into my head.
A lot of people don’t realize it, but writers know pretty early in life who they are. That doesn’t mean they’re going to BE writers, though. If all you had to do to BE a writer was to think you WERE one, there’d probably be about five million more writers in the world. Well, maybe not five million, but more.
The thing is, after you know you have the writing gene inside you, it’s up to you to get up enough steam to do something about it. Otherwise it’ll fizzle out and you’ll never go anywhere. That’s one reason I started telling the Mysterious Mole People story to Oggie, to kind of exercise my gene.
The other reason was to get Oggie’s mind off Dad and Bunny and everything that was going wrong in our family.
“Hey, Oggie, turn off the weepers. Want to find out what the Mysterious Mole People did last night?” I’d ask him.
“No!” he’d usually howl. He was one tough customer.
“Well, the only way you’re going to find out is to quit moaning.”
“No!”
“The Mole People came up in Florida and took Disney World.”
“No, they didn’t.”
One of Oggie’s main goals in life was to get to Disney World. He had this idea that Disney World was the answer to everything, like heaven. On TV, it shows whole families going there, forgetting their troubles and sliding down water chutes into each other’s arms. Little kids actually believe that stuff.
“You can’t steal Disney World. How could it get stolt?” Oggie asked.
“Well, it did.”
“How will we get it back?”
“Who says we need it back?”
I was kind of mad at Disney World. The way things were, I knew our family would probably never get there in one piece, so I was against it.
“I NEED IT!” Oggie would scream. “I want it!”
“Then quit yelling and listen,” I’d say. “Sit down here. I’ll see what I can do.”