9.
Down in the basement at 863 East Memorial Drive, I had my own world.
There was my dark room, where I loved to watch the images I’d seen weeks ago in my camera viewfinder reemerge on the paper floating in Kodak’s Dektol developer beneath the red glow of my safelight.
Here was my father with the reflection of my flash in the lens of his glasses—I remember how he jumped when the flashbulb ignited, as if he were much more agitated than his serious face revealed. Here, too, was my mother blurred as she tried to wave my camera away. My brother with Down syndrome smiled and held up a cracker. My aunt offered a cocktail glass and winked. My uncle turned a steak on the grill. I had images of our house and pictures of our good car and my dad’s work car.
I hid out in the darkroom after my father had his nervous breakdown. Unlike the people around me, those appearing in that chemical bath seemed mostly happy. I printed their images over and over, as if that act would keep things from going wrong. I began to cry. It wasn’t a very big world in that developing tray, but in there my father wasn’t stabbing at imaginary monsters crawling toward him across the kitchen table.
In 1959, my mother got a part-time job as a census taker for the US government, and I discovered that I could disguise my voice and call in sick from school on the days when she was out working.
“He’s not feeling at all well,” I said to Miss Morgenthau, the secretary at Marshall Junior High School. I deepened my voice into that of an adult. “Little Rickie needs to take the day off.”
Nineteen fifty-nine was also the year that Charles Van Doren admitted to Congress that he’d been given answers ahead of time on a television quiz show.
But, hey, who cared? It was all good, clean fun on television, right? So what if contestants lie. We all lie, don’t we? What’s a little fib when entertainment’s concerned? The important thing—the really important thing—was that we could be whoever it was we wanted to be. Facts—why, facts were what we said they were. They didn’t have to be true, did they?