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
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 kept 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.
Daredevil was a word to which we might have given some thought, inasmuch as the best place to play chicken was the empty parking lot of Johnny MacKay’s fire-and-brimstone church where the sand wasps made their nests.
How we really got hurt was by accident, trying to bring our bikes to abrupt halts on loose gravel. We never understood the physics of this maneuver.
I blame Tarzan for our ignorance of physics. The old Johnny Weissmuller movies were on TV almost every Saturday morning. Tarzan swung effortlessly on his jungle vine pendulum, from wherever he was to wherever he wanted to go, with no thought of pivot point, length of pendulum arc, or pendulum acceleration back to equilibrium position. We would do the same on a rope from a tree branch in the Penske backyard to the roof of the Penske garage, making the Tarzan yodel and trying to thump ourselves on the chest with one hand while holding onto the rope with both. Pendulum acceleration back to equilibrium position was smack into the Penske tree trunk.
But whatever ignorance of physics we indulged in, extra glory went to anyone who required a bandage larger than those that came in the standard Band-Aid box.
Meanwhile, what were the girls doing? I don’t know. Boys didn’t notice. Boys didn’t notice anything that wasn’t loud, fast, or about to explode. The girls were too old to make those high-pitched shrieks of glee or grief that could be heard all over the neighborhood. (The raised voices of mothers and daughters didn’t carry much beyond bedroom walls and certainly not all the way back to the alley where we were skewering newts on lit sparklers.) The girls were too young to be “fast,” as it was still called. And the girls weren’t married to us yet, so we didn’t make them explode.
It used to be that, toward the end of childhood, boys and girls led separate lives. There was a kind of half-joking purdah. On one side of the veil frilly dress patterns were sewn and stuffed animals were collected. On the other side Johnny and Bobby and I were given hammers and crowbars and five dollars apiece to spend a glorious afternoon tearing down the MacKays’ rickety one-car garage. We didn’t drop the roof right on our heads, but not for lack of trying. Boyhood and girlhood were parodies of manhood and womanhood.
As our generation got older we ceased to be amused by the joke. By the time we’d grown up the list of things women aren’t supposed to do was reduced to using the men’s room unless the line for the women’s is really long at sporting events or concerts. And there are only two things men aren’t supposed to do: pace up and down in hospital waiting rooms smoking Lucky Strikes while our wives deliver babies and hold forth on what it’s like to be a woman.
I am not about to violate that second injunction. But the men and women of the Baby Boom are more alike than men and women used to be. I’m trying to imagine my dad acting like my mom. I’m not having much success. And I’m only slightly better at imagining my mom, pipe stem clenched between her teeth, driving too fast with one eye on the road, trying to dial the car radio to a Cleveland Indians game.
The Baby Boom genders are similar, therefore I conclude that the experience of our formative years was similar. The girls were prying up icky things from the busy street of the psyche. They were loading Wham-Os of melodrama with steel ball bearings of emotion. They were lighting firecrackers of hurt feelings, breaking parents’ hearts the way we broke parents’ windows, and leaving flaming bags of dog poop on the front porch of vulnerable people’s sensibilities. And girls were as avid as boys in their attempts to torment a dumb animal, otherwise known as Mom. But, mind you, I was a boy, so I’m only guessing about this.
As well as the facts of life, the fact of death obtruded. Of course, if you came from a large Irish family, somebody was always kicking off. There would be a solemnity to the nagging in getting me into my Sunday school clothes and no baseball game on the car radio. Funeral homes shared their architecture with branch banks. Drive-through deposit windows looked like the porte cochere where the hearse was parked. Why funeral homes were called “homes” was puzzling. And a strong smell of cut flowers in any kind of home was as surprising then as the smell of boiling cabbage and tobacco smoke would be in a home today. Other than that the atmosphere, full of grim faces and dull carpet, was reminiscent of a visit to a larger and more populated principal’s office. Up at one end was a dimly remembered kin of Dad’s, partly scary, partly waxy, and partly covered by the horizontal Dutch door of the casket. A weeping aunt would say, “The good die young.” I’d wonder what she was talking about. He was in his forties.
But these deaths were adult matters. Sonny Merton was our age. He lived several blocks away, a sinewy, freckled, and unpleasant boy. He’d grab you by your wrists and yell, “Do you know why they call me Sonny?” and shove your fists into your nose if you didn’t say, “Because you’re so bright.” He rode his bike out into the middle of Central Avenue and was run over by an oil truck. For the next few weeks we huddled on the school playground every day before the first bell and talked about nothing else.
Mostly we discussed how squashed Sonny had gotten. Several kids claimed to have special knowledge of the accident. “I heard the siren when the ambulance came.” “My dad talked to somebody who lives right near Central.” “I saw a oil truck downtown that I bet was the same one.” According to the evidence of this testimony, Sonny had gotten very squashed.
We all said, “There’s no one like Sonny.” We all said, “Gosh, that Sonny!” We all said we’d known Sonny well. A few kids, who had, went to his funeral and were objects of envy. “They had to use rubber and stuff to make him look human again but then they wouldn’t let us look at his body anyway.”
It was the most interesting thing that happened all year. And now, when I listen to myself and my friends rue distant violence among hostile peoples or possible extinction of man-eating sharks or thawing ruination of inhospitable arctic wastelands, I confess that sometimes—not always, but sometimes—I hear an echo of Sonny’s name from the school playground.
We weren’t soft kids. We aren’t a soft generation. We couldn’t be or we wouldn’t keep getting our own way. And we’ve been doing so for more than sixty years. Our parents called us soft because we didn’t get up at 4 a.m. to help Pa drag a mop through the dust bowl or wear underpants made of barrel staves because Ma couldn’t afford burlap or work two jobs to put ourselves through grade school or squat in the basement all night with a piece of cheese in our hand because mousetraps were too expensive.
We kids were called soft because we didn’t go through what our parents went through, which they were usually lying about. And now we call kids soft—their flabby fingers plopping out text messages, bodies barely capable of enough wiggle for Wii, mounds of suet parked in front of LED screens with body mass indexes to make Jerry Harris look like Olga Korbut. I say that and then I go outside and see kids on skateboards and funny little bicycles and snowboards and twin-tip skis doing things that would have scared the worst word I knew out of me in 1959.
There’s no such thing as soft kids, at least not in their hard little hearts. I admire the way modern children are trying to break their necks, but I also worry about them. They wear helmets and knee pads and wrist braces. Every post and pole they slam into is padded. The piles of wood chips beneath their slides and swings are as deep as the curbside autumn leaf piles that no one’s allowed to burn anymore for fear of harmful air pollution. The rubber mats under their monkey bars are more cushy than what their moms use for yoga. And skate parks, ski hill terrain features, and indoor climbing walls have been built with care to make youthful high jinks harmless.
You’ll never get to be a splendid generation like the Baby Boom doing harmless things. Run, kids! Flee! Go ride your boards and bikes down the handicapped access ramps with which every building in America has been so inclusively and sensitively equipped. Nobody’s using them anyway. They’re too steep and treacherous to be ascended in a wheelchair, except by Paralympic medalists. (And you may become one.) Or, better yet, get the Uncle Walter that I had.
He was not one of those happy-go-lucky younger uncles like Uncle Timmy whose antics had to be discussed out of children’s hearing. Uncle Walter was a respectable uncle, a vice president of something in a corporation and graying at the temples. We celebrated the Fourth of July at his cottage on the lake.
The summer after I turned eleven Uncle Walter gave me a grocery bag filled with fireworks of every type and kind. Then he handed me a lit cigarette. Not to smoke, of course—the 1950s were a different time, not a different planet—but because this was considered a sensible way for children to ignite fireworks. Playing with matches was dangerous.
I and my like-equipped cousins were turned loose on the beach. Fourth of July taught the Baby Boom an important lesson (albeit one we’ve frequently ignored). It’s a given that the stuff of life will blow up in your face, just try not to set it all off at once.