Death Threats

Little boys in my circle never heard of Peter Pan. Elsewhere those who did had to eventually absorb the shock that all those Peter Pans who flew across the footlights on stages that faced audiences were women. Some of those women were pretty old, even when we looked at them when we were grown-up.

None of us wanted to be Peter Pan. We put on capes and pretended to be Superman, Captain Marvel and other guys that flew. But no one put on green tights and Robin Hood's hat. My survey indicated boys who hinted they would put on green tights should move to another neighborhood. Maybe middle aged women want to be boys who don't want to grow up but when little kids play act, it's to be sturdier heroes than a guy in green that vaguely fancies some silly named Wendy and her little brother in the Doctor Dentons. Most boys would prefer being Captain Hook.

Boys and girls at play practice being older types. That's why toymakers sell guns and dollies. They know what's going on. Sadly when kids aren't kids anymore some of them want to be kids again. It's easier and safer for kids to pretend they are adults, even with the risks, than for adults to even begin to think about regaining the irretrievable. Either way the thought reveals the futility of fantasies turned serious.

Someone coined the expression "rites of passage" to try to explain some very obvious habits. Some habits are rites of passage. Others are problems. Problems are at times influences or interferences that are best described as infections on our lives.

When I look back to my childhood I feel at times that my mother was an infection that wouldn't go away. In proof that punishment didn't fit the crime she'd say: "Wait 'til your father gets home. He's gonna kill you." Mothers who forget their virtues say things like that and the younger generations absorb threats and lose their own sense of tranquility.

I

From among my early possessions other than toys perhaps the most prized one was my first watch. I don't remember the make. Was it a "Big Ben"? Maybe, but I do remember my second one was a Helbros.

Watches are like automobiles. After a while it's fashionable to discard an older one for a more trendy or smarter timepiece. I moved from my little Helbros to a Gruen and then to a Bulova. My sister bought me a self-winding watch, the kind that adolescents were accused of abusing. In later life I would wear a Timex if any at all. Idiots prefer a Rolex. It doesn't tell better time for four thousand dollars. In today's society wearing a Rolex is almost as risky as getting AIDS.

Our possession of watches is much like our love affairs with automobiles. The roll call of cars that I owned is much like the psychology of what watch I should buy. There's a parallel in the vanities that accompany ownership — but that all washes out when we die.

My first timepiece was a pocket watch. They fell out of vogue a long time ago because admirers couldn't readily see them, like they would a Rolex although with proper flourishes and dramatic motion the fal de ral that follows the simple question "What time is it?" can make telling time epic grand comedie. Get a pocket watch with a fancy lid that pops up with authority, a fob that's a conversation piece and a face that has character and vanity reaches deserved stunning heights. Anyway, it's easier to read a face with numbers and arrows than most digitals, especially on a sunny day. No worry about batteries, either.

One day I took my pocket watch apart. I think I realized immediately that my curiosity was fatal. Kids do these things, even with pets and the penalty for "experimenting" can be dreadful. I tried to put the watch together. A foolish act turned to an impossible one. There, on the table, lay so many extra pieces after I had put back everything that screwed into place.

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty...together again."

Where did all the rest (of these parts) come from?

When I shook the reassembled clock, I knew. Give a little boy access to a jewelers screwdriver and next you'll give him a gun. He'll turn his Big Ben or his Westclock or whatever ticks into a Humpty Dumpty.

How would I explain this to my father who bought it for me? Price was irrelevant. A dollar or a million were the same. To put value other than as something given takes away the purpose of the gift. Despite my darker fears and the well worn prediction that my mother made so often in those now abstract or vague circumstances, my father didn't and never would "kill me." (Evidenced by this writing).

II

"Here's a key to the front door. Don't lose it." The front door! Now these words were said none too lightly. Never mind that the back door wouldn't make it at a fortress. The front door! I don't know how old I was when this overwhelming trust was thrown at me. Obviously it came somewhere after the time I learned to walk and to read and to cross the street on my own but before I smoked cigarettes and drank beer and went to dances...which meant that I was about eleven.

The key to the house was a symbol. It was, more importantly, a passage. Now my access was unimpeded. I didn't have to ring a bell or knock with my knuckles (shouldn't that be knockles?) to inconvenience someone who might be asleep or in the cellar or in the bathroom. My survey says that if you sit on the toilet the doorbell will ring. If you sit in the tub the telephone will ring. It's a likelihood factor. Deadzones are the nearest to telephones...unless you are asleep in the hours that God made for us to be awake. There's some hope for manners because most people are left alone after midnight. Our antagonists do have to sleep, too. But they'll get you during table grace or when you have a mouthful of yams.

For a while I kept my key on a string that I wore around my neck. My jewelry consisted of my Helbros watch, the successor to the Humpty-Dumpty pocket piece, and my key to the house. That's plenty of accessories for boys. But having a key on a string around my neck was like having mittens attached to strings sewn into the sleeves of coats. It made me look younger. That's hard to accept. If I wanted to look younger (than eleven) I think I'd talk mom into getting me green tights and a Robin Hood hat.

Having a key to the front door was more symbolic than practical. I think in those days almost every house in the world had a key under the doormat in case the adults forgot to take the housekey with them or adults lost or misplaced them when they went out. Doormats were invented to be a convenient place to hide keys. My survey shows that less than one out of seventeen people regularly wipe their feet on doormats. How often do you see worn-out doormats in the trash collections by the curb?

If you studied economics you will know of the failed conspiracy between doormat makers and cobblers to teach the public new habits that would enrich them all. It failed. Communism lasted longer although it didn't have the viable long range potential that the scheme between doormat makers and cobblers did to keep thousands, countless thousands of workers alive.

Our key wasn't always under the doormat. If I forgot to take my key and came home when everyone in the house was in the land of Nod (of wynkin 'n blynkin 'n Nod) I'd climb onto the roof of the pantry which was under my bedroom window and climb in.

"What time did you get in?" Moms ask that when they're not sure or when they've got you on the edge of a fib. I dunno!

Possession was a hundred percent of security. That percentage evaporated to fear when I told my mother four little words.

"I lost my key."

The predictable threat was re-stated. "Wait 'til your father gets home." She was programmed. "Your father's gonna kill you."

When I said that I had lost my key, home was in Philadelphia but we were on vacation in North Wildwood, a resort at the oceanside one hundred and ten miles away. North Wildwood was in another State. Right. So was my mom who would have to argue to have the lock changed in our Philly house because I had lost the key not too far from the planet Krypton.

There had to be other mothers who applied this fear- stricken argument to send their husbands running to hardware stores for new locks and keys for houses never known to people who find keys.

III

Whenever my father bought glass for windowpanes there must have been, somewhere but not in our house, some interesting chats. I knew my father had a sense of humor but he had to put up some kind of front at home. How many times a year: ten, twenty, did he replace the same window pane? Its measurements were quickly committed to memory unless the guy who sold him the same measured glass on Mondays was a dim-wit.

There used to be a breed of people out on the open road called Sunday drivers. They're disparaged now. Before television and other organized diversions irrevocably changed and diminished our sense of communicating, the plan for otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoons would be a family drive to nowhere. That's the way it looks and sounds but a couple of miles out from home mom would reveal her choice (probably made in secret a few days earlier) for journeysend. It was invariably New Hope or Doylestown or King of Prussia, all equally distant from home and all across gentle countryside. Or, closer to home if the mood was right she'd order from her navigator's seat a visit to the airport.

There were two airports convenient to the Sunday drive. The Philadelphia Airport was not yet known uninterestingly as Northeast Airport. Going there was about as exciting as watching paint dry. There might be a flight this Sunday but don't hold your breath. We could sit in the lobby for a while. The Flying Dutchman, a little south and west of the yet undubbed Northeast was a different matter. Barnstormers looped and wobbled into the sky after an adoring public gawked at their shiney craft parked by the runway. The airports were closer to home than New Hope.

On longer rides we would press our noses against the windows of our back seat and my sister, two years older than me, would wonder aloud where we were and when we would get to wherever we were going. She had no sense of geography or continuity. She was one of those souls who could be counted on to say, "Are we there yet?"

Other Sundays were planned and we would visit kin in Easton or Morrisville or Wyndmoor, all in Pennsylvania or in New Egypt across the river and deep into New Jersey. So we went here or there often enough for alert natives to recognize our car as we passed through places on the way. The rare trip was to New York City, a world away.

If the Olympic Committee awarded gold to worriers my mom would have run off with a good share of it. Sunday trips were a plot, an elaborate plan to do on the road what she did at home. I suspect that when there was nothing to worry about she would switch to plan B. "I think the coil is on," she would cry out in terror. No one could remember if the coil was turned off. That was an involuntary response to keep her worries justified. Why spoil the pattern of this drama?

The "coil" that she referred to was the hot water heater that sat next to the furnace. In those easier times before most houses became fully automatic the now simple convenience of hot water at the turn of the tap didn't exist. The coil gas heater had to be lit and after a while the copper coil would carry water, now hot, to the tub or the sink for ablution or dishwashing. There was a complication. The gas had to be shut off after a short period of heating to prevent the copper coil from melting and putting out the gas the wrong way. The wrong way "out" gas then would build up in the basement and at a spark would blow up the house and kill everyone plus whoever lived next door and all those walking by the house. Now that is a scary thought. I think that the "coil" could only be lit for about a half-hour at a time. My mother, the realist, had visions of returning to a crater where our house should have been at the end of a nagging riddled drive.

The thought of catastrophe always hit her when we were as far from home and a public phone as whoever's law said that when needed, a phone would be engaged or unavailable. If we gave her assurances that the "coil" was off it left her with nagging doubts. Quick! To a phone! She would put through a call to the Brower's or the Snoyer's. They both had sons who liked kicking in our cellar window. They would climb in onto the pile of coal and go into the basement and check the "coil." I don't think in those years of Sunday drives that the "coil" was ever on. My mother would refer to houses reduced to craters. They were everywhere, she knew. But I never saw them and I had my nose pressed against the car window on the Sunday afternoons that were prelude to a guy cutting glass for my father to put in on Mondays.

IV

Little kids are always at the ready to do good deeds. They want to do things that they are not capable of performing. They are too weak, too small and they lack understanding. My survey proves that when they do understand, they aren't so willing anymore. Sometimes they are a problem because they get underfoot and in their innocence they make parents grumpy. This helpful attitude, as noted, disappears but returns in old age when it often repeats those troublesome episodes of being underfoot. Before, blame lay with little children but now it's ex-little children grown dependent in late years. The damage is identical: broken dishes, mislaid tools, things viewed and judged foolishly by those (earlier as parents, later by their children) in charge.

One example of the acceptable limits that were tolerated and at the same time had positive effections in our house and I'm sure in others was being daddy's helper...when daddy was in control. One situation involved tending the furnace. That was to be a daily obligation once the fire was lit in autumn.

Little boys are very serious when given big jobs. Whenever my father fed the furnace I was at his side. He would shovel coal into its belly. He would shovel ashes from its bowels. Coal to ash, coal to ash from November to March. He gave me a little broom and when he shoveled coal into the belly of the furnace my job was to sweep coals that fell from the shovel onto the floor back into the coal-bin. When he emptied the ashes I swept up after him. In my little chores, I was important.

Fathers know when to turn daddy's little helpers into their successors. It's like being in the will because they are giving us something important. The whole complicated business about tending the furnace was built upon two "don'ts." Otherwise it wouldn't be important: "Don't let the fire go out" and "Don't draft and vent the fire the wrong way."

The first admonition was simply a protection of our comfort. That's a luxury. Woe to the tender of the fire if it goes out and the temperature drops to about 15 degrees Farenheit. The house, full of cold inhabitants, is no longer a nice place.

The other warning was to protect life. Unlike those stories of craters that we never saw from ruptured "coils" the frequency of sickness and even death from coal gas was fact. People were carried out of houses in our own neighborhood.

Timing for turning "daddy's little helper" into his surrogate usually is a tick too late. It comes after the child has discovered the outside world. My survey notes that kids are willing to be gofers for outsiders and will do harder tasks readily for new found acquaintances than do lesser ones for their own needy families. Interest in home affairs has to be reinforced by the reminder that daddy is bigger, wiser, stronger and is, if rumor is to be accepted, capable of making uncomfortable things happen if child turned slave becomes uncooperative.

"C'mon." My father opened the door to our basement, the cellar. I think I wanted to ask him where we were going. Since we were going to the cellar I scratched that question. I think I wanted to ask him why but that's never a good idea. There were no hints, yet he sent out a signal that something distasteful was about to happen and I followed him down the stairs. It was a tick too late for enthusiasm.

He stood before the furnace that, as he spoke, seemed to me to be larger and now very intimidating. Strange: so did he. At an earlier time Santa Claus, because Clement Moore and other liars told us, was for real because chimneys were put on houses not only for smoke to go up but for him to come down. I spent an agonizing time inspecting the interior of this monster that suddenly became unacceptably too small for the fat man to enter. It was obvious, at that earlier time, that if he got in he would not get out but would be roasted to cinders.

My father spoke again. There was so much more than shoveling two scoops of pea coal (the anthracite of his choice). What's he doing? "Pay attention."

He went on. The seminar was getting complicated. He opened the bottom door and scooped out the ashes and put them into the ash can. What's that little door between the top and the bottom one? I saw it but didn't ask. He spoke as if to his equal, not a boy of about eleven. Equal?

As the lesson proceeded I realized he was speaking Japanese. Clever, it almost sounds like English. Bank the fire. Shake down the ashes. (I didn't like the idea that I might be shaking Santa's bones through the grate). Stoke the fire. Vent the fire. (Click. Clack. He opened the little shutters. He closed them. He opened one part way. I was panicing. Which one for what?) Poke the dead spots with this poker. He was into it with gusto, great animation. The lesson was complete. What's that little door between the top one and the bottom one? I didn't ask and I never found out 'til much later, forty years after we moved away: four years after my father died. What an inheritance! Would he follow me around with the little broom now that I was going to do what he used to do?

As he went on I thought that I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. But that was soon enough corrected. He said those six words: "Don't let the fire go out." Then he underscored what he said by translating all that Japanese: "If you let the fire go out..." It trailed away without explanation but I knew that things could go very badly for me if I failed.

My mother kept all of her ammunition in two quivers. Important to me was her way of reinforcing his warning "if you let the fire go out..." with her reminder "your father will kill you." My survey found no kids killed by their fathers but I hadn't made that inquiry then. But then, I hadn't seen any craters either. The death threat kept me on my toes and certainly helped move what I thought was Japanese into instant English. Equally important to my father was peace in our borders. If anything displeased my mother I at least had the luxury of being in a different bedroom. W.C. Fields, a Philadelphian, made us laugh at what was, and is, an expensive situation (the film "It's a Gift") when the bedroom becomes a battlefield. We'll laugh at others' misfortune but in our case it is misfortune and nothing else.

V

(My mother was the oldest of eleven. I'm the third in a long list of those who are cousins to each other and some of the younger ones are still young. My mother has cousins who are younger than me and others older than her. A lot of us in each generation might have never met but for funerals. Some of us were very close friends).

One of my youngest cousins used to tell his friends that his old man beat him. This story kept them a safe distance from his house. His father was viewed by them as being a villain and when he followed up the stories of his horrible treatment by running away from home it basically confirmed everything that he had said. This had an unfortunate effect. There are few secrets left as such — whether true or not — and while he was hiding out a lot of people began to view my uncle as a rat.

His dad had his faults, I guess, but child beating wasn't on the list. He did yell a lot and whether the kid deserved the verbal barrages hurled his way is not for me to say. I told him my pop yelled at me a lot. He admitted to me, soon to be the liaison in his prodigal return to the house where his father, now rat to some, lived, that he was never beaten. He was threatened, maybe, but never punched, smacked, whaled, whipped, bloodied, bruised.

"How unfortunate." I mimicked W.C. Fields.

"Didn't your old man ever hit you?"

I told him that my father never hit me. He seemed disappointed. I got up and went to the 'fridge and brought out a couple of cans of pop. He sat dumb. It seemed to him as though we ran out of conversation. But I picked up the rest of the sentence as though I never paused and that might have been a minute ago. "....unless I deserved it and he beat the shit out of me. I'm lucky I'm alive." I winked.

He liked that. We were very much at ease and that helped pave the way for his return home, where at sixteen he belonged.

Forget parables. Bright people like Jesus were good at that. I have to rely on small experiences. See, I'm grown up at this point, thirty eight years old and beyond the echoes long blown away by time. "Wait 'til your father gets home. He's gonna kill you."

A parable. (Correction) A small experience.

Recollection says I was twelve. That's close enough. My cousin Frankie and I were thick as thieves and the only thing that prevented us from affecting earth-shattering events was space. He lived in New Egypt, a distant place by the calculations of the time. We should have been brothers because we had one brain between us whenever we got together. The obstacle of geography, about a thousand miles, now separates us for almost forty years.

Our families made frequent visits to each other. His mother was my mother's aunt. He was my mother's first cousin but he was my age. To him, she was old. The adults didn't organize our day. "Go outside and play" and they were rid of us which was a normal way to treat kids. On one of our trips to New Egypt everyone went to see one of my mother's cousins play baseball. Lew was a semi-pro in a bush league and the pride of the family — at least on days that he was in love with wood and horsehide. We cheered him on but after a while Frankie and I slipped away and went canoeing. His house was at lakeside, and it had a dock and a boatshed at water's edge. There's the life, eh?

Idle time has its limits because the things we do that give others pause and then need answers that are uncomfortable in coming are not the first ideas of the day. The exceptions are things done by bad people.

In this little incident gone bad the initial idea was good. There was even a chance for rewards...a simple thank-you would do; that's enough. We were done boating and were putting the paddles in the boatshed when Frankie noticed the cans of green paint. It was housepaint seen before decorators got artsy. I think it might have been the only shade of green used for painting porches, rails and windowsills in houses in this part of the world. Those that escaped green got coats of rowhouse brown (indescribable) or an off-white best indicted as "cream."

"Let's paint the coop." Frankie's older brother, Jack, raised chickens and kept them in a coop at the end of the property. He wanted to please his brother, his hero.

Our brushes cut a green path of ruin through the Davis property. We, to put it mercifully without detail, painted everything that we could reach: the coop, chicken wire, the chickens, his mother's wash strung across clothes lines.

For Frankie's sake, it was good that Jack was away. Time softens even outrages. In looking back to our finest hour that indeed some would call mischief, the beating (undoubtably given by our dads to please their wives) was worth it. I'd bet that our fathers who whaled us in the woodshed that day sat out of our hearing and out of their wives' poverty of humor many times laughing over what they knew and wished they could have done when they were twelve.

Our fathers are dead now. We'll get no interviews to confirm our thoughts. But I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut that old Uncle Frank and my Pop thought the worst part of the episode was having to beat their kids to keep peace in the borders.

My cousin Jeff, in a later time in history, would have his turn as being twelve and had his own epochial incident. I wonder if, in the larger plan, what he did in one moment irrevocably changed his own life. It's like shooting someone, I guess, because that act can't ever be undone. In later years he became a respected banjo and blue grass guitar artist. He may have owed that direction to heroic influences of the late sixties that seemed to promise some sort of place for kids to move to. Forget the thought of the law of saturation. Or, the germs of appreciation may have been planted when at a slightly younger age he sang solo as a choir boy at super-ritzy Saint Martin in the the Fields Church.

At twelve he played soccer for his school. Could he have become the white Pele at some time to come? That's unknown stuff that just can't be dismissed because no one has credentials to read into results that are ruined by sudden misfortune.

He was the hero of his companions. Whether what he did that day came as an inspiration or from the prodding of his mates is not an issue: that he did it, is. The game that day is long forgotten and it likely was when the sun went down. But, when Jeff mooned the world from the back window of the schoolbus taking him and his team from their afternoon's effort, it was to an unappreciative audience. Let's face it. Nuns, by any stretch of reason, are not programmed to look at this sort of thing as cute and they from their station wagon behind the bus saw protestant degeneracy and reported it.

We've not reached the point where the guilty are put in line ups and nuns are forced to point out guys like Jeff. The importance of his newly found reputation was worth the exposure, if you'll excuse the expression. His loss was two-fold! Certainly he didn't become the Messiah of soccer, the white Pele of America. And he was thrown off the eighth grade team forever or at least 'til he died.

He survived and that's to his credit. Part of his self-imposed rehabilitation consisted of plucking guitar and banjo strings. My survey catalogues all those who pluck guitar strings as being symptomatic in needing a more realistic rehabilitation. Playing soccer, though, is not a wise alternative. The world still waits for the white Pele. Had fate put the station wagon full of nuns somewhere else and Paul Reubens been behind the bus with his mom, all questions would have been answered.