Not Another Danger Boy: Post Sequel

By Dan Combs

Book three in a series of autobiographical short stories based on life-changing events: first unicycle, first psychedelic journey, surviving a superstorm. You know; the exciting stuff!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Combs
• Release date: Feb 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311325921

Dan Combs

Dan Combs was born in Pontiac, adopted by a loving couple, and moved to Lansing. He spent eighteen years there before following his inner wanderer across the U.S. and - so far - Europe. Musician, Composer, Screenwriter, Playwright; currently living in Manhattan and loving every opportunity the city of New York offers.

Book preview

Not Another

D A N G E R

B O Y

Post Sequel

Copyright 2014 Dan Combs

Published by Dan Combs at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

acknowledgements

Unicycler

Drastic Plastic

Big Fish Small Pond

Almost Dad

A Town Called Holstville

Dudes Will Be Dudes

Going Global

Skyride

Superstorm

Never Again

Halloweens

A Windowpane To The World

So You Want To Be A Writer

What’s In A Name

About The Author

Connect with Dan Combs

Acknowledgements

Lis, Pam, Dave, Schuler Books, Linda, Luis, Julie, Jennifer, Lansing Readers & Writers, Ben, Rhea, Old Town General Store, Alexis, New York Writers Circle, Sissy, Samantha Ann, Chris, and anyone else who was nothing short of incredible in their support of my scribblings, intelligible or otherwise.

unicycler

Please let it be under the tree. It’s not like I’m asking for all that much. One little gift.

OK, maybe not so little.

Man, I haven’t been this excited about Christmas morning since I asked for a chemistry set because I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up. I opened the box and I thought it was just what I wanted except it was a physics set, but I didn’t really know anything about physics, like I’m an expert on chemistry, only…

Calm down, Dan.

Tam. I’m pretty sure his name was Tam. He hosted a kids TV show in Lansing. Fun and games with a very small studio audience, cartoons. All in black and white. No color television yet; at least not in our household. There wasn’t anything about his show that made it unlike other programs designed to entertain children. Except for the opening sequence: a city street, cars drive past, people walk along the sidewalk, and a young man with dark hair and fiery eyes streaks by the camera on a unicycle.

He’s gone in a flash.

The first time I saw this, I wasn’t at all sure what I’d just witnessed. Wait, there he is, bouncing through a forest. On one wheel. And again, riding through a soundstage door and into the studio, right up to seven or eight boys and girls sitting on metal folding chairs. No doubt about it, this show was special, starring someone who was different in a way I had yet to consider.

I’d seen guys pedaling around on unicycles before. At the circus. They usually wore sparkly outfits with short sleeves and long pants; one performer on a short unicycle, another balanced on a tall one, a third astride an even taller one. Tam wasn’t like them. Except for an Alpine hat with a feather in it, he wasn’t dressed in any special way. No larger than life personality, no mugging for the camera. But he knew how to ride a single-wheeled bike. Which meant anyone could do it.

I had to get my hands on one of these things. But how? My allowance was a paltry fifty cents a week. My mom would make a big deal of doling it out every Friday afternoon. Sometimes she would slip me a dollar if I’d done something special like help my dad clean out the eaves. Perfectly adequate for a normal fourth grader. Too bad I hadn’t been normal since The Danger Boy Incident. We thrill junkies are always looking for new ways to torture our parents. If I was going to own a unicycle, it would have to be given to me as a gift. I had two chances: my birthday and Christmas.

Mom? I asked. It must have been late September; close enough to the holidays to make an impression but not too close for me to become a nuisance by asking the same question once a week until they arrived. You know what I really want for Christmas?

How could I know that? she countered.

Trying not to seem overly excited, I said, A unicycle.

She paused for an instant, probably knowing that this request was coming. I’m sure she hadn’t been unaware of my fascination with Tam’s show.

Oh, honey, she said. You just got a new bike last year.

"But that’s a bicycle," I said.

And didn’t you crash that bicycle just the other day? she asked. I still have to patch the seat of your pants.

She had me. I’d recently graduated to a larger version of the two-wheeled variety of pedal-powered transportation, a red Columbia with big fenders and a fancy chain guard. Of course I crashed it. That’s what I’d done with every bike I’d ever owned. What fun were they if you didn’t ride them in the woods or jump them off curbs? This was about the pants. She hated when any article of clothing got dirty, let alone damaged.

It took me a year of asking, then another year of begging before I was sure I’d find a unicycle under the Christmas tree. Well, almost sure. My parents had an especially frustrating habit of teasing us with the possibility of not receiving what we clearly and in no uncertain terms had specified as the toy/game/accessory we most wanted to unwrap on that special morning.

I take a deep breath and roll over. No sound from my sisters’ room. How can they sleep? Maybe they’re awake and just as amped up as I am.

One Christmas, before Jennifer was old enough to know the importance of this day, Julie and I sat just inside the doorway of their room for at least half an hour, listening to her snore, desperately holding ourselves back from rushing down the hall and ripping into our gifts. The rule was that we had to wait until Mom and Dad got up. Pure agony.

Not this year. I’d learned to play it cool; cut down on the angst. Finally, a rustle of covers being thrown back, a tiny squeak of our parents’ bedsprings. Still, I hold steady, too old to be running out to the living room in a euphoric dash. Unlike my sisters, who I see sprinting down the hallway as I open my door. Poking out my head, waiting for our mother to emerge, I finally hear those magic words, Alright, go ahead, in a voice that’s a combination of joy and weariness. She and Dad would usually spend a good deal of Christmas Eve spreading out large gifts from Santa, some of which had to be assembled while we slept.

I casually amble toward my destiny. It has to be there. Or does it? Mom had made a point of saying how proud she was of the fact that I’d gotten straight A’s on my recent schoolwork, but she’d also been hinting that this might not be the right time. The big, elaborately decorated tree comes into view. Jennifer is already shredding the paper on a large box; a Barbie Dream House. There are unwrapped toys and new clothes everywhere, packages of all shapes and sizes, shining in their multicolored glory. And there, tucked in the back corner, nearly hidden beneath an avalanche of presents, is the thing that meant more to me than any gift I’d ever received.

Smaller than I expected, white spokes, red frame, and a white seat with black trim. I pull it out and thrust it forward so Dad can get a clear shot with his ever-present eight millimeter camera, the four floodlights making me squint as my beaming smile emits a level of joy I rarely feel and almost never express. I prop my unicycle against the wall - hearing the voice of my inner daredevil rejoice at the words my unicycle - and move on to other items, always keeping that one wheel in the corner of my eye.

All the gifts opened, the stockings emptied, we sit down to our traditional breakfast of Scrambled Eggs ala Mom, tiny bits of bacon and green onions coloring the fluffy yellow mixture, served on the china she inherited from her mom. Our childhood excitement fades, we help clean up a bit, stuffing yards of wrapping paper into the trash bin that Mother drags out from under the sink.

Jennifer plays Barbies, Julie plugs in her Easy Bake Oven, and I grab this contraption, this thing that doesn’t have a nickname - the progression should go from trike to bike to unike but for some reason stops short - I lovingly clutch this fresh way to raise my heart rate in my arms and carry it to the basement. With the driveway covered in snow, our downstairs rec room is the only place I can try it out.

I stand at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the seat, and think, "How the hell do you actually ride this thing?" When watching Tam’s Funtime, I noticed that he was already on his unicycle and whizzing around as the camera cut to him so he could introduce a cartoon. What did those circus folk do? Especially the ones who rode the wheels on six-foot-high frames. This one hadn’t come with an instruction book, so I had to figure this out on my own.

The guys on smaller unikes simply stepped on - right foot, left foot - and were up. I tried that. Right foot on the black plastic pedal, seat as close to my butt as I could get it, left foot, up. And over! Flat on my face.

Damn. Linoleum tile does not cushion one’s fall in any way.

Maybe I should go back upstairs and try this on the living room carpet. No, not enough space. The dining room? Not a chance. My mother’s love of decorating guaranteed that every square foot possible is taken by some piece of furniture or another. It’s the basement or nothing. The only things down here are a dilapidated arm chair, an old couch, and a heavy black table that once sat in my grandfather’s tavern.

That’s it! I can use the varnished pine slats that serve as a barrier between the stairs and the room to steady myself, climb on, and ride from there to the table. Life is good. With a death grip on the nearest slat, the standard technique of right foot, left foot, up gets me on the seat. A couple of pedals and I’ll be gripping the table just as tightly.

Alright, then. Take a deep breath. Go! One pedal forward then sideways half a pedal then crash! That’s gonna leave a bruise. At least this time I land mostly on my ass. Get up, brush myself off…back on my perch…and go! Crash! Ow! Somehow I manage to get my hands to hit the tile before any other part of me.

That went on for days. I kept launching myself from a balanced position, only to veer wildly out of control the second I started moving. I don’t remember how long it took to get to the point where I could ride from one side of the room to the other, or how much longer to then turn around and get back, but suffice it to say there wasn’t any snow covering the driveway when I took my pride and joy outside to show off my skills.

It turns out the whole right foot, left foot, up was more about the up than the feet. And once up, that first pedal had to be in rhythm. Arms out to the sides for stability, don’t twist, move forward smoothly. By mid summer I could motor down the driveway, turn around - by swiveling my hips in a kind of dance move - and hustle back up to my starting point.

The fact that most of the kids in the neighborhood thought I was odd for being so obsessed with my wheel didn’t faze me. I’d already begun to embrace my otherness. Which in some ways simply came with the territory.

My family has always been a little different.

Mom and Dad were around ten or twelve years older than most of their friends. I’m not exactly sure why this was, but it might have been due to the gap between their marriage and having kids. They’d met right after the start of World War II. Dad was playing trumpet in my mom’s father’s bar in Jackson at the time; Mom was still in high school. They were one of the few couples who delayed getting married until after the war, which my dad barely survived, having been blown up by a mine while walking next to a muddy road in Normandy. And when they decided to start a family, the children they expected to begin popping out didn’t cooperate. So, several more years passed before they thought they’d better adopt some kids or go without them.

Our little family having an adopted son made us a bit odd. But in my fifth year we moved into a neighborhood where a couple of other families had two adopted children each, so we weren’t exactly abnormal at that point. Although things had already gotten slightly stranger. Surprise! Mom and Dad were suddenly able to conceive. Thus the older of my two sisters. Then the weird hit the fan; another sister made the scene. Me adopted and them not? That just made us bizarre.

And my parents themselves were not what you’d call average. Their personalities couldn’t have been more opposite. Dad was the strong, silent type, liked to keep to himself, putter around in his shop in the basement after a long day at his job teaching high school drafting; Mom was an off-the-scale-hyper housewife, talkative and social. She was from a large Serbian family, three sisters and one brother, both parents around to keep them in line. He was Scotch-Irish, and the child of a divorced couple with only one sibling, Homer, a paratrooper who hadn’t come back from the war, killed shortly after D-Day while defending a bridge on the front lines.

And there was something else. They were rather old fashioned in their ideas about life in general. Conservative in a way that didn’t really fit in with the progressive attitudes of the day.

Which meant their outlook was pretty much on the opposite end of the social spectrum from mine. By the time I became the unicycle guy, I had completely absorbed the prevailing mind-set regarding the Vietnam War, student protest, civil rights, ecology, you name it. I’m not sure how many other kids shared my views. I didn’t pay that much attention, too busy cramming as much information into my head as possible, reading everything I could get my hands on: science, math, history, art, music. A Renaissance man if there ever was one. I loved science fiction, had a collection of a dozen different hats I would change on a daily basis, and was an insufferable know-it-all.

The unicycle just set my strangeness in stone. It also let me know that it was time to tone down my alien proclivities.

Seventh grade. I had graduated to a professional model of unike: blue frame, sparkling blue seat, chrome spokes. I rode that thing around the neighborhood just like the man who had shown me the light. Tam would’ve been proud of the way I could cross any lawn with ease, up and over culverts, through ditches like they weren’t even there.

I was performing some of these stunts one bright summer day when the other kids decided to mount their bikes and start chasing me around. It was fun for about ten minutes because I wasn’t having that much trouble evading them. Then they ramped it up.

Denny cried, Head him off!

You guys take the driveway! shouted Billy.

Crap! I started sweating, my breath coming in ragged gasps. It became clear they were going to keep at it until one of them ran me over!

I finally had to jump to the ground and put a stop to the whole affair, yelling, Damn it, that’s enough!

A revelation settled over me. Maybe it was time to put away the hats and the unicycle, and get my bicycle out of the garage, become a little more normal, at least on the outside. Then there was the smart kid thing. I had always been at the top of the dean’s list, ready to answer any question, hand in the air, a model student. Perhaps this incident was a signal to back off a bit on that part of my efforts to appear unique as well.

Being ostracized is different than being seen as a harmless eccentric.

So I started to keep my mouth shut when an arcane topic rose to the surface of any conversation, both at home and in school. The words I don’t know began to find their way into my vocabulary. Fitting in was more enjoyable than being odd for the sake of being odd.

Oh, I would still ride my unicycle across town, in the snow, to get to a buddy’s house for a game of driveway basketball. But only once in awhile.

One wheel, one boy, lots of friends.

Drastic plastic

We’re going to need some acoustic glass, Gavin said. Have you ever heard of that?

I’ve heard of it. Here we go.

Do you know what it is? he asked.

Having been through this game before, I stopped to consider whether or not I wanted to play. What the hell. No, I don’t.

He’s off. It’s double glazed. You have to have a space between the two pieces. So vibrations don’t get transferred from one pane to the other.

Makes sense, I said.

And the best way to do that would be to create a vacuum in there. He paused.

Between the glass? I inquired.

Right. He answered. But they don’t do that.

I continued with, Why not? guessing the odds we were in the home stretch of our conversation at around sixty/forty.

Because, he said, his eyes narrowing ever-so-slightly, then if you even just tapped it, the whole thing would implode.

"Which would be