My Moms and Me - Second Edition

By William Jack

An atmospheric 1950's coming-of-age story about Andrew, a quirky seventh-grader living in vacant buildings with his grandfather while attending a ritzy private Catholic military grade school.

 

At first, he's convinced that a monsignor's sexual abuse won't spoil his bizarrely fun life in which he looks askance at everything, especially Catholicism.  After all, a kid's gotta be tough...but, is he tough "enough"? 

 

He walks a jagged line between his bliss and agony.

 

Andrew convinces his best friend, Damian, a quiet reflective rebel also from a poor background, to become a fellow altar boy.  Mark, Andrew's other friend, is a fun, risk-taking heathen (i.e., an Episcopalian) who takes Andrew's mind off things going on in church.

 

[Available in paperback and ebook format.]

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Francis Jack
• Release date: May 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201487720

Book preview

Copyright

Copyright © 2021 William Francis Jack

All rights reserved

ISBN:  9798201487720

Cover Design by Jan Vanhellemont

https://www.masterandmargarita.eu

About the Story

An atmospheric 1950's coming-of-age story about Andrew, a quirky seventh-grader living in vacant buildings with his grandfather while attending a ritzy private Catholic military grade school.

At first, he's convinced that a monsignor's sexual abuse won't spoil his bizarrely fun life in which he looks askance at everything, especially Catholicism.  After all, a kid's gotta be tough...but, is he tough enough?  He walks a jagged line between his bliss and agony.

Andrew convinces his best friend, Damian, a quiet reflective rebel also from a poor background, to become a fellow altar boy.  Mark, Andrew’s other friend, is a fun, risk-taking heathen (i.e., an Episcopalian) who takes Andrew’s mind off things going on in church.

[Available in paperback and ebook format.]

I.

Whacks

Me? Andrew Francis Fischer. Seventh grade, Saint Polycarp-Barbara Catholic School. Third-rate altar boy. A river rat. I’m short, my hair won’t stay combed, and grimy masking tape holds my glasses together between my eyeballs. So as not to go on about physical appearance, I can put it in one word: butt-ugly. That's two words if you don't want to count the hyphen. Sorry.

Some people call me a smart-aleck.  Other people use different names, most of them not nice. Can you see inside me? Hope not, or I better clean up the place.

Oh, you get your middle name at Baptism, but Grandpa says I wasn’t baptized. Religion already muck up family.

I asked him many times why he said that, but he never told me so I stopped asking. But being a pagan means I won’t go to heaven no matter how good I behave, so why try, right?

Sputtnik is up there. Best to get it all down before it hits me. You can’t throw Saint Joseph Missals at the Reds and expect to escape.

I WAS SAD WHEN THEY transferred Father Brady to a different city. We had a going-away party for Father Murray in the gym when I was in fourth grade, but Father Brady disappeared on us...no party, no chance to say good-bye. He was my favorite...so nice to students, altar boys especially. He took them on camping trips but I never got to go because I’m a river rat, bottom on the rung but now up the bluff in a ritzy Catholic school where I didn’t belong, and for this camp you had to pay for supper and breakfast so Damian and me didn’t go.

I ASKED TUBBY MONSIGNOR Waller, the pastor, Did Father Brady die? Why did he leave us so fast?

His furry paw slammed across my cheek. It’s none of your damned business!

I didn’t know that priests swore.

BEING A PAGAN, I DIDN’T understand some Catholic things. Sometimes I kept my trap shut about it but not often enough. Like in class we had to draw a biblical frieze on a single roll of brown butcher paper (white not being in the budget...too much money spent on underprivileged pupils, like me, who couldn’t pay tuition).

Vidor the one-eyed janitor had put up the paper and got in trouble for it. Our frieze stretched around the classroom like it was supposed to except it covered the blackboard, and Brother Saint Vimin of Holywood found three empty Bourbon Supreme bottles behind the Infant of Prague statue. What with butcher paper and masking tape covering the blackboard, Brother had to stand on his tiptoes or bend down to the floor to write anything. When he bent down, you could see the bottoms of his trousers from under his black dress, and when he stretched up, his stiff white baby bib dug into his chubby neck, like as if it was choking him. Too bad it only looked that way.

He was teaching us a new way to multiply. I didn’t understand the old way, so adding a new way that I didn’t understand made things worse. I get around multiplying when I can. Nine times three? You write out nine three times and add it up, or if you want to spend more time on it, you write out three nine times and count.

So I learned (didn’t learn, actually) this new multiplication system by craning my neck way up or way down. To this day, every time I have a neck ache, I think about multiplying something, and every time I think about multiplying something, my neck starts to hurt. You can see why I avoid multiplying.

For the frieze we grabbed our crayolas and drew various scenes from the Bible. My job was to work with my stubby crayons (rejects from the rich kids) on two feet of paper in theback corner of the room and draw Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. I knew my Gospels.

What a mess you have made of our frieze! said Brother Vimin, his punctuation mark being a whack across my cheek. What is that horrible gray blur?

"Brother, the Bible says, From dust thou art, to dust thou shall return. If Lazarus is dead, he needs to be dust, so I have a skinny cloud of dust for him."

Whack! I know the Scriptures, Mister Fischer. You do not. You must re-read Chapter Eleven of the Gospel of Saint John!

I ducked, then said, Maybe, Brother, you want to know why Lazarus looks like a gray cloud except for real feet?

Whack! "You dare challenge me, Mister Fischer? Lazarus is not dust! Why have you drawn only his feet?"

I’m not the kind of kid to be intimidated, and I still have the scars to prove it. I figured that when raising somebody from the dead, Jesus started at the easy part and worked his way up.

I won’t say whack again, but you can put it in if you want to be realistic. I got a second whack because I hadn’t bowed my head when I said the word Jesus.

And your depiction of The Christ is a sacrilege! He is disfigured! Mister Fischer, I do not know what kind of sad family background you have, but this is an outrage!

I ducked big-time. "I admit that his arms are an inch or so too long, Brother, but I figure he needs long arms when he wraps them around crowds of small kids and says, Suffer the little children and forbid them not to come unto me. He wouldn’t want them suffering more, what with being squeezed together and all."

VIM, WITH HIS SQUARE head and thick black glasses, glued a new chunk of butcher paper over my Lazarus, who was erased...like the New Testament erased the old one.

The classroom door cut off part of the Epiphany so Eddie Grunz drew only one-and-one-half Wise Men coming from the east (which on our frieze was actually from the west). Brother gave him a whack. Like me, he was underprivileged. Mister Grunz, if you had drawn the Wise Men on a smaller scale, all three would have appeared on your section of the frieze.

Yes, Brother, but then they would be half the size of John Baptist next door, even if you don’t count the head.

My seventh-grade teacher was Brother Saint Vimin of Hollywood. I found out later that his genuinely real name was Brother Saint Vimin of Holywood. The number of l’s is important. The place with one l is in Scotland, near the Fifth of Fourth or the Fourth or Fifth or some such, in the county of Fib...honest! That’s the name of the county.

The place with two l’s has its name written in white letters up on a hill so’s you can see it and my mother and father are almost-famous actors there. Soon they’ll be as rich as Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart and will have enough money to come fetch me. I don’t know what my mom looks like because she went to Hollywood when I was three years old, but I’m sure she’s beautiful and she’ll bring me a stack of short-sleeve shirts and bernuda shorts, as my grandfather calls them.

Over my dusty Lazarus and long-armed Jesus, Doris Elizabeth Miller (that’s an interesting name and I’ll tell you about it soon) drew the driving of pigs off a cliff. In the Bible (The Good Book, they call it, although I’ve read books that are written better), Jesus takes the sins out of a crowd of people and transfers them over to a sounder of pigs (That’s what you call a bunch of pigs. You just can’t make this stuff up...at least I can’t). The sounder dives off a cliff and the people are now holy, but the pigs aren’t doing so well down there...no need to renew their Readers Digest.subscriptions. If you don’t want to believe me, Matt tells you about it at Chapter Eight, Verse Thirty-Two.

On the first scene in the frieze, Damian Bellini drew the most beautiful Garden of Eden you could imagine. The tiniest flower had petals with delicate edges. A rounder, bright-red apple you could never find.

He was the smartest kid in the school and the best-looking guy in the whole city. He had skin of a pleasingly light hue, as they call it in books I don’t read, curly black hair that graced the tops of his forehead, ears, and the nape of his neck. Girls rushed up to him, sticking their fingers into his face. "Oh, let us touch your long eyelashes! And would you look at those beautiful green eyes!"

God I hated that kid.

Mister Bellini, you have failed to draw Adam, Eve, the Lord, and Satan! yelled Vim as he yanked Damian at the back of his collar, then punched him to the floor. You have left out the most important parts!

He grabbed onto the chalkboard rail and pulled himself up. No, I haven’t, Brother. I drew the leaves and flowers.

I didn’t know then why he said that.

I might of hated him but I hated more seeing Vim knock him over like a bowling pin. He was the most gentle person ever. Too bad he was so perfect. He’d never be friends with the likes of me.

Don’t you dare talk back to me! said Vim. Two slaps for Damian as the paddlewheel whacking boat made its way around the classroom.

For Wilbert Pomeroy the first whack came because his Moses was wearing a crucifix around his neck when he was coming down from Mount Sinai, and the second whack was for what Moses was carrying when he came down from that mountain: two white pages with blue lines and three punch-holes along one side. Well, the Bible calls them tablets, doesn’t it? I kept my mouth shut about it.

RKO Hollywood Vim never whacked Doris Elizabeth Miller, his pet. I heard that a lot of girls were named Elizabeth because of Elizabeth Taylor and the same goes for Doris and Doris Day, but why aren’t there any boys named Bing or Perry or Miltie? At least I don’t know any, do you? I mean, except for the originals.

When Vimin finished paddling his way around the frieze, he stood at where you would have seen the chalkboard if it wasn’t for the butcher paper. He rubbed his fat reddened fingers. "All four of you who have desecrated our class frieze are underprivileged pupils. You do not belong here!"

Monsignor Waller usually waddled out of his rectory and came to the school building so’s he could admire friezes, but he didn’t show up for that one. Two days after we had finished messing it up, Vermin the Vulture yanked down the whole thing on the first try.

It was 1957, and Sputtnik was making circles overhead. Newspapers asked why Soviet Ivan in seventh grade could design a space rocket but American Johnny in seventh grade barely knew the multiplication tables beyond ten, which number is the easiest anyways because you just have to add a zero at the end.

I knew that Sputtnik was aiming for me.

I’M A PAGAN BUT I GO to Saints Polycarp-Barbara Catholic Grade School up on the northern bluff of the Mississippi. Oh, I didn’t make a mistake when I wrote northern.

Remind us, in which direction does the Mississippi River flow? Brother Saint Vimin of Fib had asked me.

Um, from west to east, Brother.

You can put a whack in there if you want, but it was a punch instead. However, I am not as dumb as you maybe think. The river makes two bends before and after my spot, although it really isn’t my spot, just the flats where I happened to live. Around these parts, the mighty Mississip goes west to east, meaning the bluffs are north and south. This is sometimes hard to explain to foreigners from down-river or from North Dakota where they don’t understand a lot of things anyway. And South Dakota? Come on, a castle made out of corn cobs?

I studied at this ritzy Catholic school because boys wore military uniforms. One pants, one shirt...is cheaper, my grandpa said every time we hiked to the Saint Vincent de Paul used clothing store to buy another surplus Army uniform. You wearing high-water pants. So we didn’t save a whole heck of a lot of dough by me going to Polycarp & Barbara. We bought very used uniforms that if you were lucky lasted a couple months.

Anyways, Polycarp-Barbara was still cheaper because I could walk there. I would of needed to pay for a streetcar and a bus to go to Taft Junior High, the pubic school. No school bus would of picked me up because no one could know where we lived, you see.

And Grandpa had said, Do not go on trolley or bus. Too many crazies.

He might of been right.

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN on a streetcar.

One guy had a stringy beard that he hadn’t trimmed in a year or ten. He wore a long robe, the color of a gunny sack (about which I know a lot). Worse, he wore sandals, no socks, and it was a cold day. He set himself down in front of me and turned around, Could you tell me where the Cathedral is? I am Jesus Christ.

Like I do too many times, I opened my big mouth before thinking. Excuse me, doesn’t Jesus Christ know everything?

He turned back around to face the front, and his shoulders slouched.

I felt bad right away that I had asked him that. What if I had pulled him out of his private world? We need them because the real world isn’t always nice to us.

I had to talk loud because the whole while, the money-taking machine at the front of the trolley was clacking away. They make more noise when the belt isn’t gobbling coins, or slugs (like from me).

I tapped the guy on his shoulder: "Dear Jesus, you’re thinking about the whole world and so you need to ask a question once in a while. I mean, don’t you say a lot of whosoever’s and whatsoever’s in that book about you? So on a bad day you might forget some wherever’s too. The world is a big place, right? Oh, you know that already.

See that big dome over there? That’s the Cathedral. You can spot it from most anywheres in the city in case you go somewhere else and want to get back. From here you want to get off at the fifth stop and take bus number seven for two stops. I’ll tell you when to get off.

He turned around to me and nodded slow, like he would always remember that and it was important to him. He held out his right arm, bent up at his elbow, raised two of his fingers, and made a big Sign of the Cross over me. "In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti."

This was scary. He had said it in Latin and he knew to extend which fingers and what to do with his thumb and pinky. I don’t remember where any lay person, or even any altar boy, says the Sign of the Cross in Latin or holds their digits like that. Only the priest. Everyone else only gets to say amen, altar boys included, with their fingers remaining flat while making the Sign of the Cross on their bodies, hitting their bellybuttons on the bottom and not their gonads.

Was the real Jesus riding on that streetcar? Could of happened. Sometimes people disappear when you don’t expect it (like with Father Brady), and other times people show up when you don’t expect it, like Jesus a long time ago when he wasn’t riding a streetcar but was a small boy. You don’t have to believe this story unless you’re a student in a Catholic school and then you damn well better believe it. The Holy Roman Apostolic Catholic Church is all that protects us from the evil world, you see.

Saint Christopher (well, he wasn’t a saint yet so he was just a Christopher) had a job carrying people acrosst a river. He picked up a small kid even though it was time to punch his time clock and light up a Lucky Strike, but the kid looked like he was suffering because of one thing or another. Maybe his mom was on the other side.

The look on the kid’s face affected Chris greatly. He put him on his shoulders and was carrying him acrosst the river, but with each step the current grew stronger and the kid became heavier, like cement. Chris, out of breath from fighting the current and carrying the cement, put the kid down on the other bank and complained:

You put me in the greatest danger, Child. I do not believe the whole world would have been as heavy on my shoulders.

The kid answered:

You carried on your shoulders not only the whole world but him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you serve by this work.

The kid vanished into thin air.

Would Chris be there when I needed him?

Now you maybe know why Catholic cars have Saint Christopher statues stuck onto their dashboards with glue that if you’re lucky lasts a month. He’s the patron saint of travelers, piggy-back or otherwise.

But for me on that streetcar? Latin and the two fingers? When Jesus headed down the aisle, I noticed he was wearing sandals that came from Monkey Wards. (That’s Montgomery Wards, if you’re not from around these parts. I hope I haven’t offended any Wards people.) A tag on one back-strap said Size Ten. Half-Price. Forty-nine Cents.

At the front of the trolley Jesus made a big Sign of the Cross over the conductor who leaned over and yanked open the door. Scram! You beatniks give me the heebie-jeebies!

I wouldn’t forget that Jesus on the streetcar.

LUCKY FOR ME AND GRANDPA’S floppy wallet, Saint Polycarp-Barbara saved fifteen slots at the back of each classroom for the underprivileged so the school could get state money. I never told them how over-privileged I actually was.

At Polycarp we underprivileged pupils (as students are called, but only in Catholic schools, I think. I might be wrong on this?)...We pupils (not eye parts) sat on bent folding chairs that came from the bingo hall where not every person is underweight if you know what I mean and I bet you do. We put our legs under a mightily sagging sheet of plywood that laid on two saw horses at the ass end of the classroom.

I was the only river rat in the whole school.

I was lucky to be going to Polycarp-Barbara because it’s there that I found my refuge and my hope (as it says in that book): the Catholic liturgy, what with their genuflecting and utensils and all. Plus the ditties from The Saint Gregory Hymnal. Not to mention one of God’s greatest inventions: the Latin language. Please don’t ask me why those things were so important. It just happened.

Inside, the church glowed from rainbow rays filtering into the dim building through stained glass windows, the rays slanting across the interior from both sides, intersecting at the middle aisle. It was a separate world.

In church I felt safe.

ONE DAY ON THE PLAYGROUND six kids were crouching in a circle. One kid’s face was close to the ground and I hate to tell you this: He was pulling legs off a spider. They were watching the spider stumble around after they tore off one leg, then another.

What the hell are you guys doing, making a poor spider suffer like that? I asked.

Get lost, weirdo! said Butch.

I grabbed him by the collar (He was way bigger than me), yanked him back onto his butt and dived into the circle. It was too late for that poor spider, though. I wish I had seen it earlier. I would of protected him, like I want to protect all animals.

Maybe it comes from my middle name? Francis is both a great name and a lousy name...great because in every picture that you see of Saint Francis he’s being kind to chipmunks and chickadees. He’s the patron saint of animals which puts him at the top of my list, way above Number Two, whoever he or she is. But too bad his full name is Francis of Assisi. It doesn’t take long on a Catholic playground before you get around to hearing Francis a Sissy. This isn’t good for me because I don’t play some sports very well, or to be straight with you, I’m lousy at every sport. But, like Francis, I defend animals, small as spiders.

IN VIM’S CLASS I COULDN’T do anything right, not even lunch. In the second week of classes, he marched back to the plywood, grabbed my empty lunch bag and tossed it into the shit can. This filthy thing belongs in a trash receptacle, not on a school desk!

Excuse me, Brother, but it’s a slab of cheap plywood. I kept my trap shut about it.

We kids at the plywood used the same lunch bags over and over until you could wad them up into the size of a golf ball. Some days Poor Patrick stuffed pebbles into his sack because he didn’t have a lunch. I gave him half my lard sandwiches.

After school, the nuns and brothers kicked us out. If we hung around (lingered) without any good reason (they decided what was a good reason), there was always Vidor the one-eyed janitor who saw more than most people with two eyes. "Why you here late? I tell principal, Brother Cuthbert! Maybe you want hot chocolate? Maybe Bourbon Supreme?"

An unusual name, that Vidor? He was Hungarian but left it during the revolt last year. Along with him came Hanna, his wife, and their son, Aji, who was my age but looked like he had been lifting weights ten years before he was born. Think Charles Atlas on the back covers of Superman comic books. I can’t say for sure because I don’t read those dumb comics. I happen to like Little Lulu. If you’re a boy, you have no business reading Little Lulu, but I don’t care. She always comes out on top, no matter what. Nobody comes to her rescue.

Aji decided he didn’t like me...I didn’t know why. He hardly spoke English so I didn’t know what he was saying most of the time. Maybe I gave the wrong answer to one of his Hungarian questions. One day he rolled up his sleeves, stepped up to me, and put up his dukes, as they call it. I don’t know what dukes have to do with it because they usually fight with pistols in duels, don’t they, or have I been wrong all these years?

His knobbly knuckles stood six inches from my face, so I thought getting him into a conversation might help. Where are you from, Aji?

Budapest. He pronounced the ‘s’ like a ‘sh’: Budapesht. His fist stayed where it was.

Are you from Buda or from Pesht?

He put down his fist, opened his mouth. "They? Two city, not one? How you know?"

I didn’t know how I knew. I just knew. In geography Brother hadn’t said anything about Hungary or any country around there except that the Reds had invaded them all and were heading our way...not to mention Sputtnik spinning over us and aiming directly at one river rat.

Oh, when Aji said Holy Mass, it sounded like holy mess. I hope God doesn’t get him for that.

MY ADVENTURES WHEN I wasn’t sitting behind the plywood? Too many to name. In the early days Grandpa and me lived in empty shacks down along the levee, meaning that every year the spring floods washed them clean...washed them dirty, to tell you the truth. After the water flowed back into the river channel, stinky mud, dead carp, and rotting turtles stunk up the place. The mud was too tick (as my grandpa called it) to pump and too watery to shovel.

We had good water most of the time. There was a fresh-water pump behind the abandoned town hall, except the water wasn’t very fresh whenever the pump was buried under ten feet of river mud.

Grandpa, we don’t have electricity, I told him when I was old enough to talk and to know about electricity but not old enough to know anything else.

You dasn’t worry about electricity, Andy.

I hated my name Andy, loved the name upstairs, Andrew. I couldn’t get anybody to switch, not even Grandpa.

How did he give us electricity? He borrowed a great number of industrial electric extension cords from his various work sites, one each day that he showed up, until we could connect the cords and bury them between us and the abandoned marina. (Most underwater marinas have trouble attracting customers.) We got our electricity, like he promised. We had one lamp with a bulb the size of a watermelon. That was fine because in life we have to look for the bright side of things, always.

We made sure to pick shacks that were close enough concerning the extension cords. You couldn’t pick a shack that was on higher ground...The levee was as flat as an over-cooked Pillsbury pancake because the raging river rolled over it every spring. Only the toughest shacks survived, meaning we were safe until the next flood.

We were living royally. When we got washed out, we spent a week or three in the woods on higher ground in a tent Grandpa made from tarps he had borrowed from his various soon-to-be-shit-canned-from work sites. It was fun. We lit camp fires.

See, you always have to pick out the bright side of things such as a bright camp fire or big lightbulb or you will be depressed all the time.

WE GOT A NEW STUDENT, Mary Welch. Hey, welcome to Polycarp Barbara! I told her at recess. Where are you from?

Our Lady of Perpetual Indulgence, in Winona. Have you ever been there?

Nope, but I hear it’s a beautiful place, what with being off the river and all.

We had just gotten a new parish priest, and I heard he was from here. His name is Father Brady. Do you know him maybe?

Yup! He was a priest in this parish, a great one.

What were the chances of that? Life is jammed with coincidences. At least mine is. Like with the regional park and the castle, as you will see...or is it as you shall see?

II.

Stay Away From the Pubic Library

By the end of April , after the river went back to its usual path (flowing in the wrong direction, you will remember), if our shack hadn’t survived the flood we found another one up-river or down-river, depending.

Then they decided to build a regional park down there that actually didn’t involve building anything but tearing down everything. Lucky for us the electric company had given up on their Island Power Plant on the other side of the river. The building wasn’t on an island, actually, and it produced about as much power as two D-size flashlight batteries. A new way of burning coal had just come out, and so this non-island Island Power Plant sputtered and spit, becoming about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. To board up the doors and windows, they used nails too weak for the likes of us, especially for the three-foot crowbar Grandpa found at one of his almost-worked-there sites.

The plant was a tall brick castle with a smoke stack that reached high over the river bluffs. Everything inside was concrete or metal...balconies all over the place and a spiral stairway with ten turns that took you up five stories to an outdoor platform that became my sanctuary. Inside the castle there were more ladders than Carter’s has little liver pills.

Only in a couple spots on the ground floor could you look up and see the ceiling. From crooked wall to crooked wall, and from a cracked floor to a ceiling that you hoped wasn’t cracked much, you saw a sounder of tanks and gun-gray generators holding thousands of thick cables multiplied too many times to count.

Pipes shot up to different heights, from a few feet above the floor, and up five stories to the top...sort of like a church organ built by somebody drinking way too much Pure n Clear, Grandpa’s favorite brand.

This castle in two words? Damn, damn cool! Sorry for the repetition that might make you want to say my in two words is really in three words but I might argue with you on that.

But what will we do for water, Grandpa? I asked when we moved in. He knew answers for every question like that but not biblical ones such as which end to start with when raising people from the dead, or multiplying loafs and fish. (We could of used both.)

Water is all around us, dumb shit. He said dumb shit kindly because it was a show of affection. Honest. Anyways, it was better than calling me Andy. Where there is will, there is way.

Luck was on our side, as always. There wasn’t a waterfall nearby, so the plant had a three-story metal tank filled with clean city water. Is enough for years, Grandpa said.

Oh, saying clean city water is about the water, not about the city, believe you me. I can get confused over the order of words, and I want to be clear for you. If it’s already clear for you, then I apologize for taking up your time.

But it’s not clean water, I said when I still didn’t know any better.

Hell, dumb, dumb shit. They did not use river water because it gum up machinery.

My grandfather wasn’t very good at a’s, an’s, and the’s so he left them out. He probably would of left them out of his writing too except he never learned how to write. He didn’t know when to say those words because when he was six years old, he came with his pops to America from Lower Saxony in Germany. I don’t know if Upper Saxony is a better place or if they would of chucked it too. They forgot to bring along some words for translating into English.

Extension cords (we brought along the ones we had used on the other side of the river, plus Grandpa found a few more on this side before he got fired from his various new sites) stretched to an abandoned guard station that was still hooked up to electricity. Lucky for us (that is, lucky as usual for us), when the power plant people abandoned the place, they forgot to turn off the electricity in the guard shack...also one gas line inside the castle.

And these people were supposed to be running a power plant?

BROTHER VIM WHACKED me more often than the others. Don’t know why. I did what I was supposed to, just as soon as I stopped studying girls’ lower calves and got around to doing whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing. I have a thing for girls’ lower calves, the part you see between their bobby-socks and the bottoms of their blue jumpers...the way they change shapes when the girl is sitting with her feet behind her desk or in front of her desk or standing up or walking or running. Their movements hypnotize me.  I wasn’t interested in upper calves...I hardly saw them, and anyway, they were too close to a neighborhood that terrified me.

I had to stay after school three days a week for a bona fide reason. I worked in the library, shelving books in the wrong places for one penny a minute. There was a second reason too. If I had been a wise-ass during school that particular day (a good chance of that happening), I had to stay after and clean the blackboard erasers. They were about the size of bricks. When I smacked two of them together, they like exploded. Chalk powder flew all over the place and hit everything and me and anybody else who was around the school for bona fide reasons or not.

Even after I scrubbed my fingers in the boys’ room until they were raw, the powder stayed around the edges of my fingernails, where it will be forever. When I’m forty years old, people will know I was a smart-aleck and had to clean erasers.

After the chalk settled on the floor and on me, I had to wipe the blackboards with wet rags that in ten seconds turned chalky. You could wipe all day and the blackboard would still have white swirls, and you’d walk out of school looking like somebody’s ghost.

Mister Fischer, the blackboard is horribly smeared! Brother Fib always said. After each time he drew a small circle on the blackboard and made me lean into it with two fingertips. Then he kicked my feet farther, then farther, from the wall. When leaning like that, other kids squirmed and begged, but not me. Sure, leaning on two fingers hurt like the dickens, but giving in to Brother Vermin would of hurt more.

Among a great many other possible reasons, he might of hated me was because he couldn’t make me cry. Each time after I leaned on the board for a couple hours, he sent me to Brother Cuthbert, the Principal. He was an expert at making kids do push-ups...I wasn’t an expert at doing them. A hockey stick stood in the corner of his office. I’m sure he never played hockey and probably didn’t even skate because ice hadn’t been invented yet when he was young. I knew all about that stick.

You see, I’m bringing you into my private world. Hope you like it.

WHAT HAPPENED TO FATHER Brady? I asked Brother Vim-Vigor-and-Vitality (which is what you get from drinking a certain brand of root beer...I don’t remember which one).

No answer. Just a whack.

THERE WAS A SCHOOL crisis.

Where is Richard Werner? Vim asked. He served a Funeral Mass at nine o’clock and he has not yet returned to the classroom. It is eleven-thirty. He will surely pay for this! Mister Kelly, go to the church and locate him!

Twenty minutes later Michael Kelly returned. He isn’t anywhere, Brother.

Whack! I told you to bring him back!

Michael was crying, holding his fingers to his cheek. Monsignor Waller says he doesn’t know where he is, but Vidor said he ran away.

Brother shrugged.

We never saw Richard again. The next day Vim packed up his pencils and ink dip pen.

I WAS ACTUALLY GOOD in some subjects such as spelling. We had spelling bees where one-half of the class stood along one side of the classroom and the other half stood on the other side. When you gave the wrong answer, you walked back to your desk or, in fifteen instances, back to your plywood. You sat down and twiddled your thumbs until only one person was left standing...the winner. Usually I was still standing right or near-right to the end. Anthropomorphism got me one time. I missed the second p.

During English class which happened once in a while although the whole day was usually about why we had to stay away from Protestants (heretics) and Jews (Christ-killers), Brother corrected my pronunciation, changing my t’s to th’s and the reverse and such. I still make mistakes, despite the whacks: Thread on a tire, for instance, or tread stuck through (tru) a needle. I learned to speak mostly from my grandfather.

To make things more efficient, brother decided to organize two spelling bees. We will conduct our first bee for those students whose parents pay their tuition. The second bee will be for those who require our generosity.

The thing that was bad about this system was that Brother ran out of time after the un-underprivileged bee, so he never got around to the underprivileged bee because of the need to turn to religious subjects such as why Catholic kids shouldn’t hang around Lutheran kids. But who would want to anyway? Martin Luther nailed ninety-five of his feces to a cathedral wall. What goes on during Lutheran Sunday services? I didn’t want to know.

I think that if I was in a bee again, I’d trip up on more than just one p in anthropomorphism, like two p’s in piss-pot.

I CALLED THE POWER plant a castle, which it was, and surrounded by a wide moat made of mud. We were never lonely because nearby ran five sets of railroad tracks. When boxcars were going slow past us, men holding gunny sacks or bent-up boxes (made of cardboard as tin as paper) jumped off. They were called hobos then but the word is now maybe not polite. They have been through so many troubles that they deserve a good place to rest a spell. These homeless men without jobs traveling by rail mostly (in case hobo is a bad word) stopped in on us for a warm night or ten.

We served them boiled wieners from our dented pot that had a hole at the bottom, and also from a vat of Grandpa’s spaghetti sauce that he simmered all the time, adding clean (usually) water when necessary. It wasn’t spaghetti sauce, actually. I had supper at Frankie Pataki’s house once. His mother’s Hungarian goulash soup was...guess what...Grandpa’s spaghetti sauce. So he maybe had confused tings, like when their boat was rocking during a storm on the Atlantic.

He made us