Car Ride and Sick Joke

On a windy March afternoon 50 years ago the 10-year-old boy plays with his friends in the park. They play football and wrestle, and eventually they stop and gather around another kid who is flying a kite. The kite is a cheap conventional kite that you might buy at a candy store or soda fountain. The boys watch it flutter and riffle and snap in the wind, a ragged and hesitant ascent. The boys make suggestions and ask to take turns holding the line, but soon the wind dies slightly, and the kite twirls in demented dervish loops, hitting the ground.

The boy and his friends then disperse and head home for supper.  As he passes the elementary school there is a line of cars parked in front and the boy recognizes his parents’ car among them. Tonight is PTA night, a Thursday, and his mother must be dropping off a snack for the meeting, usually chocolate chip cookies or brownies of which she always saves a batch for him to eat later . . . after supper.

On impulse, the boy tries his parents’ car door and finds it unlocked. In that moment he decides he’ll play a practical joke, and climbs into the car and lies down on the floor by the back seat, figuring his mother will see him when she leaves the school to drive home. Besides, it will save him walking, though he has no more than a five-minute walk. 

But his mother doesn’t see him.

The car is moving and the boy realizes that the movement and direction of the car is unfamiliar. His mother is not driving back to the house. From the floor looking upward through the car window, he sees the attenuated points of bare grey tree tops sliding past, and the power lines, like unbroken elastic strings, rising and dipping with the changing surface of the road. This isn't part of his plan, and he has an urge to sit up in the back seat while the car is moving, but then thinks better of it. He briefly fantasizes that he is being kidnapped, and would need to sharpen all his senses so he’d know where the kidnappers might be taking him. His mother is driving downtown. She stops the car in front of the grocery store and enters.

By now the boy knows that he’s done something seriously wrong, and while his mother is shopping in the grocery store, he imagines ways to get out of his predicament. For instance, he could leave the car and head into the store to meet his mother, act surprised, greet her with the story that he’d been walking along  Splendid Avenue, coming from the candy store, and saw her car. This scenario had in fact happened a couple times before and seemed plausible, but it would ruin his joke, though the joke was becoming less of a joke by now. Instead, he could sit up in the back seat and wait until his mother comes out, using the same lie about finding her car downtown. Or he could simply get out of the car and walk the five or six blocks back home (a longer walk than from the school) and forget the joke had ever happened . . . but the boy does none of these things and remains on the floor in the back seat of the car, reasoning that when his mother returns, she will  ave to load groceries in the back of the car and certainly find him. His mother will be shocked of course, but not the heart-stopping screaming fear she would experience if he’d suddenly sat up while she was driving. And he’d lie to mitigate the evil of his prank, explaining that he’d only discovered and snuck into her car a few minutes earlier, omitting having really snuck in a half hour ago, back at the school, and then hiding the entire time she’d driven downtown.

But the plan fails again . . . His mother only carries one bag of groceries out of the store, and she gets into the car on the driver’s side and places the bag on the passenger’s seat. The boy could quickly sit up now before his mother has a chance to start the car and pull out of the parking space, but he doesn’t. He’s still stuck because he’s indecisive, because he’s been thinking too much about what he’s done, and he decides to wait it out on the floor of the backseat until they’re finally home. 

The car has been parked in the driveway and the boy’s mother has gotten out and is coming around to the passenger’s side to get the bag of groceries. She sees him and is jolted backwards, her face rigid with confusion and fear.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I’ve been hiding in the backseat of the car.”

“What?!”

“Since the school,” I tell her, proud of my clever ability to stay concealed for such a long time.”

My mother is clearly angry and disturbed by my Damien Thorn-like behavior.

“Do you realize how dangerous that is? What if I’d seen you, or heard you while I was driving? I could have had a terrible accident and you would have been in the car too.”

I know she’s right but I try to defend the prank.

“You wouldn’t have seen me. I hid well, and I wouldn’t have sat up in the car or said anything while you were driving,” and I realize with shame that the thought had once crossed my mind during that weird drive.

“I didn’t have to see you,” my mother says, stunned in disbelief that her oldest son has done something so profoundly scary and idiotic.  “What if I had heard you move, or heard your breathing? Do you have any idea how terrifying that would have been for me?”

“Mom, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize . . .”

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t, please don’t tell Dad.”

“Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you . . . I will never do it again.”

And in that moment it became quite clear to me that I didn’t need my mother’s verbal admonition or reprimand. The look on her face alone---not the comical spooked-and-then-relieved look I’d anticipated from my prank, but a shock far more serious and hurt that had unexpectedly scared me---the look on her face had been warning and punishment enough.

 

The Secular and The Religious

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
 
In my early childhood days the Christmas Eve parties had been in someone's apartment with quite a lot of drinking and dancing. The men in their white shirts with skinny ties; the women in heels they slipped off before jitterbugging. They were young after all, in their 20s---brothers, wives, cousins, friends, work buddies. They played the stereo: "Mack the Knife" "Blueberry Hill" "Rock Around the Clock" It felt like wild and crazy times, which probably had more to do with everyone's age and capacity for alcohol than with it being the end of the Eisenhower era. And Christmas parties weren't about the children, our time was Christmas morning. I remember being tired one Christmas Eve at an uncle's apartment and falling asleep on a pile of coats that everyone had tossed on the bed, kind of the way in which a cat or dog will fall asleep on your clothes. It's almost impossible to describe that feeling of warmth and comfort.


My parents bought a house before I turned five. Most but not all of the family Christmas parties from that time forward took place there, a stretch of about 25 years from the late 50s to the early 80s. By my late teens the Night Before Christmas had become more of a happy lark and the WPIX Yule Log set the mood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMjTD7c6TCo&feature=related

The adults took the televised yule log more seriously but my generation found humor and absurdity in the yule log and yet still enjoyed it, perhaps even more so. The Christmas Eve parties were still mainly for the adults and "the kids" needed to create our own entertainment. A few of my cousins, my brother and I, and maybe a couple friends would leave the house early in the evening, and we would drive around or walk around to look at Christmas lights and smoke a joint or two, so that by the time we returned to an adult party in full swing, we'd sit together in the combined den and dining area and fire up the Yule Log on WPIX. By now we were all in a peaceful, bonhomie, holiday mood, meditating on The Yule Log, laughing for no apparent reason which puzzled some of our parents, drinking a little wine, or a beer, or maybe a cup of tea as a buffet table was being prepared with turkey and ham and cold-cuts and potato salad and pies, and cakes and Christmas cookies. My mother and her mother knew how to create a spread. The guests varied over the years but mainly comprised my father and his brothers, their wives and kids, my grandmothers, and great aunts, but also neighbors and friends of my parents, and as we got older, friends of mine and my brother's and our girlfriends, and maybe the friends' girlfriends.

Some years, when I wasn't stoned and sitting in front of the TV mesmerized by the Yule Log, I attended Midnight Mass at the Episcopal church a few blocks away. By my late 20s I became more ambitious, and with a couple of friends would head over to Saint Patrick's Cathedral or Saint Thomas's for Midnight Mass.

And there were always people left at the house when we returned, folks to sit with and enjoy a turkey sandwich and meatballs and a little pie and coffee, and a glass of wine or brandy. It was a feeling not unlike falling asleep on that pile of coats many years before.

Have chores to do before the big day, and tomorrow I'm going to pay a visit to "The Two of Us" blog and maybe enjoy a little spice wine.

Kathleen Shaw and The Great Leap Backward and Forward

At one point (or the first of several points) where my life had crashed and burned, I found myself living once again in the town where I had grown up, reluctantly back home after having managed to escape for seven years.

Not only was it a down period in my life, it didn't seem to be a particularly auspicious epoch in the collective life as well. In the fall of 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president of the U.S. and John Lennon was assassinated. I  walked through a huge shopping mall, Christmas shopping with my father the day after Lennon was murdered, and the usual manifest depression of the season, and the end of the Carter years, coupled with this tragedy, was palpable. The malaise washed over you in soul-numbing waves. It was the end of an era and no one seemed to have any idea of where things were headed. Instead of the usual holiday tunes, the muzak speakers were cranking out "Imagine" and "Instant Karma" and "A Day in the Life" and "In My Life" and "Revolution" and "Mind games" and "Across the Universe"and (Goddamn) "So this is Christmas", and it felt bloody awful amid all the glitter and merchandising and material craving of the holiday season. It felt like the end of the world.

One day in this lost season, I had gone to the local Channels or Lumberama which, along with Rickels, were the "Big" hardware stores in the decades preceding Home Depot and Lowes. I bought some widget and headed to the register to check out . . . and there she was . . . Kathleen Shaw . . . I was 28 and it was nearly half a lifetime since I'd seen her. She had been my girlfriend---the only girlfriend I'd gone out with and broken up with twice---first at age 14 and then again at age 15. She may have been the only girlfriend from those early adolescent years that I'd actually loved, although I didn't know it back then. Kathleen recognized me with my long hair and beard. She'd always been shy. She rung up my purchase and we made small talk. I may have mentioned that I was back in the area for awhile, the Prodigal Son returned. I don't recall if she had worn an engagement or wedding ring, and it didn't seem important. I had no desire to rekindle anything with her. I could easily see Kathleen Shaw and I were worlds apart.

Later I mentally traveled back with Kathleen to the Spring of '67, to a Sunday in late March when the ground was starting to thaw, and there were a few blossoms and a thin wrapper of early warmth around our winter jackets. We were pressed against the brick wall of a public building, kissing, making out, smiling into each others eyes.

 Kathleen:
      "What does your father do?"
Me:
     "He works in a paper mill."

      "A paper mill?"
      "Yeah, where they make paper. Boxboard. What does your father do?"
      "He's a bus driver."
      "Like Jackie Gleason on the Honeymooners?"
      "Yeah, like Jackie Gleason . . . Sooooo?
      "Nothing . . . You're sister still lives at home. What does she do?"
      "She has a job at the bank . . . We have to stop kissing. My lips are chapped."
      "So let's get some chap-stick at the drugstore. I wanna buy some licorice."
      "I'm not going to kiss you if you eat licorice and the drugstore is far away."
      "You said you were gonna stop kissing me anyway, and we can make it to the drugstore. It's a five-minute walk."
       "Ten . . ."
      "Okay, 'ten.'"
      "By the time we get back I'll have to be home for Sunday dinner."
      "So we're just gonna stand here and not kiss? Maybe I should start walking you home now. We can walk slow."
      "You're rude . . . We can talk."
      "But we're already talking!"
      "You call this talking?"
      "One more kiss?"
      "Well, alright . . ."

I said goodbye to Kathleen Shaw and left the Channels or Lumberama and started walking across the mall parking lot, which was only two blocks from my parents house where I was living. Kathleen had been one of several people I'd run into that apocalyptic Fall of 1980 whom I hadn't seen in years, and I was suffering from a sense of dislocation. Things really had changed in Wayward the past seven years, and though I'd returned every now and then for Christmas or the 4th of July, I really hadn't noticed the scope of the change until I'd planted myself for a time. So it wasn't just a strange time ("strange days indeed" as John Lennon had sung) it was a strange place too, because as even a mediocre or novice student of physics knows, time and space are interchangeable, or not interchangeable---they're the same. Time is an illusion.

A cinder block wall roughly 7-foot high ran the perimeter of the mall parking lot along one of the avenues. The wall had been there since I was a kid (when "the mall" hadn't been an enclosed mall) and the wall had a hole in it, and on the side was the street that I'd often traveled to get home. The hole was made from a missing half of a cinder block roughly three-and-a-half feet from the ground, and it had come in handy starting around age 9 or 10, because without having to go around the wall by a hundred yards or more and walk along busy Wayward Avenue, you could instead scale the wall by securing your foot in the hole---quite convenient. Later, in my early teens, the hole was sometimes used as a place to stash cigarettes or other contraband.

I was 28 and wayward in Wayward, but the hole in the wall drew me toward it like an astronomical black hole. Already ignoring the civilized and adult path across the parking lot that would have led me around the wall, I instead reached the hole, maybe wishing for a minute or two that I could somehow shrink myself and disappear inside. But I jumped up, clutched the cinder block with my arms, leveraged my ascent by placing one foot in the still correct place, and leaped over.

Going Up

In the summer of 1965 my grandmother who lived with us took a six-week summer trip to Washington State. It had been her longest and most ambitious trip to date. Normally she took one or two trips a year with her older sister, Jess. They would vacation in western Massachusetts if it was summer and Florida in the winter, where they would stay with their only surviving sibling, an older brother. They were a sight---a pair of 5-foot, 1-inch elderly ladies with their Bingo night hats and valises boarding the Greyhound for Pittsfield, or on this trip, an airplane to Seattle, where they had a second cousin (or was it a first cousin once-removed?) living in Everett.

There had been a resurgence of World's Fairs or Expos in the '60s. The previous summer, my family, along with millions of others, had visited the New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. The Montreal Expo '67 was on the horizon. The Seattle Expo had taken place in 1962, and of course one of the largest and enduring attractions had been the Space Needle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Needle

My grandmother and great aunt were excited about visiting Seattle and The Cascades and Puget Sound, and of course the Space Needle. They had both come from Brooklyn, and for a time had been raised by Catholic nuns, because they'd lost their mother at a very early age. Jess never left Brooklyn where she was the matriarch of a large family. My grandmother had married in 1928 and emigrated from Brooklyn to North Jersey, and her descendants were smaller in number.


Here is an interesting site about Worlds Fairs and their history.

http://www.worldsfaircommunity.org/

My grandmother lived on the second floor of our house. You could hardly call her living space an upstairs "apartment"; it was more of a semi-finished half floor, or attic, with stacked up cardboard boxes and random junk, with an overwhelming odor of mildew and must. There was a plain bedroom, a practically unusable bathroom, and a central room with torn red linoleum flooring, an old sofa, TV, a mahogany coffee table and end table with lamp. That was it. My grandmother lived downstairs with the rest us during the day, but spent her evenings on the second floor. It was an enchanting but usually off-limits place for me. Sometimes I would  sneak upstairs at night and sit with her for awhile. A crucifix hung above the TV and another one over her bed. Nan (as we called her) would not smoke her beloved Kent cigarettes upstairs, but would instead eat hard candy as she watched Lawrence Welk or some other variety show of the era. She would always give me candy, and she also pressed dollar bills into my hand with the stern warning not to tell my mother, as if I were a spy and the money was some secret code or plan I needed to carry with me behind enemy lines . . .

While my grandmother was away my mother often took the opportunity to clean out the years of detritus that had accumulated over a few family moves and the blending of stuff from her mother's house with her own. Occasionally I dared to venture upstairs myself. I had never been in the bedroom before. I remember a rosary on her bureau, and  an old photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, possibly in her teens. She looked quite pretty in that portrait. The ceilings sloped, the wallpaper was corrugated and yellowed from dampness, the bed was a twin. My grandmother, now in her mid-60s, had been a a widow for over 10 years and had only one child who'd been stricken with polio at the age of 12, and then the child later married at age 18, already pregnant . . . this room was a lonely place to be.

But unlike most of my friends, I had never lived on a second floor, and I was always mystified at the way in which more of the world was revealed to me from the two small windows in her bedroom and two more throughout the floor. I would watch the cars and buses---altered and scaled down---as they passed below on the street. I could see a greater number of houses and yards, and people going about their daily routines, and I felt more omniscient and privileged gazing down from this second-story, almost dizzying, height . . . I must have been seven or eight years old when I'd first come up here, a time in my life rich in epic dreams. There were storage cubbyholes below the sloped eaves, and you could enter them through a weirdly-angled door, like a door in a play house, a little skewed and unreal, and the space in there was dark and dusty, and you could not see too much. Soon after discovering the cubbyhole, I had a recurring dream of entering these tight spaces, but the spaces would expand into long passageways that I would follow and eventually emerge onto a higher floor, and then reenter the passageway and come out on an even higher floor. On the third floor all the furniture was draped in long veils of light blue silk, and on the fourth floor there appeared enormous beds and sofas and ottomans of fine linen with green and gold embroidery---white, open and airy rooms---and by the sixth, or maybe seventh floor, I would emerge from the passageway into a realm of mostly formless and heavenly illumination.

When my grandmother returned from Washington State (and the Space Needle), I remembered asking her about her trip.


"It was such beautiful country out there," she'd said, elated, her life changed, her horizons broadened, "and every place you go the people treat you so nice."

She lived to the age of 94.

Halloween '74

I had been in Portland, Oregon less than two months, living in the upstairs of a house with the Lane Brothers and Sam Clemens when we had a Halloween party for the neighbors. As newcomers in a strange city some 3000 miles from where we'd grown up, we had thought the party would be a good way to meet some people (girls) and gain some new friends (girls).

We had gotten friendly with a pair of guys who lived on the first floor. In those early days in Portland we'd spent many a night at the Belmont Tavern playing pool and eating bar pies. The downstairs neighbors both went to Lewis and Clark College. Dale was a music major and Mark was studying Serbo-Croatian language. They had lived in the neighborhood longer and suggested some folks to invite to the party.


It wasn't a large turnout. I remember we had a keg. Sam Clemens had a bozo mask and another friend showed up dressed in drag, which had proved interesting because at the time no one guessed that a few months later he'd come out. There were a couple of girls from the neighborhood and one was very pretty, but they were local and homespun, and our shared experience diverged in a number of ways. Still, it hadn't been a bad idea to invite them.

One of the strangest characters at the party was a poet who'd looked as if he'd stepped out of Medieval or Renaissance England. He had long neat hair cut like a knight's (or false representations of such) and a finely trimmed Vandyke beard. We had recently met his girlfriend in the neighborhood and invited them to the Halloween party.  I recalled seeing the poet with his girlfriend playing pool at the aforementioned Belmont Tavern. The poet (a composer of sonnets, or vilanelles, or epics, I guess) told me he'd been reading all the novels of Sir Walter Scott. His girlfriend, who was beautiful and Jewish, made me think of Rebecca in Ivanhoe, which as we all know, was a thinly concealed attack on antisemitism in England dressed up as a tale of knights and jousting. Had Rebecca been the reincarnation of Sir Walter Scott's girlfriend for that reason? I couldn't tell. I noticed he seemed to have a mesmerizing effect on people, especially women. He also coveted my collection of Poe's complete works, 10 pocket-sized hardbound volumes printed in 1904 with an illustration or engraving, some by famous artists, on the front of each book. I had acquired the set in 1972 for 50 cents (a nickel a book) at a flea market. The poet held one or two in his hands, and with a wicked gleam in his eye, not unlike Rasputin or Svengali, or Mesmer or Manson, he offered to buy the collection for considerably more money than I had paid. It was a little uncanny and disturbing the way he tried to will the Poe books away from me. And it was Halloween, after all. I stubbornly held firm and refused to part with Poe. I still have those books.

But the biggest and funniest and scariest star of the party was a full-sized skeleton we had named Abdul. I forget the connection but the skeleton was on loan to us from someone Lane knew at Reed College and supposedly the skeleton was of a middle-eastern man, but to our untrained eye that would have been difficult to corroborate. For the Halloween party we propped the skeleton (Abdul)  next to the keg and he was a big hit. And we kept him for a few weeks after Halloween which gave us further amusement.We took lots of photos---the skeleton sitting on the couch with us, wearing a hat, a lit cigarette in one hand, a can of beer in the other. Or the most bizarre thing we did was to take the skeleton with us on joy rides through the city. We would seat Abdul in the passenger's seat, one "bony" arm crooked on the open window. This play of the unexpected got quite a few reactions from other drivers, especially the ones stopped to the right of our car at a traffic light. Looking back on it, the humor seems in rather poor taste, and juvenile, but we were adolescents, or post-adolescents back then and in a strange far away rainy city on Halloween.

Saturday Odyssey

On Saturday mornings in September and October I would often wake up early and meet up with two or three friends to have breakfast. There was a Walgreen's near my house and at the time Walgreen's had a soda fountain and grill connected to their drugstore. They served a "breakfast special" 2 eggs, bacon, home fries, toast and coffee for only 59 cents. I was smoking back then, at the age of 13, and usually, after one of these fine breakfasts, I would get a coffee to go and have it outside the store with my cigarette. It's almost impossible to recapture the sensory rush of smoking a cigarette with a steaming cup of coffee on a cool September or October morning.

What was best about Saturdays at this time of life, and younger, was that the day, unencumbered by school, or church, or Sunday dinner, was an 8- or 9-hour Odyssey. If you started out around 8:00 in the morning, you found yourself by 4:00 in the afternoon at a place you could not have foreseen. The location was unimportant: maybe you were at the stores, or in the park playing football, or helping a friend rake leaves, or walking home from the woods or those fields I had once burned down. The fascinating part was trying to recall how you got there, realizing how many different stories, and connections with different kids or people and changes had occurred since early in the day, the less eventful spots already nearly forgotten, discarded from the narrative, or maybe kept for the purpose of transition to a more eventful scene---say, an hour or two with a girlfriend.

 

Like in the Spring, the air and light by late afternoon had taken on a mystical quality, which made the concatenation of scenes and experiences and sensations (and the linking of scenes), made the recollected Saturday Odyssey all the more compelling, all the more transcendent and mysterious. And years later, with any random play of light and shadow, or a change of season, or a stray sound or a smell, a gesture even, we return to the old places once again. We never really leave them, do we?

Paper Oy

Traffic increases on the Memory Highway at certain times of the year. September and Fall would be one of those times, with being back in school, night and darkness coming on much earlier, games of manhunt in the chill air, and the sounds of marching bands coming from a football field somewhere . . . Although much of what follows used to take place in the fall, it also spanned the other seasons too.

Larry Leeper was the paper boy in my neighborhood from the time I was in 4th grade through 6th or 7th grade. Leeper was three years older than me and for a couple years I helped him as an assistant on his paper route. "Helping" him amounted to my doing the majority of the work, after he'd come back from the dispatcher with the two pannier baskets on his bicycle loaded with folded papers and a burlap bag stuffed with folded papers slung across his handle bars. I would take the heavy bag and lug it down the street, pausing at each customer's house to either place the paper on the front porch or, if there were special instructions, leave the paper inside the front door, or side door, or breezeway or patio. I helped Larry Leeper every day after school during the school year and often in the summer when we delivered papers in the early afternoon. He paid me a paltry fraction of  what he made from his route, abused me with little games of torture which will be disclosed, and, to rub salt into my wounds, made me go around door-to-door with him when he was collecting on Thursday evenings as an inducement for my getting a measly dollar or two, if that. I needed the candy and soda money.

As it turned out, "collecting" was a fascinating business interaction with adults, a real eye opener into the harsh realities of the world. Elderly women with gin on their breath, dressed in fuzzy bathrobes, staggering to the door, saying what nice boys we were, but would we mind coming back next week to get paid? Other women and men whining about missed deliveries and threatening to stop service. Loud, bitter-with-their-lot-in-life men, some drunk, cracking ribald jokes or telling endless stories of The Depression, or The War, or past feats of derring-do, their faces flushed with road maps of veins. And there were the every day curmudgeons who didn't answer the door but sent their German Shepherds as willing emissaries. Leeper had a stack of cards attached to a metal ring about as large as a horse tether, but thinner. Each card was for a customer, and when a customer paid for our services and the daily delivery of his/her newspaper, Leeper made a heavy pencil (no. 2) mark on the card. I seem to recall that if the customer missed two weeks payment, they were given a warning; if they missed three weeks, they were warned that delivery would discontinue by the following week, and by the fourth week delivery would stop altogether if there was no payment for the current week and all the skipped weeks. Unfortunately, no one took a kid, or a pair of kids, seriously who were trying to politely persuade them to cough up a few dollars like good citizens for the privilege and enjoyment of having a finely written, finely edited and printed newspaper delivered to their doorstep each evening.

Most evening newspapers, or morning and evening editions of daily papers clearly have left us. In fact the existence of major newspapers and print media in general has been seriously undermined in the Digital Age, and it is no revelation. Around the time I was helping Larry Leeper with his paper route, New York City had at least two other dailies long gone: "The Journal American" and "The New York Herald Tribune"  Extra! Read all about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Herald_Tribune

Northern Jersey had the Star Ledger, but right outside New York City where I grew up, "The Bergen Record" was the most popular paper and the one I helped deliver. In the morning, you got "The New York Daily News" and in the afternoon, it was "The Bergen Record." Think they still might be in print.


Larry Leeper treated me as one of his unfortunate charges and told me in a big-brotherly way that he was always looking out for my welfare. Like a big brother, he abused me accordingly. Sometimes, when we were nearly at the end of the route, he would make me stop at a basketball net on a side street near his house and play a game of one-on-one with him. He was 14 years old, about 5-foot, 8 inches tall, and I was 10 years old and 4-foot, 11 inches---a fair match up in Leeper's eyes. He would also make me practice boxing with him: guard with the left, jab with the right, and when you had an opening, swing and punch with the left. I took some shots to the head, but I guess I learned a few things, like stop letting this idiot push you around.

But the cruelest torture was reserved for Winter. My hands were so frozen and red all the time, whether you were wearing your gloves or not (gloves were usually the cheap cloth variety and would become soaked with snow and therefore worthless). Leeper had a good left arm. He displayed his pitching prowess for me by directing a snowball to a high street lamp across the road. The snowball made a lovely arc and hit the lamp with a shatter and brief cascade of crystal powder. As I delivered papers with my freezing hands, Leeper would pack perfectly spherical snowballs with his highest quality gloves---they were really a marvel to look at (the snowballs not the gloves). Then, once I'd dropped the paper in a door or inserted in a mail slot, Leeper would tell me to start running while he counted to 5---fast. I was usually nailed with one of his ice missiles, and the worst spot to be hit was the back of the neck, because even wearing my winter coat and cloth cap some of the ice managed to slide down into my back and even sometimes further down to my waist. I should have worn a hood.

Some years later I heard that Larry Leeper lived near Phoenix and was working as an officer with the Arizona Highway Patrol. No longer having snowballs at his disposal, I guess Leeper had to settle for writing tickets and fines instead.