Free Fall (finished story) -- (Author) dogboy

[llsadmin]

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Author: dogboy
Timestamp: Aug 11, 2020 at 11:22 PM
Content: I mentioned in another thread that I had taken a creative writing class and had written two autobiographical stories. A member asked me to post them to the story forum so I hope I've done this correctly. There are no diapers involved in this story, just as a heads up, but every word is true. We are an interesting collection of members on this site and many of us are reminded of when we were young. This is my story from when I was six years to thirteen. We can never go back but we find ways to relive past experiences. This one is mine and I hope you enjoy it.

Free Fall

Dogboy

My parents were emblematic of the post World War II rising middle class. They were part of the Greatest Generation, starting life dirt poor and poorly educated, greatness eluding them. They would become war hardened survivors; lessons learned dodging German and Japanese artillery and making extraordinary sacrifices. I was born into the aftermath of that discord and it would leave its mark on me just as it did to everyone of my generation.

My uncle fought on the shores of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and all I got out of it was a t-shirt. The expression may be well worn but the shirt was new and my most prized possession because pictured on the front of the shirt was an angry winged yellow jacket carrying a rivet gun masquerading as a machine gun and in big blue letters it exclaimed with pride, Fighting Seebees. In the summer I would sit out on our front stoop with that shirt covering my scrawny post World War II chest, a baseball hat cocked to the side like Scotty Beckett from The Little Rascals and people driving on the highway connecting New York City to Atlantic City, would slow down and look at the only six year old to have survived landing on the Japanese occupied islands. Seven years later I would come close to killing a thirteen year old like another victim of war though this one fought in the trenches of public school.

The busy highway was at our front door but in back was the Veeder farm, old man Veeder raising pigs, chickens and who knows what else. Exploring a path that my dad used to walk our dog Buster, getting a little older, I decided to venture on my own, no father or dog to protect me from the monsters. I had been told monsters didn’t exist but this day turned out to disprove that because in the middle of the path was the severed head of a genuine demon, its dull glassy eyes staring at me from the ground and a big purple bruise in the center of its head where its horn had been ripped off. I did the expected. I screamed in terror and ran home. When I finally calmed down and when my dad got home from work and when all the dust settled, he made me take him to what he imagined I saw. There in the path was the monster’s head which in reality was one of old man Veeder’s pigs, the poor animal having escaped its pen. It was executed on our dog path, its head separated from the body, the rest of the pig not going to waste. My dad swore as he disposed the head somewhere deep in the woods.

My parents decided to move, not because of the pig’s head, but after one of my cousins shot our cat with an arrow. My dad was Leni Lenape Indian as were all of my cousins who lived in a row of houses about a football field’s length from our small bungalow. I was adopted and not Indian. I had discovered my cousins as a means to end loneliness. Day after day they would beat me unmercifully. I’d run home crying and my mom would tell me to fight back. So we moved and the ritual of finding friends began anew.

Holly Park was not so much a community of bayside houses, but a casual gathering as none of the houses matched. One was a Cape Cod, another a cedar shake bungalow, and all of them worn from the weather that accompanies the Atlantic Ocean. The few friends I had were older and violent, or stupid. It was a poor community where fathers found ways to make a living, selling oysters and clams on the main highway roadside, or fixing small motors.

The last year we lived there, I talked both my parents and the owner of a failing boatyard into letting me work as his “boy” during the summer. Mr. Downs always hired a teen to help him move the rowboats, sell bait and clean out the bait traps that would wash ashore on the salt marshes after a storm. Often the fish would be rotting for several days before Mr. Downs would send me to clean out the traps. As an eleven year old, I would struggle to lift the heavy outboard motors to put on rowboats that customers had rented for the day. He used to get frustrated with me until the hurricane came.

It was July 10, 1959, the year hurricane Cindy was moving up from the south. It had already killed one person before it hit the Jersey Shore. Houses along the ocean and anything associated with the water were the first to go. It was during the eye of the storm that Mr. Downs called my parents. He needed me, the little kid too small to lift outboards, but lithe like a jackrabbit, to jump from boat to boat. I looked at my mom who had answered the phone and pleaded, “Can I go?”

Outside the winds were howling at about seventy miles per hour, and she said, “I guess so. Your dad will have to drive you. You can’t ride your bike in this,” and with that, we were off.

Mr. Downs owned twenty, sixteen foot oak rowboats which he rented. Part of my job was to bail them out each day, often using a hand pump. Today he had something I hadn’t seen before, a gas driven pump and attached was a long rubber hose, maybe six inches in diameter. The boats though tied up, had flooded to the gunwales, a sailing term I had recently learned, and the water was lapping over the sides, water covering even the wooden plank seats. The wind was blowing and pushing Mr. Downs and my father. I think I was too small and thin, like one of the shiners in the bait traps, to be affected.

Mr. Downs bent down and yelled, “Boy, I want you to take the end of this hose and stick it all the way down into the water. Let the pump do the work.”

I looked at the first boat; I watched it swing violently back and forth, first tugging on the moorings, another term I learned, and then the ropes pulling on the pilings, pulling hard enough and erratic with the wind, to make the wood groan as the posts ever so slightly moved with the gusts. The wind and rain was pelting into my face, the ropes of the boats snapping in rhythm to the storm.

Mr. Downs handed me the pump hose. “Go on boy. You’ll be alright.”

I could barely hear him, between the noise of the pump and the roar of the wind and rain. As soon as the boat jerked, changed direction and came back at me, I jumped, sneakers splashing on the seat, the water now burying my feet. I held on to the hose as I jumped, trying not to have it ripped from my hand. The engine was running at full tilt, the smell of gasoline, oil and exhaust mixing with the incredible fresh smell of salt air and rain. I plunged the hose into the water and watched as the water was drawn up and spewed out from the pump. I should have been scared, but I was ecstatic. With the first boat bailed, I jumped into the next as the rowboats were moored tightly next to each other. I was soaked through and through and it felt exciting, the big hose in my hands plunging into the murkiness of saltwater, the occasional bait fish floating to the surface, abandoned hooks and sinkers from vacationers swirling to be pushed along the floor of the boat by the rushing water, those too sucked out and discharged.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I answered, yelling into the storm only to hear the storm outshout me, its rage and force something great and mighty and the storm being beaten down by an ancient gas pump and an eleven year old boy who was holding the fighting machine of gas, oil and rubber, flying from one boat to the next, eventually all twenty, and as the storm began to finally weaken, the last boat bailed out floating well above its water line, finally safe, I was done. I would go home and play with one of my model boats in the calm of my bedroom. It was safe haven from the storm, but it was an empty space, the attic of my parents’ house and I would once again be alone.

We moved again when my mom discovered World Book Encyclopedia, or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, she became one of their best salespersons. The greatest generation was moving up to a better paying job and a big new house which also meant for me, a new school. My parents bought a new car, new furniture and sent me to a private school. It was a Quaker school and we had to attend chapel each and every Wednesday morning. The date on the building said 1685; the worship service was befitting to its roots as was the stifling atmosphere of the classes. The only heroic challenges were to survive being bullied by the bigger students, especially when we played soccer, a sport that was forced on every boy. Two players double teamed me and broke my toe, laughing as they did it.

“They don’t set toes,” explained by my mom, and life rolled on until it didn’t.

1960 saw a recession and people stopped buying nonessentials. Encyclopedias were nonessential, just like new houses and old schools and especially your best friend to whom I was close and I lost all of them when my parents went bankrupt. My mom would come into my room at night and talk to me because my dad had a bad heart. The kid who could defy hurricanes was expected to handle the adult talk, but the tears? My parents sold the house and moved back to the shore. I left a part of myself behind, leaving the little kid who had moved there, replaced by a shell of that kid, not the little kid playing army nor the eleven year old who defied storms, but a war weary veteran, one with the thousand mile stare. We moved into a smaller house. I waited until my bed was set up in my new bedroom and told my mom I was going to lie down: I wasn’t feeling well.

A week later I woke up, looked around and said, “Where am I?”

“Well, look who’s with us.”

“Where am I? What happened?’

“You had a nervous breakdown,” was the only answer I got, the only explanation. My parents’ generation didn’t talk about mental health, especially when it was their own children. For now I had to learn how to survive in a neighborhood that was run by gangs. Parents worked while their offspring ran the streets and backyards. Everyone carried at least one knife and a few had guns. I would find a use for my knife at night and not understand why I was cutting it across my arm or wrist. I felt nothing. There’s a contemporary Christian song lamenting as the blood ran red or was it love ran red but mine had little connection to either unless one considers that somewhere in my recent break with reality, I had sacrificed my sanity just as I had sacrificed any connection with my best friend, the move having finalized that and it was something that would make me do almost anything to end the loneliness.

It was the year of the transistor radio, portable music no longer confined to your parents’ car, but a physical part of almost every kid. We would all tune to the same station, WABC, Big Dan Ingram playing the tunes, riding a school bus that smelled like vomit and singing, “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”.

Some of us were sleeping, waiting for the right opportunity to hunt, the sleeper waking, blade and blood morphing from non feeling to exhilaration, and that was when two kids I barely knew approached me early one morning before we were allowed to enter the school, junior high bound by rules and answered with rebellion.

It was fall, the early part of school where everything smelled new: clothes, notebooks and the freshly waxed wooden floors. In contrast was the old brick building, austere and menacing, its imposing height enforcing years of discipline. On the first day of school we had a fire alarm. We were encouraged to exit as quickly and quietly as possible because they used to oil the wood floors and if there was a real fire, it would all go up in an instant, the floors responding as if they had been soaked in gasoline. The tall windows would accelerate the fire as they would let in all out doors, which today was brisk and chilly, the kind of sunny day that warranted a jacket, but would be left home, image winning over practicality.

I would arrive early, my mom dropping me off. Since the move and my nervous breakdown, my mom controlled my time, kept me structured. She wanted to know where I was, what I was doing. I had already set our garage on fire and had gotten in trouble fighting a neighbor, a boy who had attacked me with a machete, something that was left out of the mom narrative, so it was no surprise when two boys came up to me early one morning, all of us killing time before the doors were opened. I didn’t know them but they knew me by reputation, the he’ll do it, he’ll do crazy.

Looking back, I have no reason why I did it, why I said yes. That part of my life is in shadow, saved in a corrupted sector of my brain, access denied, just as the boys’ names are lost. Were they Jake and Dan? I think so, but after so many years, does it matter? What was important was that they knew me, thought they knew me: fire starter, gang member and truth to that, I was trouble.

“Hey, I’ve seen you around.”

It was the common opening line for junior high males sniffing each other out.

“Wanna have some fun and scare the shit out of some teacher?”

“Can’t say no to that.” I pulled the sleeve of my shirt gently up off the hidden cut on my arm, cloth sticking to dried blood.

“I think the doors are open. If not, we can sneak in another door I know.” I looked at the two of them, sizing them up.

“And what are we doing?” The thought of being somewhere I didn’t belong did cross my mind.

“We’re going to hang Jakie out the window until some teacher sees us. They’ll be scared shitless and then we’ll run like hell.”

“How’s that going to scare them?” I assumed from the first floor but Dan said, “No asshole, from the third. We got to be quiet going up there so no one knows. You in?”

“Yeah I guess,” knowing damn well I shouldn’t be doing this but what the hell. We’d hold on to Jake and pull him in and besides, he was okay with it. He didn’t say he wasn’t so it was okay. Some teacher would see us, yell “Hey you Kids!” We’d laugh and be out of there and we’d be legendary. Everyone would know, talk about us and never tell because of the street code: you never ratted.

The front doors were still locked but the far side door was better because it was concealed and that unlocked door led to the stairs. Once inside we started running, running and laughing, the rubber soles of our Keds bouncing off the walls, running past the second floor and through the third floor door, the door flying open and hitting the wall with a bang. We found an open classroom, ran in and faced the center window. It was tall, if not monstrous, further degraded by its green institutional lead chipped paint. It resisted our plans so we had to lean into it to push it up. The cold air hit us, the fresh morning air so full of life, like us.

“Go on Jake. Climb on the ledge. Come on, you said you’d do this.”

We looked at each other, realizing how far we’d come, now inside, in some teacher’s room and soon to do something that no one had ever done. I didn’t know Jake or Dan and yet here we were like we had an eternal bond, some unspoken connection that comes with being young junior high boys.

Jakie lifted his left leg onto the ledge followed by the other, straddled the window ledge like riding a horse, looked down and said, “Shit! That’s a long way. You guys better hold me.”

“Or splat?”

“Shut up Dan!”

There really was nothing to say after that: crazy didn’t need directions. Jakie put his legs over like he was sitting in one of the student desks, but his butt was on the ledge and his legs were hanging outside. I looked outward, my eyes moving to the sidewalk that surrounded the building. There was black asphalt beyond and the faculty parking lot. The first car pulled up. We waited to see who would get out and it was a teacher I didn’t know because really, I was the new kid who didn’t know anyone, but she was pretty. Even from this distance I could see her blond hair and youthful bounce. She must have been a first year teacher, arriving early to review new lesson plans, first year teacher full of anticipation and hope for directing young minds to embrace the joy of learning.

It was time to dangle Jakie and get her attention. It was time for Jakie to flop outside, me holding his left wrist and Dan holding his right. Several things happened in the stillness of that fresh morning. Jake realized how far off the ground he was, the old building having fifteen foot ceilings, Jakie realizing he had to be forty feet from the ground, the ground being concrete, jakie realizing he’s being held by two diminutive idiots and now, Jakie yelling, “Pull me in! Pull me in!” his yelling getting the attention of first year teacher, she looking and screaming. This was before slasher movies but she had the scream down alright and then an even more curious thing happened. Dan screamed, screamed like a girl, let go of Jakie and ran down the hall.

I could hear the door slam as Dan disappeared. In the great distance downward, first year teacher was still screaming but also heading for the closest door. Jakie was thrashing back and forth, thrashing and screaming, “Oh shit, oh shit, pull me in for God’s sake!”

In my head, in the center of the screaming which was now inside my head was the little kid facing the storm, the little kid with the big pump hose, the hose that thrashed in the storm. The kid who struggled to lift the big heavy motors, lifted Jakie from the precipice. I pulled him up and I swear he said thanks as we both ran down the hall. By now, teachers were storming into the building to find the perpetrators in response to something that was unthinkable. In the chaos we found another way outside and I was suddenly brought back to the otherwise normalcy of the day. Hundreds of kids were talking, some laughing as they entered the building, the routine of school.

We were in different classes, but I suppose we waited with the same anticipation to be called into the principal’s office but that never happened. We should have been legendary, like characters from the illustrated comic, Deadly Class, but that didn’t happen either. Nothing was said, just like all the things which weren’t talked about. There was nothing to do but go home.

I didn’t see much of Dan and Jake. Most kids stayed away from me and that was okay. I had my own friends. That’s what gangs are for, right? That night I would be alone, up in my room sharpening my blade. It was okay. Pain and blood would again morph into morning, a new day.

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Author: dogboy
Timestamp: Aug 23, 2020 at 2:21 AM
Content:

littleSorcerer said:

I think as humans, we're very tribal beings, and when we find people we truly care about and that care about us, people who see us and who we see in turn, being torn away from them is one of the most difficult things.

I think being young only makes this even harder, as when we're young we're so much more connected to the world; that makes the joy so much greater, but also the pain.

[End of quote]

I think you've hit the nail on the head. When I wrote my novel, a lot of it dealt with leaving old friends and making new ones. All of this was hard on me yet I always made a new friend and life continued. In my novel, the father talks about this but he knows he's moved on because his best friend is his wife. I guess we grow up into that and one always hopes it works out. In my case it did.

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Author: dogboy
Timestamp: Aug 25, 2020 at 2:21 AM
Content:

ABAlex2 said:

I think this one might miss a lot of the comments it deserves because it isn't the usual 'theme,' so I just wanted to say it was very well written. Well done.

[End of quote]

Thanks. Obviously I was a crazy kid in junior high.