(For some reason, the following image has been cropping up for the past few days, so maybe I'd better just get it out there, and see where it leads me...)
It was the Christmas of 1957. That's the one I spent in that great dark house on a low hill, with other abandoned children, and our keepers. There was a big, lavishly-decorated tree in the downstairs hallway, outside the common dining room. There were gifts underneath, but they were just for show. When it came time for the 'real' presents, we children were all sent to our separate departments, where wrapped boxes were slowly distributed and eagerly opened.
Now, the Home had a policy about toys, it seems, with special emphasis focused on who 'owned' what particular plaything. For instance, just before our family broke apart, my mother had taken me to see a little traveling carnival, and I got a big yellow stuffed poodle, with a red collar and leash. (What she might have done to 'win' this prize must be left to the imagination, I'm afraid) With the intense affection that children can have for ultimately unimportant things, I loved that stuffed toy, even though it wasn't especially cuddly, and probably wouldn't have withstood much real play. When my brothers and I were deposited at the orphanage, and our few personal effects were unloaded, one of the first things we faced was a weeding out of 'special' items, ostensibly to keep jealousy and competition and favoritism to a minimum. So my yellow poodle, with its shiny red plastic collar, was put up high, to sit alertly on the top shelf of walk-in closet in the attic dormitory we all shared. Once in a while, that door would be opened -- probably for stowing another item too good for use -- and I would get a breathtaking little stab, looking up at the alert dog face with its useless collar and leash.
So I had mixed feelings, opening my gift that morning -- what if it was 'too good', and after playing with it for an hour or so, I would have to watch it being put into protective custody, with all the other treasures? I was especially concerned about that, because I had asked for... a remote-controlled car. A Ford Thunderbird convertible, that I could make go wherever I wanted, with just the push of a button. The ads had shown a clever and attractive hand-held key-pad -- it was all very modern and exciting.
So I was puzzled that the box was as big and heavy as it was. And then I found out why. There was the car, all right -- the promised Ford Thunderbird, a turquoise convertible (which was the coolest imaginable color at the time), so I could imagine myself sitting behind the driver's wheel, like in the TV ads. And there was the control pad too, just like in the commercials. But, to my consternation, there was nothing really remote about this toy at all. Running from the back of the car, where the exhaust should be, was a great thick cable, connected to the control pad. In an effort to make this umbilical cord 'invisible', the designers had decided on a particularly bland, dead, pinky-browny-putty color for the thin sheathing that ran down the length of the cable -- and I think this sad attempt at camouflage was held in place by some crude early version of cable ties.
The whole thing was profoundly disappointing. I tried to feel excited about it. I didn't want to be accused of being 'hard to please' and 'ungrateful'. I gave the car a test drive; it went forward when I pushed that button, and backed up when I pressed the other one. It may even have had some rudimentary control system that allowed me to turn the car in one direction or another. But I had to follow the stupid car everywhere -- the cable was maybe three feet long, which was why the box was so heavy -- making any meaningful creative fantasy impossible. No zooming under things, taking reckless curves and then stopping on a dime, so the miniature, imaginary me could jump out in triumph, and pat my dependable vehicle admiringly -- another successful adventure for both of us! But that fat cable, with its greasy texture and clumsy feel, disgusted me. The whole thing was a trick. A triumph of advertising, a failure as a toy. In less than twenty minutes, I didn't care whether the Thunderbird went into the special room or not. I may even have given it away, or traded it for a yoyo or a box of crayons.
Because, basically, I lusted for freedom. Even vicarious freedom. Even the thinnest, flimsiest freedom. For example, this kind of freedom:
There was another boy in our department with whom I had an especially close friendship -- so close, in fact, that it roused the lurid suspicions of the grinning housemother, so that, if she saw us talking together for any length of time, we were sure to get a beating with the razor strap that night.
But, being children, we had relatively short memories, and seemed to believe that things wouldn't always be bad and painful -- even though the world was, at that point, doing a pretty good job of convincing us otherwise. Billy, I'll call him (because that's what his name was), was from Pittsburgh, and he worshiped his father, who, I was told more than once, was going to show up any day, to take Billy away from that awful place, with him. In the meanwhile, Billy's father led an unimaginably glamorous life, traveling everywhere, living in hotels, driving race cars, sailing boats and flying airplanes. The usual stuff.
The bond Billy and I formed -- so far from being anything sexual, as our housemother was desperately convinced -- was based partly on this figure of his father, and partly on the elasticity of our own imaginations. While the other kids played in the grassy circle, with the treacherous jungle gym and the slide that could turn punishingly hot under the summer sun, Billy and I would sit on a bench under the sycamore trees, and our conversation would unfold, something like this:
One of us would observe that, even though it was high summer, soon the weather would be changing -- the heavy drapery of leaves would be all gone, and it would be cold enough to snow. And if it snowed on a Saturday, we boys would go down to the bathhouse by the swimming pool, and pull the collection of sleds out of storage. Each of us would haul one of them up the two-tiered hill, to the paved circle at the top of the long driveway, and then we would spend a long day, speeding down past the barberry bushes, and then trudging back up again, pleasantly sweaty and exhausted with the exertion, until it was nearly too dark to see, and the sleds had to be put away again.
Billy would say that he and his dad used to go sledding, in Pittsburgh. Billy had a special sled, he said, and his dad had a big house at the top of a dangerously steep hill, that everyone else around was afraid to use for sledding. And I would say that there was room on his sled for both of us, and Billy would agree. And so we imagined, for a moment, both of us, sitting together on that particularly wonderful vehicle, poised for what must come next.
Billy said that, because his father was so clever, and loved his son so much, he'd built Billy something called a 'Yankee bump' -- a special structure like a ski jump, but sharper and steeper, and just for Billy's use on that sled. No one else would dare to risk taking that great leap -- except for Billy, and me too, since I was on the sled right behind him. It took just the slightest leaning forward, a creeping gather of momentum, and then we would have only a few seconds to catch our breath, before we had already reached an almost impossible speed -- the neighbors' houses, on both sides, just a grey blur, with streaks of yellow light -- and with the wind stinging our faces, we swooped downhill, hit the smooth slick surface of the Yankee bump, and...
Up, out, away over the city, we soared together on the sled. We exchanged eager suggestions of all the wonderful things we could be able to see, while we were still aloft. The Heinz pickle factory, that smelled of baked beans, and where our fifth-grade class had a field trip. Snow-filled Forbes Field, where the Pirates played ball in the summer. The ice-covered steel bridges across the Allegheny and Monongahela. We would fly so long that night would fall, and we could see the sparkling lights all over the surrounding hills. Because, with the marvelous ingenuity of Billy's father, and the power of the Yankee bump, our flight could last...
Until the warning bell rang, meaning that it was time to get in line to go in for dinner, under the malevolent glitter of housemother's tiny pale blue eyes. I looked at my shoes, trying not to think about the sharp stinging that probably awaited me and Billy in our beds that night.
I don't know how long Billy stayed in the orphanage -- I was there for a year and a half, and on one summer visit some time later, I saw him again, down by a pond on the Orphanage property. Apparently, his father still hadn't shown up, and Billy had coarsened. He only seemed interested, apparently, in the fact that the dragonflies that darted about over the murky water were mating. He used a different term. We were both, by that time, different boys.
But for that sliver of time, as we sat on the bench outside, we had both been as free of our immediate surroundings as I desperately wanted my little plastic Thunderbird to be. We had been able to twist and shape our imaginary excursions in any way we liked, to come away with what still feel to me like actual memories, instead of two boys' desperate dreaming.
That's what I wanted, when I opened the box with the car inside -- I wanted a means of letting at least some imaginary portion of me to escape -- to wend its way recklessly beyond the linoleum flooring, and tumbling down the dim-lit back hallway -- across the rough-paved asphalt drive, passing the little white infirmary, on the way to someplace wonderful, far far away...
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
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