Chapter 7A

My mother scowled as she stood in the doorway of my new bedroom in our new house in the new suburb on Macon Road. She warned me, "This room better be straightened up before your daddy gets home."

As she turned to leave I said, "Can you close the door, please?"

Her frown deepened. "Why do you always stay in here with the door closed?"

"I just do," I replied, sitting on the floor and pouting, surrounded by the artifacts and tools I'd collected during the past few months in my large room.

She closed the door, sighing angrily. I remained on the floor and pondered how I might organize the mess around me. I had books and, comics, magazines, drawing supplies, record albums, newspapers, theater magazines, brochures, copies of theatrical scripts, research papers and mementos of plays and movies. Now and then I bought a copy of the New York Sunday Times at the Union Station newsstand when I visited my godparents, as I still did almost every weekend. Several issues of the Times, with all sections intact, stood piled in one corner of the room. And there were reams of lined loose-leaf paper filled with schoolwork and drama club notes and the thousands of words of novels and stories that I had begun writing since the move to the new house. Unfortunately I had only a single chest of drawers and one small two-shelf bookcase, my bed, a small table with a record player, a desk large enough only for a book and small pad, and an eight-inch knickknack shelf screwed into the wall near one of the two windows.

Knowing my stepdad would be home within the hour, I began stuffing the loose papers into a couple of cardboard boxes. I found room for the boxes in my closet, along with many other things. Even more of my keepsakes and projects were slid under the single bed, and several books were lined up along the floorboards on either side of my small desk. Just as I was looking for a place to stow the Black Lady -- my prized Underwood typewriter, with which I had typed my make-believe newspapers and my new crop of stories and novels -- I heard the kitchen door squeak and slam shut. My stepdad Tony had arrived with the familiar heavy stride that rattled the prefab windows in my bedroom as he approached.

"You finish cleanin' this up yet?" he asked, his voice as always noisily and deeply resonant. He looked tired, overworked and impatient, his strong and darkly haired arms bulging from the white short sleeved shirt, his large hands parked on his hips.

Sweaty from working quickly, I was kneeling on the floor, pushing the old typewriter along the floor. I stopped and looked up at him. "Almost," I said.

"Still looks like a lot of junk left in here." He strode heavily into the room and went directly to the closet. Pulling the door open with a quick swish of air, he grunted unpleasantly at what he saw. "In the Navy they would have kicked you overboard for a mess like this. And in the Navy, we don't stuff goods under the bunks..." Stooping, he saw what I had placed under my bed.

Without pause, he glowered at me and pointed a finger at each thing he named as he spoke. "Okay, mister... all of this goes. This goes out in the trash... and this... this... and all that crap piled on the floor in that closet."

Amazed and shocked, I gulped hard. "Throw it away?"

"This ain't the Lauderdale Courts housing project," he bellowed, "and it ain't gonna look like it, either. Throw those boxes away, throw those newspapers away, and get this place straightened up. *Before* you eat!" Without another word, he stomped out of the room.

Having lived with this intractable man for half a year, I knew resistance was futile. He had mentioned earlier that my projects were junk and that sooner or later they'd have to go.

I sat on the floor for five minutes or so, looking at each article that would soon be gone. I knew I had no choice. While I was thinking about it, spending a last few minutes with my belongings, Tony growled from the doorway, "Let's MOVE it, mister! Get rid of that crap or you don't eat."

An armful at a time, I carried one load of newspapers out of my room, through the living room where my stepdad sat watching Bishop Fulton J. Sheen talk about Communists on tv, past the dining room table, through the kitchen, out the squeaking aluminum back door, down the steps and across the narrow driveway, where I dumped the load into the dark green fifty-gallon garbage drum by the carport. Then back into the house, past my stepdad who sat engrossed in Bishop Sheen's warnings about the threat of godless enemies, and into my room. Then another armload, back through the house and out the back door, without a word between the two of us, until I had emptied four armloads of my belongings into the big green can.

He stepped into the doorway to check on me as I gathered another load. Behind him, my mother peered past his broad shoulder. "All those damn record albums, too," he said. "They must be twenty years. The damn seams are falling apart."

"Better keep those, Tony," my mother reminded him. "Most of them belong to his Aunt Frances."

"Then next time you go to see your Aunt Frances, take them outta here and give 'em back to her."

"Yessir," I said tonelessly, loading up an armful of brochures and magazines.

"And all that paper you got in that box over there, if ain't schoolwork, throw it away!"

I looked up at him. "That's stuff that I drew myself."

"That 'stuff' is foolishness nobody needs, and we don't have room for it."

The raw sternness of his voice and face told me there would be no compromises in my bedroom that night.

"Yessir," I said quietly.

"I don't see why you cain't be like any other boy and play ball with the rest of 'em. It ain't no good for somebody your age to just come home after school and close yourself up in this room every day. Put away that art crap away and grow up like everybody else."

"Yessir."

"You have schoolwork to do, and that's what you're supposed to do. Not all this art crap and newspapers from I-don't-know-where."

I mumbled, "I already have an A average."

"What?"

"... nothin'... sir."

"You don't have no time for backtalk, buster. Just get rid of this mess and clean this place up."

"Yessir."

They both left for the living room. I passed them with several more armloads, wordlessly, as they both watched Bishop Sheen and exchanged concerned whispers to each other about the Communist threat. More armsful of my history and my time and my effort tumbled into the dark green can, which began to look like a great black hole as the sun fell and the evening turned to night.

Soon I passed them with what I thought was the last armful, which I soon dumped into the top of the growing heap in the can. I stood there sweating, looking at the pile, and took a long breath. Well. I had lived through that, anyway. Perhaps they were right: there was not much future in the way I'd spent my time. I passed them once more as I went back to my room and closed my door.

After a moment my stepdad opened the door again and looked around. He pointed directly at the Black Beauty. "And get rid of that."

I argued feebly, "That's my typewriter."

"It's junk. Get rid of it!"

I said nothing. I looked directly at him, aware that I was ready to jump at him and rip his throat open. But I stubbornly concealed everything I thought and felt.

He said threateningly, "You heard me!"

"Yessir," I said. I rose to my feet, pretending that I was tired rather than reveal that even my own body resisted me. I stooped down. The Black Beauty came into my arms heavily, reluctantly, and I lifted it like an overweight child to my chest, and cradled it. I walked past them into the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, silently telling myself that I had to be prepared soon for the instant when its weight and its keys and its words and memories and its secrets that I had typed out on paper would soon disappear into a barrel of trash. I banged open the kitchen door with one foot, stumbling and scuffling under the Black Beauty's heft, and moved into the cool night under the power of the obedient little boy whom I knew was not really me at all. And the real Me watched and the sadly drifting lightning bugs watched, and the angrily flittering moth at the back porch light watched as another Me let the Black Beauty slip out of my arms and settle with a dull crunch, half hidden in the paper and drawings and books and pieces of crayon. Instead of going inside to dinner I walked to our front yard and leaned on the head high cyclone wire fence that girded our front and side yards. I listened to the sound of cars swishing past in the street and watched the automobiles full of people who did not know what had just happened and who couldn't have done anything anyway. After a moment I could not see the cars very well through the liquid gathering in my eyes.

When I felt one eye overflow I brushed the wet from my cheek and whispered aloud to myself, "You have to be tougher than this."

"... Speedy, every time I call, you aren't home," Martha Jane said over the phone. "What have you been doing all this time?"

"I called a few times myself," I answered, checking in all directions to make sure no one was listening -- not because I expected an embarrassingly intimate conversation with Martha Jane, but because I had been increasing my isolation from everyone I lived with. "Your mother keeps giving me different telephone numbers."

"I know," said Martha Jane, and her breathing and sounds of movement on her side of the line told me she was talking and doing other things at once. "I am so, sooo damn busy, it's pathetic. Moving around like a chicken with my head cut off. I moved twice in one month! I had a roommate that I didn't know hadn't paid the rent for months and we got kicked out before I was finished moving in, and now... now I'm moving AGAIN!. I don't believe it. I'm packing books in a box right now, but... Anyway, how *are* you?"

"I'm... okay," I lied. "When can I see you?"

"Oh my, I don't know, the next couple of weeks are--Oh god I wish I could just get a day off or something, I -- "

"Need some help moving? I'd be glad to help."

"Oh, Speedy, these books are so heavy, you'd break your back."

"I want to help you."

"If you'd like to spend a day together or something, that would be fine later on, but -- how are you gonna get all the way into this part of town from way out there on Macon Road?"