Chapter 1

Now that I think back on it, I suspect that the Boy Scouts probably wasn't the best organization for me, when I was a kid. I wasn't really "the type", if you know what I mean.

If you don't know what I mean, all you have to do is take a look at the cover of a Scout manual. The picture is always of an athletic, handsome kid, who is obviously clever, and I wasn't any of those things.

On the other hand, any good Scout executive would smile benignly and tell you happily that, while the Scouts can't do anything about being handsome, they are experts at helping boys become more athletic and clever.

And, come to think of it, I wouldn't be where I am now if I hadn't been a Scout.

"Where am I now?", you ask.

Well... I suppose that's the rest of the story.

It all started when, as I was trying mightily to become a full fledged Tenderfoot Scout, I learned the Scout slogan: Do a good deed every day.

That's not so hard, right? All you have to do is something nice for somebody else, or something that helps someone. How hard could that possibly be?

A lot of folks think that's the Scout motto - Do a good turn daily - but that's wrong. It's the slogan. The motto is: Be Prepared.

To get it right, you have to be able to do both of those things at the same time. That's where I had problems.

I thought up all kinds of good deeds. The trouble was, I didn't think them through all that well. I wasn't... prepared.

Take, for instance, the very first official good deed I tried to do. I took my dad's new lawnmower and went down to old Mrs. Jenkins house to mow her lawn. I didn't tell her I was coming. That's part of doing a good deed, right? You want good deeds to be a surprise.

So there I was, with my dad's brand new lawnmower, which was self propelled, which was a new idea to me. I think that's part of why I wanted to do this particular good deed. Dad wouldn't let me mow our lawn, at least not with the new mower. That was back before lawn mowers had five or ten different safety features on them. When you pulled the lever to make it go... it went. You had to push the lever to make it stop. If you didn't... well... it didn't stop.

I guess I wasn't too well prepared, because when the thing lurched into gear, and took off, and I stepped on my loose shoe string, chasing it, it jerked out of my hands. By the time I got hold of it, it had beautifully cropped ten feet of lawn, and six feet of Mrs. Jenkins' prized Azaleas.

I have to tell you, that baby could cut good!

I caught up with it, and pulled it up on the back wheels, so I could turn it around and get out of the flower bed, and sort of got tangled up in a Japanese Quince bush. Those are thorny, and I had on shorts. Who'd have thought part of being prepared for cutting grass was wearing long pants?

Anyway, there was a big bed of what turned out to be rare Calypso Oleanders, and by the time I got hold of the mower again, there were pretty pink petals scattered all over the place. I thought it was a nice touch. You know, it spread the colors out much wider than they had been. Mrs. Jenkins wasn't impressed, though, and my first good deed got me grounded for a month.

I thought my next good deed couldn't possibly miss. My mother sometimes talked fondly about a cat she'd had when she was in college, and how much she missed it. When I found a stray cat on my way home from school one day, it just seemed natural to take it home, clean it up and have it there for Mom when she got home from work. I gave it a bath in the kitchen sink.

Who'd have thought cats hated water so much? I mean everybody talks about how they clean themselves all the time and all that. And it let me pick it up just fine when I found it. But I guess my dousing it with water made it not like me, because it tore all over the house trying to keep away from me. And, now that I think about it, why in the world would adults choose cream colored furniture... and drapes... and bedspreads and stuff? My parents had all the breakable stuff up high, where my little sister, Suzy, couldn't mess with it. I learned something that day. Cats can jump really high when they're unhappy. How could I have been prepared for that? I'd never been around a cat before! That's probably why I didn't think about the fleas either.

After I got over being grounded for that, I decided to think things through a little more before I did another good deed. A long time went by without me doing anything. They don't make you keep a list of your good deeds, and read it at troop meetings though, so my Scoutmaster, Mr. Timmons, didn't know I wasn't doing anything.

In fact, I didn't try to do another good deed until after I was twelve.

This one was a no brainer. Dad was always washing his car. It was new, and he was real proud of it. I thought about it real hard, and came up with a way to do three good deeds in one... sort of to try to make up for my inactivity in the good deed arena.

First, the car would be washed. Second, it would save him the money of having to go to the car wash place. And third, I'd let Suzy help me. She was six, and didn't get to do much of anything that looked like it was any fun to me.

I showed her how to spray water all over the car with the hose, doing the driver's side first. She got me wet while I scrubbed, but I didn't care. It was a hot day. But I couldn't keep any of the suds on the car with her spraying water like that, so I told her to go do the other side of the car... kind of a pre-soak, like. I didn't realize the passenger windows were open until I tried wiping water off the window I was working on, and figured out the water drops were on the inside, instead of the outside.

Well, I got her to stop, and rolled up the windows, so we could finish. I meant to get a towel and dry off the seats, but Suzy got bored of spraying the car, and sprayed the house instead, where there was another window open. My Mom came out and got all upset, and made me turn off the water. She sent me to my room, while she changed Suzy's clothes, and wouldn't let me explain ANYTHING to her, which is why the car sat there for five more hours, in the sun, all wet on the inside, with the windows up.

I got grounded for another month for that one. All for just trying to do a good deed!

Later that summer I was playing in the woods behind our house, about four houses down. It was really just a coupld of undeveloped lots, but we called it the woods, because nobody had ever cut any of the trees down. I was practicing with my sling shot. I got it with money from mowing lawns. That's not the kind of thing you ask your parents if you can buy. Parents don't understand how responsible you can be with stuff like sling shots and B-B guns. They just say "NO!"

The little steel ball bearings that worked best cost a lot, but they were worth it, for accuracy purposes. And, if you chose the right target, you could usually find some of them to use over again. That's why I was four houses down. Somebody had left an old sheet of plywood out in the woods, and I had it set up so I could shoot at it. I was real smart and had the top tipped closer to me than the bottom, which meant the balls bounced down, where I could find most of them again. I was pretty good, too. I hit the circle I'd drawn on it maybe eight out of ten shots. That's eighty percent. That's a "B", which was better than I was doing in school.

Now I know you aren't supposed to shoot a slingshot at animals and such. But squirrels are different. Who likes squirrels? And on The Beverly Hillbillies, they even talked about hunting them for food. So, when I saw this squirrel hopping along the fence of the Miller family - they live four doors down - and he hopped into their yard, I went to look. He ran straight to this tree by their patio, and climbed up to where they had this thing nailed to the tree that had a corn cob on it. It was the dried kind of corn cob, where the birds can come and pick the kernels off and eat them, while you watch from inside the house.

And if the squirrel ate the corn, there wouldn't be anything left for the birds, right? And I was pretty good with the slingshot.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking patio sliding glass doors and slingshots don't make a good mix. But I thought of that too! Honest, I did! I just meant to scare the stupid squirrel away from the corn cob. I did, too, except that the ball bearing bounced off the tree.

Do you have ANY idea of how much sliding glass doors cost? I sure didn't. And who in their right mind would actually want to FEED a squirrel? I got grounded for TWO months for that good deed.

I was fourteen before I decided to try it again. The Johansens, across the street, had a dog named Cricket. He was friendly and all, and they left him in the back yard all day so he could run and play and stuff. I went over there sometimes to pet him. I was doing that one day when I saw his water dish was empty. I tried to fill it up with the hose, but I couldn't get any water to come out. Turns out they had this little thing where the hose attaches to the faucet that has a little lever on it to turn the water on and off. I'd never seen one of those before, so I didn't know how to use it. Anyway, Cricket was thirsty - I could tell - so I looked in the garage for something. All I could find was a jug of antifreeze. Well, you put that in the radiator, along with the water, right? So it must be like water, except that it just won't freeze. So I gave her some of that. She liked it too.

Thank goodness I bragged about my good deed to Mom when I got home. I know you aren't supposed to brag about good deeds, but I wanted to show Mom I'd finally gotten it right.

They took Cricket to the vet, and they did whatever was needed to save her. I got an education on anti-freeze. I had plenty of time to research it while I was grounded.

The one I think was the most unfair of all happened later that year, just before I turned fifteen. I was walking along, minding my own business, when I saw a briefcase sitting beside a trash can at the bus stop. Obviously, somebody had gotten on the bus and left it there by accident. I looked inside it, to see if there was an address for the owner. It was full of money! I mean REALLY full of money, in nice neat packets, with little bands around them.

So now I had the best of good deeds right in my hands. All I had to do was take it to the police station and turn it in and everybody would be happy with me.

Except that I didn't have to take it to the police. They came to me. There were like ten of them, and they were really mad. First of all, they arrested me. It took a couple of hours to get that sorted out. See, it turned out that somebody was blackmailing the mayor, Mr. Hildebrand. That's all I found out that day, except that the briefcase I had picked up was put there while the police staked it out, to catch the blackmailer when he picked it up. They thought that was me, which was why they arrested me, which was stupid, but they didn't know that then.

The rest of it I learned while I was grounded, and had nothing better to do than surf the internet. See, the reason the mayor was being blackmailed was because somebody had taken some pictures of Trudy Hildebrand, Mrs. Mayor, or whatever you call the mayor's wife. Those turned up on the internet, after the blackmailer saw the police scream in and capture me for picking up the ransom money. Those pictures were something else. I'd seen something like them before, when I accidentally got porn on the computer. Good Boy Scouts don't look at porn on purpose, but if it happens by accident... well, you can't do much about that, right?

Anyway, I was surfing around and saw Trudy Hildebrand's name on a file, and when I clicked on it, there she was, sucking on a big, black penis. She's white. So's her husband. Even I knew that wasn't her husband's penis she was slurping on.

The thing that ticks me off so much is that I was trying to do a good deed, and it WOULD have been a good deed, if it hadn't been blackmail money. And besides THAT, just about everybody agreed later on that it was that picture that brought about better race relations in town. It got everybody to talking about race relations. And it got us a new mayor, which everybody said was a good thing.

But I got in trouble for it.

So, I gave up good deeds. I stayed in Scouts, cause I liked going on overnight camping trips, and I learned a lot. I wish they'd have taught us about the dangers of antifreeze before they did, but they eventually got around to it.

What brought the good deed problem to a head... OK, another head... was one of those camping trips. One of the first things you learn in Scouts is about fire safety. Why they call gasoline "Scout Juice" is beyond me, because you are NOT supposed to use gasoline to light a fire. Of course some kids don't get that lesson the first time they hear it, and one of those kids was Jimmy Sprague. So, when his cook fire wasn't going as well as he thought it should, and I saw him stand over it and tip a can of lantern fuel so it would dribble out and fall on the fire... and when I saw the fire climb up that dribble and start the can on fire... well I knew action was needed.

Jimmy yelped and sat the can down on the ground, where it burned merrily from the opening on top. All I could think about was how badly Jimmy would be burned when that can exploded, so I yelled at him to run, and I did some running myself, so I could kick the can hard, and get it as far away from people as possible, so that, when it exploded, nobody would be hurt.

I wasn't thinking about being a hero or anything. It was just a good deed, to imperil myself, to save Jimmy. I was fifteen, by then, and had to set a good example, you know?

I got in a heck of a kick, too, and the can went flying, end-over-end, off into the woods. It splashed on my leg, and set that on fire, which is kind of hard to put out when you're wearing the clothing that's burning. Stopping, dropping and rolling didn't seem to do it, though it did set the leaves on fire that my leg rolled over. I finally slapped it out with my hands. When Mr. Timmons got there, it looked like the whole forest was on fire, but he ordered us to stomp it all out, which only took a few minutes. Then he went over to the can, which was lying on its side, still burning. He reached down, set it upright, and put his foot on the opening.

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The Good Deed Blues

Lubrican

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