Thirty Rooms To Hide In (15 page)

10-year-old Kip gives a status report to Mom who is away visiting her parents in Florida, 1958

Lukee is not getting along with Christie. They’re constantly arguing about who’s going to have the big, brown chair in the Dad’s study. Christie will cross his right leg over his left. This makes Christie’s knee get in Lukee’s half and when that happens, Lukee rises up and bops Christie on the head with a cardboard roll filled with the rolled up newspaper. Then Christie rises up and makes a swing and a miss. While he’s off guard Lukee comes down with a good, solid whack with his cardboard roll. This only maddens Christie and he jumps up and connects with a right to the jaw.

* * *

Mom says the earliest sibling argument she can remember was watching toddlers Kip and Jeff ride trikes in a circle and fight about who was ahead of whom, each loudly redefining the other’s position on the circle.

Kip was born in 1947. With no brother to irritate him, correct him, or attack him things were peaceful, until 1949 when Jeff was born; after which began a 25-year-long series of arguments between brothers that ended only when we all went off to college and had Nixon to be pissed off at.

Every brother was assigned a nickname calibrated to irritate him. Chris was “Rake.” Jeff believed Chris’s face was long and resembled the handle of a rake. Strangely, the name Rake pissed Chris off even more than the original appellation Jeff assigned him: “Mike Rosscopick.” (Translate: “Microscopic.”)

The shape of brother Dan’s head also presented rich comic possibilities to Jeff. Dan, having a nearly circular head as a youth, was dubbed “Beach Ball.” Beach Ball was what you called Dan if you wanted to make him mad. But most of the time his name was, mysteriously, “Learbs,” for which no etymology exists.

Our littlest brother, Collin, was randomly named “Neil.” This made him mad for reasons we never understood but since it seemed to work we stuck with it. Even the oldest brother Kip was assigned a nickname: “Toe-Pay-Deh,” the scrambled pronunciation of potato, a shape Jeff maintained precisely described the silhouette of Kip’s head. Kip, in turn, noted that Jeff’s ears made his head resemble a taxicab with the doors open and dubbed him “Tax.” Jeff’s friend, Chris Hallenbeck, appreciated the poetry of “Tax” but referred to Jeff as simply “Debbie.”

As for me, Chris decided I was “Buggen,” a name derived from “Flying Rug” (Sprinters
flew
through the house). It then became “Ruggen” and finally Buggen.

Referring to a big brother by his nickname resulted in “chesties.” To give someone chesties you pinned them to the ground with your knees holding his arms out of the way, and rapped the knuckle of your middle finger on his sternum for ten minutes. It didn’t hurt at first but after five minutes of steady rapping it seemed prudent to call your brother by his given name.

* * *

Out in the front yard, we played games that hurt people.

In the winter, our front yard became a Currier & Ives print done by Quentin Tarantino. We created a vicious brand of snowball pressed to the density of croquet balls. Creating such ordnance took fifteen minutes of packing and squeezing after which we misted them with water and put them in the freezer for an icy sheen. If a snowball could somehow be made in Hell, this was it. Parking one of these babies between the shoulder blades of a retreating brother was a satisfying experience and when one of us came in the house crying, within a half hour his parka was back on and he was out in the yard using his anger to squeeze a new snowball to the density of a diamond.

In the summer, we played a short, rule-free version of football called “Smear.” The object wasn’t getting touchdowns, making passes, or even winning. It was about smearing the guy who had the ball.

Five brothers lined up on one side of the yard and kicked off to a lone brother who – standing way down at the other end of the yard – appeared an inch high and extremely vulnerable. The single offensive player had one shot at getting a touchdown and this never happened because all games of Smear ended 0-to-0 with somebody crying.

Smear wasn’t about the guy who had the ball anyway. The ball itself didn’t matter either; he could have been carrying a portable radio. In fact, even if he dropped the radio and tried to run into the house, the defense would pursue because Smear was about landing on a brother with great force. If there was any art or strategy to Smear it was in creating the dog pile that ended the game. Everybody (and his brother, in this case) piled on, sometimes leaping from six feet away until the ball carrier was pressed to groaning breathlessness at the bottom of the heap.

As we grew older, the stakes went up. In 1964, one of us received a BB gun as a birthday gift. (We’d all whet our appetites for target shooting with Dad’s .22-caliber rifle.) After a chorus of whining from the unarmed brothers, another three or four BB guns appeared on the grounds of the Millstone and the Great BB Gun Wars of ‘64 began. Sometimes there were teams, but allegiances were built on sand. A brother who felt safely part of a group one minute could suddenly become “it” and be peppered with BB’s which stung like wasps.

Somewhere in our sweaty little brains remained a small group of perhaps four or five brain cells which recognized the possible injuries from shooting BB guns at each other. So we called a truce while we designed eye protection. We fashioned masks by bisecting the round plastic tops of gallon jugs of ice cream and fastening the semi-circle to our heads with string. But in order to see, we cut eye holes. That these holes exposed the very thing we were trying to protect never entered our heads. Neither, fortunately, did any BB’s.

The little brothers were content to conduct the Great BB Gun Wars in the horse pasture and Low Forty, but Jeff and Chris Hallenbeck took to staging their fights at an abandoned farmhouse. Jeff remembers dashing from window to window shooting at Hallenbeck as he tried to make it across the barnyard, up to the porch and inside. Out in front, Hallenbeck fell to his knees and screamed, “Oh, God! My eye!” Jeff, white in the face, ran out to help the crouched figure and at the sound of his footsteps, Hallenbeck brought up his rifle and made it rain copper.

Their Three Stooges nyuk-nyuk-nyuk abuse of each other continued long after a truce had been called. Returning home in the car, Jeff shot Chris point blank in the ribs. Later, when Hallenbeck and Jeff were experimenting with methods to take the sting out of the BB’s, Jeff tried on a leather jacket, turned his back to Hallenbeck and told him to shoot. Hallenbeck shot him in the calf.

The stakes were raised yet again when brother Chris discovered that a wooden kitchen match fit snugly down the barrel of a BB gun. The match flew a good 50 or 60 feet and on striking rock, popped like a cap and fell burning to the ground. Experimental launches at the back of a brother’s head, though satisfying, never struck fire and the fad soon passed. It did, however, spark a new idea: if a person were to quietly borrow Jeff’s bow and arrow and then perhaps tape a cherry bomb to that arrow, might it not make for a pleasant afternoon’s diversion? Thus, the Gemini space program was honored in the Sullivan yard with multiple launches of the sleek, exploding rockets. The supply of cherry bombs usually ran out before the arrows and the remaining arrows were recommissioned for a new game, “The Parabola of Death.” In this game, you shot an arrow straight up into the Minnesota sky and then stood there blinking at your brothers –
Where will it land?
– playing Chicken with ballistics, gravity, and skull trauma.

The 80-foot fir trees along the east side of the yard were another source of ordnance. The cones that fell from them had none of the heft or distance of snowballs and so combatants simply paced off a distance of ten feet and pelted each other. In one cone skirmish (with a local kid named Chris but whom we called “Fudd”) hostilities escalated until Fudd retreated across the road from the Millstone and hid in the sumac. He was out of range of our cones so I switched artillery and lobbed a golfball-sized rock into the bushes.

Most childhood injuries are announced after five seconds of complete silence.

So it was with Fudd and about five seconds after my rock disappeared into the bushes, he began to wail loudly and when he came out he was holding exactly one half of his big front tooth in his hand. Fudd ran home, combatants scattered, and rice-paper-thin alibis were constructed.

I was fingered and though I do not remember my consequences, I recall having a solemn little discussion with an insurance agent where I was deposed on the events leading to Fudd’s injury. I don’t remember what I said but looking back I wish I’d confessed, “Yeah? Well, a rock isn’t the worst thing I ever whipped at somebody’s head anyway. That would be the bowl of my own
piss
I threw in my brother Chris’s face.”

All boys fight, but by 1964 the unhappiness and anger that ran through the Millstone seemed to amplify our confrontations. As Dad got sicker and drunker, our fights – once flurries of anger – fanned into day-long rages.

Of the six of us, Chris and I were the most vicious adversaries. When he was thirteen and I nine, my age represented everything Chris had grown out of. He was a Prince. I was just a Sprinter.

* * *