The Best Little Boy in the World Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Author’s Note to the Original Edition

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Afterword

  Copyright

  This is a book about owning up to one’s true identity, yet I have disguised the characters and signed it with a pen name. The characters are disguised to protect their privacy, which I have no right to invade. Using a pen name, though I would rather not, is the least I can do for my parents, who have done a great deal for me. Ideally, of course, it would not be necessary. But, then again, ideally there would be no reason to write a book like this at all.

  CHAPTER 1

  I was eighteen years old when I learned to fart. You may think it’s easy for me to write a disgusting thing like that. It’s not. If someone had told me on that occasion seven years ago—well, of course, no one was around at the time, I would never have done it in anything but the strictest privacy—but if someone had told me that seven years later I would write a book which began that way … the point is, you have no idea how far I’ve come in seven years.

  But this will only make sense if I begin at the beginning.

  I am wearing a sheet with a hole cut out for my head and holes for my arms. I am carrying a shopping bag that was empty when my mother gave it to me. It has some bite-size Tootsie Rolls in it now, and some white-yellow-orange waxy candies, too. I am not sure what is going on. It seems naughty, and it’s past my bedtime, but Mrs. Connell is driving the car, so how can it be naughty? I am the last one into the station wagon this time. She lifts the gate of the wagon, checks to see that no fingers get caught as she shuts it, but she does not put up the back window. We always put up the back window of our station wagon when anyone is in the back, but Mrs. Connell doesn’t want to put it up and down every time we stop.

  I wonder whether I am allowed to eat any of the Tootsie Rolls. They haven’t said, so I’d better not. The car starts forward; I fall out the back window onto the dirt road, thunk, in the darkness, alone. I am not the kind of little boy likely to be missed in a car with a dozen screaming children. I don’t scream.

  I am lying on my back on the dirt road, dazed, beginning to wonder what I am supposed to do, beginning to wonder what they will do to me, if they find me, for doing such a bad thing.

  I see the car stop up the road. Another ghost has seen me fall out the back window and has passed the word up to Mrs. Connell. Mrs. Connell backs the car up slowly. I am sitting up now, dirt on my sheet, dirt on my hands and in my hair. I am not supposed to be so dirty.

  It doesn’t occur to me to move from the middle of the road. I assume that Mrs. Connell won’t run me over. She doesn’t. She checks me all over to make sure I am all right, puts me back in the car, and rolls up the window.

  I hope she won’t tell my parents.

  I am in the hall closet, behind the winter coats, stifling hot, but this is the price you pay to win at hide-and-seek. We don’t often have enough children around to play hide-and-seek, but when we do, I usually hide here. Someone may open the closet door and look inside, but I just hold my breath behind all those coats, and even if they thrash around the coats, they never find me. It is pitch black with no light fixture inside and poor lighting outside. Only when the television is on is there any light in the closet, and that is because the television is set in the wall, with the back in the closet and the front in the den. I like watching TV backwards, through a crack in the grating behind the picture tube. Today the television is not on. What am I thinking about there in the dark, my open eyes as good as shut?

  I am five years old. I am the best little boy in the world, told so day after day. The worst thing I have done to date is to consider—just to consider—ripping off the mattress tag that says DO NOT REMOVE THIS TAG Under Penalty of Law. At five, the best little boy in the world can read that, but somewhere he has heard the unique zrzrzrzippp that ripping off this appendage makes. It’s a louder sound than such a small, soft piece of material deserves to make, and so of particular interest.

  I would love to zrzrzrzippp that stupid tag right off; it just invites mischief, hanging there as it does. What good does it do, anyway? It’s our mattress, isn’t it? It is inconceivable that policemen or judges would ever enter the house of the best little boy in the world, whose parents are, by implication, the best—Wait! Maybe they would enter to go after my big brother! Maybe I can zrzrzrzippp the tag off his mattress, and they will come and get him—but that is too much to hope for. And when the Law comes and looks down at me and asks—just a matter of routine questioning, mind you, not grounded in any particular suspicion—“DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS?”—I will immediately break down and confess. The BLBITW can bring himself secretly to consider ripping off a stupid tag, but he cannot consider lying.

  Five years old. My father is painting the front door of our early American house in Brewster, New York. We go there every weekend, a million miles from anyone else anywhere near my age, except my brother, nine, who alternately terrorizes and ignores me. Being ignored, of course, is the worse of the two.

  My father and I are painting the front door. That is, he paints; I am there to run errands. I am never allowed to paint or saw or hammer. I ask my mother what I should do—I’m bored. “Go help your father.” He lets me run errands, which I hate. Or, “Go help your mother.” She lets me set the table, which I hate. My brother loves to set the table, to make me look bad.

  The only other member of my family is Sam, the Airedale, who has rough, kinky hair, which I don’t like, and who is about as big as I am. That’s something my brother and I fight about: whose turn it is to feed the dog. Poor Sam. We take the frozen leaves and the ice out of his black metal pot, too large and hardware-storish to be called a bowl, and spoon out some cold corned-beef-hashlike stuff from the can. I don’t know how Sam puts up with it day after day.

  Father is painting the door white. Sam and I are watching, standing on the lawn in front of the house. Father goes off to the barn to get something—it must be too high for me to reach or too much fun or something—and I wander around the flagstone path from the driveway looking for ants to squoosh. (No one has ever told me not to do that.)

  Father returns, and he is mad. I take my father very seriously, as I suppose most five-year-olds do, and if he is mad, I am scared.

  But what have I done? The ants? The mattress-tag thoughts, somehow overheard? He points to the lawn, which now has white splotches all over it. I didn’t do that! Honest! Nonetheless, I feel guilty. I always feel guilty. I break guiltometers.

  “It wasn’t that way when I went to the barn. Who else did it if not you?” he asks. True, there is not another little boy for miles, and the evidence is unmistakable. I am being framed.

  I didn’t do it, I persist. That gets him considerably madder. Now we are talking not about mischief, but about honesty. And if there is one thing …

  My defense department computer should be calculating the probability-weighted payoffs of alternative courses of action along my decision tree, considering sunk and relevant costs, and determining the only rational course of action: Admit guilt and be done with it. Only F. Lee Bailey could advise a plea of not guilty. However, as I am five, I don’t know anything about computers or decision trees, and F. Lee Bailey is still in law school dreaming of the publicit
y that will come from winning impossible cases like mine. Okay, Dad; I did it. I’m sorry.

  Are you kidding? No way! I have an absolute sense of right and wrong, and I am not going to lie, no matter what the consequences, particularly when lying means admitting that I did something wrong, for heaven’s sake, and jeopardizing my status as the best little boy in the world.

  I DIDN’T DO IT! I am screaming now. Tears will appear shortly.

  Come in the house. Mother comes to watch. She usually rescues me. (I don’t mean to exaggerate: Spankings are as far as it ever goes, and they are rare—of course, I rarely do anything to warrant a spanking.) But honesty is a lesson she feels I must learn.

  There we are: I suspended over the ottoman, backside up, yelling that I didn’t do it, honest; Father whacking me and telling me in his strongest language—“FOR CRYING OUT LOUD” is his ultimate profanity—that the paint means nothing, but lying to your parents, for crying out loud, is intolerable; Mother thinking to herself how much more it hurts them than me and preparing for the reconciliation. I don’t know where my brother is. Probably working on the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, or setting the table. Sam is absent also.

  I go crying, howling, wracked with the injustice of it all, suddenly tuned in to mankind’s suffering through the ages, stumbling, stamping, stomping to my room.

  Somewhere beneath the tears I am still a smart, self-centered little kid, and I half realize, anyway, that I am playing this thing for all it’s worth. Still, this is the kind of injustice and frustration I have heretofore experienced only at the hands of my enormous nine-year-old brother, “Goliath.” That the Supreme Court should suddenly turn against me—the Court upon which the legitimacy of my standing as the best little boy in the world depends (Goliath is the best little bit bigger boy in the world, in case you are wondering how they get around that)—well…. My mouth is full of the pillowcase I have been gnawing. I can say no more.

  There is a knock at the door. LEAVE ME ALONE! Let me suffer, you who do not even trust your son. My parents are knocking on the door. They have Sam with them. Sam’s tail is white. I hear through my emotional straitjacket that Sam got his tail into the can of white paint and accidentally did all the splotching himself. “Forgive us.” HAH!

  I remember very little of my first five years, though I keep trying.

  How old was I when I pulled the drawers out of my father’s dresser, each one not quite as far as the last, like steps, and climbed to the top? My mother came in, instantly terrified that I might fall off. I felt perfectly safe up there, but she set me on the carpet and told me that we never did things like that. And how old was I sometime later when, despite the warning I had gotten on top of Daddy’s dresser, I climbed to the top of our bookshelves, leaned the wrong way, and brought the whole thing crashing down, books all over the floor—unhurt myself, but terrified at the sentence I expected from the Supreme Court? (It was commuted.)

  I remember standing in Brewster on a hot summer day, bored, watching my mother planting pansies, with all their surprising colors, kaleidoscopic, you never know what combination to expect. What other flower is as unpredictable? I mean, standing there was very boring, but if it had to be some kind of flower, I am glad it was pansies.

  We had an elderly black maid, a “Negro” then, of course, whom we loved dearly. She would come up to our room in the country—Goliath and I shared a room—and tickle our feet to make us go to sleep. I don’t remember her reasoning, but we loved it, went wild over it, would not go to sleep without it. (No hidden meaning here, really; all she did was tickle our feet.) To this day I am ticklish, but have become considerably less so over the past few years. People are not assigned ticklishness the way pansies are assigned colors: Ticklishness has something to do with where your head is.

  I remember sitting in front of my mother’s night table with a pencil in my hand and some paper and her telling me it didn’t matter which hand I used to hold the pencil, I should use whichever one felt more comfortable. I tried each a couple of times and chose my left one. I don’t remember whether I had learned the difference between left and right. Both hands looked alike. Wouldn’t my left hand become my right hand when I turned around?

  I remember riding around my room in the city, in our West Side apartment, on a tricycle, just around and around in a circle on the orange Howdy-Doody linoleum floor, thinking I can’t remember what, fantasizing I can’t remember what. Most of the time just bored.

  I remember my brother and me being mugged in the park by a ten-year-old, the neighborhood Bad Boy, who I vaguely remember had once been charged with setting fire to the playground with his magnifying glass on a sunny day. He wanted our scooter, and he wanted to bully my brother—which didn’t make me feel as good as I would have thought it would.

  As there is no particular thrill in bullying a five-year-old when a nine-year-old is available, the mugger said I could beat it. I ran to the edge of the park—our building was right across the street—but I had never, never in my life crossed a street by myself. When I got older they would let me, maybe. Still, my brother was being mugged in the park by a convicted arsonist, and even I knew the thing to do was to run home for help.

  There was a woman at the corner waiting for the light to change—we never talked to strangers—and I decided to take drastic action. I asked her if she would walk me across the street. She looked at me a little surprised, not very sympathetic—what’s there to walking across the street, for Christ’s sake? When the light’s green, walk. So I just followed her (it wasn’t that hard after all, but it felt different, all of a sudden being responsible for myself) and buzzed the buzzer of our apartment, fearing the worst, feeling very guilty. How could I explain the loss of Goliath? How could I explain being back here alone? I mean, How did I get across the street? My mother quickly grasped the situation through my mumbling and went to retrieve my brother from the ten-year-old mugger, scooter and all.

  Shortly thereafter we moved to the East Side.

  I remember missing the school bus to kindergarten one morning and my father taking me in a cab on his way to work. He knew the block my school was on, but not the proper entrance. I remember not knowing, either. I had been going for months, of course, but had always found my classroom by following the head in front of me.

  Another time, one afternoon in the first grade, they changed school bus drivers on me. The rookie driver asked me where I lived. Where I lived? Are you joking? I know how to read, I know how to multiply—do I know where I live? I live at home, that’s all. You’re the school bus driver, not me, for crying out loud—what do you think this is, a taxicab? Of course, I didn’t say any of that. I just began to well up with embarrassment, which was quickly overtaken by fear—lost among thousands of look-alike buildings, millions of strangers—on my own at the age of six. After some thought, I remembered my last name. (Well, I went to the kind of school where everyone was called by his first name and treated very carefully. We were gifted children, you know.) My last name was all the driver needed, apparently, as things quickly returned to normal.

  And then another time—I may even have been seven or eight by now, or nine—one of the people who came periodically to measure our IQs and to interpret our ink blots asked me what my religion was. Oh for crying out loud, here we go again. When I reddened, she tried to help, listing off the possibilities. I was on the spot and just took a guess. I sat there kind of expecting her to tell me whether I was right or wrong, as normally happened when I answered a question in school—but this time I was the original source. (I was wrong, as a matter of fact.)

  Of course, through all these shining performances I was feeling less than entirely adequate. Embarrassed? Look, let me tell you about embarrassment! But it was more than that: It was the basic understanding—that sick, guilty feeling in the deepest recesses of my psyche—that I was a phony. I was not the best little boy in the world as my parents thought. I mean, the BLBITW couldn’t possibly be so OUT OF IT! I was superpolite, maybe
, but not superbright as I was supposed to be. What kind of idiot doesn’t even know his own religion? I was sure everyone else in the class knew. Chip Morgan certainly knew. He knew what was coming off, believe me. Chip Morgan was wearing white bucks and playing spin the bottle before I had ever heard of either one, for crying out loud.

  And if I was superpolite, it was for the wrong reasons. I was not polite because I loved other people or was considerate or believed in the Golden Rule, or any of that, other crap. I was a goody-goody because it was the proven road to reward. It was the way to play the game. I was one very Establishment little kid. And deep down, I knew I wasn’t “good” at all—just selfish, just out for myself. I was a phony, and I knew it.

  Meanwhile, the religion thing went even further. If I didn’t know my own religion, do you suppose that could mean that I didn’t believe in God? Aged seven, and already a heretic. With one simple question the researcher had discovered the evil lurking within me.

  There really was evil lurking within me. I didn’t want there to be. I didn’t ask for it. But it was there. For example, I always forgot the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and to the Anointeth-My-Head-With-Oil psalm that we did at the beginning of school every day. And while I made the best show of mouthing the words that I could, deep down I knew that I was the only one in the class who didn’t understand what the things meant, even, let alone believe that the Lord was my shepherd. “Anointeth”?

  But while I was dumb, I was not so dumb as to let on just how dumb I was. You never caught me asking what “anointeth” meant. Or, later, “masturbate.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I learned to masturbate the same year I learned to fart. Eighteen. I was a sophomore in college. I had been to Europe twice, had won most of the academic honors at my high school and six varsity letters. But I had not learned to fart. Or to masturbate.

  I had never farted because I knew it was a bad thing to do. The family would drive to Brewster every Friday evening, and back on Sundays, eating the peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwiches my mother had made and listening to Our Miss Brooks, whenever we could catch it on the radio, or, mainly, fighting. That is, my brother and I would be fighting in the back seat—DON’T CROSS THAT LINE!—and my father would be for crying out loud in the front, wondering how he could be responsible for such brats, while my mother would be predicting imminent 60-mile-an-hour gory disaster if we didn’t behave ourselves and let our poor father concentrate on his driving, during all of which I would be getting clobbered, physically and psychologically, by my brother’s intimidations—which I probably invited out of excruciating boredom—when all of a sudden the tables would turn. GOLIATH! The car hushed. We all knew instantly, without a word spoken—it is bad enough to do it, let alone speak of it—GOLIATH! ROLL DOWN YOUR WINDOW! I would already have rolled down mine, hand to my throat, looking as nauseated as possible, playing my brother’s lapse in manners for all it was worth, again … gasping for fresh air, but really basking in my undisputed supremacy: The BLBITW would never do a disgusting thing like that. Here was a level on which I, at little more than half his age and not much more than half his weight, could compete and win time after time. For some reason it took him years to learn control, and by the time he finally had, and we could make it all the way from Brewster to the East Side without so much as a single—GOLIATH! ROLL DOWN YOUR WINDOW!—he was about ready to go off to college. Which left me, naturally, the undisputed best little boy around.