In God We Trust (14 page)

They would just look at each other. What can you say?

Our time finally came. I am in the Fair! I am looking at the flags, and I see the great Halls of Science. I am a tiny, tiny squirt, but it made a colossal impression on me, the first truly immense impression of my life.

Green, yellow, gold, orange buildings! The Skyride! The unreal Fantasy World’s Fair architecture. World’s Fair buildings have no relationship to real buildings. It was truly beyond all my expectations, whatever they were. It
was
the Emerald City. Nothing was real, nothing, not even the people. Everything was just swirling around me—lights and colors and sounds and funny, sweet food, and more excitement than I could stand. And then, Treasure Island!

And right in the middle of Treasure Island, the vortex, the center, and as far as I was concerned the
reason
for the entire World’s Fair—The Magic Mountain! I had never heard of Thomas Mann at that point. This mountain had certain parallels with Thomas Mann’s
Magic Mountain
that did not become apparent until later.

Treasure Island was a true island. There was water all around it, with little boats and swans, and Indian canoes and rocky
grottoes, and even a pirate ship riding at anchor. Everything great, all in one place. Everything that kids want to see was there.

I am just absolutely out of my skull. I am wild. The sun is shining down, the birds are singing, Kid music is playing; it is all there.

And right in the middle of it, the Magic Mountain, rising high up into the sky, six or seven, maybe even ten stories high. It’s made out of that stuff that they build fantasies of. It’s made of whatever they make things out of that they’re going to knock down in a year. It had snow painted ’way up there near the summit. It was a real mountain. A mountain, in the Midwest, is really a
mountain
mountain. They don’t have mountains in the Midwest, except in stories and cowboy movies, and here is a real mountain. My kid brother and I just couldn’t believe it.

Only kids were allowed on the Magic Mountain. No grownups, even mothers, just kids. Kids under ten. We went in through the turnstiles and got in line, a long line of kids, jostling cheek by jowl, snaking into the Magic Mountain.

The line led onto a ramp that wound its way in a spiral round and round the sides of the mountain, and up and up. Slowly we climbed, higher and higher. I’m wondering what’s happening to the kids at the top. I can hardly wait.

About every thirty or forty feet there’s an attendant on the ramp, wearing a red cap and a blue jacket.

“Come on, you kids. Move along there. Straighten up. Come on, straighten up that line. Dress it up. Come on, you kids, quit shovin’. You, there. Hey, cut it out. Move along.”

And so we inched along slowly, higher and higher. I am looking down over the railing from a tremendous height, maybe ten stories high above the Fair. I can see all the people down below, like ants. My mother is way down there. Flags flying. What a great thing!

I am hanging onto the railing and moving upward, my kid brother right behind, until finally, the last turn and I am at the summit—a flat wooden platform. There was only one kid ahead of me. And the Chief Attendant He was taking each
kid as they arrived on top of the platform, pushing him, shoving him into a dark doorway. A dark doorway, like a cave into the side of the mountain, right up at the very peak, where the snow was painted on. He grabs this skinny kid ahead of me by the shoulders and gives him a shove into the darkness.

“
AAAAIIIIIIIIII!
” And the kid is gone!

I am facing this black door. Alone! This is the moment I have been waiting for for maybe two or three years. I am at the core of my entire life. I have been building my existence on this, and now I am terrified. It’s a black hole! Just a black hole! Nothing!

The guy with the cap grabs my shoulders.”

Come on, kid. Move.”

“NO! NO
!” Remember, I’m five or six.

“NO! NO
!”

“Come on, kid, get in there. You’re holding up the line.”

He shoves me. I am in a hollow tube, a black, inky hollow tube, flat on my back. I start moving. Faster and faster in the darkness! A thousand miles a minute, round and round and round!

“
AAAIII
iiii!” I’m spinning round and round in total blackness. I can’t catch my breath. I’m getting green, purple, red. Faster and Faster!

zzzwwooooomp! I shoot out feet first in the sunlight, onto a pad.

“Aaaaiiiiiii!” Immediately another guy with a cap on grabs me and shoves a red plastic fire hat on my head, with a sign on it:

“ED WYNN
, The Texaco Fire Chief!”

“Get moving, kid, here comes another one.”

I could hear coming out of the black hole behind me: “Aaiiiiiiiiiii!”

My brother flew out. Purple and green.

“Klonk.” The fire hat on his head.

“Aiiiiiiiiii!” Another kid shoots out into the sunlight.

“Klonk.” Another fire hat.

We went out through the turnstile together. And there was my mother, eating a taffy apple.

“How was it?”

How was it! I have never been able to tell her. I have never been able to tell her about the Magic Mountain. It was then that I began to learn about dreams, that center hard core of dreams.

“Get in there, kid, you’re holding up the line.”

XIII
FLICK DREDGES UP A NOTORIOUS SON OF A BITCH

“Do you remember that robot they had at the Fair?” Flick asked.

“What robot?”

“Well, they had this robot. That smoked cigars. My Old Man took me to see it. That’s the only thing I remember.”

“That’s the way it is with fairs. You never know what you’ll remember.” Beer brings out the philosopher in me.

The two ironworkers were now having a loud artistic argument in front of the jukebox. The boilermakers had done their work well. Flick’s blue jaw tightened and once again he left the bar to go into combat. I watched from the corner of my eye as he loomed over the truculent music lovers. A few seconds later, all was peace as the two were eased out of the side door and into the cold air. Flick returned to his station and slapped his bar rag angrily into the brass trough.

“If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. You never get no peace around here.” He continued:

“One day I’m gonna kick that son of a bitch in the ass so hard he’ll never forget it!”

I looked out into the gray street and watched the belligerent, unsteady pair as they struggled against the wind in search of another, friendlier tavern. There was something vaguely familiar
about the short, wide one on the left, the one carrying the battered lunch bucket.

“Hey, Flick, who is that short guy on the left?”

“Grover Dill, that son of a bitch.”

“No kidding! Really? Grover Dill! Flick, you shoulda sic’d
me
on that bastard. It woulda scared him out of his wits.”

Flick stared at me for a moment uncomprehendingly, and then the dawn came up like thunder on his simple Midwestern map. He leaned over the bar on his elbows.

“That’s right! Boy, I will never forget
that
day!”

I put up two fingers in my best Biltmore Men’s Bar manner.

“That calls for two fingers of the Real Stuff, Flick.”

“You said it, Ralph!” He poured two neat ones.

“So that old son of a bitch Grover Dill hasn’t changed a bit, has he?”

Flick tossed his off.

“If anything, he’s worse.”

XIV
GROVER DILL AND THE TASMANIAN DEVIL

The male human animal, skulking through the impenetrable fetid jungle of Kidhood, learns early in the game just what sort of animal he is. The jungle he stalks is a howling tangled wilderness, infested with crawling, flying, leaping, nameless dangers. There are occasional brilliant patches of rare, passionate orchids and other sweet flowers and succulent fruits, but they are rare. He daily does battle with horrors and emotions that he will spend the rest of his life trying to forget or suppress. Or recapture.

His jungle is a wilderness he will never fully escape, but those first early years when the bloom is on the peach and the milk teeth have just barely departed are the crucial days in the Great Education.

I am not at all sure that girls have even the slightest hint that there is such a jungle. But no man is really qualified to say. Most wildernesses are masculine, anyway.

And one thing that must be said about a wilderness, in contrast to the supple silkiness of Civilization, is that the basic, primal elements of existence are laid bare and raw. And can’t be ducked. It is in that jungle that all men find out about themselves. Things we all know, but rarely admit. Say, for example, about that beady red-eyed, clawed creature, that ravening Carnivore,
that incorrigibly wild, insane, scurrying little beast—the Killer that is in each one of us. We pretend it is not there most of the time, but it is a silly idle sham, as all male ex-kids know. They have seen it and have run fleeing from it more than once. Screaming into the night.

One quiet Summer afternoon, leafing through a library book, with the sun slanting down on the oaken tables, I came across a picture in a Nature book of a creature called the Tasmanian Devil. He glared directly at me out of the page, with an unwavering red-eyed gaze, and I have never forgotten it. I was looking at my soul!

The Tasmanian Devil is well named, being a nocturnal marsupial of extraordinary ferocity, being strictly carnivorous, and when cornered fighting with a nuttiness beyond all bounds of reason. In fact, it is said that he is one of the few creatures on earth that
looks forward
to being cornered.

I looked him in the eye; he looked back, and even from the flat, glossy surface of the paper I could feel his burning rage, a Primal rage that glowed white hot like the core of a nuclear explosion. A chord of understanding was struck between us. He knew and I knew. We were Killers. The only thing that separated us was the sham. He admitted it, and I have been attempting to cover it up all of my life.

I remember well the first time my own Tasmanian Devil without warning screamed out of the darkness and revealed himself for what he was—a fanged, maniacal meat eater. Every male child sweats inside at a word that is rarely heard today: the Bully. That is not to say that bullies no longer exist. Sociologists have given them other and softer-sounding labels, an “over-aggressive child,” for example, but they all amount to the same thing—Meatheads. Guys who grow up banging grilles in parking lots and becoming captains of Industry or Mafia hatchet men. Every school had at least five, and they usually gathered followers and toadies like barnacles on the bottom of a garbage scow. The lines were clearly drawn. You were either a Bully, a Toady, or one of the nameless rabble of Victims who hid behind hedges, continually ran up alleys, ducked under
porches, and tried to get a connection with City Hall, City Hall being the Bully himself.

I was an accomplished Alley Runner who did not wear sneakers to school from choice but to get off the mark quicker. I was well qualified to endorse Keds Champions with:

“I have outrun some of the biggest Bullies of my time wearing Keds, and I am still here to tell the tale.”

It would make a great ad in
Boys’ Life:

Many of us have grown up wearing mental Keds and still ducking behind filing cabinets, water coolers, and into convenient men’s rooms when that cold sweat trickles down between the shoulder blades. My Moment of Truth was a kid named Grover Dill.

What a rotten name! Dill was a Running Nose type of Bully. His nose was
always
running, even when it wasn’t. He was a yelling, wiry, malevolent, sneevily snively Bully who had quelled all insurgents for miles around. I did not know one kid who was not afraid of Dill, mainly because Dill was truly aggressive. This kind of aggression later in life is often called “Talent” or “Drive,” but to the great formless herd of kids it just meant a lot of running, getting belted, and continually feeling ashamed.