Thirty Rooms To Hide In (12 page)

“Jeffreeeeeeeeeeee?!?”

It was the way Jeffrey’s high-pitched mother hung on the last syllable of his name that gave us the idea for The Jeffrey Game, which was all about lung capacity. Whoever could hold the last syllable of Jeffrey’s name the longest, won. The fact that Mrs. Hartman, no less Jeffrey, could hear us over in our yard playing The Jeffrey Game never once crossed our minds.

“Jeffreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!”

The Beatles had set true north on our compass of coolness. And now anything that wasn’t cool demanded our scorn; the way people dressed, the sound of their voices, their weight, it was all comic fodder.

One summer we focused our derision on the babysitter. She was a kindly overweight old lady named – and this is the part we loved – Mrs. Buttert. This irony sent us into paroxysms of Sprinter glee. There was “Butt” in her name. There was also “Butter,” as in lard-ass. It was a rich comic vein waiting for our genius to be mined. Eventually, all you had to do to make a brother laugh was to point at something flat. Flat meant “Mrs. Buttert sat on it.” Flat frogs dead in the road were suddenly funny – “Mrs. Buttert’s pet frog.” The nickels we’d flattened on the railroad tracks were funny – “Change from Mrs. Buttert’s back pocket.” Kids are cruel, we more than most, and if there’s a Hell it’s likely there’s a reserved table for six there, with a helpful and instructive card waiting in the middle – SULLIVAN PARTY. In our defense, unlike The Jeffrey Game, we didn’t make fun of Mrs. Buttert within earshot.

We did, however, go to great lengths to vex her. In metal shop at Central Junior High School, Chris discovered that 30 pieces of tin, cut to the size of a potato chip, would when dropped create a sound very much like glass shattering. We’d wait until Mrs. Buttert was settling in to a comfortable chair and then, in a distant room, drop the 30 pieces of tin.

Mrs. Buttert would come bustling into the room to find Chris quietly reading, the tin now concealed under his shirt. She would look about, raise an eyebrow, and retreat to her chair again and just as her ample rear married with cushion – CRASH! – the sound would happen again. Chris reported later that after five repetitions the subject seemed to accept the idea that shattering glass was, in the Sullivan house, simply ambience and began to ignore it. Harder to ignore was the night we locked Mrs. Buttert in her room so we could watch TV.

Lock isn’t actually correct. The Millstone’s ancient doors all locked with an old-fashioned skeleton key, cold and about the length of a cigarette in your hand; and Mrs. Buttert kept the only key in her apron pocket. So to keep her from discovering we’d all sneaked out of bed to watch
Laurel & Hardy
, we rigged a series of ropes around her bedroom doorknob, looped it through the stair banisters, and tied it off with one of Kip’s Boy Scout knots.

As the six of us watched TV and talked, we discovered her name sounded even funnier when you burped it. We practiced this in chorus, drinking green bottles of warm Coca-Cola pilfered from the midnight pantry to fuel our effervescence.

“Mrs.
Buuuuuuuuu
–tert.”

If you were bad in a previous life, you came back as a bug in our yard.

Any anthill inhabited by the stinging red kind was subject to, forgive me, “The Red Anthill Solution.” This usually involved a magnifying glass or peeing on the colony, and it brought more joy than pest control ought to bring. Fireflies, too, were sacrificed matter-of-factly to produce glow-in-the-dark war paint. We were kinder perhaps to larger animals, like Caesar, but sooner or later every living thing at the Millstone was a Comic Victim. One game involved a cat and a tire swing.

One of us would hold our cat, Mr. Brown, in our lap and sit inside the tire’s arc. A brother would then slowly rotate the tire, which soon knotted the rope like a balsa-wood airplane’s rubber band, and then let go allowing the tire and its occupants to spin into a propeller blur. When it came to a stop, Mr. Brown was placed on the ground and the drunken zigzag our poor cat made was, to us, the zenith of comedy.

One summer we realized our pets didn’t wear clothes. They were, in fact, naked. Just watching the dog walk to his water dish became funny. Watching Mr. Brown walk away, his tail high and that one eye winking back at you, brought us crumpled to the floor in laughter.

Another day, while feeding a carrot to our horse Coppersmith, we noticed his lips didn’t quite entirely shut. In their resting state, Coppersmith’s lips formed a small circular hole which made the horse look like he was whistling. To bring this comic image to life, you stood in front of Coppersmith and looked at his lips while a brother stood behind you and whistled the theme from
The Andy Griffith Show.
We spent hours doing this.

Another cruelty I blush admitting to was “rat helicopters.” To make a rat helicopter, you held a bed pillow with hands at either end. You put your pet rat in the middle of the pillow and bent it inwards, enclosing your rat-a-naut in its fold. Then, with a quick and hard outward yank the rat popped up about two feet in the air and, to stabilize its flight, the poor thing would rotate its tail round and round, completing the effect.

“Hey guys, look! Rat helicopters!” (I know, I know. But we were kids.)

Rats were our favorite pets. We liked how their tails gave girls the willies and we appreciated rats’ under-dog status. They were just, well, rats. We’d hold our rats, look ‘em in the eye and say in a James Cagney voice, “Why, you dirty rat. You killed my broth-ah.”

Our first pair of rats (we called them “blats”) was a gift from Dr. Zollman, presented after a tour of the Mayo Clinic’s Institute Hills facility, just up the road from the Millstone. We figured we’d saved them from getting cancer and so they were accorded special status at the Millstone. But after the first batch of babies, and then a second, special status was revoked and Mom had us move the blats from the Rumpus Room to the garden shed in the back yard.

We emptied out the shed, threw away the small cages, and turned the entire structure into one huge blat fraternity house. Without cages the blats had run of the place resulting in, of course, more blats. At its peak, the population of Blatopolis was 46.

Lying on the shed floor and letting the city of rodents crawl over you was a delight we found visitors generally eschewed. We even fashioned a dinner bell for them. Pulling a string on the outside of the shed clanged together two Folger’s coffee cans hanging inside and if you waited a minute for the congregation to assemble, when you opened the door 46 dirty rats would be lined up at the threshold to greet you, with a few scrubby souls hanging high on the interior of the door itself like hippies on the scaffolding at Woodstock.

With the green shed as the only available gene pool, mutations occurred and we loved these deformed rats more than the others. One of the Institute’s great-grand-blats was born with his head permanently tilted to about 2 o’clock, making him look as if he was always checking to see if that was his name they just called over the intercom. Our favorite was a poor little rat born without the use of his hind legs. He was a happy little guy and seemed to get along fine dragging himself around, though after a few months we noticed the fur had rubbed off his belly. Perversely, we called him “Jim Walker.”

Jim, of course, was the rat we proudly displayed to surprised visitors at the Millstone – rushing into the room to show off Mr. Walker’s scraggly-assed mutant rat belly to the ladies in Mom’s bridge club.

Death was introduced to me by a hamster.

The Millstone was home to many hamsters over the years; so many we had a nickname for the species. The word hamster, when spoken as if you had a cold, was “habster.” We shortened it to “hab.”

The hab I loved the most was Mama Hab. Mama lived in a small cage on my desk, which filled my bedroom with the comforting smell of cedar shavings. It was here she bore six babies that looked like pink kidney beans; and it was here I watched in horror as she ate them. I wasn’t familiar with the species’ natural tendency for infanticide when they feel unsafe and so I was angry with Mama Hab for awhile. After a successful litter, however, I came to forgive her and the little wheel in her cage spun regularly every night for a year or so until one morning I discovered her paws-up.

Using the funeral of JFK as a model, I immediately chose a room in the Millstone where my hamster could lie in state – the quiet of my mother’s Tower Library seemed fit for the rites. To fashion a coffin, I emptied a box of the large wooden kitchen matches and with a little toilet paper serving as bed and pillow, Mama Hab was respectfully displayed for viewing on the ornate desk in the middle of my mother’s oval library.

Though Mom and all five brothers were invited to pay their respects, attendance was low. So I set the burial date back a week, extended the invitation to neighborhood kids, and waited for the lines to form.

With time running out and the crowds somewhat thinner than expected, my agenda shifted from crowd control to odor control. A liberal application of my Dad’s Old Spice would have been the preferred mortuary science, but I was unable to locate the frosted green glass bottle and settled for spraying a half a can of Right Guard antiperspirant onto my ex-hamster. After a few more days of mourning, my mother discovered my above-ground pet cemetery and told me to commit the critter to the elements. Mama Hab was finally buried in the pine grove near the garden with only myself in attendance.

Death came next for our most beloved pet; the family collie, Caesar. But this wasn’t just death – it was murder.

Caesar was part of our family long before I was. He’d been with us since the family lived on the farm, when the oldest boys – Kip, Jeff, and Chris – were toddlers.

He was a beautiful collie and to us looked prettier than Lassie (and she was on
television
). When we moved into the Millstone, Caesar inherited a dog’s kingdom of four acres to find sticks and six boys to throw them. Then came the morning I found Caesar dying on the front lawn. It was long before his time and there were no apparent injuries, but there he lay. By the time the family had all gathered around his fallen regal form, he was gone.

Caesar was no hamster. He was our dog; our guard, our angel, the one you met coming home from school, waiting for you by the mailbox. His sudden death changed everything. JFK’s assassination hadn’t happened yet nor had our parents separated; we’d never felt loss before. All of our little-boy lives had been about addition; new little brothers arriving, Grandpa and Monnie pulling into the driveway bearing Florida oranges, big homes being bought, Christmas following Christmas. And now something was taken. Loss was new to us.

It was just minutes after my father’s graveside pronouncement “Cause of death: unknown” that the rumor began of Mrs. Hartman and her “orange dog food.”

Mrs. Hartman, who lived over the fence to the south of us, had been known to complain about Caesar from time to time. Caesar would dig the occasional hole in her garden. She’d shoo him off and then mention the trespasses to Mom at every opportunity.

Our grief turned to anger and, needing an outlet, we chose her. It seems one of us (today nobody recalls exactly who) remembered seeing Mrs. Hartman “feed Caesar some orange dog food.” Of course this was nonsense and Mom did her best to disabuse us of the notion, but the conspiracy theory took. Mrs. Hartman officially entered the Family Shit List and shot to #1. And though none of the boys ever confronted her with our suspicions, urinating through the fence into her garden became common practice and our passive aggressions continued for some time. Even six years later, whenever Kip’s and Jeff’s rock-and-roll band The Pagans practiced on the porch at the Millstone, we would point the big amplifiers in the direction of Mrs. Hartman’s house, just to rattle the old dog-killer’s china cabinet.