Meanwhile

I can't photograph this hillbilly holiday for a lot of reasons. There will be no visual recording of it on my part. I may be sorry one day, but so it goes.


Meanwhile, the band was going well. Wayne did nothing but live music day and night. He was two years older than I and had a younger brother who also played in the band sometimes, I think at his parents insistence. Going to Wayne's house was weird for me on just about every account. For instance, I got a ride home with his father one time. He was one of those white collar dad's I've written about before, not one of the thick, big-boned fathers in my neighborhood who nobody wanted to rile, but a man with a small neck and wrists and a sort of weak face and glasses. He wore white shirts with ties and said very little. Weirder for me was the car he drove, a Mercedes Benz. There were only three car makers in my neighborhood, and the boys would argue endlessly over the benefits of owning a Ford or Chevy or Chrysler. I guess my own father went out on a limb when he bought a Rambler from the American Motors Company, but then again, he bought an Edsel one time, too. I guess that is where I get it. But these cars were all made in the United States. I'd never seen a word like Benz before. On our way home, Wayne's father had to stop for gas, but it wasn't gas, it was diesel. He had to pull up to a pump on the side of the station where trucks went to fill up his German car. It smelled awful, I thought, when he hit the gas and we pulled away with a terrible metallic ticking that sounded like bad tappets. I think I might have been a little afraid that he was a secret spy for the Nazis like the fellow and his wife who left papers in pumpkins we had just learned about in our Americanism class. That guy wore horn-rimmed glasses and looked weak, too.

Wayne's house was in a better neighborhood. Not much, but some. The first time I went over, Wayne and his brother were still in bed. His mother told me to come in, that it was time for Wayne to get up. She sat at a kitchen counter in her bathrobe, her hair a mess, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and looking the way my mother did when she was sick. She asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. No adult I knew would ask a kid such a thing. Then she started screaming at the top of her lungs, "Wayne, get up, one of your friends is here." Then, in a lower, gravelly voice, "Go get him up. He won't get up."

I went into Wayne's bedroom. He lay there heavy, eyes closed. I'd never seen a room like his before. The walls were painted a dark color, sort of purple, and there were music posters all over the walls. "Hey, Wayne," I said. He groaned. I'd never seen a kid get up like this before. He got up like an adult on the weekends, slowly, with complaint. Finally, we went back into the kitchen where his mother gave him coffee with a lot of milk and two pieces of toast. I went all to pieces when Wayne reached over and got a cigarette. He smoked, of course, but I'd never seen a kid smoke in front of his parents. I'd heard of the twin cities of evil when I went to church, but I hadn't really believed in them. Wayne lit up. God knows what I must have looked like.

They coughed and talked awhile like boyfriend and girlfriend it seemed to me more than mother and child. But I learned that both Wayne and his brother were adopted, and I could never shake the feeling that being an adopted son was not quite legitimate. It was like being a son with an asterisk by your name. It was as creepy to me as Roger Maris's record breaking home run.

Wayne's mother pulled out a thick paper catalog like the Sears' I had seen at my aunt's house, but this was something different. It was a Speigal's. The name was like Benz to me, foreign. His mother told him to pick out some clothes, and Wayne began going through a section that I'd never seen in a Sears catalog, boy's clothing like the Beatles with red bell bottom pants and shirts with puffy sleeves. And it was the middle of the year--the school year, I mean. The boys I knew got clothes once, just before the school year started, and then maybe a few at Christmas. Wayne was getting clothing at a random time, out of season. There was no rhyme to any of this for me.

What I remember most now was Wayne's mother taking her "medicine" and coming to in a little while. She was a skinny woman and it was the age of diet pills. Later on, Wayne would have us all take them. But I never liked the damn things and would fake it and throw them away.

That morning, however, was a portal to all sorts of evil demons. I would be tested.