Playing Hooky

It seemed a mad violence lay all about me in a world from which I was willing to retreat. It was difficult, however, for even at home there was fighting. The relationship between my mother and father had strained to its breaking point. They fought, and if they didn't, there was the smoldering, barely repressed resentment underlying their every word and deed. I was happiest when everyone was gone. I was happiest alone.

Now reading was shaping my internal world. I couldn't find the rich things I read about in the barren landscape about me, but I knew that somewhere beyond the invisible barriers that held me in this mean, hillbilly life was something richer, fuller.  I'd read it. It had to be true.

I took solace in the gray days of winter when things were still. Quiet days alone in the house when I would stay home from school were always the best. I had learned to keep the note my mother wrote on the days she knew I stayed home in order to use it on the days when I skipped.  If the school secretary called, I would just tell my mother I had lost the note. They were never dated.  Skipping was a heart-racing deviance. Both my parents went to work before I left the house, so on those mornings I would get up and dress and wait for them to leave, then I would turn on the T.V. and watch the "Dialing for Dollars" movie with Russ Wheeler who would randomly choose phone numbers from the telephone book and call to see if the person was watching and knew "the count and the amount" that were randomly selected by spinning a large Las Vegas-styled wheel. It was embarrassing, even for a delinquent, for hardly anyone he called was viewing the show. But it was thrilling, too, and intimate, knowing I was watching T.V. with a handful of stay at home housewives when I should have been suffering through my math class. And after the movie there were reruns, "Andy Griffeth" and "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Dick Van Dyke" and "Bewitched" and then "That Girl." After this, there was nothing but soap operas, so I would turn the TV off and steal one of my father's cigarettes and go outside and smoke. I would be hungry then and have to steal food from the back of the pantry shelf so my mother wouldn't notice. The shelves were lined with nothing but Spam and Vienna Sausages and Potted Meat, and even at that age, I knew instinctively that those things were poison, but what could I do? I would make a can of Campbell's Soup and put the faux meat on pieces of white bread and try to scavenge something else from the fridge.  All there was to drink was that hideous Tab sitting next to cans of Metracal, for my mother was on a perpetual diet. Such things, I thought, were the bane of my existence, a phrase I had picked up somewhere recently.

After lunch, I would read through the afternoon until it was time for "The Merv Griffin Show," where I could watch all the Borscht Belt comedians and absorb that great Jewish angst and gain knowledge of an absurd universe, the sharp humor subtly recruiting me into an unspoken conspiracy of subversion.

But all too soon, my parents would come home from work and I would be plunged once again into mundane life, the omnipresent unhappiness and the threat of worse. What would save me, I wondered. And when.