The Story of a Bad Boy

The imp and his father

In my long life’s spare time—that is, when I wasn’t making mischief—I have studied to be a scholar of American literature, and so I begin this episode with a literary-historical reflection. Though Thomas Bailey Aldrich was our first novelist to popularize the "bad" boy, publishing  about 1870, he had appeared much earlier in our literature. The truth is that he is almost as old as our country. His premier portrayal came from the god-father of the Plymouth puritans, William Bradford. On December 5, 1620, Bradford wrote in his diary:

"The fifth day [of December, 1620] we, through God's mercy, escaped a great danger by the foolishness of a boy, one of ...Billington's sons, who, in his father's absence, had got gunpowder, and had shot off a piece or two, and made squibs; but there being a fowling-piece charged in his  father's cabin, shot her off in the cabin; there being a little barrel of [gun] powder half full, scattered in and about the cabin, the fire being within four foot of the bed between the decks, and many flints and iron things about the cabin, and many people about the fire; and yet, by God's mercy, no harm done."

That is from Mourt's Relation (1620-1621), but was probably written by William Bradford. A good-sized leap takes us to the year 1870, in which Aldrich published “The Story of a Bad Boy and established “the bad boy’s book” as a sub-genre of American Literature. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer came in 1876 followed by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, and we were on our way. 

Now for my small part in this play, which will end with the story of my 6th grade math teacher Johnnie Neer.

I usually do not answer when people ask about my childhood rebelliousness, but this time I think the public--my readers!-- deserve a response. I have various theories, none of which is incompatible with the others. My rebellion goes too back too far in my young psyche for me to know the answer. My mother said I was a fat healthy-happy baby, a thing pleasing to all mothers, and there are photos that prove her right. Then the legend begins. 

Set your  Global Positioning System to Lake County in northern California. Here’s the first version of the story, which I tell in the first person but paraphrased from Mama.  At the this early point let me notify the reader that most of the early information in the essay below--I mean the matter preceding my arrival at the age of accountability-- comes from my mother, in her lifetime a grandmother four times over and long since resting quietly in her grave. 

*    *    *    *    

 

This was in Kelseyville, CA, 1948. I was vomiting and had diarrhea from a "bug". They took me to the hospital. The doctor saw right away that I had dehydration and that it had to be turned around. My parents sat up all night with me feeding me teaspoons of salt solution to make me thirsty so I would drink.  

This was sometime shortly before my second birthday. The birthday itself came as we were on our way back to OK. After his rectal operation, Daddy had taken a six months' leave of absence from truck driving and they had to go back. Grandpa and Grandma Pounds went with them. There is a photograph of Grandpa holding me by the car, and Daddy says you can still see the circles around my eyes.  I was a "very sick boy."  

They speak of this episode and their nursing me with the justifiable pride of parents who have saved their child's life.

I shifted typeface there to set off a document I wrote years ago. What’s wrong with this tale as it came down to me is that dehydration is the name of a symptom, not a disease or illness. Consequently, I have never felt I understood what my illness was. For all I know, it could have been a touch of polio, rampaging and killing children as it was in those years.

Something happened however because, again according to my mother, thereafter I stopped eating. I no longer enjoyed food and became a very picky eater. I would eat only meat and potatoes and drink a glass of milk. No fruit or vegetables and please no fried eggs. Mama tried everything she could think of. She’d make breakfast and then not let me leave the table until I had eaten my portion. I quickly learned to ask for my eggs fried hard. Then when she turned her back I’d slip them into my pocket, and later take them outside and feed them to the dog. Yes, I had learned deceit. When adults make up impossible rules, what can the child do except break them and cover his deceptions with lies?

Another episode. Can’t remember if this one took place in Kelseyville or Chandler, but probably the former as I was between 8-10 year old. Mama takes me to a doctor and tells him I won’t eat. He has me strip, sit naked on his black foam-rubber-topped table, and gives me a complete medical exam. He uses a little rubber hammer to test my knee reflexes. Boing!  to my knee. Good reflexes. Finally he tells Mama, “Mrs. Pounds, I don’t find anything wrong with the boy. He’ll eat when he gets hungry.” 

In retrospect I find these words of the doc pretty wise. I did get hungry—after I joined the army in 1968: Long days of strenuous exercises, three full meals a day and no snacks, so if I was picky I’d just go hungry. More important, perhaps, was the fact that I didn’t have to eat with my parents. Remember how thin I was in that 1955 pic of me and Daddy standing beside his milk truck. I put on twenty-five pounds in the two months of basic training, all muscle. And after that I’ve alway had a good appetite and enjoyed eating. But before that, between the ages of two and twenty-two, I looked like a refugee from a concentration camp.

Once I began serious literary study in graduate school, my introspective impulse wanted a name for my personality quirk. After reading Poe, I decided that I was possessed by an Imp of the Perverse. You remember, the impulse that makes his narrators do the very thing that is contrary to their best interests. It might have been about this time that I wrote an undistinguished poem called:

Perversity

When I am hungry I don’t eat. Food

is left out for me. I act like

I don’t see.

There are those I meet I might talk to.

We pass on the street. I look down.

I don’t speak.

At age eight in Kelsey Creek

I wanted to drown. I hated that angry man

that yanked me out.

I am like that. People are too.

With this difference: what I hate,

that I do. 

I made some jumps in my first account. Let me go a bit more slowly. I leaped from the doctor in Kelseyville to my graduate study of Poe. A lot happened in between.

On the bad boy note, I have always (perhaps even now) held it as a matter of pride that I was paddled (whipped, dear reader) every year of school until I got to be a senior in high school. It started off in the first grade (we had no kindergarten) with Mrs. Armstrong, whom the adults thought must be a splendid teacher because she had a puppet theater and maybe twice a year would give the kids a little  Punch and Judy show. She was an old lady who had also taught my mother in the first grade. But you know what? Personally I don’t think she liked children at all. She certainly demonstrated a strange animosity in my case. We sat at tables, three kids to a side, six to a table. I liked the girl who sat across from me (he name might have been Joan) and we would play handsies inside the space for books under the table. One time in the midst of such play, she hurt her finger (caught it on a loose board, I think) and started to cry. Mrs. Armstrong immediately seized me and gave me a paddling, though I swear to you that I had done nothing wrong, certainly nothing to make Joan cry. But Mrs. Armstrong didn’t ask me a thing. She gave me a paddling, and with it my first taste of raw injustice administered by top-down authority. It is from that moment that I date my rebellion against arbitrary authority. 

Segue to the fourth grade in Kelseyville, when I am nine.

It was a rainy day, and a bunch of us had remained in the classroom during lunch time, unsupervised. I devised an attractive game of throwing darts. In those halcyon days in California before the Reaganite repression brought cutbacks to education, students got free classroom goods: yellow no. 3 pencils, writing pads, and other desk paraphernalia.  I opened the supply closet and provided us all with new pencils which had virgin erasers. Then we used the handy-dandy children’s scissors to clip the heads off the pins. The pins could them be inserted butt first into the eraser, making perfect darts. We were throwing them at the cork boards to make them stick, like a regular game of darts. It seemed like a lot of good clean fun. Eventually we probably would have started throwing them at each other, just to up the ante, “but by God's mercy, no harm done.” We hadn’t gotten to the perilous poinnt yet when Mrs. Brown arrived back from her lunch break. For some reason she apprehended me as the chief mischief maker and sent me to the principal’s office, where Mr. Petey wielded an instrument I’d never encountered before known as a ferrule. About four feet long and limber, the diameter of a pencil, it was painted a garish blue and purple in spiraling stripes like a masochist’s barber pole. Mr. Petey was an athletic man, he aimed to hurt, and he did, but all it all disappeared when I returned to my classmates on the playfield and found myself a hero.

It was after that episode that Mrs. Brown called my mother and asked her to come to school for a conference. The upshot of the confab was that Mrs. Brown was to write a note to my mother every day after school reporting on my behavior that day, which I was to take home to my parents. From the adults’ point of view, it was a promising system, but they forgot that they could not rely on the messenger. If I got a bad report on any one day, I would throw it away before I got home and tell my mother that I had lost it or that Mrs. Brown had forgotten to write anything. On that basis, the system withered and died of inertia just as in Marxist theory the state is supposed to wither away under socialism. 

Now let me say a word about my friends of those years in the 3rd to 5th grades in Kelseyville. For prime evidence, I offer a photo, taken in 1955.

5th grade class, Kelseyville CA, taught by Mrs. Angie Brown

 

This shows us with the social stratification that sets in so early in the public school system, the good, studious, middle-class kids versus the others. Of course I am among the Others, four of us standing immediately under the watchful eye of the teacher Mrs. Angie Brown. These were my friends: two Indian boys, Lester and Henry, outsiders like myself; and at the end of the row, Ray Warfield, considered trailer trash but my mentor in the paths of transgression. We were as sly and hard to see as bear cubs in the woods. Ray and I dug a cave into the side of a ditched embankment, concealed the roof under a scatter of brush, and would sneak into it to smoke our cigarettes. I can’t tell what happened to Lester and Henry in later life, because as Indians they didn’t leave many tracks. Or, to drop the metaphor, as members of a brown-skinned ethnic minority, they faded away into the evening sun, leaving no tracks (no paper trail). 

Ray was different. We both went to the Holy War in Vietnam, but like a good bear cub I kept my head down, whereas he liked the killing. After re-upping for four tours of duty in Nam (a total of five), he became so notorious as a killer of the Cong that in 1969 he got his face on the cover of Guns magazine, him and his M-14. A year later he’d joined the Marine

Raymond Warfield pictured, March 1969

Corps and was sent back to Quantico with half his face shot away. The medicos agreed that with his half-face he’d have trouble “fitting in” in Virginia society, so they put him on Desipramine and Norpramin to aid his depression. Ray upped the ante on the pills and said good-bye to the world.

I insert Ray’s story above as a way of keeping checks and balances. Worse things could have happened to me, but did not. True, my early years were like a prison camp, where the chains were Blake’s “mind-forged manacles,” which he understood as teachings of the christian church which approved of small boys being apprenticed as chimney sweeps with their growth providentially stunted so they would’t get too big to fit the chimneys. Whereas it was my good fortune to escape like a bear cub through the underbrush, having learned one of the arts of survival.

Consequently when Mrs. Brown sent me to Mr. Pettey to get a whipping after the hullabaloo of dart throwing, it made little impression on me. I was already a hardened case. As I have said, I remember only the gaudy barber-pole striping of the principle’s ferrule.  It must have hurt because he was an athletic man and his rod was designed to inflict pain, but I was already long inured. It was worth the expense of pain to be treated as a hero at the next recess. 

And so we beat on, “boats against the current,” as Scott Fitzgerald says, until I arrived at the green fields that open to view when a boy gets out of the public school system. But first there was my senior year of high school, my first year without a whipping though with assorted trips to the principal’s office.

In that year, however, the principal was a man named William Burr who was my hunting and fishing buddy, and when I got sent to his office for discipline, he would just talk to me and tell me not to torment the teachers. The reason for this permissiveness wasn’t actually friendship for me so much as a recognition that my two best friends’ parents controlled the best fishing ponds and hunting lands anywhere near Chandler. My friends were Joe Sam Vassar and Arthur Goble, who was my second cousin. Joe Sam’s dad was a prominent attorney and sat on the School Board. Arthur’s dad owned a thousand acres of fine pasture land where we could hunt and with ponds where we could fish. Joe Sam, Arthur, and I in our high school years were so inseparable we were known as the three musketeers. That’s why Mr. Burr overlooked my sins. 

I would be unfair to close this account without mentioning my 6th grade math teacher, Mr. Johny Neer, who to this day I count as the finest teacher I ever had. In that year and the one before, my friends were country kids of the Ray Warfield caliber. At noon recess we went down to the hollow below the school and smoked (I’d learned to smoke from Ray) where no teacher ever trod. None of us ever studied or made a grade above “C”. Mr. Neer was indirectly kin to my mother (married to a cousin of hers), so he knew my parents. One day he showed up where Daddy was working and had a little talk with him about Wayne’s poor performance in school. 

Johhny: “You know, Arch, Wayne could do better in school if he’d just study a little.”

Archie: “I know, Johnny, but we can’t get him to study.”

Johhnny: "I think I know how."

Archie: "How?"

Johnny: "Pay him. Give him a dollar for every ‘A' he brings home on his report card."

So that’s how the deal was dealt, marking a turning point in my life. Johnny Neer taught math, and math quickly became my favorite subject--and not because of dollars. It was because Mr. Neer payed attention to me. It was that simple, but I assure you it was my Damascus Road. He was the first teacher who ever paid attention to me—except for the paddlers’ transient afflictions. Mr. Neer used a paddle too, but that made no difference. I was a hungry puppy and he fed me with tidbits of attention. That made me love him. That made the difference.

If we’d stayed longer in Kelseyville, I don’t know how I would have fared under Lloyd Larson, a coach kind of strong-armed teacher, but we lived in Lake County only a few weeks after the sixth grade term began before moving back to Oklahoma. He would have been my first male teacher. As it was the first male was Mr. Neer, of whom I have just spoken. Public school teachers like to remark of a colleague under scrutiny that he or she was “strict but fair”—words they very reasonably intend to denote approval. I suppose all my teachers after Mrs. Armstrong could receive that seal, but in my case it was not enough—at least as the matter now appears to me. Maybe all kids need discipline and fairness, me too surely, but I also needed affection, which before Mr. Neer I hadn’t gotten from a teacher. Mr. Neer looked happy when I could always answer his math questions, and pleasing him gave me pleasure. 

Johnnie Neer, East Side Junior High School

I think it was after this that he talked to Daddy and the dollar-for-an-“A” system started. Between our four-year junior high and high school, we were all given an IQ test. I cannot explain this but somewhere I had acquired an aptitude for taking tests of the kind the state and its Washington DC rulers constructed. We students were never told the results of the IQ tests, but from teachers’ remarks carelessly dropped over the years I suspect I outscored the studious straight-A students. So that’s when Mr. Neer went to talk to Daddy. I note how this was done. The teacher goes to the parent, not the converse. And they talked man-to-man, with all that phrase connotes, as compared to woman-to-woman, a phrase that has little or no currency. Except maybe nowadays when we’ve all become feminists. 

Gentle readers, had you been a school teacher and returned after lunch to find your students throwing homemade darts and all bedlam broken loose, what would you have done? Sent the chief perpetrator out for a paddling? But all good teachers know that to resort to physical punishment is to admit their own failure.

Tokyo, 13 Feb 2024

Imp of the Perverse

Wayne