to Mr. Parsons’s homeroom and sat there at my desk. I opened up my backpack and got out the book we would be reading, The Story of a Bad Boy, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. This is the story of a bad boy, it began. Well, not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy; and I ought to know, for I am, or rather I was, that boy myself.…
But let us begin at the beginning.
* * *
My father’s father had died in 1940, when my dad was only twelve and my grandfather fifty-two. His father, my great-grandfather, had died at age fifty. All the Boylan sons had lost their fathers early.
Just as I would lose my own father in a few years, just as my own sons, decades later, would lose theirs, although in a slightly different manner.
I had been enrolled that fall in a weekend course in which I assembled a gasoline-powered model airplane in an elementary school classroom. On Saturday mornings I was dropped off at the school in Springfield, the next town over, and in I went, walking down the hallways of a school where I knew no one. Along with my fellow inmates I glued a frame together from a balsa kit, then stretched silk over the frame, coated the silk with dope, fitted in the propeller, laid in the delicate ailerons. We were assigned desks and used the same ones each weekend. But of course these desks were the property of other students who spent the week there, people whom I would never know. I was given the desk of a girl whose name was Denise. Her name was written out on a large piece of lined paper that was affixed to the front of the desk. She kept a pair of barrettes in her desk, along with her other stuff—a plastic bag of mini Kleenex, her crayons, all of her schoolbooks. I sanded the elements of my balsa-wood plane surrounded by these traces of the life of some invisible girl.
My mother had enrolled me in the airplane-glue colloquium because she was worried about me, and not without good reason. It was her theory that getting me out of the house might make me more like the sons of her friends. They played sports, these boys, joined Little League, had friends. Unlike me, they didn’t build Gemini capsules in the corner of their room and explore imaginary planets with a dalmatian as copilot. They did not spend long hours inside of a box marked ROBOTRON 9000. To be sure, I was extremely entertaining, in short bursts, but my only real interest outside of the space program was carnivorous plants. I kept a broken aquarium full of Venus flytraps in my room, which I fed roast beef and scrapple. I’d had the seahorses, too, but they all died.
One weekend, slightly stoned on airplane dope, I reached into Denise’s desk. I held her little plastic yellow barrettes in my fingers. I looked around the room. All around me were boys wacked out on glue, making progress. My hands fell upon Denise’s crayons.
Slowly, my hands completely out of sight, I removed the crayons from the box. With malice aforethought, I snapped each one in half. I couldn’t see them, but I imagined them in her desk, the red and purple and the burnt umber, each one ruined. I sat there stunned by the thing I had done and pictured this Denise coming into school and finding her crayons broken, her eyes filling with tears at the random injustice of the world. I wasn’t sorry.
* * *
“All right, Playboy,” I said to the dalmatian. “It’s time for you and me to get into the box.”
The dog knew what that meant.
My father had done his best. He’d bought me a baseball glove, which I tended with neat’s-foot oil and placed beneath my pillow as I slept. I liked the way the glove smelled, with its promise of summer. But I was more interested in smelling the glove than in catching any actual baseballs with it.
The box was in the basement. A few months earlier, it had contained a new refrigerator. Now it was decorated with a Magic Marker, with drawings of magnetic tape reels and blinking lights. A sign bore the legend ROBOTRON 9000 THE ANSER MACHINE.
The dog and I climbed into the box, booted up the system.
My parents and sister entered the house. Next to the Anser Machine was an inflatable punching clown. “Boing,” I suggested.