So It Goes, part 6

Had we been twins, my brother and I would have fought in our mother's womb to see who would emerge first. As it was, I was older by a year and a half. He was fire; I was ice. He woke up angry and, though the anger faded, it lurked just behind his taciturn, scowling visage and seemed ready to explode at any moment. It was as though someone did a search around the universe, found the one individual who was different from me in every possible way, and made him my brother.

He had been away, working on some oil fields in Nevada. Suddenly he reappeared--bigger, stronger, brooding ever more deeply. Heavy steps made the stairs shake. He never seemed to remove his Red Wing work boots, but slept with them on. The room became filled with clothing piled in heaps. A slip of orange paper protruded from one of my desk drawers. It was my Driver's License, which I had not seen for months. "Great!" I smiled. Then I began to wonder.

Downstairs, Marcus was sitting in the easy chair, plucking his guitar. "Did you put this back in my drawer?" I stood behind the chair, afraid to face him.

"Yeah," he said, still strumming, not looking up. "It was under your bed."

"Oh, well, thanks." I went upstairs and stared at it. It had been deeply folded, as though someone wanted to make it as small as possible. A few grains of sand clung to the folds.

I stomped downstairs heavily but passed him and went into the kitchen. I pretended to pour myself a glass of water. "Did you take it?" I asked finally.

"What would I want it for?" The plucking went on, uninterrupted.

As I stomped back upstairs I thought about the eighteen moving violations he had on his license already. Then I noticed the blob of ABC gum he had left on my desk. I threw it against the wall on his side of the room. I picked up his guitar case and flung it across the room. "Son of a bitch!" I yelled. "What did he come home for anyway? Sits around here all day and eats. Look at this mess!"

By the time our mother came home I had the stereo up loud. "I'll find some socks for you," I heard her say to him. He had been sitting downstairs for more than an hour without socks. She came up stairs and opened my dresser drawer. Only then did she notice me.

"That's it, get more socks for him, out of my clothes drawer," I growled. "You're just as bad as he is."

"What's the matter with him?" she said to my brother, who had come upstairs as well.

"I don't know. I find his Driver's License and he bitches at me for it."

I turned down my friend Chip, who called wanting to go to a movie. The year Star Wars came out, we had seen 75 movies. I tried to avoid my Dad, but it was difficult to avoid anyone in that tiny house.

"Want to go to Zayre's?" he asked.

"No, thanks."

I wanted to be in my head, where I believed I could still communicate with the Rootweavers. I continued to send thoughts to my new friend Farkus. But no words came back to me. I knew I couldn't possibly tell anyone else about what I had seen beneath the earth. No one would believe it. I wanted to prepare for school, for college, for my life away from this town, and for the column I would write that week. But that night, once again, I found myself unable to sleep. My body was as restless as my spirit. I was no longer here in this house and town where I grew up, but in some new in between place, in the bit of prairie squeezed between the town and the industrial park, destined for relocation.

[Click image to read A Tourist's Guide to Des Plaines]

So It Goes

part 5

In the night the suburban streets that were so quiet during the day became crowded and noisy. The voices of the lonely people called out to one another, expressing their innermost longings: "Why did you leave me?", "How will I pay the mortgage?", and "Won't someone make me a club sandwich?"

The pavement was hot beneath my bare feet. The trees were on fire. I wanted to get away from the world where I was alone, trapped in this body, unable to turn off these thoughts. I stumbled past the hedges, feeling all the sadness of the human realm crowding in on me. I walked to the last bit of prairie, at the edge of the industrial park.

I stood quietly, hardly breathing. The first bit of salmon-colored light from the rising sun crept closer and closer to the hole. There was a shivering. I could feel my heart pound as I heard a rustling: a real perceptable noise, a shape emerging from the darkness. I saw a hand, a hand covered with dirt and with a pale palm, holding a great crystal, a crystal about the size of a softball. When the light came the crystal seem to fill with the light and glow orange. When the crystal had been brightly lit, the hand disappeared.

I did not think. I followed, diving down deep into the hole, closing my eyes, holding my breath. It was more spacious inside than I would have guessed. I hardly had to stoop.

I pursued the light of the crystal, but I was not at all quiet. I stumbled, I fell. The earth was polished, hard, and did not transfer dirt onto you. It was almost like pavement. Was this where the sewers were? No, everything seemed to have been molded by hand, with no harsh corners, only smooth curves that did not hurt when you brushed against them.

I got up and could no longer see the light. I peered into the pitch black dark, suddenly without any bearings or direction, blind. Just as suddenly, the light appeared and two eyes were peering up at me. I gasped, I didn't say anything. The eyes looked me up and down, the light shone on me, head to toe. The pale hand gestured: come along.

I followed. I heard a voice. I did not hear the voice with my ears, though: it seemed to resound directly within my head. "What have you brought?"

"Brought?" I said aloud. "Who is that?" No response. I thought to myself: Is this fellow talking to me? Then the thought came: "Of course I'm talking to you. What have you brought us?"

I reached into the pockets of my jeans. Luckily there was a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, half empty. "Gum," I said inside my thoughts.

"Good," said the voice. "What kind: Chiclets? Spearmint? Bazooka Joe?" When I thought the words "Juicy Fruit," I heard the response: "Excellent!" and laughter resounded inside my skull. I had not heard laughter since the last sitcom I had watched on TV: a rerun of All in the Family. Then laughter sounded and echoed inside my head, seeming to come from multiple directions. Shapes came forth into the orange light: I had discovered the home of the Rootweavers.

[Click image for part one]

[Click here for part two]

So It Goes

Part 4

The drugstore delivery boy is a mixture of Mercury and Sherlock Holmes for a suburban town. When you go out on deliveries, you get the chance to keenly observe your fellow townspeople.

From the front stoop, you might hear a child crying from an earache in an unseen bedroom. At another home, piles of newspapers and magazines and the tinny sound of old 78 big band dance music. At another, the pink silk nightgown of the housewife who smiled at you and looked you right in the eye, leaving you unable to speak or move, and smelling, after the door had closed, the faint scent of lavender.

When you returned from your journeys you were greeted by the huge metal sign, rusting at the edges, painted orange, black, and white, that hung over the street, buzzing. Its neon tubes lit up the word Rexall to guide weary husbands. A glass display window twenty feet long lined the sidewalk. I sometimes got to help Mrs. Aulert, a sweet and perpetually cheerful lady who was the mother of my childhood friend Mike, create seasonal displays. She happily arranged elves and Santa Claus for Christmas, bunnies for Easter, and so on. The huge expanse of sidewalk was something we stock clerks had to maintain religiously lest someone slip and sue the store’s owner, Frank, for negligence. The pavement was my continual nemesis. It had to be salted and shoveled so the walkway was bare each winter day. I was required to sweep it clean of leaves in the fall, and to clear away those maple tree "helicopter" seeds, which seemed to cling tenaciously to the concrete, each spring.

Once you were done you had time to hide in the storage area and do your homework. If there was no homework, you could stand by the cash register and look out over the landscape—the auto repair shop across the street, the real estate office, the Italian beef eatery.

If this had been a small town, and if this street had been called Main Street, the Rexall would have been the place to congregate. There would have been a soda fountain and benches outside for people to loaf—a term you never hear any more because no one knows how to do it correctly. The sound of voices, and gossip, and laughter from bad jokes would have been heard outside. People would have asked, “What’s going on?” or “What’s the good word?” and stayed to smoke a cigar or chew a stick of Wrigley's Spearmint.

But Oakton Street was four lanes of fast-moving traffic. People stood on the corner of Oakton and White only to wait for the bus. When the door opened with a hiss and the exhaust belched as the big vehicle lumbered away, they were gone without a word. Women talked only to ask what cosmetics were on sale. Men might have inquired about how the Cubs were doing. But they were inevitably losing, so there was no need to ask. People always seemed to be in a hurry. They accelerated madly at the green light. It seemed they were either late or worried about being late. One young man in a Bears jacket would run in and ask the way to the expressway. He was not moving quickly enough already; he wanted to move even faster. A man in a suit might poke his head in the door--no more than his head--and begin to ask, "What time is--?" but then see the big clock on the wall behind the cash register, and say "Never mind" and disappear before I could even open my mouth.

I took notes as I stood and watched, and jotted down observations and thoughts for my columns. I noticed that shoppers seemed to want to scour the aisles for petroleum jelly or first aid cream or suntan lotion without having to ask where it was. They handed over their money with a curt "Hi." I counted the change, then looked through the coins for any rare ones to add to my coin collection at home. Once or twice, I found an Indian head penny or a Buffalo nickel or a Mercury dime. That was the high point of the evening.

Ernie, the pharmicist, would stroll the aisles with nothing to do, a Camel with half an inch of ash dangling at the end perpetually hanging from his mouth. “Price controls,” he would say. “What is Ford thinking? Roosevelt tried that and look where it got us. Nothing but debt.” He looked at me as though he expected a response, as though I was familiar with the Roosevelt administration.

But Mrs. Aulert would say something harmless—“Oh, you wouldn’t want to go back to those days—“ and he would be appeased and shuffle back to the prescription area, stoop-shouldered and muttering, surrounding himself with the controlled substances we were not allowed to touch.

At 10 o’clock we would close up, and I would get on my bike and ride the six blocks or so through the silent streets with a chorus of crickets for company. I looked out of the corner of my eye for the gnomes. They were never visible, though the traces of their work were everywhere.