Rationale for Baking Cookies is Chapter 13 from my new serialized novel, The Witch Next Door. I've promised to wrap it up by the end of summer, and we're on schedule.

If you missed part of the story or recently dropped from the sky, you can start with Chapter One by clicking here, then step right along in links at the end of each chapter. Just a quick note: although the book so far may seem to have a kind of randomness, a chronological illogic, it does have a plan. Taking it in order works best. Trust me, not your common sense or intuition.

Prefer to read straight through in a few days? You can find some opportunities with my baker's dozen of finished books, six of them novels, by clicking on my Amazon Author page. Otherwise, come on aboard and read about my Rationale for Baking Cookies. 

Thanks.

“I’d rather be unemployed than eat shit,” I told Roscoe, the scruffy manager of our agency’s gas station/offsite training area. 

“What are you going to do for money? You quit, so you can’t get unemployment. Why not keep the job and look around while you’re still getting paid?”

Roscoe’s concern surprised me. I imagined that he’d be one of those happy to see me exit. In seven years with the agency, I’d raced from boy wonder to irritating outcast. I’d jumped ahead of myself, taking credit for good luck, alienating people, some of them Roscoe’s buddies.

“I’m starting my own business. This place is a dead end for me now, you know, with the new asshole in charge.”

“Think about it,” Roscoe urged.

I had. Too many things to fix and not enough reason to fix them, not seeing yet that the reason they needed fixing was because I either broke or let them be broken.

Why was I getting advice from Roscoe, anyway? Yes, he was a great guy to hang around with, sometimes hilarious, but last year, his chain smoking put him under the knife. Half of his jaw and the tissue around it got cut out, a surgeon excavating a cancerous landscape. He resumed smoking before leaving the hospital. 

“My old lady and her whory daughter are driving me nuts,” he griped as if he read my mind, holding up a lit cigarette between his fingers. “What the fuck else have I got?”

Roscoe’s semi-marriage, the source of some of his funniest stories, had its screws shook loose by his girlfriend’s daughter’s awkwardly evolving womanhood, a hormonal calamity cascading deeper into his universe. 

I thought of Kurt Vonnegut writing that he was, “Committing suicide by cigarette.”

“She’s fourteen going on twenty. We can’t keep her down, and the way she dresses, the boys are all sniffing around. At that age, you remember, all we had on our minds was pussy…”

“Some still do,” I interrupted.

“Yeah, right. Me for one. But, geez, my old lady, if she caught me screwing around, she’d cut my balls off.”

Roscoe’s unbalanced face, the left side hollowed out at the bottom, reduced this possibility to sadness. 

The subject changed, and although I was mostly killing time, released from all responsibilities the day after I handed in my resignation, I walked the block down Leroy to the main building for the agency where I’d traipsed my learning curve from not quite thirty to the horizon of forty. In the past year, misjudgments and inexperience I refused to admit lead to irreversible mistakes, but I learned more here, about myself and others, than everywhere else. Now, I was unwelcome in the building, but my peculiar, unbroken state of employment entitled me to the parking lot.

While I imagined myself as right on track with my plans, fate set me up as a distracted hiker about to be knocked off the trail in a mudslide. Shedding the craggy classrooms of my twenties, I now had a clear plan for myself. 

“Your twenties are your chance to get all the shit out of your system,” I repeated. 

I had plenty of that, but there was more. Twenty, I made my break, burning bridges in a way that left me no way back to the city, Binghamton, where everything before took place or the people I knew there. I built myself pretty much from scratch and discovered I could be an astonishing fuck up but still keep a grip on passion and wonder. I knew what I was supposed to do.

“I was supposed to write,” I said.

Val nodded.

“If not, what good was all that experience? You tumbled up toward thirty with stories to tell.” 

I made a plan. If the shortest distance between two points is straight through, I’d find the least tiring good-paying job in reach. So, a four time high school dropout, who stayed on track for a diploma, finally, because it shielded him from the Vietnam draft, paid a fee for night school in Buffalo.

Adult night school was different because they didn’t assume you were an idiot right out of the gates, a scrambled mess of possibilities who had to be forced by law to sit at wooden desks and listen all day. You volunteered and paid your way. I went back to school to become a stationery engineer, tending high pressure boilers, reading the newspaper and playing cards. 

If ever there was a job that looked easy but paid well, it was shift engineer. Once your shingle got hung, you were obliged to take two clock rounds per day, checking vital instruments and recording their readings — in pre-digital days — on written charts. The other six hours, you were forced to find ways to pass the idle hours creatively. Sometimes, you dialed up your wife or girlfriend, or you might hang around with the guys on the loading dock, swapping stories. In the unlikely event of an emergency, you called the chief and waited for him to pull up his pants and drive in.

I believed I could handle that, and it would leave me time and energy to sit with Bic in hand, writing stories, two hours a day, as prescribed by Henry Miller. 

What I landed instead was the most demanding, confounding work I ever took on, days and weeks marked by duties I never expected to perform, aided only whatever involuntary teachers I could summon to help me through it.

“The thing is, Val, I caked it. A me I knew very little about got in gear, and I caked it. I was the golden boy, the guy who pulled off stuff they didn’t think could be done.”

“And what else…?”

“Okay, what else?”

“And your head got so big,” she said, “nobody else could squeeze in the same room with you. Nobody else measured up to your standards, did they?”

“Alex did,” I reacted, defensively.

“How did that turn out? Where’s that partnership now?”

“In da ditch,” I mimicked. “Who’d imagine a guy as smart as Alex would just spin his wheels…? For decades!”

“So, he didn’t quite cut it either, did he?”

“Stuck in a time warp. Clock’s still ticking, but the hands don’t move.”

I walked back to my car down the quiet, residential street, ten years later, in the detached fragment of a near death experience, scanning scenes, friends, opponents, students and teachers, before feeling my shoes hit the sidewalk again, made richer but now on my own, no bosses to confuse with head games, no novices to mentor and no more head-turning feats to impress the stalled and wary. 

No surprise, I’d driven off the cliff myself.

Actors talk about searching for a character inside themselves when they go to work on a new play or a movie. Paul Sorvino almost dumped his role in Goodfellas because he didn’t believe he could scare up the coldblooded character needed for it. Then, one day, he looked hard in the mirror and saw the creature waiting. He wrestled with his soul over it for months after the movie was finished. Who the hell wanted a passionless killer, a machine, willing to mobilize on call inside?

After all these years, it’s uncanny that people are blind to the devils and angels mingling as their souls. I mean, what’s the point of virtue if it’s involuntary? Are we good because that’s all that’s in our nature?

Until we’re not?

As Sorvino found, Hitlers, Stalins, and the Donner Party daily attend the happy hour, listening to music and conversations in our heads. Who gets called up next? Devil or angel, as Bobby Vee’s song went in the Sixties? All those people ready to slip into the costume your friends, family and neighbors point to and call “you…?” You’d probably rather be blind than look at the freaks, malicious actors and loiterers gamboling around in there.

It my twenties, it first hit me that we’re all actors, taking on parts in front of an authentic self. If the capacity didn’t exist in us, we wouldn’t sit still admiring plays. It knocked me out to see how artfully skilled performers slipped in and out of characters without losing a center. In my thirties, I watched myself try on masks. It was interesting, being someone new for a while without changing clothes.

Oh, sure, I reprised some roles. I got to be the bad husband and bad boyfriend again, and the reckless lover. I played head games with my bosses and risked mutilating the best of what I gained. But I also played rainmaker for the first time, showering dozens of people with money they never expected to earn. And I learned to be something I’d never been, member of a functioning family, an unexpected gift that kept giving. 

Thirty, I shut my eyes, plugged my nose and jumped in the pool. I used everything I knew about fixing buildings to massage two structural cripples through Buffalo winters, polishing them up with a crew thrown together from parts retrieved from a human scrap heap. Alone in the middle of a night when a pump failed, I transformed the pipes behind walls in one building into an extended, temporary low pressure boiler. I pulled it off so seamlessly nobody else noticed. Then, piece by piece, I assembled a team of discards and gave them jobs, sixty rejects earning living wages by the time I was done. As it happened, my corner of the business generated so much cash that the rest of the place had to lose ten-thousand dollars a month, just to remain nonprofit, a feat achieved with impressive reliability. If I’d only had the presence of mind to keep my mouth shut about it… 

On the day Roscoe tried to talk me into staying, I walked away from the mess. It still worked for everyone else. Sixty broken people had jobs. An incompetent by design nonprofit agency continued riding their backs for survival. But it was a mess because I left it without a single friend remaining. I polluted my own legacy.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles, I guess. So, what do you do?

Not a tough question. You start baking new cookies. 


David Stone
Find all my books on my Amazon Author Page

<---Previous: Ends of Things

Ends of Things is Chapter Twelve from serialized novel, the Witch Next Door. 

The story will come to a conclusion before summer does. Then, after some patching, fixing and polishing, it will go between soft covers on Amazon and into the ebook marketplace. 

If you are new here or may have missed something, you jump back in time to the first chapter by clicking here and following the links to all the ones that follow. If you like to just grab hold of something already done and waiting for you to dig in, you can find my baker's dozen of finished books on my Amazon Author Page.

The Iowa Tests of Basic Skills bumped us off the routine. We got to do nothing but sit for multiple choice tests for two days, a serious breach of the mandatory monotony that, if you played it right, give you some extra minutes for daydreaming. I loved looking out the window more than anything but baseball then, even with the coalition of teachers, counselors and other miscellaneous adults marshaling forces to suffocate my bad habit.

“Fill in the circle with the correct answer,” Mrs. Pruitt instructed. “Clearly,” she added.

She walked up and down the rows of desks, passing out corresponding question and answer sheets, dangerous tools that, nowadays, send legions of parents into spasms of outrage as if they were poison arrows and jagged edges. She asked one of the girls to distribute sharpened pencils. Risky shit, but how could be know in the dark ages of 1960?

In the Sixties, we took tests that told us where we ranked, and if good enough, we moved up a level. Sometimes, we get held back. I did. The turbid landslide of anti-intellectualism that would discredit education wasn’t on anyone’s radar yet. We needed more TV to get it lumping in a downhill direction. For now, smart was still good.

In an adolescent world built on uncanny paradoxes, I was a great test taker, although my report cards, except in the months spent repeating 6A, were a mess of Fs, Ds and the occasional beam of sunlight C. F3s were the worst, the 3 being an assessment of the kind of effort you put into earning your grade. F3s stamped you with not knowing anything and, at the same time, not giving a shit about it. F1, meaning nitwit, was worse, but only one teacher was disgusted enough to slap one of those on me. My internal argument was that I deserved A3s all around. I knew the stuff. I passed the tests, but a high grade without misery and coerced commitment, that is, paying rapt attention in class and spending time at home doing useless homework, isn’t conceivable where careers are based on the idea that, “I know everything, and you’re an empty can I’m assigned to fill up.”

Then, the aces out at the University of Iowa cut me loose, even though nobody but me seemed to notice, but not yet.

We knocked off our two days of tests. I was thirteen, an eighth grader, when I took the Iowa tests the first time, a loner with lousy hygiene, few friends, barely passing grades and a family irritated by the loser bumbling around their home. I didn’t take the tests seriously, only enough to fill in the right answers, rushing at the end if time was running out, relying heavily on intuition. Fill in the circle with the first answer making its way into your head, that was my successful technique. If you knew it, you knew it. If you didn’t, why fart around? Move on.

Finished, we all returned to the routines of public school, guys like me doing as little as we could get away with, bored most of the time, without an alternative, keenly aware of the age, sixteen, when quitting school was legal. My oldest brother had sailed off with the Navy on the first day he was old enough. I could see myself trickling off in that direction, if I could just stand a few more years of public school.

When the test scores came back from Iowa and were handed out in homeroom, I looked and blinked twice. Not one section grade was lower than 94. My composite, all skills taken into account, was 99. That meant, we were told, that 99% of all the kids in America scored lower than I did. Looking back, the surprise is that nobody stepped up to congratulate me. I was the only 99 in the school. In retrospect, the shock is that nobody took me aside to try trying to turn my future in another direction, leaving me to be a genius all by myself, brains growing like weeds in an uncut field. But I was used to being ignored whenever possible, so it didn’t strike me as odd at the time.

My family? My brothers seemed discouraged by it. Either I didn’t deserve to be a 99 or, more likely, it was a mistake. As far as I knew, Dad never noticed at all. Family set points remained stable.

“Well,” as my now ex-friend Roger would say, “fuck ‘em.”

Or on the sunny side, as Ira Gershwin wrote, “They can’t take that away from me.” 

But this was knowledge that changed the character I observed every day from one born to lose at everything but baseball to a rebel unwilling to accept what everyone else said was the truth.

Steve Jobs liked to remind everyone that we connect the dots of explanation in reverse. You get clarity from looking back after excitement, confusion, wonder and frustration cut the trail forward — if you chose to cut your own, that is, and not step lightly along the well-worn path everyone around you discards their souls in.

Within months of being shown that I was a genius waiting to happen, I started writing my first novel, freehand on the lined sheets Dad paid for at the start of the school, sheets that otherwise languished unused. That was the next dot, a big one, my theme being a boy my age’s romance with a black girl, a topic that sprung out of my head without warning or visible antecedent, like a twenty year cicada. I didn’t even have a black friend yet in nearly all white East Junior, let alone a girlfriend. 

Fourteen years old, an intuitive radical in the works.

“I don’t know what happens when people die,” Jackson Browne wrote. 

But I do. 

It’s like looking behind you and seeing a building has fallen, a part of the city lost. Others stand, but this one is gone. You can’t go back and fix the plumbing. If the skeleton sagged, nothing now can prop it up. It’s gone, one more vacant lot in the city behind you.

It’s not the first or, maybe, even the most significant or interesting, but it held its place, it played its role.

One day, I glanced back, curious, looking for something else, the look of a building I used to visit and how it sat on the skyline, how it was being kept up, and saw that the building called “Val” was now a pile of rubble, bleached by sun, rinsed over by fifteen years of wind and rain.

David Stone
Find all my books on my Amazon Author Page
<---Previous Juvenile Delinquent

With Juvenile Delinquent, the eleventh chapter from my serialized novel, The Witch Next Door, I am guaranteeing that I will finish the book, although you will still have to wait for it. Every chapter should be posted by the end of summer. Then, I'll do a final dust, patch and fix to the manuscript before publishing it as a single volume.

Tip of the hat in appreciation to Roger K. Miller, a writer of exceptional skill with which I share a hometown, Binghamton, New York. Roger's offhand comment about the old days of novels serialized in periodicals got me thinking. I suggest that anyone who admires great writing should click here to check out Roger's Amazon Author Page.

If you're new here or just a horse of a different color, you can start this story from Chapter One by clicking here.
From there, you can follow the links from chapter to chapter.

Marion gone, our peculiar stage was set for change. A swing back in the direction of normal made its awkward surge up from the wings.

Beverly, younger than any of our previous live-ins with big breasts, fully rounded hips, red hair and blushing cheeks, filled Marion’s place within a week. Another thing setting her apart from Roadster, Marion and Clara was that she showed no evidence of being a refugee from the psychiatric frontier. She was the single mother of a four year old daughter with whom she shared the alleged master bedroom off the kitchen.

Of course, we knew next to nothing about where Dad found Beverly or why he let a sixth child to join the crew. Desperate as well as practical, he probably recruited the first reasonable prospect from a newspaper ad, figuring we’d sort the baggage out on the fly. His responsibility for five kids allowed no gaps, no days off, never the luxury of mulling things over.

The era of Beverly and her Brat Daughter was short-lived. Four boys, all rowdy and raw, teenagers now, discolored the pleasures of looking after our motherless little sister as well as one of her own. 

What I remember about the day she left was a conference behind closed doors in the alleged master bedroom. She confronted Dad before he had a chance to take off the tie that hung from his neck all day. 

Hungry and restless, we waited, trying to hear words, maybe a complete sentence leaking under the door, for the mystery to be solved. Dad finally swung open the door, controlled rage on his face while Beverly packed a suitcase fully opened on the bed behind him. It looked like she’d barely paused to explain. I can’t remember my special contributions, but Beverly cited my oldest brother and me as impossible to handle. I can’t tell you more because my memory eraser was working overtime in those days.

Dad’s anger and our punishment were soon compacted and put away as history, but Beverly’s legacy changed our lives, springing us from a kind of vault, at least a little, from our uncommon isolation. Because she had a child of her own, Beverly persuaded Dad to put in a telephone, a tool he hadn’t let unsettle domestic tranquility since Ma Bell forced him to pay up for Mom’s long distance gabbing or strategizing or whatever it was she’d done on her way out. 

The telephone changed our lives.

Without a housekeeper assigned to screening calls, a voice from the past, now dragged down by a southern drawl, found its way back into our lives. 

“How you doin’, darlin’? I sure missed you,” were the first words Mom said to me when I got my turn on the line, last of course.

How can I write this without seeming maudlin? Straight up: this was the first time I felt that anyone loved me, even a little, in five years. I was twelve years old, and intermittent showers ended  one hell of a drought.




Dad looked over his shoulder, anger simmering, when he followed Beverly out to the car, her luggage in one hand, her daughter on the other. Later, he’d vent his rage, once again, with his thick, black leather belt, but change was coming anyway. The unintended seeds of revolution leaked out behind our last nanny. 

With our ages spread from ten to sixteen by now, Dad decided to spare himself another search. We were old enough to fend for ourselves from the time he backed his car out of the garage in the morning to when he coasted down the driveway in the early evening. He seldom left for anything else. 

Less important housekeeping ended with Beverly, but the essentials we picked up between us. My sister cooked with the assistance of my brothers, all of us taking turns with dirty dishes. Beds were left unmade, and laundry got hauled by Dad to the laundromat across from the Pig Stand on Fairview Street. We shared responsibilities, but there was little balance. Fourth son with a bag of resentment hauled around like an invisible knapsack, I refused to do almost anything unless coerced. By now, anger became so routine, it was invisible.

When no adequate emotional fabric causes people living under the same roof to blend and stitch together, individuals emerge roughened by vagaries, irregularities exposed, unprotected, traits exaggerated. Childhood shreds like duck down, the making of a human accelerates. Adolescence is like trying on every possibility, yoking yourself temporarily to the ones that fit, then flipping off to the next. Mostly, you step out. In families left adrift, you take giant steps without guides. You risk.

It was a paradoxical time when I discovered both Jesus and disgust. I escaped my father’s rath one Sunday evening by exiting through a second floor window and dropping down off the front porch. The paradox? I hit the ground in time to jump into Mr. Johnson’s station wagon. My sister and the Johnson clan were waiting to be taken to a church meeting. We sought comfort in Jesus’s embrace. And then some.

For the short time it lasted, my passion for church, the feelings I had listening to the preacher roar about our savior, cushioned my fall with a place to belong. That’s what church does for most people. Not so many buy the whole narrative, but the gravity of spiritual zeal gets you like a full moon. For me, it had the additional appeal of being the one place where I wasn’t the loser.

To be honest, I also had a crush on a girl there. She was memorable only for that since I never sucked up the courage to talk to her. But it was also where I met the Miller brothers, a pair of guys prowling along as close to the edge as I was.

So many people went to church then, it wasn't odd to find rebellious outsiders like Roger and Mark slouching in pews. Maybe the gravity had them too, or maybe fate got bored and threw us together to get some action going. 

“I ain’t going home. My father wants to kill me,” I told Roger, the older brother, as we walked out of Fairview Methodist into the evening chill.

“What did you do?”

Parents were always right, then, the question natural.

“The usual. I got mad at my brothers and yelled at them, but it’s always my fault. When we get in fights, I always get blamed because I’m the youngest.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Roger advised.

“Yeah, fuck ‘em,” Mark agreed.

Thick brown hair curled in a defiant wave falling down his forehead, Roger looked like the prototype bad boy. Mark was more tame, but he smirked a lot, like he knew something that you didn’t.

“Why don’t you come and stay with us?” Roger suggested. “ We’ve got a place. Fuck ‘em.”

Across from the church’s dirt parking lot, fast emptying, the three of us stood under a light with our thumbs out. Three’s a threatening number. It took a while, but we finally caught a ride out past Kirkwood, almost into Pennsylvania. The Millers lived in a brown shingled house, two stories, on a road losing itself in the tangle of rounded foothills and stream cut valleys.

“Mom’s still up,” Mark noticed.

Roger said, “You can stay in the trailer.”

A house trailer was parked on the edge of their front yard, unlocked and convenient, dream space, furnished like a normal home made up of one long room.

“You’ll be okay,” Roger promised. “Nobody uses the place for now, but if anybody asks, you ran away and you broke in because you were cold. Me and Mark, we don’t know who you are. You dig?”

“I dig.”

With my only alternative being hitching all the way back home and getting the hell beat out of me for my efforts, I accepted their offer, huddling up against the cold under light covers, tired enough to sleep through earthquakes and tornadoes. 

The earliest slice of morning edged through the nearest small, rectangular window. I pulled back a curtain. Winter swept its long arm back, tossing an inch of fresh snow on the ground overnight. Mark and Roger’s father had parked his semi-trailer rig in the muddy driveway on the other side of their yard. Everything was quiet with snow, but the rig seemed to give off a kind of steam.

It was cold in the trailer. Sleep hid me from it, but now I was shivering. Nothing else to do, I slipped as invisibly as possible out into the snow-silenced morning and walked downhill to the main road between Binghamton and Pennsylvania. It was a school day, after all. I might as well go.

I didn’t know what time it was, but the countryside around me had barely awakened. Standing by the roadside as mist backfilled the night, you could see spring, even in the snow. The ground cover incomplete, patches of grass broke the surface. A roadside gutter trickled along unhindered by ice. For a kid as alone as you can be, I felt weirdly happy. Independence juices joy. 

One ride got me all the way into the city, and as I walked up Broad Street toward Robinson, kids were already hopping down the steps of a yellow school bus outside East Junior. Blue sky had begun to crack through the overcast.

I’d have been on one of those buses, half-assed awake, if I hadn’t declared my independence. It found my friend Wally and corralled him into our usual practice of walking around the parameter of the school repeatedly until it was time to migrate inside for homeroom. We weren’t the only ones participating in this ritual. The less restless, the more confident kids gathered instead in tight groups we curled past.

Wally was tall and skinny and had a chin straight out of the Wicked Witch of the West. We were each other’s only good friend at school. Wally had, by far, the best baseball card collection I’d ever seen, and knowing I was an addict, he’d let me finger through the player poses and statistics over the summer. 

Telling him the story of how I’d run away from home and stayed overnight in the Miller brothers’ trailer, I continued with the rest, the ramshackle spree I’d gone on with them the weekend before. 

It had been one of those days in the mix between winter and spring when a warm south wind encourages with a promise of pushing the gray and cold away. Roger, Mark and I wandered back toward home, walking the tracks of the Erie-Lackawanna right of way paralleling the highway, mostly hidden from Upper Court Street beneath an embankment.

We tried to balance on a rail or stride evenly from one tie to the next.

“Bet you can’t break that with one shot,” Mark challenged.

I’d been telling them what a great pitcher I was in Little League.

Enough loose rocks for a million boyhoods firmed up the track bed. I grabbed one and fired it into the tall, round signal. Glass shattered and spilled onto the ground. 

“See?” I said.

“You broke the railroad signals?” Wally asked. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“We wanted to see if we could derail a train.”

Roger, Mark and I found spikes laying loose along the way and began strategically laying them across the rails. In my head, a theatrical vision of a big diesel flying off the rails into the muddy flats by the river ran in a loop. Tiring of that and with no train coming to test our experiment, we broke a couple more signals as we walked.

Eventually, the tracks curled along a broad field that the Susquehanna flooded every spring.

“There was that house down next to the river,” I told Wally, “the one with the high foundation to keep it above the floods…”

“Yeah.”

“They don’t lock the door.”

Not so strange. My family didn’t lock our doors either.

The Miller brothers and I climbed up the steps and went inside. 

“Stupid not to lock the door,” Roger said, then smirked, “so I didn’t have to break down the fucker.”

There wasn’t much to see, but the thrill of breaking in vibrated. Roger took coins from a coffee can, filled his pocket and, then, found a bottle of some kind of liquor. 

“Have some,” he said, handing it to me after taking the first gulp.

“Jesus! Tastes like liquified garbage! God. How the fuck do they drink this stuff?”

 “Did you get drunk…?” Wally wanted to know.

“No. I stopped right there. It was the worst tasting stuff I ever swallowed.”

By now, we were a few blocks from school and playing hooky by default.

Skipping school was a novel idea and, like running away from home, exhilarating.

“After a while, we should hitchhike out to my house and get some food. I’m starving. I haven’t had anything.”

I wasn’t a fully realized runaway yet.

Around the time it dawned on Wally and me that, without school, we didn't have any other way to knock down the day, around ten o’clock, a city cop rounded us up and took us to the main station downtown to sort out who we were.

Wally was older and bigger than me, so I told the cops that he forced me to skip school. Wally returned the favor by sharing the story of my railway antics with the Miller brothers.

I also told them that I ran away because my father beat me, putting Dad in the miserable position of having to defend himself in front of me and the cops on his lunch break. Lucky for me, he hadn’t heard about the railroad yet.

That all came out later in Family Court when I sat between him and his lawyer, the one who colluded with him to strip Mom of her rights, while the Miller boys testified under oath about how I’d led them, Svengali-like, into crime. Their tattooed truck driver father was on hand, too, and took a moment to explain how hard it was, him being on the road so much, to keep his boys from “falling in with characters like that one,” nodding unpleasantly at me.

Just what I needed, I thought, two more brothers to pin me into a corner. Roger and Mark were in clean-cut mode, but I understood that. Their father was buying. Mine wasn’t.

Dad believed he’d already figured out my motives.

“Your mother put you up to it, didn’t she?”

The question was rhetorical. I didn’t answer because he was crazy. Red hot nuts were in his eyes.

“See,” Val reminded me. “It was your mother, not you, he looked at.”

“You know, it changed later, but when she first started calling us, she didn’t have a bad word to say about him. She barely mentioned him, never put me or anyone else up to anything. Fucking nut job.”

By the time the Family Court case played out, my only three friends were finished, and I was on probation, a juvenile delinquent on the fast track toward state prison. I’d have skidded right in too, if not presented with objective proof that I was a genius.

David Stone
Find all my completed books on my Amazon Author Page

<---Previous Rent-A-Mom
Next---> Ends of Things

Rent-A-Mom is the tenth chapter from my new novel, The Witch Next Door. Inspired by an idea dropped injudiciously on Facebook by my friend, fellow writer and Binghamton, New York, native, Roger K. Miller.

Roger was thinking aloud about how writers like Charles Dickens once published in weekly installments in periodicals. The idea stuck, if for no other reason, because it harnessed me with some discipline and, for the first time ever, relieved me of isolation of treading all the way from cover to cover alone.

If this idea doesn't appeal to you, blame Roger or, better, yet find and buy one of his terrific books, which you can find by clicking here.  You can also find my bakers dozen and their ebook siblings, all finished and waiting to help you pass the summer, by clicking here.

We're past the halfway point now, and all the cautions are dropped. I guarantee you that I will finish this book by the end of summer. So, jump aboard and enjoy. If you'd like to start from the beginning and follow the links, chapter to chapter, feel free to start here.

Dad’s adventure with Ma Bell is family legend, a true story we repeated, adding our own memories, until we all understood it the same way. That is, Dad was a stubborn old bird who was not going to let Mom get away with anything, even in absentia, even in reverse, if he had a way to block her.

“I don’t know if he cared about the money, but I think he decided to fight paying the bills just because she ran them up,” my brother mused, decades down the road.

In the weeks before our funky Florida caravan, Mom ran up long distance telephone bills like a foreign diplomat, ones she could never pay, launching a practice she kept up until plunging rates took the risk out of it.

“Who do you think she was calling?”

The code of silence meant the details were vaulted, even while the battle went public.

“I don’t know, but it was a lot, and Dad wasn’t going to pay for it unless they forced him to.”

Dad, who one of my brothers later anointed “the old bull,” a nickname with such visceral resonance it stuck, refused to pay the long distance bills until the telephone company sued in court. His lawyer probably cost more than the charges, but there we were, all five of us like a hayseed royal court, out of school for the one day trial.

We know that memory is a capricious partner, sometimes a friend, others an adversary. With a kid who’s been damaged, memory struggles to play its part in the duet between what is and what can be retained. I remember all of two things from that day in court.

I remember a beautiful new belt Dad bought me to wear with spruced up clothes. I loved that belt, plastic and rainbow colored. Come to think about it, it might have been a girl’s belt, but it was the prettiest thing I owned. It stood out sweetly in a gray world.

The other thing I remember is weird. A juror in the pool, during questioning, admitted that she knew Dad slightly from attending the same Methodist church. Remembering that, among all the losses that year, seems as likely as being struck by lightning and finding out it doesn’t hurt.

I turned to Val.

“Are you taking me through this for a reason? It’s old stuff. We don’t even make jokes about it anymore.”

“Your family made a lot of jokes, didn’t they?”

“Two of my brothers were pretty funny. They set a wise ass tone around the house.”

“You know that was armor, right?” 

“Of course,” I said, “too some extent. Humor often comes from pain, but they were also cool observers who found life pretty funny, objectively, sometimes.”

“You, too?”

“More absurd than funny for me. If I watch closely and really honestly, most people seem lost, feeling around in a dark they can’t admit. The funny part drains out.”

“Can I play doctor for a minute?” Val asked with a small laugh.

“I’d rather you played nurse.”

“No, you wouldn’t. We went over that. What I wanted to say is that, as your psychiatrist…” We both laughed here. “As your amateur psychiatrist, I thought I should point out that, when you do that, look closely I mean, what you’re doing is calling up yourself.”

“I am my own darkness, Val?”

“Got a good grip on the handles there, have you? Or are you feeling your way along too?”

“Not so much anymore, I don’t think.”

“Hm.” She looked up. “Well, the jokes, especially when you were kids, were armor. You went through a pretty strange home life, which explains a lot, but that’s not what did the most damage. Your injuries came from the thirty years war your mother and father fought. The kept at each other from a distance. No pitched battles, but your father stuck with his heroic silence and your mother had her ragged anger. Neither one gave up.”

“I don’t agree with that, Val. Once the ridiculous hope that she’d come back and we’d be normal again was gone, it was like, who cares? It was between them to let it gnaw away at their new lives.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

This was a little annoying.

“Okay, what did we get so wrong, keeping in mind that you never met any of us but me?”

“Are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“Their long battle showed that they had more passion for each other than they had for any of you. Neglect’s as damaging, maybe more, as anything else. How does a mother leave five little kids behind without fighting like crazy? How does a father do whatever he can to prevent their reuniting — including refusing even to have a telephone in the house? Just to beat the other…”

“Oh, shit.”

“Let’s put it in your words — they fucked their children over, just to sink daggers into each other.”

After Grandma bundled her things together and returned to the farm, a series of mostly live-in housekeepers followed Dad in the back door. Just as he did at the start of every school year, piling us in the car for a shopping trip to Philadelphia Sales, Binghamton’s super savings store out in the First Ward on Clinton Street, Dad scraped the bottom of the barrel for bargain live-in housekeepers. With few coins to spare while providing for five rambunctious, hungry kids, childcare on the cheap was probably his only choice.

Teenage sisters living nearby came first, doing lightweight duty. When we tumbled off the school bus, one of them was waiting. In summer, they fixed us peanut butter and jelly or bologna sandwiches for lunch, loaded and unloaded baskets of laundry and swept the bare wood floors where Mom once encouraged us to take running slides to buff up fresh wax. The sisters gave way to a neighborhood eccentric named Roadster. Image the giddy parents putting their heads together to come up with that name. Maybe they hoped she would grow up to become a vehicle. Everything about Roadster was forgettable, except that she once flushed an unsuccessful cake down our toilet while my brothers watched in awe.

Within a year, Dad realized full time help was needed. My sister was just five, my oldest brother eleven. A live-in housekeeper had to be recruited. Speculation continues about where he found these women in an era long before you could find almost anything, including much you wish you couldn’t, on Craig’s List. His methods were never revealed, a consistent pattern of needless secrecy imposed. Evidence suggests there was not then a waiting pool of retired soccer moms or polished European nannies from which to cherry pick. He scrambled contacts to find who he could.

When Dad drove off alone one Sunday, he didn’t prepare us for the stranger who came to live in our home as a kind of loopy, just the basics pseudo-mom. Our rambunctious rattling around in the place was probably beginning to thrust sharp bumps onto its outer surfaces. Mom, it seems, reveled in the coltish behavior of young boys and did little to discourage it. Into a cramped milieu, a larger than life misfit was inserted.

Marion, an enthusiastic, overweight brunette, was lively, loud and pretty much nuts. She lacked the mechanism that comes standard in most human models, gracing us with the power to stop talking and let our minds race on in silence, as appropriate. She never shut up and refused to be limited to topics in which she had anything worthwhile to say. She annoyed and confused us.

One of her outlets, when the reservoir feeding her talking threatened to overflow, was attacking the upright piano that sat against the back wall or our so-called living room, next to our tiny bathroom. The only reason we had a piano, as far as I can guess, is that it came with the house and was considered too big to move. None of us ever took a lesson. But Marion seized it like a virtuoso possessed with a satanic demand to play. She seemed unfortunately to never have taken a lesson.

A large, exceptionally pale woman, she parked her ample bottom on the bench and began hammering the keys without self-consciousness or inhibition, both of which were unnecessary exclusions because her bellowing of My Wild Irish Rose was plenty loud enough to block all other sounds from interfering. Her singing was nearly a cappella by default.

“Where did he get her? She was in and out of the loony bin, right?”

We were reminiscing, many years after those singular years.

“That’s what we heard,” my brother said. “She was supposed to be a cousin or something of one of the aunts and in and out the psychiatric center. For depression or something like that though, not as an ax murderer.”

“Maybe a piano murderer? A music killer?”

“Who knows, though? She certainly wasn’t right there on the cusp of normal.”

Marion departed abruptly, without details of course, and Dad’s next choice differed from her as if he were trying to neutralize a looming crazy epidemic within our borders. His preference shifted from bombast to a curious remoteness.

We never got to know Clara well, which seemed fine with her, but who could tell? Her arrival brought with it some unintended comedy.

How far Dad traveled to fetch Clara and her things we never knew, of course. By the time he returned, it was late enough on Sunday, a school night, that we’d switched off the TV and gone to bed. Two of my brothers slept in separated bunkbeds in one room upstairs, my other brother and I on a salvaged army cot across the hall. We all faked sleep when Dad brought our next nanny noisily upstairs on a tour. She had to hit the ground running in the morning.

They paused in the darkened threshold of my brothers’ room.

“The beds are a little rough,” Dad confided with a rare mix of pride and apology, “but the boys don’t mind.”

“Were we asked?” one brother wryly reminisced.

The old bunkbeds, hauled over from our old house out on Route 11, the place with the witch next door, really were held together in places with baling wire, decades before the cliche, the multi-purpose precursor of duct tape. My recollection is that some lavishly applied glue also kept certain wooden ornaments from falling off as the next boy ran by.

“Mom must’ve let us beat the living shit out of the place.”

My brother, the only one blessed with a forgiving nature, shrugged.

“She was a child herself, most of that time. What was she, twenty-five with five kids to take care of already?”

Our first unsupervised contact with Clara was memorable. My brothers and I, like cows coming home, wandered back from a morning playing baseball in the state fields, our summer ritual, three games every day with meal breaks. Clara waited on the cement block landing outside our back porch, launch pad for kick-the-can on summer nights.

“You boys rehyaheet?” Clara called out.

One astute brother turned toward the rest of us after a few seconds and translated, “Ready to eat.”

“How did you get that?”

“My stomach said it must be true.”

All that summer, we learned to be rehyaheet at the same time every day.

At least for us, Clara was distant and unknowable, strange in her way but without an unlikable quality of any kind. She left her mark not with noise or intrusion but with harmless habits that left their historic mark, unlike anyone else’s.

Like all our live-in housekeepers, Clara joined us at the table for dinner. All seven of us ate in the kitchen, refrigerator and stove reachable without getting up. Rowdy as we inevitably were, powering down milk and staples competitively, Clara’s deep silences stood out as pools of concentrated calm, but there was one other thing.

Clara stared for minutes at a time at unexceptional objects, the penetration of her gaze suggesting an effort to decode its quantum substructure. Soon, we began watching her like entertainment, which seemed to have no effect. Her gaze broke only after she produced a dry sucking sound at the side of her mouth, sounding like spfit. Twice. Then, we all resumed eating.

Living alone in that small house with us must have been hard on our housekeepers, since none stayed for long, so it was a surprise when Marion returned to replace Clara. 

Marion seemed more settled, this time around. Instead of piano bashing, she demonstrated a skill for making a kind of harmonica by wrapping waxed paper around a comb and blowing on it to make music. She was happier too because she was in love. Her unfortunate choice, however, was Dad. Her second tour of duty, my guess is, she saw as encouragement or at least a second chance.

Did Dad stray into her embrace? It seemed beyond the realm of possibility, but most of his life was a mystery to us, the bulk spent outside our observation. The opportunity certainly existed. How we knew, I don’t know, probably from Marion’s uncensored babbling, but there was no doubt that she hoped to rope the old man in.

Old man to us, that is. To the outside world, Dad was a catch, a handsome man with a steady job and no wife to interfere. There were the five brats to take into account, though. Doubtless, we darkened his marital prospects.

Unsettling was the idea of Marion as stepmom. It resonated more as joke than possibility. We weren’t disappointed when the match came to a head on Marion’s birthday. 

Dad came home from work to find Marion not leaning over the stove,  spoon in hand, fixing dinner for the gang. She’d left the house earlier, something she seldom did. Her not having food ready wasn’t just rare, it was a breach, but as she explained when she finally wobbled home, it was her birthday. She deserved to celebrate.

Marion was what we called tipsy then, lightly, but not sloppily intoxicated, a chaotic quality for a person who woke each day with a screw or two lose already. Her condition brought out an interesting quality in Dad. The wilder things got around him, the more unmovable he grew. From upstairs, we heard the confrontation, Marion demanding to know if he was in love with her and planned to marry.

His answers crisp and controlled, Dad let her drain herself of all paranoia and delusion, sitting in his favorite chair, the one next to the radiator, undoubtedly smoking a cigarette or two. When Marion lost her enthusiasm for a fight she’d never win, Dad calmly told her she would have to go, her tenure short this time and heartbreaking.

I don’t know what became of Marion, but in the Fifties we were less tolerant and more afraid of mental illness. The unstable, erratic or depressed had few places to turn. If there was no room in the family’s home or the demands for care too high, you got handed over to the state. 

Whole lives were spent behind walls in grinding Dickensian conditions by people who committed the crime of being strange, if not dangerous. Marion was guilty of that misdemeanor.

David Stone
Find all my books on my Amazon Author Page.


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