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Jul 25, 2021

61* - Hero or Antihero?

Roger Maris, forever Mr 61*It’s my birthday. Somehow, I’ve managed to reach the grand old age of 61*, which, frankly, I wouldn’t have bet on a year ago.[1] I should be happier about that than I am. I’m not terribly unhappy about that, but I am feeling it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing to catch that bus to oblivion before I see much more of the chaotic, hellish world we “adults” are leaving to our descendants. I shouldn’t be able to look my grandchildren in the eye. “Oh well,” say well-meaning people, “you shouldn’t dwell on it. You’ll only make yourself unhappy.” This only adds anger to my sadness.

What would Nero do? He’d fiddle, but I can’t play the violin.

Before I ran my head into a mental block of granite[2], I was doing my best to “fiddle” while our world burns: literally, fueled by our addiction to cheap gasoline and fatty burgers; and figuratively, by our racial, religious, and political hatred. I fiddled—without a violin—by working on the memoir no one asked for.

Before slamming into that granite, I did manage to regurgitate memories of my first fourteen years. The excerpt below is from a chapter devoted to my middle school years. Posting it here allows me to fiddle with my blog—which is a monument to fiddling—and allows my hypothetical readers to fiddle along with me. It also allows me to pretend my memoir writing wasn’t all for nought.[3] If you, hypothetical reader, find you have even more time to kill, an earlier excerpt is available as The Big Snow.

A young hero

While alone watching something educational on TV—Gilligan’s Island, perhaps, or Bewitched—I noticed an unusual flickering behind the semi-opaque dial used to change channels (this was before remote controls expanded our American butts, if not our minds). Something inside the black-and-white television had sparked and caught fire. If Mary Ann were on screen in her short cutoffs and bare midriff, I wouldn’t have noticed this until a tube blew and killed the picture. But she wasn’t and I did. I needed to snuff the flame, so I unplugged the set and hoped that might do it. It didn’t, and the situation worsened. Smoke appeared and the acrid smell of burning electronics filled the room. What was a 12- or 13-year-old firefighter to do?

Ours was a spindly-legged standalone TV console of modest size, not too heavy for a lightly muscled kid to drag outside, so that’s what I did. I pulled it through our side door, bumped it down two concrete steps and across a rocky patio, and finally to the center of our lawn. There it burned. I may have hosed it down—I don’t remember—but it didn’t burn completely to the ground, though its insides were fried. I was hailed a hero for saving our house. Better yet, we got a new color TV, and Mary Ann looked better than ever!

An old-enough-to-know-better antihero?

Not long after my moment of triumph, before I’d left middle school for sure, I turned from firefighter to accidental arsonist. Until now I’ve kept the story to myself.

Grandpa and Grandma Cagle paid us a visit, probably for the first time since the snowy winter of 1968. This one was during a hot, dry California summer. Grandpa was an occasional smoker then, and like most kids, I was curious about adult pleasures forbidden to adolescents. I should have asked him—away from Mom—to let me try a cigarette. He might have seen an opportunity to teach me a lesson. One or two drags from one of his menthols—he’d have encouraged me to inhale deeply—would have made me sick, and that would be that. But I didn’t ask him. Instead, I waited for an opportune moment, and helped myself to one from an unguarded pack. Immediately I absconded with it and a book of matches on my bike.

Trails crisscrossing the large undeveloped area northeast of and across Happy Valley Road from our neighborhood created a frequent haunt of mine. Young scoundrels used the area to enjoy hidden pleasures: beer cans, mattresses, and dirty magazines littered the area. I never got up to any of that stuff there (and though the discarded magazines promised interesting educational opportunities, I was smart enough to not touch them). It was the perfect place for a young sophisticate to light up! Or so I thought. The deep cover didn’t keep me from shaking with apprehension as I lit the purloined cigarette, and when I heard the sound of approaching voices, I panicked, quickly discarded it, and mounted my bike to flee. Before I could pedal away, I saw the thing still burning in the tinder-dry grass. I had a pretty good idea of what was about to happen, but rather than try to stop it, I fled—pedaling hard for home. When I arrived, I rejoined my family in the backyard with my pulse and mind racing.

Just as I began to calm down, we all heard sirens and the tell-tale sound of a fire engine’s horn. We speculated about the location of the blaze—I probably declined to hazard a guess—and soon saw the smoke. There was talk about the need for rain, always a staple of Shasta County summer conversation, and the fire was quickly forgotten—by everyone except me. I spent days expecting a knock on our door from a local Columbo, who was sure to slowly wear me down with dark hints about evidence and eyewitnesses. I hoped my fingerprints hadn’t been lifted from the discarded matchbook, which the fire somehow missed.

Days later when I supposed the 24/7 stakeout of the crime scene had probably ended, I screwed up my courage to visit it. The burned area wasn’t as big as I feared, and though a few trees were blackened somewhat, only grass had burned. I was unable to find the matchbook—it had either gone up in flames or was in the hands of the FBI, which, as I was well aware, “always got their man.”

  See the related The Big Snow  

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Notes

  1. The baseball fans who make up much of Bachblog’s hypothetical readership recognize that “61*” references Roger Maris, who became a hero/antihero when he had the fortune/misfortune of breaking the Babe’s sacrosanct single-season homerun record in 1961. Because he played in an 162-game season, eight games longer than the Babe’s, an asterisk was often appended to his homerun total. In the 1990s true antiheroes emerged, and Maris was sainted. Posthumously. [^]
  2. For “granite,” read “apathy.” [^]
  3. So, am I done with my quixotic memoir scribbling? I don’t know. At this point it seems possible I will live through another winter. What else will I do? [^]

Jul 25, 2021

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