Joe Cottonwood

SUBURBIA

I was a nice boy from the suburbs. In high school my best friend was named John. We were good students, near the top of our class.

At night we stole signs. It became a ritual for us. I borrowed my father's Chevy; John swiped his mother's whiskey. We cruised, grabbed a sign, cruised some more. We grabbed so many that we ran out of places to hide them. We gave them to our classmates: ONE WAY for the scholar, SPEED LIMIT for the slow learner, NO TRESPASSING for the shy one, YIELD for the nice girl, DO NOT ENTER for the virgin, FOR SALE for the bad girl, ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES PROHIBITED for the football captain. We became connoisseurs. We aimed for the special prize: PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON GRAVES from the military cemetery, or TRY US! WE'RE NOT EXPENSIVE - WE JUST LOOK THAT WAY! from a motel, or SHRIVER from the driveway of Sargent Shriver, the director of the Peace Corps who lived a few miles from us in a wealthier part of the suburbs. The Shrivers had a horse that kept jumping the fence around their yard and trampling the neighbors' gardens. We figured we were striking a blow for the common man by stealing their sign.

John and I came from one car families (worse yet, one old car with chipped paint, big tailfins, many dents), and we had to mow lawns and shovel snow for pocket money, while it seemed that all the other kids had their own cars and a fat weekly allowance. It brought us closer, feeling poor.

Our sign stealing days ended the night we tried to chop down the Coppertone ad. We were hacking away at this mammoth billboard with that picture of a dog pulling down the little girl's bathing suit and exposing her precious white fanny. I forget what we were planning to do with it. A police car pulled up, and we were too drunk to run. It was quite a scene at the station when our parents came down. My dad was confused. He had no idea what he was supposed to do. My mother was embarrassed - for herself, not for me. John's dad was outraged. He was shoving John around like a kid trying to start a fight. John's mother, a semi-alcoholic, thought the whole evening was simply hilarious. The police were annoyed. There were no charges. We promised never to do it again, and agreed to drop by for a few chats with the "youth counselor."

The youth counselor turned out to be EMIT GODWIN, PROBATION OFFICER according to the black lettering on the frosted glass of the office door (which, I confess, we briefly considered stealing). Mr. Godwin was a nice guy, an old man who was slowly losing his mind. He'd already lost his hair. He gave us a couple of half-assed lectures which among other things revealed to us that we were Double Arrow Buddies. You see, some friendships are mostly one way. Mr. Godwin diagramed a one-way friendship on the blackboard:

In this case A needs the friendship of B. A makes all the moves. B likes A, but if A stopped making most of the moves, B would drift away. Now sometimes you get a friendship like C and D:

Here C needs the friendship of D, just like A needed B. But D also needs the friendship of C, and so they are Double Arrow Buddies.

Smirk. It became a private joke: "Well John, I wouldn't do this for just anybody, but since you're my Double Arrow Buddy. . ."

Poor Mr. Godwin. When he retired (I think they pushed him out), we sent a card signed with a double arrow. But I think he was right about one thing: our sign stealing - our "petty vandalism" as he called it, and of course that's what it really was - our petty vandalism was motivated not by want or need (who needs signs?) and not by resentment (well, there was a little resentment), but mainly we were motivated by friendship. It was something we could do together. "And Friendship," Mr. Godwin said, "and I mean Friendship with a capital F, is a noble motivation indeed - and a rare one."

Besides the night we were arrested and the day Kennedy was shot, the only other excitement in high school was Miss Putts. She was a sweet old lady with a kind face and striking white hair. She taught twelfth grade English. We called her Putt-Putt Putts because she drove a little Morris Minor that sounded like a toy.

John and I had both been burned in English. We'd always liked to read, but suddenly in eleventh grade we were supposed to study the books - not just read them and remember the plot and the names of the characters but also analyze them, recognize symbols and themes. Suddenly books became puzzles to solve, and plots became moral theses. We hated it. We barely passed. Then in twelfth grade with Miss Putts I somehow couldn't take it seriously any more. I started making fun of the work. I found a cigarette to be a death symbol, and telephone poles were crosses for Christ to bear, and pencils were sex symbols and on and on. John picked it up, and soon we were finding symbols in toenails and punctuation marks. Putt-Putt loved it. English became our favorite class. We couldn't believe our success. "I detect a note of irreverence," Miss Putts would say if we laid it on a bit too heavy, but as long as we sounded vaguely reasonable she'd beam with approval. Once when I compared drinking a glass of water with a symbolic attempt to drown oneself, she said, "Willy, are you making fun of me?" And I said no. I wasn't making fun of her. I liked her. It was the subject that was ridiculous.

One day Miss Putts bought a gun and drove to her sister's house. Her sister was dying of cancer, hopelessly suffering. Putt-Putt shot her twice in the head, then drove to the parking lot of a shopping center where she wrote a grammatically perfect note in elegant script, and then right there in the front seat of the Morris Minor between the K mart and the A&P, she put the gun to her heart.

We were stunned. Teachers don't do that sort of thing, especially English teachers, especially sweet old ladies. We analyzed the suicide note:

. . . could not bear to see any more suffering . . .

"Bear," John said. " pun on 'bare.' Baring the truth. Bare as her ass." We were drinking bad whiskey in John's basement, trying desperately to be witty and smug, studying the note as it was quoted in the newspaper.

My sister faced a certain death. It was only a question of time . . .

"My sister," I said. "Like 'my brother.' Meaning we are all sisters and brothers in the Family of Man. Facing certain death. Only a question of time. If time is a question, what is the answer?"

John made a face. "I'm sick of this bullshit."

"Me too."

We never played the English game again. We sent flowers to Miss Putts' funeral, signing the card with a double arrow.

After we went away to college we never saw each other. We didn't even phone or write letters. Whatever had held us together in high school - being smartasses, for example - didn't apply any more, and to be friends in college we'd have to start all over. I guess neither of us wanted to make the effort. Anyway, there were geographical problems. John went to Yale and then to medical school in St. Louis. I went to a small midwestern college where I was initiated into the pleasures of hemp, which grew wild near the campus. Unfortunately these were still the Dark Ages, and my Good Citizen roommate reported me to the dean. I was dismissed. Soon I was drafted. After boot camp I drove a bulldozer in Vietnam until one night a sergeant asked me if I wanted to turn two hundred bucks. I would be given a pass. I would drive a truck to Saigon and back. One night's work. Two hundred American dollars. I went. I got stopped by some MPs. The truck was full of black market cigarettes. I spent six months in a sweltering stockade. Sleeping in a bunk below me was Cro-Magnon, a man who'd killed ten American soldiers, two of them after he'd been put in the stockade. I was a bit nervous. Once I saw Cro-Magnon walk into a wall by mistake. He demanded an apology. The wall refused. Cro-Magnon swore at the wall, calling it every name in the Army vocabulary. The wall ignored him. Finally he hit the wall. He punched it again and again. The guards had to carry him away. I slept lightly, knowing he was down there. The only amusement in the stockade was racing cockroaches. We each had our pet roach which we kept in a jar and fed with our own bread. We pampered our bugs as long as they ran for us. If one balked, though - even if it was a star runner - if it balked just once, we had the law of the camp: If you don't run, you don't live. We'd stomp the son of a bitch right there on the starting line. I've thought about that law. I think it says a lot.

After six months they let me out with a dishonorable discharge. I'd entered the Army less than two years before, so I felt like I'd put one over on Uncle Sam - I'd gotten out four months early. My father said he couldn't pull any strings, but there must've been one thin piece of twine because he got me a job washing test tubes and cleaning rat cages. Home was unbearable. My parents tried - after all they were liberals - but I guess I'd simply outgrown the whole scene. I saw an index card on a bulletin board asking for riders to help with the driving to San Francisco. I went. Being a skilled and experienced technician, I soon found a job in San Francisco - washing test tubes and cleaning rat cages. I had a room in the Fillmore District. At that time San Francisco was in the forefront of a chemical revolution, and I joined the peasants who were storming the Bastille. At the same time I was spending every spare moment at work watching how they operated their little computer, which was next door to the rat room. It was easy. Soon I talked my way into operating, and doubled my salary. After a few months they installed a bigger computer, and I was promoted to operate it. I'd moved in with a painter named Melinda who was pretty fond of amphetamines, and soon I was fond of them, too. I talked my way into operating a 360/​65, which at that time was probably the biggest machine in the city. I had a flair for the work. I was also zooming on speed. One day Melinda went out for some wine and never came back. A few days later I dropped acid and walked through a plate glass window. I decided to cool it. When my wounds had healed I took a bus to Boston. I found a job operating a 360/​50 for an insurance company. I didn't cool it. I was an out and out speed freak, skinny and shaking. I lived next to a nice couple named Jim and Mary - nice, but terrible judges of character. One day Mary said a friend of theirs wanted to buy some hash. I told them I didn't deal, but I could get some and sell it at cost. Their friend was no friend. It was a setup. My father flew up to Boston and told me he'd help if I agreed to go to this place in the mountains where I could be "cured." If not, I could rot in jail. Naturally I agreed. His lawyer beat the rap - illegal entrapment - and off I went to the mountains. It was a nice old resort in the Appalachians that used to treat tuberculosis before penicillin came along. Now it used the same treatment - clean air and cold nights - for drug addicts. The sign over the driveway said MUSHROOM MOUNTAIN SANITARIUM. I lived in a big white house on a hill surrounded by pine trees. At night I slept under an open window covered by heavy wool blankets. Ever since, I've always loved the smell of wool. I used to lie in bed and count the shooting stars and listen to the owls and the rustle of the night.

One of the other patients was Erica. She was only fifteen. She wasn't an addict, but she'd had some weird kind of reaction to LSD - maybe she was allergic to it, or maybe it was bad acid, some animal tranquilizer or God knows what - and she'd lost the coordination in her fingers, and sometimes she'd have spasms run through her body from head to toe. The spasms were creepy. It looked like an orgasm, but there was fear in her eyes. Erica and I would climb the mountain to a lake where she taught me how to fish. We were usually the only people there. We'd fish and picnic and skip stones and make love, and if we caught anything we'd fry it on a fire. Erica could talk to the birds. If she heard a dove she'd sit on a rock and coo, and it would coo back from far away, and she'd coo again, and the dove would answer from a closer tree, and she'd coo again and the dove would come closer and closer until it was sitting on a branch right over her head. She went home before me. She gave me her address in Wheeling, West Virginia. When I got out a month later I took a bus to Wheeling and got a job operating a Univac for a bank. I had to lie about my background, but I knew that a good operator is hard to find. I hoped that as soon as the bank saw how good I was, they'd forget about checking references. Erica was living with her parents in an old gray rowhouse shaded by elm trees on a cliff above the Ohio River. The front porch had a chair hanging by a chain from the roof, and you could swing in the chair and watch the river go by. I was living in a flophouse down by the bus station. The only other tenants were winos and burned out prostitutes. They were all psychopaths. There was screaming and doors slamming all night long. When I wasn't at work I tried to spend every minute with Erica. Her parents came from Harlan County, Kentucky. Her dad played fiddle and her mother played a mean harmonica. Erica sang. I told them they should write to a record company and sign a contract. They didn't think they were any good. They just wanted to have a good time. Her dad was happy driving a delivery truck for Coca-Cola. He was a Teamster, and proud of it. When Erica got pregnant, her folks wanted me to move in. Instead I took her to a Justice of the Peace and then to an apartment I'd found in another part of town. She didn't like it. Too far from the river, she said, but she moved in with me. The baby came out strange. It was blue and didn't cry and looked like a moron. It died after two weeks. I was sorry it had turned out that way, but I was glad it had died. Erica was broken-hearted. She blamed it on the LSD. She blamed it on me. She blamed it on the apartment that was too far from the river. One day she split. I called her folks - they hadn't seen her. Three days later she was picked up in Pittsburgh. They sent her home. She went to live with her parents. She was having spasms again. I tried to get her to go fishing with me, or to go up in the mountains to talk with the birds. She refused. Her coordination got worse. Her folks sent her back to the sanitarium in the mountains. She lost weight, and when I visited she wouldn't see me. I was going mad. I loved her but she was driving me crazy, and I obviously wasn't doing her any good, either. I had to go. If you don't run, you don't live.

I hitchhiked to Cincinnati, then decided to try hopping a freight. I'd never done it. I walked around the trainyard looking for a good long train. I figured the more cars, the more likely it would be a long distance run. I saw one pulling out that was so long I couldn't see the engine or the caboose. I ran alongside and climbed onto a flatcar that had a truck trailer lashed to it. That was a mistake. I was exposed to the wind and the sun, and somebody could spot me. As soon as the train stopped for the first time, I selected a boxcar. It was nice. For the rest of the day I sat by the open door of the boxcar while the land rumbled past my eyes. I pretended I was sitting still, and the land was moving. In the evening the train stopped in Vincennes, Indiana. I was hungry, so I got off and found a cafe. After supper I felt so good that I just wanted to walk down the tracks. Dry autumn grass was hanging over the gravel, and swallows were swooping and diving. I didn't know it at the time, but this was my last night as a legal citizen. The air smelled clean and crisp and full of life.

I slept in an abandoned railroad station. Occasionally through the night a long freight would clatter on by, shaking me awake from the pillow of dust. For the rest of the night there was only the sound of dry grass scraping in the wind, and a mysterious machine that I could hear somewhere beneath the floorboards. What the machine did I'll never know. The station was locked, waterless, abandoned - the town had died and disappeared - and yet every five minutes or so this cursed electric motor would whistle to a start, hum along for several seconds, and drive a piston clank-clank-clank until it shook the floorboards. Then it shut itself off and lay dormant for another five minutes or so, while the grass scraped and the wind blew. To me that machine symbolizes the Midwest, and I often think of it even today - a persistent, mysterious industrial force coming to life and dying again and again amid the land of wind and dry grass.