7

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

—BONO

Sixth grade was about as painful a period in my life as any. There was a tiger in our home, roaming the hallways. When I heard my father coming, I would dart into another room or quietly close the door to my own, so I wouldn’t have to see or speak to him. The rest of the family tiptoed around the house as well. If he was napping in his chair, we were terrified of disturbing him. When we committed the crime of making noise while playing a game or laughing too loud, he wouldn’t yell; instead, he would bellow from the living room. He roared against our childhoods.

During the day, we left my father alone on the front side of the house, where the living room, dining room, and bedrooms were. The rest of us holed up in the kitchen or the den, while thankfully maintaining access to the back door and the stairs that led to our finished basement. We had an unspoken contract. We would stay out of his side of the house as much as possible, if he would avoid coming into ours. If it worked for North and South Korea, why not for us? Needless to say, we never burst through the front door of our house, throwing our book bags onto the sofa and crying, “I’m home!” the way Ron Howard did on Happy Days. We crept in through the back door and went to the den to do our homework or to watch TV with the volume turned down so low that we had to stick our ears next to the set to hear anything.

We were living in an Edward Albee play for the hearing impaired.

School wasn’t much better. My typical day followed a predictable pattern. From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. I would go to school and get my butt kicked by the cool kids. Now that I think about it, there were even a few girls and kids with disabilities in my class who kicked my butt a few times. Okay, everyone kicked my butt. I was an easy target.

I was invisible to my father. He rarely spoke to me unless it was to tell me I was making too much racket or to tell me to stop running in the house. My father’s psychological and emotional problems so consumed his visual field that he had trouble seeing anyone but himself, much less a lost, father-hungry kid.

This haunts me to this day. No matter who I am talking to, I eventually have the feeling that they are experiencing me like a gnat. I ask people on the phone if I’m calling at a bad time. After saying “good morning” to someone, I apologize for rambling. A counselor once recommended I should carry a can of Raid bug killer around so I could spray myself when I feel like I’m being a bother to someone.

I pay people for this sort of advice.

More often than not, Jesus comes to us incognito. In the sixth grade, he came to me in the disguise of a manic, irreverent radio personality.

My most treasured possession was a small handheld transistor radio that could pick up all the AM stations in New York City. Made from royal-blue plastic, it had a speaker no bigger than a quarter glued to the back of a grill made up of lots of little holes aligned in neat rows on the front panel. You tuned in to the station you wanted by sliding the ridged dial that stuck out from the side of the radio with your thumb. I don’t remember who manufactured it, but the model name—Westminster— was printed in big, bold, black letters under the dial face. Beneath the model name were the words “solid state” in small understated red letters. It also had a strap so you could carry it around on your wrist. I never took advantage of this feature. I had trouble making friends as it was.

Every night at precisely 10:15 p.m., Waldo would jump onto my bed, scratch and paw at my comforter to mark out a space for himself, do the three-turn dog pirouette, and collapse into a heap by the footboard. I would tuck the radio underneath my pillow and wait for the familiar strains of Strauss’s “Bahn frei!” polka, performed by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, that heralded the arrival of my hero. His name was Jean Shepherd. He saved my life.

Shep, as his listeners called him, was a radio personality whose nightly show was broadcast live from the studios of WOR-AM in Manhattan. He went on the air every night and spoke for an hour without a script or notes. Unimaginably creative material gushed out of him like water from a fire hose. Sometimes he would start the show with words like: “Yes, you fatheads out there in the darkness, you losers in the Sargasso Sea of existence, take heart, because WOR, in its never-ending crusade of public service, is once again proud to bring you: The Jean Shepherd Program!” No one does this sort of thing anymore. Today we get Rush Limbaugh, and comparing Rush Limbaugh to Jean Shepherd is like comparing Miley Cyrus to Bono.

Shep ripped across the airwaves like a tornado through a cornfield. As I listened, I imagined him in a rolling chair, ricocheting off the walls of the station’s control room like a BB in a shoebox. When he wasn’t chastising his engineer for making technical mistakes, he might go into a tear about the bird-brained commercials interrupting his show. One minute he was dead serious, waxing philosophical about the meaning of life, and then he would say something like, “You get too close to the primal guts of life and you’ve got to clear the air,” then pick up a kazoo or a Jew’s harp and play a chorus of some old classic song, like “Lucky Star,” “It’s a Grand Old Flag,” or “Margie.” He even played an obscure Polynesian instrument called a nose flute. He was a raconteur, a biting wit, a social critic, and the ideal spokesman for those of us who got our butts kicked in dodgeball every day. He was the uncle your parents didn’t want you to know about.

Shep told it the way it was. He mused about what people would say thousands of years from now when they dug up artifacts from our crazy civilization—like televisions and Slinkys. One night he spoke about the difficulty of explaining the purpose of an amusement park to an alien from Venus. His material was not only funny; it was smart, an indictment of an age satisfied with “bread and circuses”—a phrase Shep taught me the meaning of one night as he bemoaned the inanities of life. He would sound off about our succumbing to “creeping meatballism,” which had something to do with being hypnotized by Madison Avenue and the loss of our individuality. He did it all in this conspiratorial voice, moving from whisper to pressured rant, as though he were radioing in while the enemy advanced on his location.

Shep said there were two kinds of people—Night People and Day People. The Day People were folks who were being trivialized by the increasing insipidness of life. The Night People were the lucky ones who saw through the whole sham. The Day People were content to be brainwashed by the pernicious forces of commercialism that dehumanized us, while the Night People had the inside track on what was true.

The kids with radios under their pillows were Night People.

Shep wasn’t afraid to do things to try to wake up the Day People. One time he got his listeners to go into bookstores all over New York City to ask salespeople for a nonexistent book entitled I, Libertine, by Frederick R. Ewing. Thousands of Shep’s fans followed his instructions, driving bookstore clerks all over the five boroughs crazy looking for the book. I’m told that it took almost two weeks before the Wall Street Journal revealed that the I, Libertine book hoax was a well-planned gag—and that it was the only time a book became a best seller without actually having been written. If this fact isn’t true, it should be.

Shep is best known for writing and narrating the film A Christmas Story, a classic holiday movie that gets played repeatedly on cable during the Christmas season. It’s about a nine-year-old kid named Ralphie who’s obsessed with getting a Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range model air rifle for Christmas. Every time he tells people about it, they dash his hopes by saying, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” After finally getting his air rifle, Ralphie shoots at a paper target attached to a metal sign, and the ricocheting BB breaks his glasses, nearly shooting his eye out. Shep didn’t believe in wallpapering over reality.

I didn’t always understand Shep, but he understood me. We were the outsiders, the misfits, and he was our voice. If you saw a picture of him from the 1970s, you would know instantly that he was our guy. In the shots I’ve seen, his clothes look like they have a lot of cat hair on them, and he was pudgy in the way New Yorkers are when they’ve eaten too many gyros on the streets of Manhattan.

The Jean Shepherd Show was to me what the wardrobe was to the Pevensie kids in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was my way out of a world that adults had screwed up. Every night Shep would transport me to a different place and time. He would take me to his hometown of Hohman, Indiana. I would lose myself in his descriptions of what sounded to me like an ideal America. Shep made me nostalgic for something I had never experienced—a normal “kidhood,” as he called it. He had friends with names like Flick, Schwartz, Bruner, and Randy. Shep’s father, “the old man” as he called him, showed up to his baseball games and spoke to him about life, albeit awkwardly. His mother, who always wore a “yellow rump-sprung chenille bathrobe with bits of dried egg on the lapel,” was drab but predictable. The world he described wasn’t perfect. Alongside the absurd and hilarious stories he told from his childhood, he spoke about the disappointments and hardships that were warp and woof of being a child. Shep told the kinds of stories you find in the Bible—they were unnervingly honest.

It was in one of my darkest hours that Shep, like the angel Gabriel in the Annunciation, came and said, “Do not be afraid.”

It was the night of my elementary school band’s spring concert, and my friends and I could hardly contain ourselves. This was the night our parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, even a few lapdogs, came to hear us play “America the Beautiful,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and our rollicking version of “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” Sitting through an elementary-school music program in which volume trumps intonation is a profound act of human love. It’s like falling on a hand grenade to save a group of friends, except that you have to do it three times a year.

Every eleven-year-old boy in the Western Hemisphere chooses to play one of two instruments: the snare drum or the trumpet. I played the trumpet, and I was pretty good too. Most of the time I practiced in our basement with the bell of my horn stuffed into a pillow so the sound wouldn’t hack off my father. This practice regimen had the same effect marathoners experience when they train at high altitudes and then run a race at sea level. Once that pillow came off, I was like Miles Davis after six cans of Red Bull.

The accomplishment of all accomplishments for a young trumpet player was to be able to hit a C above middle C. If you could hit a high C, then every kid in band knew you could play for Earth, Wind and Fire or Tower of Power, two bands whose horn sections were filled with major blowers. During spring tryouts I squeezed out a high C in front of Mr. Martin and the whole band. The effort rendered me cross-eyed for three days, but that momentary squeak was enough to earn me the honor of sitting in the first chair. And this was the first concert during which I would be occupying that prized seat.

My mother was on a business trip but had called from an airport earlier in the day, promising that she would be home in time for the 7 p.m. concert and that she would bring Nanny along. The performance was to be held in our school cafeteria, which doubled as a small gymnasium. The school administration referred to it as the cafetorium. This word should be stricken from the English language immediately. It signals to children that food should be followed by frolic. At lunchtime we would wolf down our bologna sandwiches and pretzels so we would have time to move the tables out of the way and play basketball. And every day, some kid would blow his lunch.

The band was forced to wait in the hallway that led into the cafeteria while the audience took their seats in those brown folding metal chairs that freeze your butt when you first sit in them. As the clock ticked closer and closer to 7 p.m., the more panicked I became. Not only was this my first appearance as the first-chair trumpet player, but I also had a short solo at the beginning of the song “Shenandoah.” I had practiced that solo for weeks. All day long, I would rehearse the fingering for it on my thigh while hearing the notes in my head. In my pre-performance anxiety, I began to imagine what it would be like if I got sick into my trumpet midsolo. I could see my Chef Boyardee spaghetti dinner with pulpified meatballs in red sauce shooting down the lead pipe, hurling at untold speeds through the pistons and valves, and exploding out the bell of my horn, splattering my beloved band teacher, Mr. Martin, and the front row of the unsuspecting audience.

Mr. Martin tried to get us to enter the cafeteria with some modicum of dignity, but to no avail. When the door opened, we ran to our seats and began warming up as though we were the New York Philharmonic waiting for Bernstein to make his entrance. We looked dead serious as we made sure our music was in the right order, which was odd since few of us were capable of deciphering, much less actually playing, the notes on the page. I scanned the audience to see if my mother or Nanny had arrived yet, but I couldn’t spot them. I wasn’t worried, though—there were nine or ten rows of chairs, and they could be sitting in the back where I couldn’t see them.

The audience exploded into applause as our conductor and teacher, Mr. Martin, walked in. Parents regard band teachers with a combination of awe and respect, the way you might a war hero. How could any human being spend eight hours per day enduring the acoustic violence created by fifty children playing their instruments all at once? These families knew what it sounded like with only one kid practicing an instrument at home. Even Jesus couldn’t stomach a group of fifty of them.

To us, Mr. Martin was the funniest human being ever created by God. He had a way of making us laugh at ourselves at all the right moments. We had a kid named Larry who played the clarinet. In the hands of the untalented, a clarinet is a lethal weapon. There are states that allow the sale of automatic assault weapons but ban the use of clarinets at school concerts. If played poorly, they are the sonic equivalent of Hurricane Katrina. Larry had a number of challenges. First, he was eleven and just beginning to pull the whole hygiene thing together. He wasn’t quite there yet. His teeth were coated in plaque, and the armpits of his shirts were stained yellow. Second, he was onerously unmusical. Once, when counting us into a song, Mr. Martin said, “One, two, Larry-don’t-blow.” All of us fell off our chairs, laughing uncontrollably, including Larry, who felt honored to be singled out by Mr. Martin, regardless of the reason. Mr. Martin was the best.

The show was going swimmingly. Parents waved at their kids. Brothers and sisters whistled. Babies cried and held their ears. Grandfathers took photos with those cameras with the square revolving flashcubes. Between songs, I kept looking for my mother and Nanny but couldn’t find them. Even so, I was confident that when I stood up to play my solo, I would finally be able to see over people’s heads and spot them somewhere in the back row.

When the moment came, Mr. Martin nodded at me to stand, and then again to tell me to put my trumpet up to my lips so he could count me in. I knew that solo like the back of my hand, so while preparing to play, I was able to quickly search the room for my mother and Nanny.

There is little point in my telling you what happened next. You already know. Likewise, there would be no point in my musing out loud how it’s physically possible for a hole the size of a galaxy to appear in a boy’s chest, leaving him desolate, in the mere five seconds it takes to scan a room. I could tell you about the tears that ran down my face as I played my solo, but this last detail would be a lie. I felt no surface emotion. The injury was deep and hidden.

When I finished my solo, Mr. Martin beamed at me. I had played it flawlessly. After the concert, kids slapped me on the back and parents said I came close to stealing the show. I was happy but distracted.

By the time we filed out of the school, it had begun to pour rain, and I had no ride. Out in the parking lot, kids and parents were running to their cars, lugging tubas or with long trombone cases banging against legs. My friend Phil’s parents stopped and asked if I needed a ride. I said no. My parents were just pulling the car around and would be there in a minute, I lied. Phil’s mom looked sad. Mr. Martin pulled up in his Volkswagen bus and asked if I needed a lift. I told him the same thing. He looked kind of sad too.

During the half-mile walk home, the rain drenched me. My shirt and the fronts of my white pants were plastered to my body. I had to keep resetting my grip on the wet handle of my trumpet case to prevent it from slipping out of my hands.

Kids from alcoholic homes are lousy accountants. They lose track of the number of times they get let down, embarrassed, or left to make sense of life on their own. But every so often a minor injury comes along—like a missed concert—and it tips over the box in which the disproportionate number of disappointments those kids have yet to acknowledge or grieve are found.

And so I cried.

I cried for every concert and play my parents, especially my father, hadn’t seen. I cried for every pounding I’d taken from kids at school that I hadn’t even bothered to report to anyone. I cried for the father who barely knew I played an instrument and certainly had no idea I was first chair in the school band. I cried so hard I thought my throat was wringing itself out like a dish towel.

Walking up LeJeune Court, I asked God if he would send down a celestial staircase so I could walk up into the night sky and go to heaven before I had to endure the sound I dreaded more than any other—the crunching sound of my feet on the gravel on my driveway that told me I was home. Sister Rita Marie told us God sent staircases for saints all the time. I stood in the rain awhile to see if my staircase would appear. Apparently I wasn’t a saint.

My mother explained that there had been weather delays in Chicago and she couldn’t get home from the airport in time to get to the concert. I looked at Nanny’s face and knew this was only half the truth. The whole truth was that when my mother got home, she’d had to make a choice: attend to my father, who was drunk and demanding attention, or go see my show.

I shrugged. “That’s all right,” I said. “No big deal.”

“I promise not to miss the next one,” she said. I knew she meant it, but it was little consolation now.

By the time I’d changed into my pajamas and eaten a snack, the kitchen clock said 10:00. Fifteen minutes until The Jean Shepherd Show. I ran to my room, jumped into bed, put my Westminster radio under my pillow, and waited for his theme music. Waldo jumped onto the bed and made his nest at my feet. As I lay there listening to ads for Schaefer Beer, Esso gasoline, and Alka-Seltzer, I was overwhelmed again by a terrible sadness. I sobbed.

“Is that you crying?” my father called. He was reading in his chair in the living room, just down the hall from my bedroom. His words were garbled and hard to understand, like he was talking underwater.

“No,” I called back, which was a ridiculous answer, since anyone with half a brain could tell from my constricted voice that I was crying.

Then there was silence. I held my breath and waited for my father to come down the hall. I imagined him sitting on the edge of my bed, stroking my forehead, and asking me what was wrong. I wanted to tell him that I would do anything if he would just stop drinking. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry for not being a good enough son, for being such a disappointment to him. If he would just tell me what I had to do to make him stop drinking, I would do it.

If he would just come sit on my bed and look at me, I would tell him that even though I was already eleven, we could start life all over. He could be like my friend Phil’s dad. We could go to the barbershop on Saturday, and he could run his hand through my freshly cut hair to get the stubble out; then we could spend the day together playing baseball or washing the car.

Instead, I heard the sound of a page turning, and then another. He was not coming to sit on my bed. My father had gone back to reading.

These kinds of experiences are not biodegradable. They float in the reservoir of memory forever.

It was then that I noticed a bottle of Anacin on my dresser. I had once heard a sermon in church about a man named Elijah whom God just took to heaven without dying. I had asked for that option on the way home from the concert but had received no answer. I decided that if God wouldn’t send me a staircase or a chariot of fire to take me into heaven in a whirlwind, then I would arrange it myself. I had been told all my life in Catholic school that suicide was the unforgivable sin, but I felt certain that, given my situation, God would cut me a break. Did I really intend to kill myself? I don’t know. All I remember was that I was weary and sad. I got out of bed and grabbed the bottle of Anacin and held it in my sweaty hand under my pillow next to my radio.

Then came the “Bahn frei!” polka and the voice of Jean Shepherd.

Let me adjust the equipment here in the studio. I am now inundating Staten Island with mediocrity. Just a minute— now we are sneaking out to Darien; you can hear them screaming out there. All right, now I’m all set. I’m ready to sing. This is a singing night.

And Shep then launched into what he called a rare Swahili version of a Mantovani classic.

That night Shep said he was telling a story from when he was in the second grade.

I’m sure there are a lot of skeptics out there. I suppose if you have never had any experience of the supernatural, you tend to be skeptical about it, I’m sure. I think it goes back to the experiences you have as a kid with this kind of thing. The only reason I ever talk about being a kid has nothing to do with nostalgia, about it being great to be a kid. You just stop and ask any legitimate, walking-around, certified, guaranteed kid and you ask him what it’s like being a kid, and you’ll get the straight dope. He’s likely to kick you in the kneecap! So don’t come around with this jazz about it being great to be a kid. It’s not great being a kid. It’s just a fact . . . It’s not great being a kid.

No kidding, this is nearly word-for-word what Shep said that night, and it was exactly what I needed. If Shep had said childhood was the most precious time in a person’s life, I would have shut off the radio and inhaled that entire bottle of Anacin.

Then Shep said, “This show tonight is not for the squeamish or the lighthearted.”

As he spoke I forgot who I was, where I was, what had happened that night at the concert, my feelings that dying would be better than living, the belief that at my core I was so wretched a child that my father felt it necessary to drink himself blind every day just to endure me. I was ready for the truth, a show that wasn’t for the squeamish or the lighthearted. Bring it on.

I had three pals growing up—Bruner, Schwartz, and Flick. Now when it comes to childhood myths, you’ll always find three believers and a skeptic in a group of four. Bruner was a true believer. If you told the same joke a hundred times, he would laugh as hard the last time you told it as he did the first. Schwartz was a believer but always waited to see which way the wind was going to blow—which way the crowd was going. Me, I was a patsy. Do you know what a patsy is? He’s the guy who fills out the coupon and gets shucked. He’s the guy that says, “Gee, that’s a great idea. I’ll try it first.”

Flick, on the other hand, was a skeptic. He was always six months ahead of us and always on top of everything.

One day the wind was blowing out of the cold, frozen north and we were struggling on our way to school—me, Flick, Bruner, and Schwartz wearing our sheepskin coats, wearing those helmets with the goggles, snow up to our you-know-whats, trudging our way to the Warren G. Harding School, when one of those perennial kid myths is brought up.

Childhood is full of myths, and like I said, most people are believers and there are a handful of skeptics. One of the great myths we discovered was the Tongue Myth. The Tongue Myth said that if the weather was cold enough and you were to apply your tongue to a streetcar track or lick the grease off a hubcap on the bottom of an Oldsmobile, that your tongue would stick to this thing and it would tear your tongue off if you tried to pull it away. Bruner believed this myth so much that every time he walked past a metal telephone pole, he would give it a six-foot berth. Schwartz played it cool and didn’t say anything. Me? I was a believer.

So one day we are struggling through the ice and snow on our way to the Warren G. Harding School, and Schwartz says that if you stick your tongue to a metal telephone pole that it will stick so hard that you have to wait for summer to get it off.

Flick the skeptic was incredulous. “C’mon, you believe this stuff?” he asked. “It ain’t true.”

“I dare you to do it then,” Schwartz replied. “I double-dare you.”

This challenge can’t be ignored in kid-dom. Flick’s lip curled like an atheist at a Billy Graham meeting. The wind is blowing. The temperature stands at three degrees blowing off Lake Michigan, straight from the Arctic Circle like the breath of a wolf. And there’s the telephone pole with the wind whistling through the high-tension wires.

Throughout the story, Shep would make sound effects. He would cup the studio microphone and with his breath make the sound of the wind as it whistled across the high-tension wires. At dramatic moments he would turn on music that sounded like Wes Craven picked it. Then he continued.

So Flick stands up tall and says, “Who’s afraid of sticking his tongue to the telephone pole?” You rarely see an act of heroism in this life, and this was one of them. Flick walked right up, stuck his tongue out, and ZAP. Flick’s face whitened. Schwartz backed away. Bruner is on his knees, whimpering. I am circling around, waiting to see which way the wind is going to blow. And there is Flick with about a foot and a half of tongue riveted to the pole.

Schwartz says, “Okay, take your tongue off, Flick.” But all Flick can do is talk like he’s holding his tongue with his fingers.

The story went on for another half hour, and every detail was delicious. Shep, Bruner, and Schwartz abandon Flick and run to school, where they tearfully tell the teacher that Flick is outside with his tongue stuck to the telephone pole. Fire engines, police cars, the school nurse, and ambulances rush to the scene. Flick, of course, is eventually rescued, but not before Shep says,

Lo, this early morning we had all taken off to school after an innocent breakfast of Ralston’s and Cream of Wheat, and we had put on our high-top shoes and socks in such innocence, not knowing that today would be a day of total disaster.

And then he concluded, “It’s interesting to see an atheist like Flick get his comeuppance.”

By the time Shep finished his story, I felt like I had eaten a gargantuan plate of Nanny’s meat loaf with ketchup, mashed potatoes, and creamed spinach, the supper that steamed up the windows of our house most Sunday afternoons. I could almost smell the blueberry crisp and taste the vanilla ice cream waiting in the kitchen for dessert. His words were comfort food. I lay on my back, hands behind my head, and looked at the ceiling. Shep’s tale of a goofy childhood experience and his candor about the hardships of childhood was balm to my soul.

I was about to turn over and go to sleep when the large brown water stain on the ceiling over my bed caught my eye. The previous winter, an ice dam had formed in a gutter, causing the leak that created the stain. I had glanced over that stain a million times, but tonight it captured my attention. The edges of the stain were more pronounced than its interior, and there was a dried bubble in the center. Around it were glow-in-the-dark stars I’d bought at a toy store on Greenwich Avenue. I’d stuck them to the ceiling without looking at the picture on the back of the package showing how to lay them out to look like a real night sky. There were numerous ringed Saturns and a few crescent moons thrown in for good measure.

I had never noticed until that night that the stain resembled a country on a topographical map, with its jagged borders and the bubble mountain stuck in the middle. I was seeing this country now surrounded by the heavens.

I didn’t know anything about the Bible in those days. I had never read Hebrews 11, the roll call of the saints who felt like “aliens and strangers on the earth” and who lived through hardship, all the while “longing for a better country.” They knew in their hearts, though, that God had prepared a city for them, and it gave them the gumption to carry on. I was given a revelation that night. Shep’s idyllic hometown of Hohman, Indiana, was not the center of the universe. It was only a signpost pointing to this other country that was infinitely more innocent and larger than my little world.

I felt that night as I felt during Communion—as if we were caught up in something bigger than we could grasp, and somehow the bread and wine were a visible sign of it. Every time I went forward to receive, I was re-upping to play some part in that story.

I’m not saying I understood any of this as I lay there in bed that night; I didn’t. As was so often the case in my life, it was a feeling that I now know was homesickness for God.

As I said, I wasn’t a student of the Scriptures, so I wouldn’t have been familiar with the verse from Proverbs 25 either: “Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.”

Shep delivered the good news that saved my life that night. I slipped out of bed, put the Anacin back on my dresser, and went to sleep.