Passing Out

Like a lot of kids, I could sit and watch ants a long time. Ants were great. They were industrious. On the move. A team. They had their own thing. They didn't need people.

Clouds were good too. They weren't alive, of course; but they always changed. Like ants, they came and went on some whim or power that had nothing to do with people.

Getting older, I was starting to feel less connected to people, myself.

I began to notice, and to mind, how unfriendly adults were to kids.

My nuns and family were fine, and spoke as if kids had minds. But so many adults were either bossing you around about something inane, or patronizing you, or ignoring you altogether.

I remember talking to a neighbor one time, Mr. Rohaly, while he was gardening his meager plot. I figured I'd do the guy a favor, kill a little time with him as he puttered.

In the middle of an off-the-cuff soliloquy, about someplace I'd recently been, he looked over his shoulder at me, on his hands and knees in the dirt. His head was furrowed. (He was completely bald-headed. Mr. Nolan lived next door to him and didn't like him. He called him Beetle-Head Rohaly.)

"Really, Stevie?," he said. "Did they have pickles there?"

This threw me for some seconds as I realized this is a remark by someone who really doesn't feel like talking to you.

He must have forgotten about it a few days later, when he was painting a patch of his garage as I walked by, and he said, "You know, Stevie, in the Army, we had the saying, 'If you own it, paint it'." I thought about asking him if he painted pickles in the Army, but just kept walking.

Meanwhile, getting older, kids were also becoming more tiresome, or difficult, or both.

In school wasn't so bad. There was order, and you were occupied.

But out of school, games were getting rougher, or abandoned altogether, for meaningless - what? I couldn't even put a name to it. Hanging around, on the street, on stoops, on bikes, ranking each other out, as it was called; doing nothing.

Talk was getting stupider. Younger kids aren't ashamed of what they don't know. Older, they want to fight about it.

"Your God can't take Hercules and Atlas at the same time," a Jewish kid named Scotty (improbably, but so)once challenged me.

"He can take everybody," I said, although I was not eager to explore anything at this level of idiocy. "He made everybody."

"He can't take Hercules, Atlas, and Superman at the same time," Scotty said, with an air of rigorous triumph.

"Maybe not," I said.

If Scotty was stupid, how about James Conley, who told me Superman was real, because he saw a Superman parade on TV?

"Didn't you see that on the Superman TV show?," I said. I knew the episode.

"They can't fake a whole parade," he said.

Or, relatedly, Robert Packus, who told me his brother was Superboy, because his brother told him so, and then raced down the street tearing off his shirt, into an alley from which he (presumably) flew away?

I started spending a lot of time alone.

I could throw a ball against a wall for hours. I would create a ballgame in my head, with two teams, 27 outs apiece. Sometimes they played two.

Walking alone, I could look at an old wire fence, say, buried in a hedge behind a building, and think, no one has ever seen this before in quite this way. That means it never existed this way before. It never will again. I'd stare, and work myself into a real state of Being and Nothingness, until I thought I'd pass out; if I hadn't already. Had I?

On the normal side, I drew, read, and wrote. But things were closing in on me. That's a funny feeling at age eight.