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Blue Springs, MO —
It must have been a few months after my mother was summoned by my elementary school teacher for a conference about my sudden habit of using certain curse words when we found the newest neighborhood of unfinished homes.
Yes, that had to have been the time because I had become friends with a new kid in the area, Cliff Smith, and we became the unofficial terrors of the neighborhood. Let me be honest straight up: my mother once told me that some friends are good for you, like fruit, while others are bad, like corn dogs.
Cliff, as much as I admired him, was a corn dog.
He was actually the son of a big shot real estate salesman who lived in a huge brick house in the woods. I don’t remember his mom – well, yeah, I kinda do. She was your typical real estate salesman’s wife: quiet, smothered in foundation and able to stand in a living room for minutes at a time like a mannequin.
On the side of virtue, Cliff taught me how to disappear on a summer day – from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. He taught me how to wander the woods and ride my bike for unnaturally long periods of time without food and water. He taught me how to build a good treehouse and how to scale dirt hills. He taught me how to ride a bike “no-handed,” as the saying went, and how to bend matches back with one finger and strike them alight before pitching the matchbook into a puddle or someone’s drink until it went hisssss.
On the side of vice, he also taught me how to curse.
For my mother, this was the antithesis of what she thought Jeffery, her 8-pound baby boy born in the wee hours of March 28, 1973, should be. My obsession with cursing, while short-lived, was unfortunately one of many instances in my life when I would disappoint her.
“She said...,” my mother said as she got back in the car after seeing the teacher. “She said...oh...” She looked out the window at the playground, as if something very precious to her was lifting into the sky forever.
“She said you’re using bad words!”
Of course I acted afraid, disappointed, sullen. Of course I wasn’t. No man alive can remember a time when he was genuinely sullen over his behavior – unless, of course, his behavior caused his sibling’s death.
It must have been a few months after my mother was summoned by my elementary school teacher for a conference about my sudden habit of using certain curse words when we found the newest neighborhood of unfinished homes.
Yes, that had to have been the time because I had become friends with a new kid in the area, Cliff Smith, and we became the unofficial terrors of the neighborhood. Let me be honest straight up: my mother once told me that some friends are good for you, like fruit, while others are bad, like corn dogs.
Cliff, as much as I admired him, was a corn dog.
He was actually the son of a big shot real estate salesman who lived in a huge brick house in the woods. I don’t remember his mom – well, yeah, I kinda do. She was your typical real estate salesman’s wife: quiet, smothered in foundation and able to stand in a living room for minutes at a time like a mannequin.
On the side of virtue, Cliff taught me how to disappear on a summer day – from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. He taught me how to wander the woods and ride my bike for unnaturally long periods of time without food and water. He taught me how to build a good treehouse and how to scale dirt hills. He taught me how to ride a bike “no-handed,” as the saying went, and how to bend matches back with one finger and strike them alight before pitching the matchbook into a puddle or someone’s drink until it went hisssss.
On the side of vice, he also taught me how to curse.
For my mother, this was the antithesis of what she thought Jeffery, her 8-pound baby boy born in the wee hours of March 28, 1973, should be. My obsession with cursing, while short-lived, was unfortunately one of many instances in my life when I would disappoint her.
“She said...,” my mother said as she got back in the car after seeing the teacher. “She said...oh...” She looked out the window at the playground, as if something very precious to her was lifting into the sky forever.
“She said you’re using bad words!”
Of course I acted afraid, disappointed, sullen. Of course I wasn’t. No man alive can remember a time when he was genuinely sullen over his behavior – unless, of course, his behavior caused his sibling’s death.
Sometime later (after I was grounded), Cliff and I found a new neighborhood of unfinished homes. They were like skeletons you could walk through. We’d throw down our bikes and stomp up through the mud, condemning everything we saw with our language. We’d throw rocks at the house. And we would throw rocks at each other, until the rocks became the bullets from Indiana Jones’ gun or the lasers from Luke Skywalker’s blaster. Soon the house lifted into the sky and we were deep in outer space and Darth Vader was somewhere inside the house – and Cliff, the better-looking, would become Luke.
“You be Vader,” he ordered and ran up the near-finished staircase.
Looking back, it’s almost surreal to imagine that you were once so young that you could take stairs three at a time with two sticks thrust through the loops in your jeans, your legs feather-light, your skin a pristine white except for scratches and scabs, and a mind empty of cares.
I was Vader. Always Vader. Luke charged down the stairs and we fought in earnest, denting the drywall stacked in columns and kicking up chalk dust until we choked. We swore like pirates.
No one caught us that day. No one ever caught us doing anything in the four summers Cliff and I hung out. We found more unfinished houses and one abandoned factory, including an underground boiler room full of what we thought back then were just simple glass vials full of colored water. We played chicken on what was called the Iron Horse Trail, which was an old cinder path about two inches wide that ran the length of an old railroad track for about 10 miles in the wildest reaches of Stark County, Ohio.
On a clear day, you could stand in the middle of that trail, squint your eyes and see down the path over a mile. And sometimes you’d see the lone headlight coming at you – a dirtbike, its distant weeee-weeee getting closer, getting closer, getting closer until it was as loud as thunder and the driver’s leather-clad leg flew by.
“Don’t move, you stupid *******!” Cliff would yell. Of course I would move; it was the beginning of a typical adult life of getting out of the way either too early or just in time.
In our early teens, Cliff and I and a friend of his poured a can of gasoline down a storm sewer on an early autumn evening. Cliff and I watched as our friend, whose mother didn’t figure very prominently in his upbringing, threw a match in and, when nothing happened, spat out a good juicy curse word.
He got down on his knees and stuck his head inside.
Nothing exploded, except probably my innocence. By then, at 15, the bag of tricks was running low, as was my luck. Even at that age, I knew that a human being could only be so lucky for only so long.
I don’t know what happened to Cliff. Sometimes when the reality of childhood feels so impossibly vague, like a faint trace of evaporated water on something metal, I wonder if Cliff really existed at all. All I can guess is that Cliff lived during a time in my life before life got complex, so it’s no wonder I have my doubts that he ever lived.
I asked my mother recently if she remembered Cliff Smith.
“Cliff who?”
Of course she didn’t remember him, but she does remember all the things I put her through while I was growing up.
And all those times I disappointed her...?
She says not a word.
That’s what good mothers do.
