And so most everything I know about the birds and the bees will be gleaned from books, magazines, and music, principally Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night” and Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady”: “Move it in, move it out, shove it in, ’round about, disco lady.”
Our home library is only forty or so books, but the terrain and hidden treasures of each become as familiar to me as the backyards of South Brook. I can skim a whole history of the United States in just a few volumes. Miracle at Philadelphia is about the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Confessions of Nat Turner is about a bloody slave revolt in 1831. The Death of a President recounts every harrowing detail of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The newest book on the top shelf is All the President’s Men, about the enduring mystery that is Watergate. When I open it up, newspaper articles clipped from the Star rain down on me. Each has a date inked on it in Dad’s handwriting. He knew I’d open this book. The clippings are his way of explaining Watergate.
Mom and Dad know that Jim and Tom aren’t about to read any of these books for pleasure, and that Amy and John are too young to be interested in these grown-up hardcovers. Mom probably assumes my plate is full with the ten Children’s Classics on the shelf in my bedroom. Bound in fake-leather covers, their spines beautifully imprinted in black and silver, these were a birthday present to The Reader in the Family, a role I embraced when I discovered that reading can excuse me from going out of doors. And so I work my way through them: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Robinson Crusoe, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but also Little Women, The Secret Garden, and Mom’s childhood copy of her favorite book, Jane Eyre. There are more books about girls than there are about boys. And while I won’t admit it under penalty of torture, the girls are often braver and stronger and cooler than the boys. Pippi Longstocking lives with a clothed monkey and a horse on the porch at the Villa Villekulla, where she goes to bed whenever she wants in the absence of her dead parents. Harriet the Spy lives on East 87th Street in New York City and takes the subway to a place called Far Rockaway. Jo March wants to fight in the Civil War.
The only boys I read about are Frank and Joe Hardy of crime-infested Bayport, where everyone seems to have been lobotomized. “It sure was swell of Dad to let us have them,” Joe says of the motorcycles on which he and Frank chase hardened criminals. They never face danger on an empty stomach. Before Frank and Joe visit a dilapidated water tower, where they’re imprisoned by a man named Hobo Johnny, Mother packs them a picnic hamper filled with roast beef sandwiches and deviled eggs. All the moms in the Hardy Boys books are greeted as “Mother,” not “Mom.” But it’s pretty Laura Hardy who makes the best picnic baskets. “That sure would be swell,” friend Chet tells her when she offers to make him one. “You make grand picnic lunches, Mrs. Hardy.”
No one uses food as a weapon quite like Mrs. Hardy. Mother tells the boys to wait a minute before they go visit their friend Slim Robinson: “I’m going to bake a ham and a cake for you.” In addition to Slim, the Hardy boys have friends named Chet and Biff—“the gang”—who greet each other not with Hertz Donuts or Pit Vipers, as we do in South Brook, but with ancient salutations from some distant decade that I don’t recognize and that may never even have existed: “Hi, chums!” they say, or “Hi, fellows!”
There is no way for me to know that the first three Hardy Boys mysteries—the only three on my bookshelf—were written in the 1920s not by Franklin W. Dixon, as the covers claim, but a Canadian newspaperman named Leslie McFarlane, who was paid as little as eighty-five dollars for his fevered manuscripts. Nor can I possibly know that the editions I’m reading were revised in 1959 to remove racial stereotypes. And yet, even in my revised editions, characters say things like “No workee, no eatee,” while preparing dinner. An Italian immigrant named Rocco runs a fruit stand in Bayport. “You very kind boys,” he tells Frank and Joe. “You better salesman than Rocco.” And that’s just the very first volume, The Tower Treasure, a book that so offends me I’ve read it three times.
And anyway, these characters are consonant with the other cultural stereotypes on TV. My worldview is informed by the prototypical Frenchman Pepé Le Pew, Latin archetypes Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito, the Chinese characters Ah Chew on Sanford and Son and Hanna-Barbera’s Hong Kong Phooey. Whenever Tom and I are kung fu fighting, we first bow to each other and say, “Ah-so, Fatso,” before delivering every blow with a “Hi-yah!” On The Muppet Show, it is Miss Piggy’s catchphrase.
When a British colleague from Mickey Mining visits our house for cocktails one evening, Dad instructs me to greet him with “Cheerio, ol’ chap!” I’m surprised that he isn’t wearing a bowler and carrying an umbrella, like Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins or Winston Churchill or any other Englishman I have ever seen on TV.
But what am I? I’m not Scandinavian like so many Minnesotans, who tell Sven and Ole jokes about dumb Swedes: “Did you hear Sven died while ice fishing? He was run over by the Zamboni.”
I’m not Polish, like the “Polacks” in the “Polack” jokes that everyone else tells. “You’ve got to hate someone, I guess,” the syndicated columnist Andrew Greeley writes in 1976. “And you can’t hate the Jews or blacks or Latinos or Indians or women. Who’s left? Why the Poles, of course.” A study of working-class Polish Americans in Detroit this year reveals Polack jokes have left them with low self-esteem and a zeal to make their children’s lives better. “Poles are far from the only ethnic group to serve as the butt of jokes,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “They just happen to be at the top of the list right now.”
The United States Supreme Court has just denied an appeal by the Polish American Congress and a Chicago man who wanted to reply—under the fairness doctrine’s principle of equal time—to a TV-show skit that disparaged the Polish. In February, on The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, Don Rickles tells Jimmy Stewart that the war is still on and he’s needed at the front. Then the comedian looks at Nipsey Russell and says, “The black guy just went ‘I didn’t know the war was still on.’ And the Polish kid went ‘I did.’” The audience at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas roars. I’m not Polish, so I do too.
I’m not Russian either, thank God, though other kids ask me in a hostile tone: “Hey, Rushin, are you Russian? Are you a Commie?” I always assure my accuser that whatever a Commie is—and neither of us has the slightest idea—I am not one.