FATHER: Very astute, my dear. Not to encroach upon your professional territory, but I believe this is what holds a lot of people back from reaching their full adult potential. They’re still trying to reconcile the lies they were told in the nursery with the cold hard facts they’ve learned about life on their own. We’ll be giving little Jonathan a real head start by teaching him that life is not like Oz or Wonderland — it’s real, it’s earnest, but not altogether unpleasant.
(There was only one thing wrong with Mother and Father’s plan: Santa Claus and Superman were not going to sit still for it. And they have a zealous corps of missionaries working to spread their word — grandmothers, housekeepers, Steven Spielberg, the kid on the other end of the seesaw, et cetera.)
Mother and Father did their utmost to offset the pernicious effects of unbridled fantasy. The walls in Jonathan Frederick Johnson III’s bedroom were adorned with fine art prints from the school of realism, not posters of singing purple dinosaurs or ninja reptiles. His sheets were plain white, no ducks waddling across them or rocket ships orbiting them. For breakfast he was served oatmeal or Cheerios, but nothing with silly rabbits, talking tigers, or snapping, popping elves on the box.
And they were as scrupulously careful about what went into his mind as they were about what went into his mouth.
MOTHER (Up early on Saturday morning doing damage control. Jonathan Frederick Johnson III is watching cartoons. No telling what kind of damage those bright, flashy, downright impossible images could do a developing cerebral cortex.): Jonathan, honey, listen, why don’t you turn off that obnoxious nonsense and watch the Nature Channel or CNN?
JONATHAN FREDERICK JOHNSON III (No response. He doesn’t hear her. He is trying to figure out why the roadrunner always says “Meep-meep!” whenever one of Wile E. Coyote’s schemes backfires on him. What does it mean? Is it bad language?)
MOTHER: Jonathan, you know, of course, that if a real coyote fell off a real cliff like that he would be dead, dead and in — (She was about to say coyote heaven, but she realizes she’s not sure where, if anywhere, dead coyotes go. Fortunately, she catches herself in time.) — in a smooshed-up pile of fur and bones. These cartoon things are just drawings that give the illusion of movement. You understand that, don’t you, Jonathan?
JONATHAN FREDERICK JOHNSON III: Meep-meep! (Which gets him in big trouble for backtalk-ing. From then on he is not allowed to watch anything on TV unless it is preapproved by Mother or Father.)
No matter, he could always look at books. He loved books, and his parents had procured for him an extensive library of picture books about real children doing real things like helping mom fix dinner, or going to school, where they did all sorts of fun things like sitting still, being quiet, and listening to the teacher. Once he traded his copy of My Daddy Works in the City to his friend Kenny Preston for a book about dogs who race cars and have big dog parties in the tops of trees. It was his favorite book until Father explained it to him.
FATHER: Son, real dogs simply do not behave like this. You’ve seen old Jake here, and you know what he does. He sleeps and he eats and he barks his head off whenever somebody knocks at the door — well, he doesn’t really bark his head off, that’s just an expression. But he definitely does not wear funny hats and drive a car. The dogs in this book are imaginary. Do you understand? They’re not real like Jake. They’re imaginary.
JONATHAN: Is “imaginary” bad language? (He doesn’t mean it as backtalk.)
He had to give the book back to Kenny, even though they had a no-takebacks clause in their contract.
At least he could still be friends with Kenny. Watch what happens when Father meets Toby Redboy.
FATHER: Jonathan, who are you talking to?
JONATHAN FREDERICK JOHNSON in: I’m talking to Toby Redboy, Father.
FATHER (putting on his stern, life-is-real face as he walks into his son’s room): Who is this Toby Redboy person? I don’t see anyone in here but you.
JONATHAN: He’s right there by the computer — whoa, you almost ran into him.
FATHER (making a dramatic pretense of scanning the room): I still don’t see anyone.
JONATHAN: He probably doesn’t want you to see him right now, Father. I can’t see him all the time either, but he’s—
FATHER (sighs heavily, sits down on son’s bed, lowers voice): I thought we were through the danger phase here. You know — I mean, you must know that this Toby Redboy is not real. Now, you have real friends like Kenny and Margie, don’t you? Real friends have homes and mothers and fathers. Toby Redboy is not real.
JONATHAN (considers Father’s words till they start to make him dizzy; this real-imaginary thing still seems completely arbitrary): But he is real, Father. He talks to me and everything.
FATHER: That’s just you talking to yourself, son. And that’s okay, nothing wrong with that. But it is wrong to give different parts of your personality names and converse with someone who isn’t really there. That’s what people in the crazy house do. You don’t want to wind up in the crazy house, do you? Very well, I do not want to hear any more about this Toby Redboy, do you understand?
JONATHAN (looking over Father’s shoulder to see if Toby Redboy exhibits some symptoms of imaginariness he might have overlooked, but Toby Redboy is making funny faces behind Father’s back): Toby, that’s not nice. Meep-meep! (Jonathan Frederick Johnson III and Toby Redboy have decided that “Meep-meep!” is what the roadrunner says when he laughs, and the two boys have adopted it as their own secret laugh, a way of honoring the roadrunner’s memory now that they are no longer allowed to watch his show.)
FATHER (pulling off his belt): Son, I told you this Toby Redboy is imaginary: now you leave me no choice. (Reluctantly spanks the hell out of son.)
After that Toby Redboy still came around and tried to play, but Jonathan Frederick Johnson III ignored him. After awhile Toby Redboy’s feelings got hurt badly enough that he went away and never came back.
Jonathan was thinking about — and missing — Toby Redboy and the roadrunner and the dogs with their funny party hats and other friends Father had banished, when he got bored with the PBS special about the amphibians of Africa and went upstairs to his room. He wanted to be a good boy, but sometimes living in Mother and Father’s world where everything fun and exciting was imaginary and bad, and everything dead and boring was real and good made him so sad he could hardly stand it. He knew Mother and Father were wrong; they had to be. If only there was a way to show them that everything and everybody are real — they’re all just real in different ways — or if anything it was Dan Rather and President Clinton and the amphibians of Africa that were imaginary.
But how could he prove it when Father only bestowed reality status on stuff he could see and many of Jonathan Frederick Johnson Ill’s more colorful friends were notoriously shy and apt to vanish in the presence of grownups? He tiptoed across his bedroom, opened his door a crack, and peeked out into the hall to make sure Mother and Father weren’t out there listening. Then he went back inside, sat on his bed, closed his eyes and very quietly said, “Damn it!”
He opened one eye, looked around the room, but there was no one in it but him.