I don’t know what happened—whether he lost his nerve or realized that he was approaching the water at a murderous velocity or what—but about three-quarters of the way down he seemed to have second thoughts about the whole business and began suddenly to flail, like someone entangled in bedding in a bad dream, or whose chute hasn’t opened. When he was perhaps thirty feet above the water, he gave up on flailing and tried a new tack. He spread his arms and legs wide, in the shape of an X, evidently hoping that exposing a maximum amount of surface area would somehow slow his fall.
It didn’t.
He hit the water— impacted really is the word for it—at over six hundred miles an hour, with a report so loud that it made birds fly out of trees up to three miles away. At such a speed water effectively becomes a solid. I don’t believe Mr. Milton penetrated it at all, but just bounced off it about fifteen feet, limbs suddenly very loose, and then lay on top of it, still, like an autumn leaf, spinning gently. He was towed to shore by two passing fishermen in a rowboat, and carried to a grassy area by half a dozen onlookers who carefully set him down on an old blanket. There he spent the rest of the afternoon on his back, arms and legs bent slightly and elevated. Every bit of frontal surface area, from his thinning hairline to his toenails, had a raw, abraded look, as if he had suffered some unimaginable misfortune involving an industrial sander. Occasionally he accepted small sips of water, but otherwise was too traumatized to speak.
Later that same afternoon Milton Junior cut himself with a hatchet that he had been told on no account to touch, so that he ended up bleeding, in pain, and in trouble all at the same time. It was the best day of my life.
OF COURSE, that isn’t saying a huge amount when you consider that the previous best day in my life at this point was when Mr. Sipkowicz, a teacher we didn’t like much, licked a Lincoln Log.
Lincoln Logs were toy wooden logs with which you could build forts, ranch houses, stockades, bunkhouses, corrals, and many other structures of interest and utility to cowboys, according to the imaginative illustrations on the cylindrical box, though in fact the supplied materials were actually just barely enough to make one small rectangular cabin with one door and one window.
What Buddy Doberman and I discovered was that if you peed on Lincoln Logs you bleached them white. As a result we created, over a period of weeks, the world’s first albino Lincoln Log cabin, which we took to school as part of a project on Abraham Lincoln’s early years. Naturally we declined to say how we had made the logs white, prompting pupils and teachers alike to examine them keenly for clues.
“I bet you did it with lemon juice,” said Mr. Sipkowicz, who was youthful, brash, and odious, and had an unfortunate taste for flashy ties, and who for a single semester had the distinction of being Greenwood’s only male teacher. Before we could stop him (not that we had any intention or desire to, of course) he shot out a long, reptilian tongue and ran it delicately and experimentally—lingeringly, eye-flutteringly—over the longest log in the back wall, which by chance we had prepared only that morning, so that it was still very slightly moist.
“I can taste lemon, can’t I?” he said with a pleased, knowing look.
“Not exactly!!!” we cried and he tried again.
“No, it’s lemon,” he insisted. “I can taste the tartness.” He gave another lick, savoring the flavor with such a deep, concentrated, twitchy intensity that for a moment we thought he had gone into shock and was about to topple over, but it was just his way of relishing the moment. “Definitely lemon,” he said, brightening, and handed it back to us with great satisfaction all round.
Mr. Sipkowicz’s unbidden licking gave pleasure, of course, but the real joy of the experience was in knowing that we were the first boys in history to get genuine entertainment out of Lincoln Logs, for Lincoln Logs were inescapably pointless and dull—a characteristic they shared with nearly all other toys of the day.
It would be difficult to say which was the most stupid or disappointing toy of the 1950s since most of them were one or the other, except for those that were both. The one that always leaps to mind for me as most incontestably unsatisfactory was Silly Putty, an oily pink plastic material that did nothing but bounce erratically a dozen or so times before disappearing down a storm drain. (That was actually the best thing about it.) Others, however, might opt for the majestically unamusing Mr. Potato Head, a box of plastic parts that allowed children to confirm the fundamental truth that even with ears, limbs, and a goofy smile a lifeless tuber is a lifeless tuber.
Also notable for negative ecstasy was Slinky, a coil of metal that could be made to go head over heels down a flight of steps but otherwise did nothing at all, though it did redeem itself slightly from the fact that if you got someone to hold one end—Lumpy Kowalski was always very good for this—and stretched the other end all the way across the street and halfway up a facing slope and then let go, it hit them like a cannonball. In much the same way, Hula-Hoops, those otherwise supremely pointless rings, took on a certain value when used as oversize quoits to ensnare and trip up passing toddlers.
Perhaps nothing says more about the modest range of pleasures of the age than that the most popular candies of my childhood were made of wax. You could choose among wax teeth, wax pop bottles, wax barrels, and wax skulls, each filled with a small amount of colored liquid that tasted very like a small dose of cough syrup. You swallowed this with interest if not exactly gratification, then chewed the wax for the next ten or eleven hours.
Now you might think there is something wrong with your concept of pleasure when you find yourself paying real money to chew colorless wax, and you would be right of course.
But we did it and enjoyed it because we knew no better. And there was, it must be said, something good, something healthily restrained, about eating a product that had neither flavor nor nutritive value.
You could also get small artificial ice-cream cones made of some crumbly chalklike material, straws containing a gritty sugar so ferociously sour that your whole face would actually be sucked into your mouth like sand collapsing into a hole, root-beer barrels, red-hot cinnamon balls, licorice wheels and whips, greasy candy worms, rubbery dense gelatinlike candies that tasted of unfamiliar (and indeed unlikable) fruits but were a good value as it took more than three hours to eat each one (and three hours more to pick the gluey remnants out of your molars, sometimes with fillings attached), and jawbreakers the size and density of billiard balls, which were the best value of all as they would last for up to three months and had multiple strata that turned your tongue interesting new shades as you doggedly dissolved away one squamous layer after another.
At Bishop’s, where they had a large and highly regarded assortment of penny candies by the cash register, you could also get a comparatively delicious licorice treat known, with exquisite sensitivity, as nigger babies—though no one actually used that term anymore except my grandmother. Occasionally, when visiting from her hometown of Winfield and dining with us at Bishop’s, she would slip me a quarter and tell me to go and get some candy for the two of us to share later.