I was on vacation between first and second grade. We were living at Uncle Jim’s house. One day all the grownups started acting crazy and laughing and hugging and hollering and crying. I asked them what was going on, and they said the war was over. I asked them who won, but they just ignored me. I ran up and down the front steps for a while.
I knew it was important. I had on my brown and orange striped shirt.
Before we lived there we had our own house. A few other things happened. I got hit on the head with a rock. I broke my brother’s radio and looked at a girl’s hiney hole. Italian kids moved in and came to my kindergarten. I asked my mother what a fucking cocksucker was. My father stopped coming home. My teacher made me hide my face in her lap. I had to clean the school steps with a bucket and scrub brush because I wrote on them. While I was scrubbing my mother walked by on the way to the store but she didn’t look at me. I cut off the tip of my finger slicing bread and got a red wagon for not crying too much on the way to the doctor’s.
At Uncle Jim’s house I jumped off his garage roof with an umbrella. I broke off enough roof shingles to build a fort but he made them not punish me. He had a Civil War rifle hanging on a rafter in the cellar.
When we got our own house again I used to play under our dining room table and make believe it was my fort. There was a metal lever there to pull the two halves of the table tight together and I would slide it back and forth and pretend it was the speed control on a trolley car. I wrote ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ in chalk on the underside of the table and the day the movers took the table apart to bring it to our next house they walked past my brother and me with the words facing out and he laughed, but didn’t tell anyone.
