No one could make heads nor tails of what bred the demon that hatched out in me between fourth and fifth grades. The fourth grade was as fine as cat's hair. I was in Mrs. Betty Fletcherton's room, and since I was her cousin, she let me the classroom dentist and pull teeth, so I had a year in the limelight. (She never let me bring in a reclining chair or drill or put in fillings or attach braces, even though I could have handled the braces because once in church I had managed with two paperclips to build myself a whole set, and by the time Reverend Holder had finished his sermon, I had them fastened on so tight, we had to use a pair of pliers to get them off.)
But now just a few months later, it was like some invisible cowboy had pulled open a chute and turned this twisting, stomping, dirt-kicking she-devil loose on Azalea Heights. By then Daddy had lost his fervor for the movie camera, so we didn't have any spools of film that we could slow down or stop and rewind for another look to learn the answer from some telling darkening of my countenance. Later on people would speculate that I had just finally breathed my fill of the toxins that were being manufactured by my parents' escalating melee in vast quantities within the walls of 212 Herald Street.
This was their second round of matrimony to each other, and the sewn-up sheets seemed doomed to unravel once again. I guess their repentance wore off, and whatever dastardly behaviors both of them had agreed to wash down the drain weren't chased with a strong enough dose of healing waters, and so they came bubbling back up. Angry words of accusation spurred by long-simmering jealousies darted dangerously through the air late at night penetrating the walls of Julie's bedroom. There we huddled under a pile of quilts and afghans in search of warmth from the constant arctic blast being cranked out by her Curtis Mathis window unit. The fact that the air conditioner bellowed boisterously and the quilts stayed piled up twelve months out of the year tells you that the noise we manufactured and the quilts we used as bivouacs were defenses against more than the frigid air in our bedroom.
Occasionally more than words would fly. Once there was a plate, and another memorable morning we awoke to find one of the green padded aluminum dinette chairs poised precariously in the wall above the deep freeze with all four of its legs a foot deep into sheetrock. Mother refused to take it down because she wanted Daddy to see it when he got up and feel the foolishness of trying to explain it. Daddy, of course, wouldn't give her the satisfaction, so it just stayed there like some perverted art exhibit. Our friends who came over regularly finally just got so used to that green kitchen chair poking our of the yellow sheetrock, they'd just saunter on by it like it was as normal a sight as white clouds swimming through a blue sky.
But I don't know. If my hurtling into hoodlumism was some kind of a message I was sending, I sure didn't know it. I just thought I was having fun.
(From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, by Jan Doke © Jan Doke, 2009)
