In my last essay, I described the formation of my grandiose personal myth, according to which I was a creature set apart from the rest of humanity and not bound by the rules that applied to other people. I said that the emergence of this personal myth could be traced back to two primary factors: the cultural differences that separated me from my peers during my childhood, and my mind-blindness, or my inability to understand or recognize the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others. However, I didn’t describe in detail how these factors had affected my development. The story that I’m about to tell, about a friendship in childhood that was valuable to me but that eventually fell apart will give some color to this theory.
Between 1977, when I was seven years old, and 1980, I had a friend who lived in my neighborhood named Ricky Kelleher. I can’t remember how I met Ricky, but he lived only a few blocks from me, and his house was along the path that I would walk to my first school, so it was natural that we should meet. It was also natural that a friendship would form between us because, not only were the same age and size, but we shared a similar serious temperament. I found most boys my age gross and uninteresting. They liked to make jokes about farting. They would ask you, “What do you call shrimp and fish?” and when you said, “Seafood,” they would open their mouths and show you a bunch of chewed up food. “See food! Get it?” But Ricky wasn’t like that.
Thanks for reading Things You Might Not Want to Know About Jonah Ogilwy! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Ricky and I had a passion for building things, and we would focus on our projects with an intensity that was a little nerdy. Behind Ricky’s house, there was a dirt alley that bordered on a bank of rich clay soil, and we spent hours upon hours shaping elaborate winding chutes and aqueducts for water out of this soil. We work at that bank long into the summer evenings and get eaten alive by mosquitoes. We would show off our splotchy legs to each other to see who had the most bites.
Another big construction project that we undertook one summer was building a house out of cardboard boxes. At the dumpster of the local supermarket, we found refrigerator-sized boxes. We would take these out into a wild wooded area that was in between the supermarket and the houses of our neighborhood, and we would cut holes in them to make a sort of network of rooms and corridors. We would experiment with different techniques for to increase the sturdiness our houses, such as using branches as columns and bolstering the boxes with vines.
Ricky’s company was delightful because of his wonderful house. The Kellehers were a large Catholic family with five children, of whom Ricky was the youngest. The Kellehers had been raising children for close to 20 years, and the house was perfectly outfitted for the entertainment and rearing of clean-thinking children. As a result, Ricky and I would almost always meet and spend time at his house. The Kellehers had redone the basem*nt as a rec room with a pool table and games. Ricky and I primarily played pool, Risk, and Battling Tops. While most boys would just goof around while playing games, Ricky was very serious and systematic about them. He would note what worked and what didn’t and try to repeat and build on successful strategies. I was a more spontaneous and daring player who tried out original strategies, but Ricky didn’t care about originality, only winning, and he did usually win the games that we played.
The Kellehers’ house sat high on a steep embankment covered with vines. It had been built in the early 20th century during a whimsical period of domestic architecture. It was made from an irregular patchwork of rough limestone and mortar with a sloping roof and gables. The trim was orange. Columns supported the roof of a large porch in front. My mother called houses like that “gingerbread houses.”
In the evenings, Ricky and I would sit on the porch and watch cars pass in the quiet street below. Ricky thought a lot about cars and especially brooded on the question of which car was the coolest and why. Bouville was a big car town, and some of the people in the neighborhood had sports cars that we were on the lookout for. There was a black Mazda RX7 that slid through the dark streets like a mamba snake. Sometimes this was Ricky’s favorite because of the sleek design and the pop-up headlights. But sometimes Ricky’s favorite car was the red Pontiac Firebird, with a burning phoenix painted on the front hood, around an aperture that Ricky explained to me was the air intake scoop. Ricky knew a lot about cars and would tell me details about horsepower, 0 to 60 times, cylinders, and the like. I was as happy as I have ever been in my life while I was listening to him, and I would sometimes hazard an opinion about which car I thought was the coolest.
One of the reasons why this friendship was so valuable and interesting for me was that Ricky introduced me to the culture of Bouville, the mid-sized mid-western city where we lived, and of America more broadly. I lived alone with my mother, who had divorced my father when I was five. My mother wasn’t from the Bouville area. My father and she had moved there after grad school in New York because they had both found academic jobs there. She stayed on teaching history at the University of Bouville after he moved out, but she wasn’t happy living there and was trying to get hired somewhere else. She wasn’t interested in the local culture, nor was she interested in American pop culture. She worked hard teaching and grading big stacks of blue exam books in the evenings. When she wanted to relax, she watched high-brow public TV, listened to classical music, or went out with me or her friends to independent films at art-house theaters. As a result, I was disconnected from the culture that other children took for granted, and Ricky exposed me to it and explained it to me.
It was because of Ricky and the Kellehers that I shared in one of the most important cultural events of my childhood: the release of Star Wars: A New Hope, although we just called it “Star Wars.” My mother probably wouldn’t have taken me to see it, as she didn’t enjoy violent movies or Hollywood blockbusters. On the whole, she tried to steer me towards non-violent entertainment, but she wasn’t strict about this. I think that she must have been grateful when she found out that Mr. Kelleher would take me to see it.
Star Wars was unlike anything that I had ever seen: two hours of astonishment and terror. It was one unheard-of and shockingly original concept after another: a robot with an English accent; a car that never touched the ground; a moon that was a giant machine; a sword that shone and hummed like a neon light; creatures with eyes in the wrong places; a giant snail-man. I’m not clear what I made of the gargantuan spectacle, but the next time I saw Ricky, I said, “Star Wars was scary ‘cause of all the ghosts.”
Ricky looked puzzled. “What ghosts?”
“There were all the little ghosts staring out from behind the rocks. The ones in cloaks with bright yellow eyes.”
“I don’t think those were ghosts,” said Ricky. “I think they were just some kind of alien race. They were driving around a huge tank thing, and I never heard of ghosts driving before.”
It was a fair point and captured my problems making sense of the film. Ghosts that drove a tank? Ghosts living in a robot? The film was doing violence to all my categories.
“There was another ghost inside the little blue robot. A ghost of a lady,” I persevered.
“No,” said Ricky, “that wasn’t a ghost. That was a polygraph, like a film made out of light. And that wasn’t just some lady, it was Princess Leia.”
I hadn’t realized that the ghost that came out of the robot was the same as Princess Leia, but it made sense, so I figured that it must be true. “Darth Vader was a ghost,” I said direly.
“Darth Vader is a man. You see him walking around like a man.”
“But why does he breathe like a ghost then?” I asked. “And how can he make the man choke without touching him? And why doesn’t he ever take off his mask?”
“I’m not sure,” Ricky conceded.
“I think it’s because there’s nothing inside of him, and he’s a ghost,” I concluded. I wanted to wrap up the conversation because I didn’t know if I was allowed to talk about Darth Vader.
Ricky got to go see Star Wars again, he got some of the action figures, and he even read a novelization of the film, and from this, he pieced together a fairly accurate picture of what had happened. We established that there were no ghosts in Star Wars, we learned the word for “hologram,” we figured out who Jawas were and even played with Jawa figurines. I was still fascinated by how the Jawas had hidden in the rocks, and I would like to hide the figurines in Ricky’s rec room and wait for him to discover them. I would say, “Hey let’s play Risk!” And when Ricky got the box from the game shelf, he would see the Jawa hiding behind it. “You’re so stupid!” he told me affectionately.
I loved the Kellehers’ home not only because of the rec room, but also because of the quality of the TV. In the 70s, a high-end TV was a massive piece of furniture. The Kellehers’ TV was encased in expensive wood like oak or mahogany and you couldn’t put a drink on it without a coaster. Large speakers flanked the screen, which, at about 30 inches, was expansive by the standards of the time.
The Kellehers also got cable quite early on. One day Ricky announced to me that we were going to celebrate the coming of HBO to the household by watching a whole day of movies. Organized and serious as was his nature, Ricky had scanned the upcoming schedule for a lineup of excellent movies, consulted with the rest of the family about monopolizing the TV for that day, and made sure it was okay if I stayed over for dinner. We started out with Old Yeller at lunch time, watched Patton in the late afternoon, and finished at night with Jaws. All the movies were perfectly sharp and bright, and there were no commercials. I had never had any idea that TV could be as good as this.
These were all excellent movies, but the one that prompted the most interesting discussion was Patton because of complexity of the subject matter and the depiction of Nazis walking around in front of big Nazi flags and wearing strange medallions. I thought they were scary, but I didn’t quite know why. I knew that I had watched a horrible show about Nazis with my mother, but I couldn’t remember what had been in it.
Ricky had watched Patton before with his older brother or his father and was able to clarify the finer points of the plot, like how Patton outsmarts Monty to become the first to enter Messina and how Patton gets used as a decoy to distract the Germans from the Normandy invasion. Afterwards he told me, “You know the Nazis are where George Lucas got Darth Vader and the Empire from in Star Wars. The Nazis are like robots. That’s why they lose, because they can’t think for themselves like Patton can. We won WWII because we have freedom. George Lucas got the Empire from the Nazis and also the communists. They’re like the dark side of the Force.”
After that, I would have horrible thoughts about a Nazi general like Darth Vader using his mind to strangle disobedient officers.
The Rose of Heaven
Ricky was always very serious about religion. When we became friends, he told me solemnly, “I’m going to take my first communion soon.” When I asked him what that was, he told me it was part of the process of confirmation, which was one of the sacraments, and he tried to list all the sacraments: “Baptism, confirmation, Eucharist…” He got through most of them but there was one he couldn’t remember. He told me the next time I saw him, “Oh yeah, the anointing of the sick, which used to be called ‘Extreme Unction.’” He was plainly fascinated by mysterious words like “Eucharist” and “Unction,” which hinted at some shadowy spiritual realm. His religious training involved learning a lot of lists. There was the list of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but also one for the fruits of the Holy Spirit, and these lists in turn contained obscure terms to bewitch our young minds like “longanimity” and “continency.”
The fascination rubbed off on me, and I expressed a curiosity to see the Kellehers’ worship. I had been baptized an Episcopalian, but I did not attend church or practice religion at all. My father was a religious studies professor, and after the divorce, my mother had decided that she was through with religion. Besides, she regarded American Christianity, especially Catholicism, with its anti-abortion and anti-feminist obsessions, as a sinister joke. When the Kellehers invited me to see the mass, she replied, with mock seriousness, “Well, far be it from me to stand in the way of a religious vocation!”
The mass was at St. Brigid’s, a lovely, high-ceilinged, and expansive church, decorated with a lot of marble and large paintings of the life of Jesus around the altar. From the beginning I was impressed by how organized the worship was and how everyone knew their lines. The priest would say, “The Lord be with you,” and the whole congregation would boom “And with your spirit” in a startling manner. When it came time to take communion, the Kellehers all got in line, and I followed them. It is inappropriate for a non-Catholic to take communion at a Catholic mass, but no one had told me I couldn’t, and no one seemed to be in a mood to stop me, so I kneeled before the altar and received a wafer on my tongue and a little paper cup of wine.
After the service was over, I tarried with Ricky along the red carpet that led from the entrance to the altar. He drew my attention to the stained-glass window above the entrance. It consisted of several separate panes fanning out from the center to form a circle, and it was pink, red, and white. You could see ethereal forms flying in flowing robes. Ricky told me, “That’s the rose of Heaven!” I surmised that the “rose of Heaven” was some new piece of Catholic lore, and I admired the window with Ricky.
Usually when Ricky and I were down in the rec room, we would listen to Elton John. But one day, Ricky had something new for me to listen to. He put on some music the like of which I had never heard before. It wasn’t really music because it had no melody and no singing, just a beat and rhyming. The song was “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang, and it was the first rap track that broke into the Top 40. The lyrics were very innocent by today’s standards.
At a certain point, Ricky told me to listen because this was his favorite part. The voice said:
Have you ever went over a friend's house to eat
And the food just ain't no good?
I mean the macaroni's soggy, the peas all mushed
And the chicken tastes like wood
The song then veered into a nightmarish description of piles of bad, rotting food that stank. The speaker describes how he tries to find excuses not to eat it, but is trapped at the table by the demands of courtesy, and ends up just running madly out of his friend’s house. I found the whole passage unbearable to contemplate. After the song was over, Ricky rapped his favorite part over again from memory. I told him that I didn’t understand what “chicken tastes like wood” meant. How could you eat wood?
“Can’t you see it?” he replied. “Like it’s white meat and it’s really dry and it sticks in your throat?”
My stomach lurched as I realized how chicken could taste like wood. It looked like wood too.
“Do black people eat food that stinks?” I asked him.
“Yeah, because they’re welfare queens!” said Ricky.
“It’s sad that black people eat bad food,” I said.
Sometime later, I asked my mother what “welfare queen” meant. She asked me where I had learned the word. I told her from Ricky. Her look told me that this piece of information was interesting to her. “ ‘Welfare queen’ is a term that this weird person named Ronald Reagan came up with. He claims that there are a lot of people who are cheating the welfare system and making huge amounts of money from it. People have asked him to name some names of these cheats, but he can never do it. Basically, it’s just his way of attacking the welfare system, as well as stigmatizing single, black mothers. There are children out there who would starve if they didn’t get welfare!”
This was the first time I had ever realized that there might be something wrong with Ricky and the Kellehers.
The Bouville Sweeps
There was one weekend per year when Bouville was in the spotlight: the Bouville Sweepstakes, a major NASCAR event. The week before the race throngs of visitors would come to the city and turn it into a huge carnival.
One group of people who less than enthusiastic about the Bouville Sweeps was the faculty at the U of Bou. The racetrack wasn’t far from the university. The race took place during the summer so it didn’t disrupt the regular school year, but the faculty still sometimes needed to go down there, and they hated what they saw.
My mother hosted a gathering of feminists called “The Sisterhood is Powerful Reading Group.” I was supposed to go to bed before the group started, but I would sometimes lie secretly in the hall and listen to what they said. Normally, they would talk about “the ERA” (the Equal Rights Amendment) or complain about Phyllis Schlafly, the Catholic conservative activist who eventually manage to derail the ERA. I would hear my mother say, “The absolute gall of her! She says a woman needs a man’s protection, as though the ERA would make it illegal for men to protect women. It’s about getting to choose whether we want protection or not!” Someone else would say, “I don’t care if some asshole in Congress thinks women in the military are ugly! We have the right to be ugly! It isn’t our duty to give a man a boner!” Such comments were greeted with peals of laughter.
In the runup to the Bouville Sweeps that year, most of the talk was about how much they hated the event. “You go down to the university to use the library and there are all these ZZ Top weirdos all over the place wearing Confederate flag shirts and driving their hotrods around breaking your eardrums! And those guys are driving drunk, you can be absolutely sure of that! I hope no one gets killed this year!” They called it “The Bouville Freakstakes” and “The Festival of Lead Poisoning.” They would talk about the racism endemic to NASCAR. They would talk about American car culture and acid rain.
For the Kellehers, however, Sweeps week was a time for celebration and reunification with extended family. The house would be packed with relatives going in and out in strange costumes, grabbing food off a big table that the Kellehers put outside, and sleeping all over the place. Ricky was deemed too young to attend any of the events of Sweeps week, but he heard a lot about them.
“The day before the race is called ‘The Shenanigans,’” Ricky told me. “It’s at the infield of the racetrack. One thing they do is gravy-drinking. They’ll get a gallon jug full of thick chicken gravy, and they try to drink it all. You’ve got to drink it all down without missing a drop to win. Most people just end up spilling gravy all over themselves and then they get hosed off by a fireman. That’s what happened to my brother. Also there’s the ‘Belching Opera,’ where people chug down a lot of co*ke and try to belch as long and loud as they can.”
These gluttonous hijinks seemed like the sort of thing that would appeal to the gross boys that I didn’t like. Nevertheless, Ricky’s enthusiasm was infectious, and I listened on eagerly. “Another thing they do is called the Blind Chicken Scramble,” he told me. “They put you in a pen and they blindfold you, and they put some chickens in the pen too with bells on their legs, and you have to catch them by listening for them.” I got an idea of what this must be like: hearing a bell jingling off to my right and lurching for it and missing, all while people jeered at me for flailing around so hopelessly. I didn’t say anything, but it confused me that Ricky and the Kellehers could take such joy in an event that my mother and her friends found so appalling. How was it possible for two groups of people could see the same thing in such different ways?
That summer, I toured northern England with my father for six weeks. My father was a religious studies professor of English origin who now had a position at a seminary in Canada. We stayed mostly with my grandparents, two retired factory workers, but my father would also take me on trips to stay with his colleagues.
We would spend most of our days going for walks across the country-side, getting shepherd’s pies and plowman’s lunches at pubs, and visiting ecclesiastical buildings—churches, cathedrals, abbeys—in various states of decay. Oddly enough, this way of passing time did not bore me. I loved the old churches with their smell of stone, their coolness, and their “storied windows richly dight, casting a dim religious light.” To these, my father was an excellent guide. He would carry around thick books with him on these expeditions and would show me carvings and stained glass that illustrated the life of St. Cuthbert or St. Oswald. Some of the buildings had old tombs with the occupants carved in marble effigy on top and shields of heraldry around the base. You could sometimes reach crypts or towers by narrow spiral stairs.
In the evenings, my father would read to me. At 11 years old, I was capable of reading on my own, and often did so, but I still relished the old tradition of hearing my father read aloud to me, as he had done for longer than I could remember. That year, we got through the whole of The Hobbit. I was fascinated and horrified by Gollum and the Dragon and I would ask my father to tell me more about them and where they had come from. My father said that I could find out the answers to those questions in Lord of the Rings (LoTR) and The Silmarillion, which were books that I could read when I was a little older.
England formed a contrast to Bouville. England was about green and ancient places whereas Bouville was about cars, McDonald’s, pollution, and billboards. Of course, as a tourist, I had seen only the narrowest and most picturesque sliver of England, but I didn’t understand that. I began to worship everything English, and I would use English phrases in my speech and affected an English accent.
When my father visited his friends, he would sometimes talk about his work. He was an early practitioner of deconstructionism, an interpretative practice that seeks to find and understand contradictions and incoherences in literary texts. He would say things like “John Milton invented Christianity!” to shock his colleagues. What he meant was that Christianity was not one religion, but a series of distinct and incompatible religions that shared no common essence. Today’s Christian belief system, he believed, had been constructed by the religious epics of the 17th century poet John Milton and had little in common with what Jesus believed.
My father told his bemused colleagues, “Just as one example, Milton canonized the idea that Satan is the anti-Christ. It isn’t quite true to say that Satan doesn’t exist in the Bible, but he’s a marginal figure, and he isn’t an enemy of God. Rather, he’s God’s employee. Satan means ‘the accuser’ in Hebrew, and Satan is usually a kind of prosecutor whom God uses to test the mettle of human beings, as in the book of Job. And if you really read what Jesus and Paul and the other apostles are saying in the New Testament, you will see that they mean the same thing by ‘Satan.’ Also, no early Christian believed that the serpent who tempts Eve in Genesis was Satan. After Biblical times, there are various interpretations of Satan. In medieval mystery plays, he’s a pathetic comic relief character who farts and raves. It wasn’t until Milton that Christians came to settle on the basic narrative of God vs. Satan the Anti-Christ, who rules over Hell and who tempted Eve.”
I didn’t understand all of what my father was saying, but I did get his main point. I started to wonder how much of what I had seen at the Catholic mass was rooted in the Bible and how much had been added on later. I asked him about the prayer where the priest had said, “The Lord be with you,” and the congregation had impressively replied, “and with your spirit!” My father said that this part of the worship did have roots in the early Christian tradition. Similar exchanges were found in the New Testament. Then I asked him about communion, and he replied that the Eucharist had always been one of the defining ceremonies of Christianity, from the days of Jesus himself, although its meaning had varied over time.
Then I remembered the pink stained-glass window that Ricky had told me was the rose of heaven. “Ah yes,” said my father. “That is definitely not rooted in the Bible. The rose has a complicated history as a Christian symbol, but a rose of heaven or paradise is depicted in your friend’s church not because there is any such thing in the Bible, but because of a medieval poet named Dante Alighieri. Dante imagined paradise as a kind of rose with angels flying around it, a bit like holy bees. Roses are mentioned in the Bible, but they were actually quite a different plant than what we and Dante called a rose. Jesus probably had no idea what a rose was. It isn’t even clear whether Jesus believed in anything like ‘heaven’ or ‘paradise,’ as we understand the term. Jesus spoke about the ‘Kingdom of God,’ but never gave us any details on what this kingdom was like, where it was, or how it worked. Sometimes it seems like a place where people go after they die, but more often ‘The Kingdom of God’ means the paradise that will exist on earth after Jesus’s second coming.”
The notion that Jesus didn’t know what a rose was—this was very strange for me. Although I had never been religious, I had absorbed the notion that Jesus was one of the manifestations of God, and surely God would know about everything, including roses. This subtle deflation of all Christian ideas was one of the reasons that so many religious scholars found my father interesting, but also suspect and dangerous.
A bad thing to say
Back in Bouville, I immediately started reading LoTR because I needed to hold on to the enchantment of England. I would tell Ricky about my adventures in reading expecting him to get sucked in, but he never seemed to get it. I would tell him that the book was about a wizard and a set of magic rings. I would intone the mystical poem of the Rings to him in a vaguely English accent:
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne…
But he would answer me, “What is an elf?” I knew quite a lot about this. “They’re tall,” I answered, “and they’re immortal, and they have three rings, and they’ve got pointy ears. They’re great at firing bows and arrows. They’re very wise.”
“Do they live in trees and bake cookies?” Ricky asked.
I knew that he was referring to the Keebler elves. “No, these are the real elves!” I said angrily.
“There aren’t any real elves,” came Ricky’s crushing reply. “And I want to know about stuff that’s real!”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like cars!” Rick pointed to the issue of Car and Driver that he had been reading when I came in. It was one of the magazines that Mr. Kelleher subscribed to.
I was aghast that anyone would think that cars were worth studying. They were dangerous. They smelled bad. They were ugly for the most part. Most of the cars that you would see were faded, dusty, and rusty. They polluted the atmosphere. They caused acid rain. They made loud noises that intimidated women. For all of these reasons, cars were appalling. But what was worst about them was that they were ordinary. Why would anyone be interested in what was going on in Bouville?
“Cars are stupid!” I said. I looked down at the magazine that Ricky was reading. I saw an illustration of some pistons. I was sure all this stuff was easy to figure out and unworthy of my attention.
It went on bothering me that Ricky was more interested in cars than in LoTR. It seemed unfair in a way. After all, I always took an interest in Ricky’s religious thoughts. And really, was LoTR really that different from religion? There was magic, there were miracle workers, there was good and evil, there was a creation story, there were a lot of symbols. Why couldn’t Ricky be interested in my religion?
Of course, Ricky and I were doing the same thing in a way: we were both taking after our fathers and reading what they read. However, it was impossible for me to imagine any equivalence between us. If it had been pointed out, I would have been furious.
I continued to push LoTR when I was in Ricky’s presence. It was as though I needed to save his soul. I would look up novel words that I encountered in the book and write them down and tell Ricky about them. “Yesterday, I learned the word ‘hearth’!” I said once.
“What does that mean?” he asked me.
“Fireplace!”
“Why not just say ‘fireplace’ then?”
I had known this question was coming. Ricky didn’t understand that the language of LoTR was deeper and more magical than the one we spoke. “Because ‘hearth’ combines ‘fireplace’ with ‘heart’!” I improvised. “The hearth is like the warm, beating heart of the Prancing Pony Inn! It sounds even better if you pronounce it ‘hawth’.” Here I did my best to imitate the way my father would have pronounced the word.
“We live in America and we say ‘fireplace’!” Ricky said authoritatively. I was mad. We played pool for a while, and Ricky started winning again like he always did, and that made me even more mad. He started talking about how he was going to serve at the altar of his church soon.
“Hey,” I said, “you know that stained glass window you have at your church showing the rose of heaven? That doesn’t exist in the Bible!”
Ricky looked confused.
“There’s no rose of heaven in the Bible!” I continued. “Jesus never even saw a rose. They didn’t exist in Israel while he was alive. There isn’t even any heaven in the Bible!” I was getting worked up. Ricky gazed at me in perplexity. “Most of Christianity is just made up! In fact, it’s all made up! It’s just a bunch of stories that people told, and then people make up new stories about those old stories. Christianity is like The Lord of the Rings!”
Ricky looked at me seriously. “I don’t know if what you’re saying is true,” he said. “I’m going to see if it is. But even if it is, that’s a bad thing to say. It’s a mean thing to say, but it’s also a bad thing to say.”
He was so serious that it scared me. I felt as though I had crossed some terrible line, and I was in a dangerous place far from home. I realized that I had hurt Ricky, which I had never done before, at least not knowingly. I said, “I’m sorry!” without knowing what exactly I was sorry for.
As I’ve explained, I almost always went over Ricky’s house. But towards the end of our friendship, we found ourselves at my home for once for some reason. Having him there made me realize how different our homes were for the first time. We did not own a large deluxe TV. We owned a small black and white TV that rolled around on a little cart. Pride of place in our living room was given to books, which stood in two sizable bookshelves flanking the front door.
My mother would often go on trips to Europe for her scholarly research. She had hung a number of posters on the wall that were reproductions of art that she enjoyed, and Ricky inspected them. There was the famous advertisem*nt for “Lait pur stérilisé de Vingeanne” from 1894. Ricky looked at it for a while and asked, “What is it saying?” I said I didn’t know, but the words were French. I explained that the little girl in the red dress was drinking milk and the cats wanted some. He fired back, “Yeah, no duh!” as though I were condescending to him.
Then Ricky paused before another painting advertising a Bauhaus exhibit from the 1920s. It’s a very beautiful poster that expresses the movement’s taste for clean geometrical shapes, bright colors, functionality, and whimsical juxtapositions.
Ricky asked, “What is that?” He seemed scared and confused. He tried to pronounce the word “Ausstellung.” I told him that the words of that poster were German, and that Bauhaus was “a style of architecture,” as I had heard my mother say. I knew a bit more about Bauhaus because my mother also had a book about it that I would sometimes enjoy looking through. I brought the book out. “It’s about these clean lines.” We looked at a few pictures of the austere furniture and homes with whole walls made up almost entirely of glass. I reflected on how different the houses were from Ricky’s house. Ricky said, “They look really cold and weird.” Then he looked at me seriously and said, “I would never go to Germany.”
“Why not?” I asked. And then I recalled the Nazis in Patton and sought to allay Ricky’s fears. “There aren’t any Nazis there anymore.”
“Yeah, but there are communists,” Ricky returned.
My mother had taught me about Germany, so I knew the answer to this point. “Most of Germany isn’t communist,” I said. “Only a part in the East.” I was getting flustered because I felt that Ricky was being unfair to my mother, Germany, and myself. “Most of Germany is normal!” I protested.
We went into my mother’s bedroom. Above the bed were two woven wall hangings that depicted the marble effigies that you saw on top of medieval tombs in England. There was a man with thin legs holding a sword across his body, and a woman with some sort of wimple, both with eyes closed, resting in peace. My mother had undoubtedly acquired these on a trip with my father. Ricky looked at these and asked about them, and I told him all sorts of things about English churches. After that, I needed a snack, so I said I’d go to the kitchen and get some co*kes and Doritos. Ricky said he needed to use the bathroom.
I brought the snacks out into the dining room. Ricky emerged, and drank a bit of his co*ke and had a chip or two. He picked up a bronze owl figurine around the size of an apricot that was standing on the sideboard. My mother collected owl figurines on her travels and had dozens of them around the house. Ricky hefted it in his hand and said, “This is the perfect size for throwing. I could do a lot of damage with this.” He made as if he was going to throw it at the Bauhaus poster. I drew in my breath, but he didn’t do anything and chuckled at me.
The fruity tycoon
The next time I saw Ricky was at his house. We went out and hit the baseball around, then went down to the rec room and played Battle Tops for a while. And then Ricky told me the most amazing thing. He said, “You know, Jonah, there’s a black man who’s selling ties in the neighborhood.”
I couldn’t make sense of monstrous idea. I knew there were black people in Bouville. You would see them when you went to the library downtown, but you rarely saw one in our neighborhood, let alone one selling ties. I didn’t think people were even allowed to sell ties on the streets of our neighborhood.
“No, there’s not!” I replied.
“Yes, there is. He’s over on Daniel Street selling ties.”
Daniel Street was a place about half a mile from Ricky’s house where we would sometimes ride our bikes. I loved Daniel St. with its large shadowy magnolia trees that bloomed white in the spring in front of the recessed houses. It was a private, shady, hushed place in a glen where I had once seen mist. Ricky knew how much I loved Daniel Street. I imagined a a black man wearing a sort of purple lounge suit and a purple fedora with an orange feather on Daniel St. It was an unspeakable obscenity.
“Well, what’s his name then?” I countered.
“I’m going to tell you his name,” said Ricky. “But the other thing you need to know is you don’t pay him with money. If you want a tie from him, you have to give him a piece of fruit, like an orange or a banana or something.”
“You’re a liar!” I said.
“I’m telling you, Jonah, my dad just went over there yesterday and gave him a grapefruit, and he got a new tie. You can ask him! He’s the one who told me about this!”
I thought about it, but I knew that Mr. Kelleher would side with his son.
“So do you know what they call him? Huh?... They… caalll… hiimmmm… THE FRUITY TYCOON!”
And now I saw that Ricky had been telling a joke the whole time. That was a relief, but I didn’t understand the joke because I didn’t know the words “coon” or “tycoon,” and I was a little vague about what “fruity” was supposed to mean in this context as well.
Ricky had a lot of explaining to do. I think Ricky told me this to show off his advanced adult vocabulary. He told me “coon” just meant a black man, “tycoon” meant a successful businessman. “So he’s a TIE-COON!” After he explained, I didn’t laugh, and I felt like I still didn’t completely understand the joke. I might have understood it a literal level, but there was other some dimension to it that I was missing. I also didn’t get what was supposed to be funny about the joke.
So I told the joke to my mother. As soon as I reached the punchline, she inhaled direly. “Where did you hear that joke?” she asked. I replied that Ricky had told it to me. She said sternly: “You must never use that word ‘coon.’ It’s a racial slur, which means it’s insulting and hurtful to black people. It’s cruel to tell jokes like that!”
A few days later, my mother made a shocking discovery: her bedroom wall-hangings had been vandalized! It was hard to see, but someone had drawn little mustaches in pencil under the noses of the knight and his lady. I was as amazed by this discovery as she was. I knew that I had had nothing to do with this miniscule crime, and I protested my innocence to my mother, who laughed at me. “Who else could it be?” she asked. I had to admit that he had a point. I started to wonder whether I might have drawn the mustaches in a fit of amnesia. It was inexplicable, and I tried not to think about it. The damage was easily remedied, and the event faded into oblivion. I never realized what happened until I started to write this story.
The next time I saw Ricky, we were down in his rec room again, and he asked me merrily, “How do you stop black kids from jumping on the bed?” “How?” I asked with a sinking heart. “You put Velcro on the ceiling!” I didn’t get it.
Ricky explained, “Because black people’s hair is nappy like Velcro.” And then with a sickness, I saw how black people’s hair was like Velcro. “Ricky…” I said.
“Hold on I’m not finished. This is a two-part joke.” I was not laughing, but perhaps he was enjoying my unease. He repeated the joke, then asked, “And how do you get them down again?” “How?” I asked reluctantly. “You tell Mexicans they’re piñatas! HAWHAWHAW!” he laughed fiercely.
“Ricky,” I said sadly, “you can’t tell jokes like that!”
“Who says I can’t?” asked Ricky.
“My mom said jokes like that are cruel,” I said.
“You told your mom?” he asked and shook his head. “You’re a tattletale! You’re a rat!”
And with that, the friendship ended. I was barred from the home in which I had known so much happiness. In the years afterwards when I passed it, it glared down at me from its embankment with a depressing and forbidding face, as though it were possessed by a demon.
Rat? Hero? Or Something Else?
Ricky had called me a rat, but you could also shape the story of our friendship and its end into a heroic myth about me. After all, I had stood up against racism, like some kind of budding Atticus Finch. I had begun to articulate an intelligent criticism of Christianity. I was precociously reading great literature.
I have spent most of my life trying to convince myself that this heroic myth or something like it was true. I went on absorbing the views of my parents throughout the 80s. I became pro-nuclear disarmament, pro-welfare, pro-feminist. I was opposed to everything Ronald Reagan. I was a precocious little liberal who opposed the entrenched conservatism of my hometown. I also went on laboriously acquiring learning and culture.
I no longer believe that I was ever heroic. The facts simply don’t support the myth. I have accomplished little, and I have spent my life making problems for other people. However, if I were still trying to believe in my heroism, I might avail myself of poetic license to invent a grim future for Ricky. I would write about how he became a bad person, a Catholic fundamentalist, a reactionary. I would conclude that I had shown good sense in bringing our relationship to a close by calling Ricky on his racism.
But that was not Ricky’s future. I’ve learned from Internet searching that, after graduating from one of Bouville’s Catholic high schools, he studied engineering at a nearby university. He became an energy broker and helped to found what would become a large renewable energy company. He worked as a vice president of the company. Now in his mid-50s, he owns his own energy brokerage company as well as a high-end resort in Belize where he spends most of his time.
He appears to have grown up to be an excellent person who did well by doing good. After all, he furthered the energy transition, the most important task of our time, in my view. I wish that our friendship had gone on longer.
In fact, the heroic myth about myself was always about avoiding the truth and covering over the real problems of my life. My delusions of heroism led me into miserable foolishness. I think many live in such a state, and I’m trying to jolt them out of it.
I do not figure as a hero in the story of Ricky and me, but I also think Ricky was wrong to call me a rat. The term designates a person who knowingly betrays another for profit. But I did not realize that I was betraying him, nor did I profit from this “betrayal,” nor do I believe that he suffered much from it.
The fact is that I was blind, and also blind to my own blindness. My disdain for Ricky’s fascination with cars shows my blindness to the value of technology and engineering. But more deeply than that, I was blind to the humanity of other people, especially those with backgrounds different from my own. I accepted my parents as omniscient arbiters of right and wrong. What they valued and strove for represented the absolute good for me, and I thought that valuing anything else was incomprehensible and wrong. I was blind to the value of otherness and indeed did not understand what otherness was.
Of course, Ricky’s perspective as a child was also comically limited in many ways. The very idea of going to Germany was intolerable to him. He thought that racist jokes were funny. But some of us manage to outgrow such limitations more quickly and completely than others.
What was the real meaning of the racist jokes? They were certainly a sign that Ricky was absorbing the racist norms of my hometown, but I think there was a deeper meaning there. Ricky was giving me one last chance to see into his mind. We were growing up, and part of growing up for normal boys meant establishing a network of loyalties, a “bro code,” as we would call it today, that didn’t include our parents or women. It was time for us to become independent men and keep secrets of our own. For the secret to be meaningful, there had to be a touch of evil about it. I made it clear to Ricky that I had no idea how to be a bro.
Thanks for reading Things You Might Not Want to Know About Jonah Ogilwy! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
