Read Little Boy Blues for Free Online Page B

spanking.
    “So can you stay home and do the cooking and be with me?”
    “No, honey, I wish I could, but Mommy has to teach school. You can stay with Tom and Melita.”
    “But I want to stay with you.”
    “I know you do, and I do too, but I just can’t make it happen.” She gave me a funny look. “Is that what this was all about?”
    By the time I turned ten, I had lost interest in putting on shows with my marionettes, preferring to work with them alone on plots that I improvised as I went along. Ultimately boredom, not necessity, became the mother of my invention, leading to odd scenarios starring the cowgirl, the wolf and the minstrel boy. There was no intent in these inventions, and hardly any volition. I felt, rather, as though I were peering down, like some sort of minor god, and merely observing the marionettes in their off-hours, when they talked among themselves.
    It was around this time that my mother mounted her campaign to make me more of a regular boy. (At church I overheard another woman say something to Mother about her special son. “Oh, no,” she replied, “he’s just a regular boy.”) She signed me up for the Cub Scouts. She bought me a baseball glove and paid to have a basketball hoop installed in the yard behind our apartment. “You know your father went to college on a football scholarship, don’t you?” she often reminded me. Marionettes were not part of the regular-boy package, although as soon as they began to gather dust, I got the lecture about not being a quitter. In time, I discovered that the immediate subject of these lectures was not the issue. Don’t give up the piano, don’t abandon your old friends, when are you going to give me a puppet show—it didn’t matter what the subject was. What mattered was that my mother hated change, especially in me. But that took years to figure out. When I was ten, I merely suspected that she thought of me as a sort of apprentice failure following in my father’s footsteps. Thatbothered me not because I agreed with her but because I did not want to be the latest person in her life to let her down. So that fall, when my new class held a talent show, I brought the minstrel boy out of semi-retirement and had him play the toy piano. Two girls lip-synching “Hit the Road, Jack” won the contest, and I never picked up a marionette again.
    Two things stuck with me about the day I witnessed the performance of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” First, when I was escorted backstage, I was surprised by how big the marionettes were (each of them came up to my chest) and how dirty. Their clothes were dingy and worn, the paint on their faces chipped and scored. One of the giant’s hands was missing a thumb, the stump just raw wood. Seen up close, everything looked old and scuffed, even the people who ran the show. Shows like this must have been the last gasp of small-time live entertainment: vaudeville, medicine shows, minstrelsy. As their usual bookings dried up, some of the milder acts turned to the school circuit. And by the time I got out of elementary school in the early sixties, even those gigs had died off—the puppet shows and magic acts and the science guy with the shiny ball that could make a girl’s hair stand on end. There’s been nothing like it since: the small-time but inimitable traveling troupe.
    I was shocked when I saw the beanstalk for what it was, a tattered thing made of nothing more than crudely knotted strips of cloth from an old bedsheet that had been dyed green. This was the object that, when seen from the audience, had seemed to levitate magically from the well into which Jack’s mother had furiously thrown the magic beans. For the four or five seconds that ittook to rise in the half-light of morning on the small stage, I had believed it completely. It took nothing more than this to fool me. And in the same instant that I understood the deception, I also understood, even without being able to articulate the thought, that I