Flush The Exaggerated Memoir of a Fourth Grade Scaredy-Cat Super-Hero
R i ck Me yer
GARN PRESS N EW YO R K , N Y
Published by Garn Press, LLC New York, NY www.garnpress.com
Copyright Š 2016 by Rick Meyer Garn Press and the Chapwoman logo are registered trademarks of Garn Press, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please contact Garn Press through www.garnpress.com. The characters in this book are loosely based upon the life of the author and his recollections are not intended to accurately reflect reality. The real names of the author's sisters are included with their permission. Any other name similarities are coincidental and not intentional. Book and cover design by Benjamin J. Taylor/Garn Press Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936904 Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Meyer, Richard J., 1949Title: Flush : the exaggerated memoir of a fourth grade scaredy-cat super-hero / Rick Meyer. Description: Garn Press, 2016. | Summary: Catastrophe follows disaster as Ricky works to keep his summer secrets from his parents. | 4th grade and up. Identifiers: LCCN 2016936904 | ISBN 978-1-942146-39-1 (pbk.) | ISBN 978-1-94214640-7 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-942146-41-4 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Bullies--Juvenile fiction. | Families--Juvenile fiction. | Fathers and sons--Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Coming of age--Fiction. | Bullying--Fiction. | Family life--Fiction. | Fathers and sons--Fiction. | Bicycles and bicycling--Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Social Themes / Bullying. | JUVENILE FICTION / Boys & Men. | JUVENILE FICTION / Family / General. | FICTION / Coming of age. | FICTION / Family life. Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M49 Flu 2016 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.M49 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--dc23.
This book is dedicated to my grandchildren Hayden, Robbie, Joey, and Keishor
I am so very grateful to my family for their support in the writing of this. In particular, my sisters who lived a very different life from me even though we grew up in the same house, were honest in their responses to this story. My wife, Pat, puts up with the angst of a writer on a daily basis and for that, I thank her. Denny Taylor and Garn Press have offered infinite support and encouragement. Thank you Lester Lamanack for thoughts about a previous draft.
Chapter 1
Fourth grade ended with a heavy sigh of sadness. In five years of schooling, only third and fourth grade were memorable in any positive way. I’d fallen in love in first grade, but that romance was interrupted when Mrs. Craft found Frannie and me in the in-classroom bathroom. We met there to whisper to each other and exchange gifts like pencil sharpeners and crayons. “What do you think you are doing in here?” Mrs. Craft asked us. I had no idea what to answer. I wanted to say, ‘We’re being friends.’ I wanted to say, ‘She’s my only friend in this class.’ I wanted to say, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing.’ That last thing is true because I didn’t have a name for it. “Ricky, I’m moving your desk to the back of the room. Frannie, move your desk over next to mine,” she said. Her face was red and she spit just a little bit as she spoke. The romance ended, our desks were separated, and Frannie moved to another city all in the space of two weeks. Aside from that quickly-ended first love, school was uneventful and unmemorable. Mack was in that first grade class, too, but he was quite the opposite of Frannie. Mack lived up the block from me and even in first grade he wore those muscle-showing 1
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T-shirts and he really had muscles, too. Big ones. I would sit and watch him occasionally and be truly amazed at the bulk that he carried on his arms. His hair was buzzed to a fine blond sandpaper look. He was tough and I usually stayed far away from him. But, I didn’t mean to begin this story in first grade. It really begins in fourth. Frannie was long gone and Mack was not in my fourth grade class. In fourth grade, I started the year in heaven because our third grade teacher, Mrs. Simmle, had moved to fourth grade with us. She told us at the end of our third grade year that she loved us so much that she was going to keep us for another year. This surprised me. I knew I loved her – she was beautiful and never raised her voice and never checked to see if we were in the bathroom with anyone else. She read us stories and told us, “You are so polite and kind to each other,” and, “I’m very proud of you.” When she said this, I thought she was talking to someone else, not to me. I stayed very quiet in school. Mostly, the stuff of school was boring, but I didn’t mind doing it because Mrs. Simmle was so gentle in her ways. My own mother looked old and overworked compared to Mrs. Simmle. My mother always worried and her forehead was wrinkled when she looked at my pants that were too short or my sneakers with holes in the bottom. She had a job with long hours and was busy working, always working, with little time to spend with my sisters and me. She and my father argued about money and we never seemed to have enough to make it to the end of the month. I didn’t understand what ‘make it to the end of the month’ meant, until I realized that we were pretty poor and didn’t know where money would come from to pay for the house and utilities. Still, I had Mrs. Simmle. She was glad to see us. She kept the classroom very warm in the winter and I liked that. Our house was usually cold. “If you’re cold, put on a sweater,” my mother would say. Sometimes she would scream, “Who turned
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up the heat?” It was usually my father. “It’s freezing in here,” he would say. But my mom won those battles and the heat was turned down. The rule in Mrs. Simmle’s class was simple – we all did the work and were given her love for doing it. She always marveled at what we did, no matter how lackluster it really was. She told me that she liked my writing, which meant she liked the way I made letters on the page because we never actually wrote anything besides rows and rows of the same letter (in cursive) or sometimes we practiced connecting two letters, but we rarely wrote a word. Except for the big states reports. State reports were what every fourth grader in our school had to do. I suppose that every kid in the US had to do them. We each had two states to study and write a report on. I had to write about Georgia and Alabama and I didn’t even know where they were. I went to the public library on three Saturdays in a row and wrote what I found in books and the encyclopedia. At least I got to ride my bike to the library. That was the best part of the day. “The reports have to be typed,” Mrs. Simmle told us. This caused stress at my home because we didn’t have a typewriter and even if we did, I didn’t know how to type. My mother ended up borrowing Aunt Sandy’s typewriter and I sat by her as she painstakingly typed my notes into a paper that looked pretty. I drew the maps of Georgia and Alabama and put in the products of each state, the bird, the state flower, rivers, mountain ranges, and the capitals. The report was thick once each typed page was mounted on construction paper and bound with yarn. Even though my mom was upset about having to spend so much time on it, the report was worth the admiration and amazement that Mrs. Simmle expressed. There was one more thing about having Mrs. Simmle in fourth grade. Looking back, I remember the day that Mrs. Simmle told us that the principal had approved and she would
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be our fourth grade teacher. We were ecstatic. There was laughter and cheering and we left for the summer anticipating the love of the year to come. We arrived in the fall, and there she was, the same beautiful, kind, and caring teacher we had in third grade. Each of us was anxious to continue our journey into rows and rows of cursive letters neatly written onto bluish paper that had tiny chunks of wood in it. This year would be one more year of heaven. How lucky could I get? But Mrs. Simmle was different. To put it bluntly, she looked rounder. There were whispers and murmurs that first day and then she announced, “I’m so glad to see you all again. I’ve had a great summer and you’ll get to tell me all about yours when you write later today …” she went on and on but I lost most of that. I was just looking at the chubby belly that was before me. I still loved her. I just wasn’t sure what was going on. As I tuned back into what she was saying, I heard, “pregnant and I won’t be able to be your teacher for the entire year.” What did she say? I broke into a cold sweat. She was leaving us. She was abandoning us and I would be left to figure out fourth grade with, well I didn’t know what or who with. I was in shock. We all were. Weeks blended together into a fine and brief swirl of work and love and smiles and then it was her last day. Mrs. Simmle was not a hugger. No one had, to my knowledge, ever touched her. But this day, her last day, things were different. We were all crying and withdrawing into ourselves and we didn’t know what we were going to do without her. The day ended uneventfully … no party or fanfare. Just ended. “I will miss you all very much,” she said, “And I know you’ll enjoy your new teacher a lot.” But how could she know that? We walked out of the classroom, rounded the corner to get to the stairs to leave the second floor, and went down to the first floor. There, we walked by her, one by one, faces and eyes red with anger and sadness and loneliness that was already surrounding us like a burst of exhaust from a truck, choking us.
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For the first time since I met Mrs. Simmle, I looked back to wave. Then I ran past the other kids in the class and took her arm. I wanted to hug her but wound up holding her forearm with my two hands and looking up and saying, “I’ll write to you. I’ll write to you every day.” That’s funny because I never thought to write to anyone. Writing was just work, awful boring work, but I had to stay connected. I think that I honestly imagined sending her rows of neatly formed cursive upper case G’s, not really sending a letter that would mean anything, say anything, or express any emotion. So I left. We all knew Mrs. Carper was coming the next day, but we had no idea what she would be like. None of us would sleep that night. ✳ I went home and did what I usually do when I needed to be alone. I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, grabbed some grapes, and climbed the tree in front of our house. I loved being in the branches and the leaves, being off the ground, and being hidden because most people in our neighborhood just didn’t look up that much. I had a spot where I could set down the food. I ate the sandwich and felt sorry for myself. Why did I have to lose the best teacher ever? I ate a grape, sticking the whole thing in my mouth, chewing around the seeds, and then, looking to see if anyone would notice, I spit the seeds out into the street. I don’t know where I first heard the expression, but I said to myself, ‘I’m spittin’ mad.’ And I was. ✳ The next morning, when the bell rang that meant we could enter the building, none of us charged into the school. We never did that. Mrs. Simmle had taught us better. Rather, we walked in, hung up our coats, and sat at our desks. Well, we intended to, but we could not find our desks. Instead of the neatly placed
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rows of desks and chairs, the room was rearranged. Mrs. Carper had moved the desks so that we were clumped into tables of six kids. She told us to find our desks by looking inside and seeing whose things were in a desk. “You’ll do just fine finding your own desk,” she said. I heard her voice and that’s when I realized I hadn’t even looked up to see Mrs. Carper. I didn’t even want to know what she looked like. She was just a voice, like the ‘waa waa’ of the teacher in those Charlie Brown cartoons. I had to tell myself to take my nose out of my desk and look up. I was shocked. As a nine-year-old, I had no idea that I had such a hang-up about weight, but I did. Mrs. Carper was fat. Not pregnant-fat, like Mrs. Simmle, but round, big, and humungous fat like no one I’d ever seen before except for my doctor’s wife who I’d seen a few times at temple. She was huge. Mrs. Carper was bigger, rounder, and chunkier. Mrs. Carper’s face was wrinkled, not smooth like Mrs. Simmle. It was a round face and her hair was gray and black mixed together. My Aunt Jeanie had hair like this, and she told us it was called salt and pepper hair but it just seemed old to me. I felt my face become sad, my lips sink into a frown, and my forehead furrow. Who was this woman? Mrs. Carper seemed happy to be with us, but we were not happy to be with her as we faced our loneliness and the memories we all had of Mrs. Simmle. I pictured Mrs. Simmle at home, rocking her baby and singing to her and not really thinking too much about us. ✳ Our unhappiness with Mrs. Carper slowly melted because she constantly surprised us by saying and doing interesting things. She took us on walks around the neighborhood and asked us what we noticed. When we returned to the classroom, we wrote about what we had seen – things we’d seen all our lives but now they looked new because Mrs. Carper’s eyes saw
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things differently. She asked us questions like: Why are those flowers drooping? What will that tree look like in four months? What makes the sun sparkle off the sidewalk like that? Where does peat moss come from? How early does a baker have to get up in the morning? How does a lawn mower work? She made me wonder about everything. And we wrote about the things we were thinking. We looked forward to sharing our writing with each other. One day, in the middle of winter when half the class seemed to be sick, she started talking to us about what we were taking for our illnesses. The list of things to rub on, suck on, ingest, inhale, and ignore went on for two chalkboards. Someone asked how they got the medicine inside of those capsules that some of us were taking at home. The next day, Mrs. Carper brought a mortar and pestle to school. She told us that she and her husband, a druggist, talked about our class all the time. Mrs. Carper told Mr. Carper about our classroom disease discussion and he suggested that she do a demonstration for us. Mr. Carper encouraged her, she explained, to show us how pharmacists fill capsules with medicine. She took a piece of chalk and put it into the mortar and ground it up into chalk dust. Then she showed us some empty capsules that her husband gave her. We all got a turn at filling one with chalk dust. We each carefully cradled our chalk dust-filled capsules in our hands and some of us watched in surprise as the heat of our hands melted the capsules, leaving a chalky mess that we washed away in the classroom sink. As my capsule began to melt and stick to my hands, I joined the
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line at the sink. Mrs. Carper explained, “The capsules melt this way in our stomachs and that’s how the medicine gets out of the capsule and into the rest of our bodies.” ✳ My father worked in Brooklyn in a factory that made things out of plastic. Sometimes they made wallets out of plastic that looked like leather and other times they made shower curtains with smiley faces on them. He liked to tell us what they were making and how the lineup of workers had to change what they were doing each time they made a new item. He worked really hard and my mother worried about him all the time. Factories were dangerous places and workers lost fingers or even an arm when sharp cutting tools were used. The climate of the factory was like the climate outdoors, very hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. Since my family left Queens and moved to Long Island, my father’s drive was very long and that meant we saw little of him six days a week. He left home before we got out of bed and often returned after my sisters and I had eaten. But, much like Mrs. Carper, my father was a very curious person. He always read the newspaper, and on the few Saturdays that he didn’t work, he’d go into a part of New York City where there were many used bookstores. Sometimes I went with him, but when Mrs. Carper came on the scene, my curiosity soared along with hers. I found the bookstores to be amazing places and for a few pennies or a nickel, I could buy a book about something that interested me. I looked at all the books that weren’t in our school library. There were books about animals that seemed like a veterinarian might have used in school. They showed animal skeletons and things like a horse’s heart. I was amazed. I found an old medical school book that showed kids with curved backbones, all hunched over and looking like they were in pain. The old wooden floors of the bookstores creaked as we
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walked around and I could tell how crowded the place was by the amount of creaking I heard as I sat on a stool looking at the books in one section or another. I loved that they had something to sit on right in the aisles of books, unlike our school library. In fact, our school library had only one thing that made an impression on me. Mrs. Jensen, the librarian, had the worst breath I’d ever smelled in anyone, including our neighbor’s dog who was really old and ate his own poop. Mrs. Carper’s curiosity fueled mine. I didn’t read all the books that I looked at in the bookstore – that would have taken me years. But I did look at the titles, the covers, the illustrations, and more. One Saturday, as my dad headed to the history section (his favorite), I went down the kids’ book aisle. I never did that because the adult books were much more interesting to shuffle through. I’m not sure what drew me down there, but then I found something that would never be in my school library – comic books. Comic books that were so cheap I could ask my dad for a nickel and get three or four. The adventures of all the superheroes were amazing, of course, but there, at the end of a row of comics held in place by a metal bookend, was a book called, 100 Things You Can Get for Free. The book had very short paragraphs about different places that would send me free items. There were places to send for free samples of goobers (which I learned was the word for peanuts in some states), free coloring books from breakfast cereal companies, free stamps from around the world, and so much more. That was the book I had to have. ✳ Buy on Amazon