Extragalactic Melodrama Saved Me From Stepmother : Book Mark

Born on the Fourth of July, 1937, Richard Rhodes was a “half orphan” 13 months later, when his mother committed “her selfish suicide.” Raised by a once-loving but ineffectual father and a stepmother who starved, beat and emotionally tortured him, young Richard and his older brother, Stanley, created ways to escape their reality. But it didn’t always work. An excerpt.

Stanley took over the sewers that summer. He lit his way with his Boy Scout flashlight. He wandered for miles, emerging at the corners of

major intersections to peer out at the world through the drain gratings. He even popped up in the middle of streets, cautiously tipping up a manhole cover, ducking and clanging it back down a beat ahead of the wheels of approaching cars. “I had an old BB gun. I took that down there for protection, to shoot the rats,” (he said). He was lucky enough not to be caught underground when it rained and the sewers flooded with runoff. Rain refreshed them, cleaned the rotting vegetation out.

He tried once to give me a tour. “We saved money and got this unusual flashlight that strapped onto our wrist. That’s when I took you down there, because I thought, Oh, he won’t be afraid with this wonderful flashlight.” I was more than afraid. I was terrified. All I could think of was rats. Ten feet along from the manhole where we entered I started screaming. Unimpressed with my claustrophobia, Stanley threatened to walk away and leave me to find my way out on my own. I begged him not to abandon me. When it was clear that I was panicked beyond calming he relented. He led me back to the rebar ladder and saw me safely up. I looked down from the world of light to his pale, upturned face. He waved his flashlight solemnly, like a conductor signaling the departure of a train, and trudged off into the darkness. I never went back into one of his tunnels, nor ever wanted to.

I don’t know if he’d read “Les Miserables” by then and imagined himself Jean Valjean. He may have, or maybe we saw the movie. He’d found a place where he felt safe. “Because I was a boy trying to get away into my own world, and this horrible, dark, filthy world was a world where no one else would go, and I was free in this world. I could fantasize this to a huge fantasy.” Could and did, to escape the darker and more horrible emotional world to which necessity chained us. We always went home at night. Where else was there to go?

With a bicycle I wasn’t as lonely as I might have been. I roamed the entire northeastern quarter of the city on my bike, coasting its long hills cool in the breeze of passage. Everywhere I bicycled I stopped to watch people going about their lives, families in particular, fascinated with their quaint and alien normality. Numbed, adapted to such extremity that I was hardly even jealous, I felt like a man from Mars.

Most of all I read. If Stanley escaped into his tunnels, I escaped into books. Not exactly books in those years. Pulp science fiction. I don’t remember when I discovered those thick, journal-sized anthologies of extragalactic melodrama. They were printed on coarse newsprint and perfect-bound between lurid four-color covers. Each issue offered several hundred smeared pages of tales of futuristic cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, heroes and bug-eyed monsters and damsels in distress. They cost a quarter.

I went through one a week and could have gone through two or three if I’d had the money to buy them. Sometimes, shaking with hunger but with only a quarter to spend, I wept tears of frustration at having to choose between buying food and buying a pulp. Even hungry I more often chose the pulp. I could staunch my hunger with black-eyed peas. The pulps fed my soul. I escaped through them into a world that had shape, a world where underdogs triumphed, a world where even the most cunning and malevolent monsters were always outwitted in the end and destroyed.

I found consolation in the pulps beyond their escapist stories. Along their back pages a sideshow of advertising promised redemption through self-help: Charles Atlas muscle building, correspondence schools that taught car mechanics and commercial art and radio repair, acne creams, trusses, foreign pen pals, odd religions symbolized by cyclopean eyes set in obelisks beaming rays of holy light.

Like Gatsby I believed their promises, sent off for their free literature, fantasized that personal discipline and secret revelations might improve my lot. Stanley and I seldom went to church. When we did, ragged starvelings that we were, indictments of middle-class complacency, we were pointedly ignored. Charles Atlas welcomed 98-pound weaklings; the Rosicrucians had the secrets of the ages to share. I needed hope to sustain me: pulps and their promises were the best I could cobble together at the time.

. . .We had tub baths that last year no more than once a month. Of all her sadistic deprivations, even starving us, I despise her most for forcing us to live in filth. The dirt on my body disrupted not only my bodily integrity but also my fragile connection with other human beings, my classmates and my teachers. My ears were black. My neck was black. My armpits and my groin were black. My socks rotted off my feet. I stank.

I had a friend--I thought he was a friend--another redheaded kid, who sat immediately behind me in school. I passed him rocket drawings sometimes, notes, even stories torn out of my pulps when I was still getting away with reading them. We whispered together. I told him about the crush I had on a pretty, dark-haired girl who sat three rows farther back.

We played dodgeball at recess. Dodgeball was my sport. I was light and quick and often managed to escape being picked off until I was the last of my team inside the circle, the winner of the round. My friend was usually my competition. One day I kidded him too sharply when he lost and I won. He gathered a knot of classmates afterward, the girl I dreamed about among them. They strolled over and surrounded me. They were smiling and I thought they were friendly; it didn’t occur to me to dodge. The boys grabbed me. My friend led them. “You stink,” he told me happily. “We think you’re dirty. We want to see.”

They jerked down the straps on my bib overalls, held my arms high, peeled off my ragged shirt. They exposed my filth, my black armpits, my dirty neck, for everyone to see. The faces of those children, the girl well forward among them, filled with horror perverted with glee.

I went the only way I could go, down, dropping to the asphalt of the playground. They formed a circle around me, laughing and pointing, I couldn’t get away. I covered my head and drew up my knees. I knew how to make myself invisible. I’d learned to make myself invisible when my stepmother attacked. It worked because I couldn’t see her even if she could still see me. I made myself invisible. They couldn’t hear me crying.

After a while they lost interest in the invisible thing I had become on the ground. They stopped jeering and drifted away. I got up and pulled my shirt back on. I thought my legs might not work. I thought a tunnel might open with ledges of searching claws, but they worked well enough. Human beings are tough. They take a lot of killing.

I walked off the playground before the end of recess and went back inside and sat at my desk. I began drawing a rocket. I kept my head down when the others came in. I didn’t play dodgeball after that. I stayed in at recess and read unless the teacher made me go out. “A lot of pride,” the social worker writes, unrecognizably, of the child I was then “likes to be indoors most of all. Rather read than play ball and other sports.”

BOOK REVIEW: A review of “A Hole in the World” appears in the Book Review section on Page 1.

Copyright 1990 by Richard Rhodes.

Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.