AuntShecky
03-20-2009, 02:42 PM
(This is one complete story posted in two parts, the second part immediately following the first.)
Ultraman and the Pagan Babies
The tiny tin can which Sister was holding up looked like a cat food container, but instead of swimming cartoon fish, little angels and clouds floated along the sides. There was a slit on the top, just large enough to get a coin though but not nearly large enough to take it back out, in case one changed his mind.
“This is a mite box, Children,” Sister said. “Each of you will receive one. You will take it home, and any time you are tempted to buy a candy bar or a soda -- or some foolish plaything wasting your parents’ money -- you will put the coins in this can instead. When the container is full, you will return it to me on the day before Easter vacation. The funds we collect will help build and maintain our missions overseas. Now, for a need a volunteer to hand these out.”
Every student in the sixth grade of St. Hilarius’s School automatically raised an arm into the air with supersonic speed. To grab attention further, some wiggled their fingers and others cried, “Me! Pick me, S’ter!” The competition for being chosen for classroom duties did not cross over to the race for good grades.That’s why one of the smart kids always became the honoree: stuck-up Antoinette Bruno or that pickle-puss runt, Mark Sweeney.
“Mr. Sweeney, please pass out the mite boxes.” The slightly-rotten apple of Sister’s eye stood up tall as a Knight of Columbus and puffed out his chest so much that a judgmental witness might easily accuse him of the Sin of Pride. Under his arm, he tucked the cardboard carton whose print announced its former life as a conveyor of Delsey Bathroom Tissue. Going up and down the rows, he put a mite box down on each desktop, gently on those of his fellow-travelers and forcefully on those of his enemies. Since he had his back to Sister, Sweeney
seized the opportunity to lord his vaulted status over everyone: to some he stuck out his tongue, and to Hal, he hissed out a sotto voce comment as sharp as a stiletto.
Between Hal and his nemesis there had been a short history. The latest skirmish had occurred earlier in the day, on the schoolyard after lunch. Usually Hal and his sidekick would be forced to fend off basketball lobs and the sing-songy taunts that certain female classmates “liked them,” the possibility of which secretly intrigued Hal even as he publicly expressed disgust. That afternoon,however, the collective attention had been directed elsewhere – to young Mr. Sweeney, who was proudly waving around a new transistor radio for all to see. “Don't touch it!” he warned, even as he held the coveted device next to an admirer’s ear. The tinny transmission seemed foreign to these holy grounds, more attuned to the sound of church bells than do wop ditties.
“Get him! It’s not even Christmas or his birthday.”
Hal pretended not to share his friend’s envy. “His old man’s got more dough than God,” he said. “Big deal!”
His apparent lack of interest did not escape Sweeney’s notice. “Hey,McGuirk the Jerk! What're ya, jealous?”
“ Not me! Some of us are too old to bring our toys to school!”
“You dirty Commie!” Sweeney screamed, as he charged the two holdouts, fast enough to elude him until it was time to return to class. The noontime incident was forgotten until the end of the school day, when Sweeney rekindled it with the whispered insult as he slammed the little tin can on Hal’s desk: “Here you go, you filthy heathen.”
The recipients of the mite boxes treated them as novelties, a new toy rather than an aid to self-denial. They examined them closely, turned the cylinders on their sides, rolled them around the tops of their desks. It was quickly discovered that if one flicked the nail of one’s index finger against the top of the thin metal, an interesting noise would reverberate through the classroom.
“Ping!” “Ping!” Hal, himself a fan of scientific experimentation, wondered what would happen if he stuck his pencil point into the slot and then sent the makeshift projectile upward. He was ninety-nine per cent sure that he would hit the classroom wall right between the portrait of the new President --so beloved by the nuns-- and the clock, which to Hal’s delight, was closing in on three. He took aim, but Sister’s sharp voice ruined his concentration.
“Mr McGuirk! Contemplating your usual shenanigans, I see.” Mercifully, the bell rang.
Later that afternoon Hal found “the old lady” – a phrase he never used at home – in a good mood. As she ironed, she sang along to Top 40 hits playing on the radio.The fact that a mature woman enjoyed the same pop numbers he loved embarrassed him; it was an example of one of his newly-learned vocabulary words: “unseemly.” She did this stuff all the time, and Hal was sick of it.
He felt like a chicken for not telling her so, but he'd rather die than criticize his mother. One time, all he had done was repeat what the nun had told the class last year: that whenever Elvis Presley swiveled his hips, inspiring “impure thoughts,” it was a near occasion of sin. The very second Hal had mentioned it he prepared himself for the worst, flinching in dread.
But no slap came then. She didn't even yell at him. Instead she threw her head back and roared. Hal hadn't heard his mother laugh so much since the night she'd let him stay up and watch Jack Paar with her. “Sister told you that?” His mother’s shoulders were still shaking.
“Between you and me, I don't think God cares what kind of music I listen to. He’s got more important things to worry about, you know?” She broke up again, making her son feel like a damned fool. When his teachers tell him one thing and his mother tells him the total opposite,
what’s a guy supposed to do? Why did adults send mixed signals all the time? Let them say what they want about Ultraman – at least you could believe everything he said.
“Comm-ma, comm-ma, comm-ma, hey, hey, hey,” his mother bellowed.
“That was ‘Handy Man’ by Jimmy Jones,” the radio announced. A tiny cloud of steam whooshed through the hole atop the iron.
“Mom, can I have a dime?”
“May I have a dime.”
“I asked you first.”
“That’s right, be smart. And what do you want a dime for? Candy? It’s Lent.”
“I know. It’s that time again.” Hal took the mite box out of his pocket and showed her.
His mother made a face. “Oh yeah. The pagan babies. You don't need it right now, do you? Remind me when I've got my change purse handy.”
“Got cha.” As he headed for his room, his mother called after him. “Put it in a safe place. You don't wanna have to tell the nuns you lost it.”
The door to Hal’s inner sanctum opened only reluctantly; it required an Ultraman-like strength for it to surrender, mainly because the blankets from the bed he never made were nestled in their usual resting place behind his door. Hal took the little tin can and tossed it atop his dresser, already populated with various objects long waiting for a more permanent storage area. The mite box landed between the clay volcano from last year’s Science Fair project and a mostly clean rolled-up undershirt.
As a rule, Hal’s room was a shrine to chaos, but for the rare occasions when the stars were so aligned that the old lady was simultaneouslyweary of demanding that he clean
his room while sufficiently energized to tidy it up herself. That was the norm except for one shining exception, as incongruous as a picture of the Sacred Heart hanging in a gin mill. In one corner of the room there was a vertical row of cardboard file boxes arranged in chronological order. On the side of each box a label neatly announced the dates of its contents. Inside individual boxes there
was a year’s worth of Ultraman Comics, each issue encased in its own protective plastic sleeve. The copies with more recent publication dates were in the same mint condition they had been on the days that Hal had plucked them off the rack at Jerry’s Hillcrest Market. The rarer editions, albeit a bit shop-worn, had been acquired through extremely lucky trades.
The Collection was Hal’s most sacred treasure, among his belongings the most beloved: his Ultraman comic books, in every sense “his,” for there was no man, woman, or child anywhere on the planet who would be allowed to touch as much as a single page. Indeed the owner himself would seldom break into the trove, and only then as a way to assuage the emotional effects of a particularly harrowing day. Not that it mattered; Hal had long ago committed every panel, every dialogue balloon,
every issue to memory, and he could recite an exact description of any cover. Mention “Volume V, Number 4,July-August, 1945” and Hal would describe the stereotypical World War II caricatures of a menacing Nazi with eyeballs in the shape of swastikas and one of Hirohito’s soldiers with unnaturally large teeth, flanking Ultraman, whose supernaturally strong arms held each villain by one hand while their puny arms flailed and their legs kicked in mid-air. Or refer to “Volume XIV , Number 1, January-February 1956,” and the young aficionado could recreate every last detail of the flying saucer hovering over of the Empire State Building, while Ultraman clutched the spire and waited confidently with his magnificent cape billowing in the breeze.
As the weeks passed, winter’s grip became increasingly weaker as spring took her first shy steps; it was no longer dark in the late afternoon when the old man got home from work. His cold weather habit of removing his shoes just inside the front door was still in effect, however.
“Damn! I meant to pick up a pack o’ Luckies,” he said. “Hal, make yourself useful and duck down to Jerry’s, will ya?”
Hal was loath to tear himself away from the tv, even though he had already seen that particular Ultraman syndicated episode a number of times. On the other hand, Hal had run enough errands to know that never in his entire life had he been asked to “bring back the change.” Every trip to the drugstore, to Woolworth’s, and especially to Jerry’s always came with a tacit tip. It wasn't a chore; it was a windfall. His father reached into the oil-stained pockets of his overalls and came up with a number of
quarters in his callused hands. “Here. I think that’s enough.” Bingo.
Suppertime was never the best time to shop at the Hillcrest Market. Some of mothers in the neighborhood often found themselves scrambling to come up with a main dish, hence the tiny store would be packed with customers all waiting for Jerry to finishing wrapping Mrs. Mariani’s ground beef or hacking off a couple of “nice pork chops” for Mrs. O’Neill. Even so, Hal never minded waiting, for it gave him the opportunity to take a look at the latest periodicals on the wire circular rack in front of the soap flakes shelf. He ignored the side that displayed the current copies of Look, Life, and
The Saturday Evening Post and carefully revolved past the side containing the local newspaper,
The Daily Racing Form, and the Armstrong until he reached the comic books. It was the usual stuff: Scrooge McDuck, Little Lulu and. . .could it be? Yes, a brand-new Ultraman, Vol. XVIII, No. 3 (May-June, 1961), with, as was the custom, the publication date slightly ahead of the real-time curve. Hal knew he'd in for edge-of-the-seat action written by Dave Bregman and as for the other half of the creative team, Harry Kohl,just one glance at the cover art was enough to convince him that the Issue was an instant classic. Dominating the majority of the frame was the titular hero in full flight, drawn in two dimensions but so dynamically you'd would swear it was in 3-D.
What appeared to be miles beneath Ultraman’s horizontal body was a landscape of despair, with the Iron Curtain represented as a wall topped with barbed wire and painted here and there with blood-red hammers-and-sickles. Under one arm Ultraman had tucked two little kids, a boy and a girl, both blond and vaguely Teutonic, probably East Germans. Ultraman’s other arm was stretched outward to propel the flight toward the West, depicted by a glorious sunset fronting an American flag unfurling in the sky. Though Hal’s school lessons hadn't yet touched on the literary concept of symbolism, he knew what he saw, and he knew what it meant.
Ultraman and the Pagan Babies
The tiny tin can which Sister was holding up looked like a cat food container, but instead of swimming cartoon fish, little angels and clouds floated along the sides. There was a slit on the top, just large enough to get a coin though but not nearly large enough to take it back out, in case one changed his mind.
“This is a mite box, Children,” Sister said. “Each of you will receive one. You will take it home, and any time you are tempted to buy a candy bar or a soda -- or some foolish plaything wasting your parents’ money -- you will put the coins in this can instead. When the container is full, you will return it to me on the day before Easter vacation. The funds we collect will help build and maintain our missions overseas. Now, for a need a volunteer to hand these out.”
Every student in the sixth grade of St. Hilarius’s School automatically raised an arm into the air with supersonic speed. To grab attention further, some wiggled their fingers and others cried, “Me! Pick me, S’ter!” The competition for being chosen for classroom duties did not cross over to the race for good grades.That’s why one of the smart kids always became the honoree: stuck-up Antoinette Bruno or that pickle-puss runt, Mark Sweeney.
“Mr. Sweeney, please pass out the mite boxes.” The slightly-rotten apple of Sister’s eye stood up tall as a Knight of Columbus and puffed out his chest so much that a judgmental witness might easily accuse him of the Sin of Pride. Under his arm, he tucked the cardboard carton whose print announced its former life as a conveyor of Delsey Bathroom Tissue. Going up and down the rows, he put a mite box down on each desktop, gently on those of his fellow-travelers and forcefully on those of his enemies. Since he had his back to Sister, Sweeney
seized the opportunity to lord his vaulted status over everyone: to some he stuck out his tongue, and to Hal, he hissed out a sotto voce comment as sharp as a stiletto.
Between Hal and his nemesis there had been a short history. The latest skirmish had occurred earlier in the day, on the schoolyard after lunch. Usually Hal and his sidekick would be forced to fend off basketball lobs and the sing-songy taunts that certain female classmates “liked them,” the possibility of which secretly intrigued Hal even as he publicly expressed disgust. That afternoon,however, the collective attention had been directed elsewhere – to young Mr. Sweeney, who was proudly waving around a new transistor radio for all to see. “Don't touch it!” he warned, even as he held the coveted device next to an admirer’s ear. The tinny transmission seemed foreign to these holy grounds, more attuned to the sound of church bells than do wop ditties.
“Get him! It’s not even Christmas or his birthday.”
Hal pretended not to share his friend’s envy. “His old man’s got more dough than God,” he said. “Big deal!”
His apparent lack of interest did not escape Sweeney’s notice. “Hey,McGuirk the Jerk! What're ya, jealous?”
“ Not me! Some of us are too old to bring our toys to school!”
“You dirty Commie!” Sweeney screamed, as he charged the two holdouts, fast enough to elude him until it was time to return to class. The noontime incident was forgotten until the end of the school day, when Sweeney rekindled it with the whispered insult as he slammed the little tin can on Hal’s desk: “Here you go, you filthy heathen.”
The recipients of the mite boxes treated them as novelties, a new toy rather than an aid to self-denial. They examined them closely, turned the cylinders on their sides, rolled them around the tops of their desks. It was quickly discovered that if one flicked the nail of one’s index finger against the top of the thin metal, an interesting noise would reverberate through the classroom.
“Ping!” “Ping!” Hal, himself a fan of scientific experimentation, wondered what would happen if he stuck his pencil point into the slot and then sent the makeshift projectile upward. He was ninety-nine per cent sure that he would hit the classroom wall right between the portrait of the new President --so beloved by the nuns-- and the clock, which to Hal’s delight, was closing in on three. He took aim, but Sister’s sharp voice ruined his concentration.
“Mr McGuirk! Contemplating your usual shenanigans, I see.” Mercifully, the bell rang.
Later that afternoon Hal found “the old lady” – a phrase he never used at home – in a good mood. As she ironed, she sang along to Top 40 hits playing on the radio.The fact that a mature woman enjoyed the same pop numbers he loved embarrassed him; it was an example of one of his newly-learned vocabulary words: “unseemly.” She did this stuff all the time, and Hal was sick of it.
He felt like a chicken for not telling her so, but he'd rather die than criticize his mother. One time, all he had done was repeat what the nun had told the class last year: that whenever Elvis Presley swiveled his hips, inspiring “impure thoughts,” it was a near occasion of sin. The very second Hal had mentioned it he prepared himself for the worst, flinching in dread.
But no slap came then. She didn't even yell at him. Instead she threw her head back and roared. Hal hadn't heard his mother laugh so much since the night she'd let him stay up and watch Jack Paar with her. “Sister told you that?” His mother’s shoulders were still shaking.
“Between you and me, I don't think God cares what kind of music I listen to. He’s got more important things to worry about, you know?” She broke up again, making her son feel like a damned fool. When his teachers tell him one thing and his mother tells him the total opposite,
what’s a guy supposed to do? Why did adults send mixed signals all the time? Let them say what they want about Ultraman – at least you could believe everything he said.
“Comm-ma, comm-ma, comm-ma, hey, hey, hey,” his mother bellowed.
“That was ‘Handy Man’ by Jimmy Jones,” the radio announced. A tiny cloud of steam whooshed through the hole atop the iron.
“Mom, can I have a dime?”
“May I have a dime.”
“I asked you first.”
“That’s right, be smart. And what do you want a dime for? Candy? It’s Lent.”
“I know. It’s that time again.” Hal took the mite box out of his pocket and showed her.
His mother made a face. “Oh yeah. The pagan babies. You don't need it right now, do you? Remind me when I've got my change purse handy.”
“Got cha.” As he headed for his room, his mother called after him. “Put it in a safe place. You don't wanna have to tell the nuns you lost it.”
The door to Hal’s inner sanctum opened only reluctantly; it required an Ultraman-like strength for it to surrender, mainly because the blankets from the bed he never made were nestled in their usual resting place behind his door. Hal took the little tin can and tossed it atop his dresser, already populated with various objects long waiting for a more permanent storage area. The mite box landed between the clay volcano from last year’s Science Fair project and a mostly clean rolled-up undershirt.
As a rule, Hal’s room was a shrine to chaos, but for the rare occasions when the stars were so aligned that the old lady was simultaneouslyweary of demanding that he clean
his room while sufficiently energized to tidy it up herself. That was the norm except for one shining exception, as incongruous as a picture of the Sacred Heart hanging in a gin mill. In one corner of the room there was a vertical row of cardboard file boxes arranged in chronological order. On the side of each box a label neatly announced the dates of its contents. Inside individual boxes there
was a year’s worth of Ultraman Comics, each issue encased in its own protective plastic sleeve. The copies with more recent publication dates were in the same mint condition they had been on the days that Hal had plucked them off the rack at Jerry’s Hillcrest Market. The rarer editions, albeit a bit shop-worn, had been acquired through extremely lucky trades.
The Collection was Hal’s most sacred treasure, among his belongings the most beloved: his Ultraman comic books, in every sense “his,” for there was no man, woman, or child anywhere on the planet who would be allowed to touch as much as a single page. Indeed the owner himself would seldom break into the trove, and only then as a way to assuage the emotional effects of a particularly harrowing day. Not that it mattered; Hal had long ago committed every panel, every dialogue balloon,
every issue to memory, and he could recite an exact description of any cover. Mention “Volume V, Number 4,July-August, 1945” and Hal would describe the stereotypical World War II caricatures of a menacing Nazi with eyeballs in the shape of swastikas and one of Hirohito’s soldiers with unnaturally large teeth, flanking Ultraman, whose supernaturally strong arms held each villain by one hand while their puny arms flailed and their legs kicked in mid-air. Or refer to “Volume XIV , Number 1, January-February 1956,” and the young aficionado could recreate every last detail of the flying saucer hovering over of the Empire State Building, while Ultraman clutched the spire and waited confidently with his magnificent cape billowing in the breeze.
As the weeks passed, winter’s grip became increasingly weaker as spring took her first shy steps; it was no longer dark in the late afternoon when the old man got home from work. His cold weather habit of removing his shoes just inside the front door was still in effect, however.
“Damn! I meant to pick up a pack o’ Luckies,” he said. “Hal, make yourself useful and duck down to Jerry’s, will ya?”
Hal was loath to tear himself away from the tv, even though he had already seen that particular Ultraman syndicated episode a number of times. On the other hand, Hal had run enough errands to know that never in his entire life had he been asked to “bring back the change.” Every trip to the drugstore, to Woolworth’s, and especially to Jerry’s always came with a tacit tip. It wasn't a chore; it was a windfall. His father reached into the oil-stained pockets of his overalls and came up with a number of
quarters in his callused hands. “Here. I think that’s enough.” Bingo.
Suppertime was never the best time to shop at the Hillcrest Market. Some of mothers in the neighborhood often found themselves scrambling to come up with a main dish, hence the tiny store would be packed with customers all waiting for Jerry to finishing wrapping Mrs. Mariani’s ground beef or hacking off a couple of “nice pork chops” for Mrs. O’Neill. Even so, Hal never minded waiting, for it gave him the opportunity to take a look at the latest periodicals on the wire circular rack in front of the soap flakes shelf. He ignored the side that displayed the current copies of Look, Life, and
The Saturday Evening Post and carefully revolved past the side containing the local newspaper,
The Daily Racing Form, and the Armstrong until he reached the comic books. It was the usual stuff: Scrooge McDuck, Little Lulu and. . .could it be? Yes, a brand-new Ultraman, Vol. XVIII, No. 3 (May-June, 1961), with, as was the custom, the publication date slightly ahead of the real-time curve. Hal knew he'd in for edge-of-the-seat action written by Dave Bregman and as for the other half of the creative team, Harry Kohl,just one glance at the cover art was enough to convince him that the Issue was an instant classic. Dominating the majority of the frame was the titular hero in full flight, drawn in two dimensions but so dynamically you'd would swear it was in 3-D.
What appeared to be miles beneath Ultraman’s horizontal body was a landscape of despair, with the Iron Curtain represented as a wall topped with barbed wire and painted here and there with blood-red hammers-and-sickles. Under one arm Ultraman had tucked two little kids, a boy and a girl, both blond and vaguely Teutonic, probably East Germans. Ultraman’s other arm was stretched outward to propel the flight toward the West, depicted by a glorious sunset fronting an American flag unfurling in the sky. Though Hal’s school lessons hadn't yet touched on the literary concept of symbolism, he knew what he saw, and he knew what it meant.