« reader mail: yoko | Main | a day in the life of john (2006) »

April 20, 2006

the great playhouse massacre

For my tenth summer, Mom shipped me to Los Angeles to live with my father. What was billed as a get-to-know-your-dad-better growth experience was, in fact, complete subterfuge. Mom was secretly selling my childhood house that summer, and she wanted me out of the picture. Was she protecting me? Protecting herself from my certain histrionics? Protecting the house's resale value by hiding its worst feature? Yes.

She would live to regret not being forthright with me. I would have removed, for instance, the teacher-photograph-adorned dartboard from the basement wall. But in retrospect, when you erect such a thing, don't you hope that your teacher will someday discover it? To Mom the incident was just a lost sale, but to me, it was a watershed moment. This was when the vindictive Mrs. Meague was confronted by the depths of my scarring at her hands, and, perhaps, to feel the guilt she so richly deserved to feel.

Sorry, Mom, I would only feel good about that. If not for me, for the next kid forced to move his desk from the "good side" of the room to the "bad side" so many times, the desk could have come with an odometer.

• • •
Years earlier, my dad had built the older kids a playhouse. It was quite sharp: a full-blown framed house on 8-foot stilts, complete with a wraparound deck and railing, slide, trap door and rope-ladder. By the time I was able to climb the rope ladder, the other kids were too old for such things, so I had the playhouse to myself. I decorated it as a 10-year old boy would, adorning its walls with hand-drawn posters of Steelers and other superheroes. Aquaman alone merited an entire shrine. The playhouse was littered with relics of my "inventor" period, which I kept for the benefit of future historians chronicling my earliest signs of greatness. The two irregular blocks of wood held together with model glue and several still-protruding nails served as the playhouse's indoor solar-powered refrigerator, for years ensuring that drinks never rose above room temperature.

As my siblings entered their late teens, they became engrossed in mysterious new hobbies that required great deals of privacy. They summarily reclaimed the playhouse. Suddenly, I found the rope ladder gone and the doors locked, and when I knocked I was emphatically told to go away. The next morning would be an archaeological dig, with me finding the occasional spent doobie or condom wrapper and holding it up to the sunlight for closer, squinting examination. Beer bottles littered the floor, and the solar refrigerator was tossed aside like so much scrap wood. My painstakingly drawn posters were utterly mangled, literally hanging by threads. I was incensed.

Fortunately, Saturday morning cartoons had shown me what to do in such a situation. Putting my old inventor hat back on, I rigged a simple revenge mechanism. Tying one end of a rope to the inside of the door and another to a hammer, I then hung the hammer on the wall opposite the door and fastened the rope's mid-point to the ceiling. When an intruder opened the door, the rope would tighten, the hammer would swing across the room, and pow! Just desserts would be served.

For good measure, I pulled the rope ladder into the playhouse and jumped to the ground, thereby ensuring that whoever entered would have to climb up the slide (a technique favored by my siblings) and use the rigged door. And for several weeks, my friends and I would stand aside when opening the playhouse door, like TV cops busting into a hostile room. WHOOSH! the hammer would shoot between us, violently thrashing when it reached the end of its arc. And then I forgot about it. And then I went to California.

• • •

"Did you see John's playhouse, Timmy?" my mom cooed at the 8 year-old child of a prospective home-buyer. "He's got it decorated really neat. You should go take a look. Oh, the rope ladder is gone? I think the kids just climb the slide. Go check it out! Have fun!"

timmy.gifAnd then, as Mom would recount many times later, we heard the scream. The Scream of Purest Terror in the History of All Mankind.

My Wile E. Coyote booby trap had grazed top of the the kid's head, cutting his scalp, and to hear Mom tell it he left behind a greater volume of blood than a dozen 8 year-olds could possibly contain. "Needless to say," the story would inevitably conclude, "We lost the sale."

I felt terrible that he had sprung my forgotten trap, and not just because he had deprived my sisters of their rightful fate. He was an innocent. Timmy, if you're out there, I'd like to apologize both for the scalp and for any subsequent decades of therapy. If it helps bring you any peace, know that I was punished severely. In one of the great beat-downs in west coast history, my dad got me first. And then with brazen disregard for the illegality of double jeopardy, my mom got me again when I returned home. I didn't even mind. Although I wasn't ordinarily a big fan of corporal punishment, in this case, I made an exception. I deserved what I got.

That realization, however, was slow in coming. When I explained to my parents that the the booby trap was actually intended for their other children and why, their anger abated a bit. Alas, I stoked the rage again by asking Mom if she had thought to reset the trap.

posted by john at 8:29 AM  â€¢  permalink