Two Rights

coincidental.

CHAPTER ONE

I always hated having to wear my brother’s old clothes. Mom said she didn’t see any point in buying me something new when what Randy had outgrown was still ‘perfectly fine’. Perfectly fine to my mother meant no visible holes and clean. But the shirts I inherited were faded and dull and reeked mercilessly of Randy’s underarms no matter how much Tide Mom used. And his blue jeans were worn at the knees, often patched and always too long so I had to roll them up twice, making me look like some hillbilly.

For the record, we weren’t hillbillies - although we did live in Southwestern Missouri. We weren’t in a trailer park but we were, officially, on the other side of the tracks from the nicer houses in Nixa. Nobody drove fancy cars. Nobody could afford to do much with their yards or houses. And, truth be told, lots of the younger kids wore their older sibling’s hand-me-downs so I wasn’t the only one going around looking like a hobo.

It was the prosperous, 1950’s middle-American dream we were living. Or were supposed to be living. So we didn’t think of ourselves as being poor. Lower middle-class, I believe, was the term that was bandied about. Back when there really was a middle-class from which to be once-removed.

So my brother and I were the only kids in a big extended family of embarrassed Irish Catholics. I say that because my mom was one of six children but Randy and I were the only offspring in our generation on her side. And we had only two cousins on my dad’s side, although Dad was one of a healthy brood of Micks himself.

Two of mom’s sisters were spinsters. One sister died when she was six. The other two were married but, try as they might, were barren. As if that wasn’t enough, the only boy among my mother’s siblings was a priest. Father Louis.

So we were a miserable example of what the Vatican felt was the duty of Catholics everywhere. To procreate. Procreation was the Lord’s work, even though the act itself was sinful by nature. Frankly, I’m not sure if Mom and Dad weren’t able to have any more kids or not. I often thought, and I still do to this day, that they could only stand to copulate the two times it took them to make Randy and me a reality. They didn’t sleep in the same bed and hadn’t for as long as I could remember. My dad slept on a nasty old foldaway bed on the back porch in the summertime and then he camped out on the living room sofa once it got too cold to brave the great outdoors. They said it was because my father snored but I never heard him snore. Not once. He would curse in his sleep – not talk – curse. But never snore.

My parents weren’t openly affectionate with one another but, by the same token, were never outwardly unpleasant either. It appeared to me as if they had accepted the fact they weren’t a love match but seemed resolved to go about doing the best they could to cohabitate and provide as stable an upbringing for their two boys as they could see fit to do.

They weren’t without a certain appreciation for the best qualities the other possessed. My mom had a fine singing voice and she loved to be told so. She sang out full and strong every Sunday at church and would look disdainfully down her nose at anyone in the vicinity who tried to out-sing her. She prided herself on knowing all the songs and all the verses without having to reference her hymnal. She could even tell, simply by the numbers that were posted on the song board at the altar, precisely which songs they were.

If there had been a church choir I’m certain my mother would have hoarded all the solos. But there was no church choir. We were Catholics. We didn’t have choirs. I’m pretty sure we didn’t believe in them.

Dad’s gift was storytelling. My dad could charm the bloomers off a nun – or so he’d boast. I wasn’t certain nuns actually wore bloomers but I suppose, if any of them had, it would have been the Carmelites.

My father could tell the same story time and again and still manage to make it sound like the first time you’d heard it. And he would manipulate the details and the characters to suit the listener. He’d use names of people we knew as sort of an inside joke within the joke for an unsuspecting first-time listener. And his laugh was infectious.

He played the piano passably and would oblige whenever he was coaxed to do so. When we had company, which wasn’t often - and was usually family when we did have – why then he and my mother would turn on the ‘happy couple’ facade and sing duets and laugh merrily for all to see.

Looking back, I’m not so sure it was an act. I think that they really were at their best when they didn’t have to be alone - one on one. It seemed to me they could only truly enjoy the gregarious nature of one another - which surfaced on demand - when other adults were around and the occasion called for it. Then, later on, when Mom would be clearing the dishes and Dad would be shutting off the lights and taking out the trash, they would return to their mundane co-existence. There would be the standard pleasantries and perhaps a random peck on the cheek before my mother would retire for the night, closing the bedroom door behind her, then trying to stealthily lock it without being heard. But we heard. Dad heard.

Anyhow, you get the picture. A family of four people who did their best to get by. Because our ‘cracker box’ house only had two bedrooms….

I always thought that was such an odd image to reference for a house. Cracker Box. Why not Kleenex Box or Shoe Box?

In any case.

… because it wasn’t a big house, Randy and I didn’t have the luxury of being able to separate so we were forced to share a bedroom - which wasn’t the end of the world but could sometimes feel like it was.

Randy was an okay brother as brothers go. He was only two years older than

me, so we weren’t without enough in common to get along when we got along. But we truly were opposites. He was all about sports and I was all about books and movies. He had dark, wavy hair and a thick, sturdy body and I had reddish hair, freckles and was woefully thin. So thin that Mom used to force me to stay at the table and finish a second helping of everything. Every meal.

‘I’ll not have any child of mine going to school looking like a refugee who doesn’t get a decent meal at home.’

No matter how much I ate, I never put on weight. And I never tanned either. Randy would look like a swarthy extra from the film Tomahawk in the summertime and I would just get all pink and splotchy and would have a new constellation of freckles any place I happened to burn – once it peeled. I sometimes wondered if I was adopted. No one except my mother’s grandmother had red hair – and again, mine wasn’t red red. It was just red-ish. If I was a girl I guess it would have been called strawberry blonde. But still…

And to further fuel my misgivings, Grandma Posey had been dead long before I was born and since there were no color photos of her, I had to go on my mom’s word that she, indeed, was a ginger. Or was ginger-ish. But with a name like Posey, it was more likely than not - don’t you think?

The one thing Randy and I did expressly share, besides a bedroom and clothes, was that we liked the same music. And, thanks to Mom’s euphonious genes, we had pretty good voices. It wasn’t a sissy thing for my jock brother to do a duet with his nerdy little brother. It was more akin to a source of pride. Everyone in the neighborhood loved to hear us do our thing and, truthfully, we were good. We won a few talent contests. The first was when he was six and I was just four years old. And I’m told by an unbiased neighbor that we didn’t win on the cute factor. We actually were the most talented act in the Greater Nixa Knights of Columbus Talent Show and Raffle in the fall of 1944.

But… back to my plight…

There was a sort of loophole where my mom would acquiesce and that was in regards to underwear and socks. Mercifully Randy’s discards in that department went into the rag bin. I am happy to report that I received - in abundance – and for any occasion where a present was called for – brand new underwear and socks. Once I even got socks in my Easter basket. I think Mom felt it was the least they could do, knowing how I seldom ever looked like anything but a leftover in our family photos.

Not that there were very many of those. The only reason there was more than a handful was because my Aunt Millie (one of the barren aunts) lived only a few houses down the block from us (but on the other side of tracks) and she doted on Randy and me like we were royalty.

She and Uncle Robert had money. Always had a nice car. Without fail she’d

show up in a new dress for any family function and then play it off with something like, ‘What? This ol’ thing?’.

They would never lord over anyone because of their situation. If they had wanted to do that, they’d have moved to a nicer part of town. God knows they could have afforded it. They most definitely could have afforded to buy me clothes for Christmas or my birthday, but Mom made it clear that they weren’t allowed to spoil us with gifts we didn’t need. It probably had something to do with Dad’s self-esteem, I’ll wager, as he was the sole breadwinner of the house.

Still, they were genuinely invested in Randy and me and they chronicled our childhoods with their ever-present Kodak Brownie and a seemingly unending supply of Sylvania flashbulbs.

I think I’m purposely telling you about my miserable wardrobe because it’s sorta related to the event I’m building up to.

See, I was a good kid. We both were. Hell, we all were. It was small town USA – Southern USA – and we were the archetypal boys and girls next door. Good manners. Good breeding… well, relatively good breeding. Crime in our neck of the woods was nearly unheard of. No one locked their doors at night (with the exception of the door to my mother’s bedroom, of course). You could, if you were of mind, leave the keys in the ignition of your car and could expect to see it in your driveway the next morning. For us this wasn’t an anomaly. It was just the way of life in Nixa, Missouri. Everyone did as they were supposed to – for the most part. Including me – for the most part.

So, that was why it was so out of character for me to do what I did. You might have expected it from the mayor’s kid. He was rotten to the core. But still he had never been caught doing what I did. And, to be honest – well, as honest as a criminal can be – it really wasn’t as intentional as it might seem.

See, it was the first week or so of school. I was just starting in the seventh grade and school pictures were being taken the following Monday. I knew that everyone was going to show up to school that day looking sharp and fresh and colorful. Everyone but me. I would show up, like I did every year, in one of Randy’s faded sport shirts - frayed at the collar and too big in the shoulders - and I would smile along with the rest of them and pretend it didn’t bother me that I looked so shabby. But it was a loathsome experience for me, even though most of the kids probably didn’t even think twice about it. Oh, some of the girls did. I knew that. You couldn’t help but know it by the way they pretended to whisper to one another but made sure I heard every word.

‘Petey looks like a ragamuffin!’

‘Petey didn’t even bother to iron his shirt!’

‘Look how Petey can’t keep his pants up!’

The thing is, I was clean. I mean, my clothes were always clean. I, myself, was often clean. And Mom ironed my shirts but there’s only so much press a worn cotton shirt can hold. Even with an ample dousing of Niagara Spray Starch. I didn’t leave the house wrinkled, I just ended up wrinkled by lunchtime. And my belt was usually one of Randy’s, pulled up tight to the last notch, but it still didn’t keep me from having droopy drawers. So, at times like that, I would just detach and try to reflect on people less fortunate than I was. Like all the poor starving pagan babies in China.

And I’d still feel pretty sorry for myself.

Then, to add injury to insult, Claude Millingsford would surreptitiously rake me over the coals because he was like that. If there was such a thing as the rich kid in our school, Claude was it. He was always looking sharp. Spiffy. Natty. Whatever your choice of adjectives, that was him. And he wasn’t exactly a jerk about it, which made it even worse. He’d just come in, looking for all the world like Tab Hunter and, without ever losing his pearly white smile, look you over from head to toe and assess you without any outward derision. But a certain steeliness in his eyes told you he thought you were miles beneath him just because you weren’t as put together as he was. Or didn’t have a crisp ten dollar bill in your shiny alligator wallet. Like maybe you didn’t smell as Brylcreem-fresh as he did. As he always did.

But here’s the real clincher. I think what struck me as the most heinous of all the facets of this ridiculous ritual… you know… of trying to look better than you did any other day just because you were being immortalized for the ages with the click of a shutter. What riled me the most was the way my mother didn’t appear to have a single misgiving about sending me out looking like (what I thought was) a modern day version of a Dickensian urchin. You’d think somewhere deep within her would have rippled a mother’s sense of pride when it came to presenting her child to the scrutiny of the big, wide world. She was concerned enough, as I mentioned, about my being so scrawny and how that might reflect poorly on her. But my wardrobe seemed to be a sort of blind spot for her. Either she had grown so accustomed to me being the second-hand-kid or she was trying not to