1.
As a child Victor astonished everyone
with his brilliance.
In the second grade he was already reading
the big, heavy book about the Kontiki voyage,
far above my level.
One day with a cape and wand
he performed magic tricks for show-and-tell,
rehearsed to perfection with his doting mother and older sisters,
who called him Sonny —
his father called him Bud.
I admired his performance with the rest of the class
from my wooden desk — which smelled
of
hoof gelatin.
One day
Victor gave me a special gift —
a pen, maybe —
gratuitously, and said something like
“A pen always comes in handy” —
though I’m disappointed that I don’t remember now
exactly what it was
or what he said.
I understood that the gift
was a courtship gesture, intended to convey
a friendly interest.
…
It was when I joined his mother’s cub scout
troop
that Victor and I became best friends.
We ate cream puffs in the back yard in our uniforms,
wolfing the first to be sure of seconds.
One day when we had quarreled,
a group of girls from class told us to shake and make up.
“We don’t shake, we kiss,” Victor said,
and we embraced.
His mother was a nurse at the Pueblo
state hospital for the insane
on the syphilitic ward.
She was great at devising projects.
We made rattles out of orange-painted gourds,
glued handles onto them,
and performed in costumes to
a 45rpm record of “Baby Elephant Walk”
at the annual Cub Scout Jamboree.
We wound copper wire
around Quaker Oats boxes to make short wave radios —
a project which bored me.
Once I had to bear colors at a
Scouts night meeting at the American Legion Hall.
Victor bore the Stars and Stripes.
I bore the flag of the state of Colorado.
During the anthem, thinking it would appear more symmetrical,
I saluted my flag instead of his — a mistake
of which I was greatly ashamed.
…
Victor’s family moved a lot.
After the 4th grade, we no longer attended the same school.
Every couple of weeks or so Victor would call me.
At that time he lived on a corner of 29th
Street, next to a gas station.
The station manager was a wiry, laconic fellow,
who called Victor “Shit-For-Brains.”
In spite of his station uniform,
I thought of him as a beatnik type.
He once told us about hearing Peter, Paul and Mary at Red Rocks Theater.
He put his thumb and forefinger close together to show us
how itty-bitty they looked from where he was sitting.
Victor and I played Three Flies Up on the parkway across the street.
There were clusters of bushes we could hide in and pee
we called the “toiletries.”
Everything at that time had a kind of
trailers for sale or rent feel,
including
a miniature golf course down the street
with a middle-aged dark-haired woman manager
who was always there in a little hut.
One day we got the idea of offering to vacuum the greens.
We thought we might get five or ten bucks apiece for doing it,
but after we’d worked for hours
and actually cleaned some of the greens pretty well,
all the lady gave us were some free golf tickets.
We’d get burgers at a drive-in called The
Joker,
run by another beatnik type
(I seem to remember him in a cylindrical African hat),
who would admonish us not to
put too much ketchup on the French fries.
There was a good pinball machine there
with a green baseball field and players
crouching in their positions with immense gloves.
When you hit a home run, the ball would go splat
against the glass top, then roll under the back wall
and be returned to the pitcher.
…
Victor had bulldog —
Butch —
who would grab my jeans cuffs in his jaws and shake
me off balance, leaving them wet with his
slimy, smelly drool.
Victor’s father — also Victor —
Victor Hugo Wesley the First —
sat on the shady front porch before dinner,
obese midriff sagging under denim overalls,
emptying Budweiser quarts.
He would run the garden hose onto the roof
so that water would run down the vines
that climbed up the porch screens.
He was a foreman at
the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation.
Once the largest steel manufacturing plant west of the Mississippi,
the steel mill was a ruin by the time I was in my ‘20’s.
He despised my father, who was affected and histrionic.
I was afraid of him.
But he filled a small dining room with a bar-sized pool table,
and always had 5 dollars for old Bud.
The garage contained stacks of pornographic
magazines Victor and I snooped through.
…
It amazes me how much I don’t remember.
For example, I don’t know how often I saw Victor
in the years before junior high when we went to the same school again.
I had other friends,
both neighborhood friends and school friends.
There must have been times when I didn’t see him for a month or more
but I don’t remember missing him.
I would ride my bike to his house.
Once I was distressed and disappointed
when, to punish me for some misbehavior,
my mother forbade one of those trips.
Sometimes one of us would call just as the other was about to,
which we took as evidence of our amazing telepathic sympathy;
though I think that I usually waited for him to call.
I also think I visited his house more often than he visited mine.
When we got together we might go bowling,
or to a movie downtown.
I can remember some movies that I saw with Victor
including Goldfinger, Dr. Strangelove, The Magnificent Seven.
Afterwards we might buy slices of pizza at Woolworths
with fennel seeds in the sausage.
Sometimes as we walked we’d take pleasure
in how unconsciously we stayed in step.
More than once, though, Victor suddenly
vanished. I don’t know where he went, I guess
he’d dart behind a building or a car
and I’d have to wait anxiously for him to reappear.
He sometimes criticized me for becoming too completely absorbed
in a movie or TV show we were watching
instead of, like him,
remaining detached and aware of my surroundings.
As a teenager I was a mass of neurotic
phobias. For example, I hated caterpillars.
Victor once made a point of standing for a long time
watching inch worms crawl up a tree trunk.
I also disliked feet.
“I rather like my feet,” Victor said.
…
We shared deep thoughts.
This thought of mine Victor acknowledged to be profound.
Religious people often
list the vastly improbable conditions of our existence,
yet we couldn’t wonder about it if
the conditions didn’t hold.
One day we saw a strange white form in the distance,
supernatural and otherworldly.
We walked towards it, and when we reached it
after several blocks, it turned out to be
an old brick wall;
yet the otherworldly feeling remained.
We took turns pretending to fall asleep
and act out dream experiences of
alien abduction or sexual gratification
by thrashing and muttering.
I knew I was only pretending
but wasn’t completely sure he was.
“We don’t care if you believe us or not,
“We just don’t care,”
we intoned in unison to his exasperated sister, Bronwen.
…
One particular memory
that seems like a dream:
We were by ourselves in the 29th
street house.
Victor pulled some black-and-white photographs
from behind some books.
They were obscene pictures
of vaginas with various objects inserted —
flashlights and other things.
Usually no faces were visible, but
at one point he grabbed the pictures away and hid them again.
”That’s my sister,” he said.
