Destiny and the Violence of Butterscotch

I’m sharing a brief excerpt from a nonfiction book I wrote and that was published by Blue Heron Book Works in 2018. The title is Misdemeanor Outlaw. Read it and perhaps gain the opportunity of giving away two Christmas presents rather than one. First, you can share a book with family member or a friend. Second, you can earn me a royalty payment by purchasing it. It’s the story of how a came to regard myself as a minor rebel at a time when this country was full of major rebels. You’ll laugh and maybe even think a little. That’s all a writer can ask for.

From Misdemeanor Outlaw:

I had a normal childhood, except for the day I died and was reborn like Jesus, only to the sight of my grandma’s black shoes. Like my grandma, the shoes were strong and heavy. Made from thick leather with much of the color scoffed away by constant housework and hiking to the IGA grocery store down the street, a circular hole had been carved and the leather removed above each big toe joint. My grandmother never drove anything anywhere during her entire life. It wasn’t ladylike. So, she was cursed with bunions, those pesky, painful bumps on the joint that grow when the toe turns inward toward the second toe and a person spends all day every day on her feet. Without those holes, the pressure and pain would have been unbearable.

Fortunately, she never damaged any fancy high heels with her paring knife. Although she wore a dress every day like many proud women of her generation, her shoes were of that style known as clodhoppers and designed for the hard-working, god-fearing country person she was. High heels were found only on movie stars. She carried that pragmatic attitude about fashion over into every aspect of her life, including her erect bearing and straightforward, practical way of seeing life. Both have a lot to do with why I’m still here sixty plus years later.

I happened to notice her shoes in great detail on this particular day as a result of hanging upside down and dangling over them. My grandmother held on to my right ankle with her left hand and thumped my back with her right. I guess what went on could be called a pre-Heimlich maneuver. A woman of less sturdy pioneer stock might have gone into shock as my complexion changed from ashen gray to crimson to blue and finally, a weird sort of purplish hue.

I was never blessed with much common sense and my fourth year on earth may have been when this deficiency became fully noticeable to the world at large, or at least the world of my family. We lived in a small apartment a block from the local high school—mom, dad, my year-old sister Sandy, and me. John Bill, my father, had returned alive, but battered from his tour of duty with the 82^nd Airborne during World War II and proceeded to live every Depression era kid’s dream of marrying his high school sweetheart, raising a family, and operating his own business. It was 1952. America had become the most prosperous and powerful nation on the planet by virtue of saving the world. Recently, my father opened his first car lot on a small patch of gravel at the edge of East Broadway right before the town of Princeton, Indiana, melted into corn and soybean fields. A building shell designed and painted as a giant A & W root beer barrel served as his office. The eyesore was born as a drive-thru root beer stand before drive-thru’s were popular and stood deserted for years until my father’s entrepreneurial spirit revised it.

Dad never needed much excuse for taking a celebratory drink, and in honor of selling his first car my parents left us in grandma’s care while they spent a much needed night away from two small children. I was too young to understand the conversation that went on between my mother and her mother-in-law on the way out the door. Certainly, I’m too old to remember it now, even if I had comprehended the language fully. But I knew both women well and I can imagine the dialogue something like this.

“Sandy should sleep till we get home, but if she wakes and starts crying, there’s formula in the ice box,” said my mother. Two points of interest here. First, the term icebox was used universally in Princeton to describe the new electric refrigerators because people were most familiar with the old method of keeping food cold with a block of ice. Second, my mother, being incredibly shy and delicate, never breast fed us. A warm rubber nipple on a sterilized glass bottle was the closest Sandy and I ever came to suckling on a teat as infants. “You can warm it on the stove, but make sure it isn’t too hot.”

“There won’t be any problems. I’ve fed babies before and they turned out alright. You married one.”

“Jimmy’s getting into everything, so keep a close eye on him. Don’t let him near the space heater and don’t let him back talk you.”

“He won’t.” At that point, my grandmother would have held up a bent flyswatter and smiled along with my mother. “What time should he go to bed?”

“Let him listen to Gunsmoke.”

Gunsmoke played every week on the radio in 1952 with William Conrad supplying the masculine baritone voice of the stoic Marshall Dillon. Appearance meant nothing until television found its way into the American living room a couple of years later. Then, tall and lanky James Arness replaced short and fat Conrad. From that point forward appearance has taken a preeminent place in our society. Today, the 21^st century is almost all form over substance, whether it happens to be entertainment, politics, economics, or the arts. Everyone has to look the part, and if they do their competence often goes unquestioned. It may be that a tiny black and white TV picture tube in a wooden box initiated our whole country’s plummet into mediocrity, but that is a prospect for another whole book.  

As Dad warmed up the 1950 Plymouth sedan that had recently replaced the 1946 Dodge, grandma and mom finished their conversation. Unnoticed by either, I slipped off the worn couch cushion behind them, away from the glowing yellow tubes of the Motorola radio, and into the kitchen. Padding barefoot across the cool green speckled linoleum past the table and chairs, I arrived at the base of the sink and looked up at the painted cabinet doors, the freshly scrubbed dishes in the drainer, the chrome toaster, and a plaid roll about the size of my father’s thumb. I couldn’t read but knew by the pattern and color of the paper that what tempted me was Scottish Kilt Butterscotch Candy. A favorite of my mothers, she had often smashed the lifesaver lozenges into tiny pieces and shared them with me. If I could compare the effect of that brown sugar-butter-vanilla concoction on my four-year-old senses of taste and smell, it would be similar to the rush I got from a line of coke twenty years later.

Always, she refused me a full piece saying I might choke on the hard circle. No matter how much whining, wheedling, sobbing and begging went on, I had to be content with whatever crumbs she threw my way. But my dear sweet mother was out partying big-time with the old man. She could no longer hoard the butterscotch for her own selfish ends. Tonight the treat belonged to me and me alone. The struggle for this prize began in earnest. First, I opened the cabinet door beneath the sink and tried to stick my foot on the elbow jointed pipe that drained it. All it would have taken was one step up and I could have hauled myself atop the counter, a similar action to placing foot in stirrup and mounting a horse. But, the angle was all wrong. The pipe set too far back into the cabinet.

Never one to panic and give up when faced with seemingly overwhelming obstacles, I scanned the room for other usable devices. The kitchen chairs were metal and too heavy for me to drag over. We lived in a small town and the phone book contained too few names to be of a helpful thickness. In the corner beneath a wall calendar, the small step stool that my mother used to reach the upper cabinet shelves and put away canned goods rested stoically, waiting for my ingenuity to catch up with its technology.

It did. I watched the delivery men from Williams Appliance use a hand dolly to bring the new refrigerator in our kitchen the week before. Then using a technique they described as walking—confusing since the huge white box had no legs—they slid it against the wall by pushing one side forward on the linoleum at a time. Left and right, scoot and catch up. Except for scratching the wax off the linoleum surface as they had done, I followed their example perfectly with the step stool until it rested snugly against the kitchen counter where my treasure waited. From there, the matter of the climb became a simple exercise, and in a few seconds I nestled myself on the counter top and began tearing paper away from the butterscotch lozenges as if I were a drowning boy clawing toward the surface of some deep lake. So intent was I on getting as many candies in my mouth as possible that I never heard my parents drive away or grandma scuttling around the apartment in search of me.

In the middle of a feeding frenzy, I failed to notice the existential dread that drifted in the window as a cloud blocked the sunlight. It wouldn’t have mattered. I had no idea what existentialism was or even how to pronounce the word until I got introduced to Sartre in a philosophy class in college. Anyway, a warning from the universe drifted over the joy frolicking in my frontal lobe and I ignored it. This was the first in a long line of warnings passed onto me by natural forces that I chose to ignore throughout my life.

Besides not knowing any philosophy, I had no conception of simple biological apparatus or function. For example, did you know that your trachea and esophagus share an opening at the back of your throat? That seems impractical to me, but I can’t change the fact. A little flap of skin called the epiglottis protects the trachea by covering it when you swallow food. Thank goodness because it keeps said food out of your lungs. Here’s something else I wasn’t aware of. A person can put so much butterscotch candy in his mouth all at once that the epiglottis doesn’t have enough time to close over the trachea. When you replace that flap of skin with hard candy, it seals the windpipe, permanently.

I began to understand this phenomenon at the onset of wheezing and gagging. It became more apparent as I tried screaming for grandma and no sound emerged from my clogged throat. At this point, my reflection in the chrome toaster took on a bluish hue. I remember waving my arms, grabbing my throat, and warm tears tasting salty on my lips. Then, blackness. No white light comforted me. I walked toward no pearly gates. I had no life at my tender age to pass before my eyes. This was surely death, a great void empty of all things human.

That’s when I saw her shoes. I hung upside down over a cliff of cloth that resembled her grey and white speckled dress and far below on the linoleum floor a pair of holey clodhoppers stared up at me. I heard sobbing, like a newborn baby was in the room but didn’t realize the noise came from me. Holding my right ankle with her left hand, my grandmother thumped by back with the other as if she were beating and shaking out the dust from a throw rug. After a few solid smacks, the candy flew from my mouth and landed on the floor beside her shoes in a puddle of tears and snot and spittle. A great heaving sound filled the room as I sucked air into my collapsing lungs. Sitting me upright on the kitchen table, grandma pried my teeth apart and ran her fingers around the inside of my mouth, ensuring that it was clear of all dangerous substances. I don’t remember her saying a single word, but her hands trembled and sweat beaded across her blanched brow. Her loose dentures clicked together nervously, like castanets. In the distance, my sister cried for a bottle.

There were many lessons to be learned from this brush with mortality, the fragility of life, the danger of greed, the value of quick action, the stupidity of impulse behavior, the importance of listening to instructions, appreciation for the wisdom of the elderly, to name only a few. Sometimes I wish I had taken those lessons to heart a little better over the years. Instead, my destiny as an outlaw, or a fool if you prefer, became sealed by dad’s comment after he heard the description of events upon his return. “Some people are capable of learning from what they’re told. Fools, on the other hand, learn only through experience.”