Casual
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual SHRINK THIS! My grandfather, who never had a son, made himself responsible for my education. He did it by following his enthusiasms. He taught me the alphabet with Red Sox box scores, told...
...After dinner, Papa would suggest we go "look at the smash-ups...
...by deploying, in my 6-yearold's falsetto, all the new vocabulary I'd learned that afternoon...
...But any pedagogical intent soon lost out to his desire to shower me with money, which my grandfather, even when I was a toddler, called my "carfare...
...But he was a maestro with cards, and it was rare he'd deal me less than a full house...
...For cripe's sakes...
...They read, "Marble-head celebrates diversity...
...If the people I grew up with "celebrate diversity," it's much as people from Iceland do—from afar...
...He'd drive us to a scrapyard...
...Ethan had taken David's 5-year-old to the Peabody to show him the shrunken heads...
...But no: My home town is drenched in PC...
...Surely, where I grew up, plain talk goes on undiminished...
...In Hawthorne's time, Salem was a big port, and the Peabody housed the booty from the whaling ships: noserings, leis, funny codpieces and headdresses, the bludgeons Polynesians used to keep their wives in line, samurai swords, and various other exotica pillaged at gunpoint from the Heathen Chinee or looted from the savages of the Dark Continent...
...F—in' s...
...But when the first hand failed to produce my wonted royal flush, I replied to my grandmother's cooing "Whatcha got, Chris...
...A few years ago, signs were posted on every road into town that showed a white Matisse cutout and a black Matisse cutout...
...A lie—that Boston's North Shore is some kind of cosmopolitan crossroads—has been posted on the highways in big letters, the better to stroke the sanctimony of the town elders...
...I chirped...
...Besides, I could probably kick his ass at poker...
...But they weren't where he'd remembered them, so he approached a docent to ask where they'd been moved...
...Papa loved cards, and had the idea that teaching me cribbage, casino, and poker would sharpen my wits...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...For in the last weeks of World War I, when he was 11, he and some friends had decided to play catch with a blasting cap they'd found on a mined beach...
...Jeepers crow," he'd say...
...He was told: "We took them off display because we could think of no way to describe them without casting their creators in a negative light...
...A similar spirit brought us to the Peabody Museum in Salem...
...I'll bet he meant it—he had gay friends and was a gentle fellow day-to-day...
...I always thought political correctness a bureaucratic thing...
...A kid I knew from Salem used the occasion of Harvard's first Gay-Lesbian Awareness Day to get drunk and pummel a couple of necking revelers...
...Yeah, right...
...I will regret what I did for the rest of my life," he said from the dais...
...When I was 6, we'd stay up till ten in his smoke-filled, applianceless kitchen in Lynn, Massachusetts, a bottle of Schaefer on his side of the cardboard card table and a mounting pile of nickels on mine...
...Somewhere, Papa had become a formidable card-cheat, no mean achievement in his case...
...If education means learning to judge between true and false, I can only assume today's equivalent of the 6-year-old I was is getting a lousier education than I did...
...And Papa would mutter a few imprecations, increasingly sanitized against my alarming mimetic precocity...
...Last week I got an e-mail from my old friend Ethan—whose older brother David had, in 1969, taught me that double-barreled obscenity with which I regaled my grandmother...
...But the pieces de resistance were the shrunken heads collected from the Cannibal Islands—wizened, striated, the size of oranges...
...My grandmother thought it was "cunning" (Bostonese for cute) the way I glowed as my winnings swelled...
...My grandfather spent his last 71 years with three fingers on one hand, two on the other, and one eye...
...One night, after I'd been playing whiffleball with a bunch of older neighborhood kids, I sat down with Papa's deck in hopes of generating some carfare...
...In my defense," he continued, "we don't have people like you where I come from...
...So: A true thing—the headhunters of the South Seas did shrink heads— has been buried in a basement...
...But then he added something that angered the assembled gays even more than his assault...
...For cripe's sakes...
...We'd wander around the chain-link perimeter, looking at cars with bashed-out windows, or—on lucky nights—with the roof peeled off like an opened bean can or the grille stoved clean into the passenger area...
...He was slated for expulsion, but the GLAD organizers petitioned that he be allowed to stay if he apologized at a public meeting...
...Whatever attitude this reflects towards diversity, "celebration" doesn't quite capture it...
...He taught me the alphabet with Red Sox box scores, told terrifying bedtime stories about explorers in the Dark Continent (as Africa was once invariably called), and set math problems— including long division, which was necessary, after all, for computing batting averages...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 15
