I Was a Child

  ALSO BY BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN

  CARTOON COLLECTIONS

  No One You Know

  This Is a Bad Time

  I Love You, I Hate You, I’m Hungry

  PICTURE BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

  Monsters Eat Whiny Children

  Cousin Irv from Mars

  Meaniehead

  PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS

  The Cat That Changed My Life

  Every Person on the Planet

  Edmund and Rosemary Go to Hell

  Everything Is Going to Be Okay

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kaplan, Bruce Eric.

  I was a child / Bruce Eric Kaplan

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15600-5

  1. Kaplan, Bruce Eric. 2. Cartoonists—United States—Biography. 3. American wit and humor, pictorial. I. Title.

  NC1429.K268A2 2015 2014027911

  741.5'6973—dc23

  [B]

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Also by Bruce Eric Kaplan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I WAS A CHILD

  About the Author

  I was a child, but I wasn’t very good at it. I’m not sure why. I think a lot of us are born waiting to be adults. I know I was. I just sat there, waiting. This is that story.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER went into labor with me at the 1964 World’s Fair, which was in Queens, New York. Every time I fly into JFK and take a cab to Manhattan, I look out the window at the old fairgrounds and I think, That’s where I began.

  • • •

  I WAS TAKEN home to 20 Sommer Avenue in Maplewood, New Jersey. On the front porch was a gray box meant for milk bottle delivery and pickup. When I was a baby, a milkman would come by once a week to pick up the old bottles and replace them with new ones. Then, of course, he stopped coming when all the milkmen stopped coming.

  That box stayed on the front porch for the next four decades, empty. When something was put somewhere at my parents’ house, it stayed there—long after it broke, or no longer served a purpose, or just wasn’t used anymore for whatever reason.

  • • •

  I HAVE two brothers, Michael and Andrew, seven and four years older. I have no idea how they felt about me showing up.

  I do know that very early on, I had the sensation that everyone was a lot bigger and they could hurt me.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER couldn’t take having three boys. She was extremely jumpy, to say the least. Any noise startled her. The sound of a pot dropping on the ground could make her hit the ceiling.

  “I’m getting discombobulated!” she would scream, when we were too loud or would be too much for her in some way.

  She spent a lot of time being discombobulated.

  • • •

  WE HAD a hamster whom we named Hampy. One day, she somehow gave birth to baby hamsters and we clamored around her tank, looking at them. Then we watched in horror as Hampy ate all her babies. My mother told us it was because we scared Hampy.

  I felt we were too much for Hampy, just as, apparently, we were too much for my mother.

  • • •

  ONE NIGHT when I was very little, I had a dream in which I saw a bee who started crying. I woke up very upset about the sad bee. I wish I knew why that bee was crying and why I was so sad that he was so sad.

  • • •

  MY FIRST best friend was Majorie O’Malley, who lived next door. We got into a fight and she scratched my face. The scratch is still there.

  The O’Malleys’ house smelled different from our house. In fact, everyone’s house had its own distinct smell. I was confused because that meant our house had a smell but I couldn’t smell it.

  • • •

  IN OUR LIVING ROOM, there was an enormous dark piece of furniture. It was a cabinet with a built-in record player on the right side and a place to store records on the left side. I remember listening to a recording of “It’s a Small World” and studying the album case. Much later, I would learn that “It’s a Small World” was written for the 1964 World’s Fair, and made its debut as a ride there. Maybe that’s where my parents got it, just before I showed up.

  Albums were mysterious objects that you studied over and over again, memorizing every single corner of them while you listened to the record. My parents had a copy of My Fair Lady. On it, there was a drawing of Rex Harrison pulling strings attached to Julie Andrews as if she was his puppet.

  I was transfixed and horrified.

  The record player broke shortly after I was a toddler and it was never fixed. That enormous dark piece of furniture stayed in the living room for the next twenty years.

  • • •

  WHEN I got older, I was in charge of dusting the living room. Once a week I took the bottle of Pledge and a rag and dusted the cabinet with the record player that didn’t work.

  We inherited a piano when I was in junior high, and I dusted that every week, too. No one in my family could play the piano, and the piano arrived at our house out of tune and was never in tune. It was a place to put photos.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER’S JOB was to take care of me and my brothers. My father’s job was being a math textbook editor. He took the train into the city each day to go to work. My mother drove him to the train station each morning, and each evening, he walked home from the train. He usually caught the same train and always arrived home at the side door. So when the clock said six, I got in place at the top of the back stairs and waited for him.

  • • •

  MY FATHER always wore a hat to work.

  • • •

  WE WERE always told that my father wanted to be a short story writer or a novelist or a TV writer, but he had to give up his writing career for something more steady once he had a family. There was a box of his old writing in the attic. One piece was an unpublished short story about a man and a woman who fall in love when the woman’s platypus escapes and the man finds it.

  • • •

  WHEN I was three I started preschool. It must have been only several times a week because when my kids started preschool, my father asked, “So, do they go two or three days a week?” I said, “No, every day.”

  For the next four years, anytime preschool came up, regarding my son, and then my daughter, my father would pause and say, “So, do they go two or three times
a week?” Sadly, preschool came up a lot. “No, every day,” I continued to say, during our weekly telephone calls. And then I would hold the phone away from my ear while he kept talking and would jump up and down with frustration. My wife wondered what the noise was the first time it happened, then got used to it.

  • • •

  I SPENT a lot of time at the Maplewood Memorial Park playground. There were wooden logs to walk on there that I have never seen in any other playground.

  I would think about those logs when I wasn’t there. And when I was on my way to the logs, I would think, “Soon I’m going to be on those logs.” There’s nothing better than having a purpose. I love purposes and hate vacations.

  There was also a seesaw. You don’t see seesaws as much anymore. It must be because the person on the bottom was always deciding to get off without telling you and you would crash to the ground and it would really hurt. It happened again and again and you just kept playing on the seesaw anyway.

  • • •

  ONE OF my earliest memories is sitting on my father’s lap, watching Here’s Lucy, a Lucille Ball situation comedy on CBS that began with a dancing little doll Lucy. The credits would come on, and at the end, the little doll Lucy pulled back a stage curtain, revealing the real Lucy. Although I wasn’t able to put it into words then, I think what I found so compelling about that moment each week was the expression of a truth—we are all just little dolls of ourselves who occasionally pull back the curtains to reveal the real us.

  • • •

  THERE WERE only two comfortable chairs in our den, where the TV was. Then there was one uncomfortable chair.

  So if all five of us were watching, it would be two parents in the good chairs, one kid in the bad one, and two kids on the floor. If it was just the three kids watching, then two got the good chairs and one got the bad one. If you were in a good chair, under no circumstance could you get up, because then someone would take your good chair. If you had to go to the bathroom, you held it in.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER’S father was a furniture upholsterer. He upholstered the two comfortable chairs in the den and the comfortable chair and couch in our living room. On all of them, he put little sleeves that went over the place where you rested your hands. The thought behind it was that when they got dirty, you just put the sleeves in the wash. But in practice, they just got gray like the part underneath would have but didn’t. Still, you had to have the little gray sleeve on at all times to protect the clean part underneath that you never saw.

  • • •

  THERE WAS a big fan in the attic that you turned on and then left the door to the attic open. That was supposed to cool the house in the summer. It didn’t.

  • • •

  THE DOOR to the attic didn’t close right. You had to fold a piece of paper and stick it in the door at the exact right moment you shut it. That piece of paper was often on the floor next to the door to the attic because someone hadn’t slipped it in at the exact right moment.

  • • •

  THERE WERE three bathrooms—the one off the kitchen, the one in the upstairs hallway, and my parents’ bathroom. Like the door to the attic, the door to my parents’ bathroom didn’t close right. In this case, it was always just a tiny bit open, as if the door was just a little too big for the frame. Neither door ever got fixed. My parents believed in just living with things.

  There was a bookcase in their bedroom that was set at an angle for no real reason. It was just floating. The bookcase had books my parents never looked at and old copies of Reader’s Digest they never read.

  • • •

  EVERYTHING in our house was repaired with Scotch tape. If a paint chip was coming off, it was taped down. If there was a tear in a lamp shade, a piece of tape was put on it.

  I felt held together by Scotch tape, and still do.

  • • •

  SINCE I was the smallest, I couldn’t hit my brothers or I would get hit back. Once I got so mad I turned over the dining room table.

  When guests came, we would pull either end of the table and put leaves in it and it would magically get bigger.

  • • •

  I WENT to Tuscan Elementary School. My mother walked me there for kindergarten. After the first year, you just walked with your friends on the block to school every day. At busy corners, there would be sixth graders who were crossing guards.

  I spent my whole time at Tuscan dying to become a crossing guard. I did, ultimately. They gave you a red strap that crossed your chest diagonally, then went around your waist and was fastened with a big buckle. I rolled it up carefully when I wasn’t using it. It sat next to me at night on my dresser. I would fondle it lovingly.

  • • •

  IN KINDERGARTEN, we had rest time for ten or fifteen minutes. We rested on carpet samples that must have come from a local store. Once I fell asleep during rest time. Before I went to sleep, I was surrounded by my whole class on carpet samples. When I woke up, I was alone in an empty room, disoriented, seized with fear. It was as if I was the only person left on the planet. No one else exists, I thought. Maybe I don’t even exist anymore.

  • • •

  YOUR FRIENDS were the kids who lived on your block. No one was driven anywhere for anything. Jeffrey Van Kirk had high hair that looked like it could topple off his head at any moment.

  Bill Bigelow’s mother screamed at her three sons. In the summer, everyone’s doors and windows were open at all times, plus everyone was in their backyards all day and night. So we heard her screaming a lot. She was losing her mind having three boys, just like my mother.

  • • •

  WHEN I was very little, there were reruns of The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver in the mornings on TV. In these shows, there was a black-and-white world of loving mothers happily taking care of kids while the fathers were busy at work. It wasn’t quite of our time, but it was still relevant.

  Then suddenly these shows were all gone, replaced by Get Smart and I Dream of Jeannie and F Troop.

  • • •

  MY PARENTS never had parties. They had family gatherings. The only time I remember non–family members being entertained in our house was occasionally on New Year’s Eve. The Riegels, a couple from across the street, would come over and we would bring out the plastic champagne glasses. I got Cheez-Its on New Year’s Eve. Cheez-Its represented total, utter wild abandon.

  • • •

  ACROSS THE STREET from us lived Mrs. Soskin. She lived all alone in a big house, which looked less taken care of than the others on the block. There was a tall pine tree between our driveway and the O’Malleys’ house. I would climb all the way to the top of it and watch Mrs. Soskin come out or go into her house. I never saw anyone else enter or leave her house, and that was sad for some reason.

  I don’t think Mrs. Soskin drove. She just did things in her garden. When I was alone at the top of the tree, everything got so still. I felt like I could really think up there.

  • • •

  AFTER SCHOOL, I played with my friends on the block. You went from house to house in the winter, yard to yard for the rest of the year. The afternoon went by very quickly, and suddenly it was dinnertime. You knew it was dinnertime because your mother went out the back door and screamed your name. That was the system. I remember being in the middle of a game, hearing my name, and just leaving. Someone was there and then they weren’t.

  • • •

  IN THE WINTER, when it would get dark before dinnertime and you had to go inside to play, I might be able to watch TV at someone else’s house. We would watch The Munsters at Jeffrey Van Kirk’s house. I never really got into The Munsters that much, but there was one aspect that was compelling. That was Marilyn. She was the only normal one among this group of creatures. Plus, she was reall
y, really beautiful. And no one treated her as special. In fact, she seemed a little less-than for some reason. Not only did she accept this strange series of events, but she seemed to have great love for her family despite their strangeness. She didn’t seem to resent them or be repulsed by them. I think this struck a chord with kids because maybe we all felt like Marilyn in The Munsters. I know I did. And we struggled to not resent our families or be repulsed by them. Maybe we all ask ourselves, How did I get put here with these people who aren’t really people?

  • • •

  I HAD a GI Joe doll because we all did.

  We used to play with our GI Joe dolls in Jeffrey Van Kirk’s basement, where his father had a workbench and various projects going on at all time. The idea of a father having a workbench was very wonderful and foreign to me.

  • • •

  MY FATHER had a secret toupee. My brothers found it once in a little box in the basement. It looked like a bird’s nest.

  He never wore it. I think he ordered it through the mail, then when it arrived, tried it on once and never had the nerve to wear it.

  He was very self-conscious about being bald. He had two or three long strands of hair that began at the left side of his head and traveled over to the right side of his head so there would be hair on top. He still looked bald, but I guess in his mind he had come up with a way of tricking people that he wasn’t, I guess. On a windy day, it looked bizarre.

  • • •

  MY BROTHERS and I had our own bedrooms. All five of us slept upstairs with our doors slightly open.