Stories About My Childhood That Start Out Promising But Somewhere Towards the End Become Sad and Creepy

When I was 8 or 9, I got my first job as a newspaper delivery boy. I only did it because I wanted money to buy comic books. But after a few months, I became addicted to the responsibility. It was nice to wake up every morning at dawn and venture out into the world while everybody was still fast asleep. I'd get on my dirt bike and haul around a bag of papers that was easily three times heavier than my body weight. My dad usually offered to help me, but I wanted to do it myself. It was my way of asserting my independence.

I had the entire route mapped out and I knew all the shortcuts; which lawns or side alleys would get me between houses faster than the main road. Sometimes a few old ladies would be waiting on their front porches to give me cookies and hot cocoa. I loved most of the customers on my route, and they were always very kind to me. Except, well, there was that one time when things got a little ugly.

KEEP ON READIN'... IT'S NOT LIKE IT COULD GET ANY WORSE, RIGHT?

I was finishing up my deliveries for the day, and my last stop was on the very edge of town, down a dirt road where the white trash people lived. I could hear voices in the background, and it sounded like a group of girls - I'd guess they were somewhere in their 30s - having an early morning party. I didn't know it then, but they were probably drunk. I threw the paper near their mobile home, not wanting to get too close.

Suddenly, I heard them shouting at me in the distance. "Hey, paperboy!" They howled. "We love you! You're so hot! You wanna play with us?"

I didn't say anything, I just jumped back on my bike and took off in the opposite direction. When I looked behind me, I saw a car barreling down the road, chasing after me. The girls were screeching with laughter, leaning out of the car's windows and flashing their breasts at me.

"Where you going, paperboy?" They screamed. "We love you!"

I was peddling as fast as my tiny legs could go, but they kept getting closer and closer. I remember thinking, "I'm going to die! They're going to run me over and then bury my body in the forest preserve! Oh my god, oh my god!" I'm still not sure how I got away. I suppose they just wanted to scare me.

I went home and crawled into bed with my mom and just cried and cried.

(Long, awkward pause.)

I think there was a point to my story, but I forget what it was.

* * *

There was this kid that lived in my neighborhood. Andy, I think his name was. He wasn't technically retarded, but he did act a little bizarre. He had water on the brain or something. He had to wear a bike helmet all the time because his head was so huge.

Our parents told us, "Be nice to Andy because the doctors don't expect him to live very long." But we didn't need a reason to treat Andy as a friend. He was always very sweet, if a little slow. And his mother gave him copies of Playboy Magazine - I assume because she thought he was going to die soon and would never have the chance to see real boobies - and Andy let us look at them.

When I got too old to deliver newspapers anymore, Andy took over for me, even though he could barely ride a bike without falling. During his first year, I'm not exactly sure what happened, but he got hit by truck. It wasn't fatal, thank god, but it gave his parents a scare. They wanted him to give up the paper route, but he refused. He just loved it too much.

Exactly one year later, Andy got into another accident with yet another truck. Once again, he walked away with just a few bumps and bruises, but that wasn't the remarkable part anymore. I mean really, what are the odds of getting hit by two trucks in two years?

My family eventually moved to the suburbs of Chicago, but we still visited our old neighborhood every summer. During one trip - I think it was my summer break from college - I ran into Andy again, and I was shocked that he was still alive. We'd been told he wouldn't survive junior high school, but here he was in his early 20s, still bouncing with energy and wearing that same battered bicycle helmet. The doctors were perplexed, but everybody in town thought it was a miracle.

I said hello to Andy and asked him how he was. He smiled at me with a big impish grin and said, "I got hit by a truck!"

As I learned later, Andy was still delivering papers and had been involved in a head-on collision - always with a truck - every year for almost a decade. The locals had come to expect it.

"Andy's been hit by another truck? Well, spring must be just around the corner."

Somehow he always survived without any serious injuries, which just made his stubborn refusal to die prematurely, as his doctors had predicted, all the more freaky. Last year I heard that he'd been hit by another truck - no surprises there - but this time it had killed him. I'm not sure of the exact tally, but I think it took around twenty-three truck collisions to finally finish the job. So much for being a miracle of science, huh?

(Pause, waits for laugh.)

Yeah, uh... I guess that's kinda sad. It seemed funny at the time.

* * *

Our mother never allowed my brother and me to have sugary cereals. If we wanted junk food, we had to get it on the outside, at a friend's house or somewhere where our mom would never find out about it.

One time, we convinced her to let us set up a tent in the back yard and sleep outdoors for a few nights. We were just a short walk from the house if we got scared or anything bad happened, so she figured it was the safest type of camping. Without her knowing, my brother and I bought a box of Boo-Berry cereal.

As soon as our parents went to bed, we sat in the tent with our friend Mike and ate the entire thing in one sitting. We didn't even need milk, we just passed it around and ate handfuls of cereal straight from the box. Not being accustomed to sugar, we went a little crazy. Our eyes got big as saucers and we started talking a mile a minute, laughing hysterically at absolutely nothing. We were like prepubescent speed freaks.

At some point, and this may've been the sugar talking, somebody had the bright idea that we should go streaking. So we ripped off all our clothes and went running through the neighborhood in the buff. It was actually kinda fun. But the next day, this elderly widow who lived down the block called Mike and told him that she'd seen us. Mike tried to apologize, but she assured him that we had nothing to worry about, that she had no intention of telling our parents. And, she added, if we ever wanted to go streaking again, we should feel free to do it near her house. "It would be our secret," she told him.

(Uncomfortable pause.)

So that was weird.

(Another uncomfortable pause.)

Anyway, long story short, that's why I didn't go camping again until I was 30.

* * *

There was this sledding hill near our house, which all the local kids loved because it was so dangerous. I think it was intended for downhill skiing, but we always preferred sledding on it, because it was steep enough and icy enough that you could go down it at some pretty eye-watering speeds.

Somewhere at the bottom, there were a few trees and a small shed where the skiers could change clothes, and you had to be careful to avoid it. But of course, when you're young and stupid, you actually think it's more fun to aim for the trees and then try to steer away at the last possible second. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

There was this older kid who used to sled with us - his name was Chad or something, I don't really remember anymore - and he was kinda insane. I think he came from a troubled home. We loved him because he was always willing to do the most risky stunts. He'd stand up on his sled and try to surf down the hill, or crash into the side of a tree and destroy his sled. The guy was nuts.

One day - oh man, I'll never forget this - he borrowed his dad's Sunfish, which is basically a small, two-seater boat. He dragged it up to the top of the hill and announced that he was going to ride it down to the bottom. Well, as you can imagine, that thing took off like a rocket. He lost all control of it and it smashed into the shed, ripping through the wall and coming out the other side. We were convinced he was dead, but he jumped out of the pile of shattered wood and began dancing around, blood streaming down his face. We just laughed and laughed and told him he was our hero.

I'm pretty sure that was the last time I ever saw Chad. He just stopped showing up at the sledding hill after awhile. A few years later, we heard that he'd committed suicide by hanging himself in an abandoned barn. When my parents told us, I had to think for a few minutes to remember who he was. And finally I was like, "Oh wait, wasn't he the dude who rode a boat into a shed? Oh man, that was sweet!" Not much of a legacy, I guess.

(Long pause as I stare at my hands.)

Kinda sad, really.

* * *

My brother and I used to dress up as superheroes. We made elaborate costumes out of pajamas and blankets, and stitched the first initial of our first name on the chests. We'd run around the neighborhood, pretending to fight crime or save damsels in distress.

Because we lived in such a small town, the neighbors always smiled when they spotted us running through their back lawns. Some of them even played along with our fantasies. They pretended to be arch-villains, waving their fists at us as we passed their homes, supposedly furious that we'd foiled yet another fiendish plot for world domination.

When we ran out of neighbors to harass, we sometimes explored the church where our dad was a pastor. There was a small staircase near the front door, with an empty storage space under it just large enough for two small boys to squeeze inside. We'd hide under the stairs for hours, spying on people through the tiny slots between each step.

During the week, our clandestine snooping was mostly uneventful, but on Sundays, when the church was packed with parishioners, we had plenty of potential criminals to investigate. Some of them would notice us and smile, but we never reacted. We preferred to believe we were completely invisible, silently gathering evidence against the city's biggest and most notorious crime syndicate.

We never actually broke the case, because on one Sunday we made a startling discovery that convinced us to go into early retirement and hang up our superhero capes.

As it turns out, some of the sweetest and most friendly middle-aged women - many of whom were the mothers of our best friends - thought it was entirely appropriate to go to church without... well, without panties.

Now, as kinky behavior goes, it was fairly innocuous. There's really no way that anyone would have ever noticed. But I suppose it never occurred to them that there might be two boys hiding under the stairs, staring up at them and, though it had never been their intention, getting an unobstructed view of what these women were wearing (or not wearing) under their dresses.

When you're seven years old and trying to enjoy an innocent game of make-believe, and your fun is suddenly interrupted with an unexpected lesson in female anatomy, well, it kinda changes everything. The moment my brother and I realized what we were looking at, we crawled out of the stairwell and went straight home. And we never talked about it again.

(Long pause.)

I'm pretty sure that's when I decided I wasn't a Christian anymore.

* * *

In the 6th grade, my teacher was a humorless old bastard named Mr. Spearing. He once asked our class to write a short story, and it was around this time that I first thought I might want to be a writer someday, so I took to the project with more enthusiasm than most homework assignments.

I submitted a truly staggering piece of fiction involving a homeless gnome who found a bottle of whiskey in a barn and proceeded to get very, very drunk. At some point towards the end of my story, the gnome took a gigantic dump and then passed out in his own excrement. I thought it was pretty good. It was in poor taste, sure, but I considered it a morality tale; a warning about the dangers of alcoholism, especially among little people.

But Mr. Spearing didn't agree. He found it obnoxious and revolting. He actually used the word "revolting" several times when grading it. He'd underline a particular sentence with his red pen and then write in big, bold letters: "THIS IS REVOLTING!"

He was so alarmed by my subversive short story that he insisted on meeting with my mother. I don't know exactly what happened, but I heard later that my mom yelled at him, screaming that he was a terrible teacher and he had no right to put boundaries on my creativity. And though I'm not sure if this is true, she apparently did such a number on him that he burst into tears.

When I heard about it later, I felt strangely proud. Not that my mother had made a teacher cry, but that she cared enough to stick up for me.

A few days later, I came home from school and walked right into an argument between my mother and father. I wasn't sure what was happening, but my mom was throwing things at him and threatening to move out. There was a lot of crying and yelling, and I ran up to my room and slammed the door. I just lay there on my bed and thought, "This is it. My parents are getting a divorce and there's nothing I can do about it."

And then I wondered, when my mom had screamed at Mr. Spearing, was she really defending me against an unfair bully, or was she just venting her frustration on somebody other than my father? Maybe the anger had just built up inside of her and it needed to come out, and my teacher seemed as convenient a target as any.

Well, somehow my parents made it through their rough patch and never got a divorce. As for Mr. Spearing, he retired from teaching shortly after his run-in with my mom. From what I hear, he decided to pursue his dream of becoming a professional truck driver. He always loved the open road. Or maybe he just wanted to get as far away as possible from all those filthy, filthy children and their obscene fiction.

Y'know, now that I think about it, it's possible that he was driving one of those trucks that hit poor Andy. Wouldn't that have been ironic? Or maybe not, I don't know. Anyway, funny story, right?

(Long pause.)

I mean, not laugh-out-loud "ha ha" funny, but funny in a "life sure is weird, isn't it?" sorta way. Don't you think?

(Another long and awkward pause. I eventually get up and let myself out of the room.)