Yesterday, the last day of school, had been the best day of the year, just like it had been for the last four years. When the school bell rang yesterday and we were done with fifth grade, so many things I’d worried about, every day, every week, I didn’t have to worry about anymore. No more tests. No more book reports. No more SRA colors. No more grownups in charge of me five days a week.

Miss Kennedy watched us kids all jump out of our seats and start talking with each other as some of us ran out the door and others stayed to talk to other kids. She looked kind of sad, like she would miss us, and I even felt kind of bad for her, even though she was a grownup. But then Beth and Abby went up to talk to her and she smiled and didn’t seem sad anymore. They were the real “teacher’s pets”, especially Beth, who REALLY liked doing school stuff.

Some of the boys said that I was a teacher’s pet too, but I didn’t even like Miss Kennedy that much, I just wanted her and everyone else to think I was a really good student. Some of the other boys said she was a robot, or even an “android”, which was a robot that looked like a human being. I didn’t think that, I just thought she was worried all the time about all the stuff she wanted to teach us, so she seemed like she was more in charge of us all the time than my other teachers had been. That’s why it felt extra good that we were done, and android or human, she wouldn’t be in charge of us anymore.

The inside of my body and everything around me just quivered with new energy. No more school. No more mom and dad waking me up in the morning. No more homework. No more stars to get on my sheet on the bulletin board in our classroom. No more classroom. No more worrying that mom, dad and my teacher would think I wasn’t a good student.

Just like the last two summers, the first Little League game was the day after the last day of school. Today. I put on my new uniform, which unlike ten-year-old league, was like a real baseball uniform that the pros wore. It had the buttoned shirt instead of just a t-shirt, that dad called a “jersey”, with the “logo” of our “sponsor” on the back, “Huron Valley Bank”. Then the special baseball pants that were kind of short and had the elastic at the bottom of each pant leg. Then those long baseball sock things, that went up under your pants almost to your knees, ours with the green stripes for our team color. But you also had to wear regular white socks underneath them, because the baseball socks didn’t cover your feet. Then I put on my black Keds sneakers, because I didn’t have any of those “cleat” shoes that some kids had. And finally my green cap.

Once I had it all on, I went into the bathroom to see what I looked like in the mirror. It was REALLY neat. Dad was typing in the office but saw me and peeked in the open bathroom door.

“Lookin’ good Cloob”, dad said, “Like a real baseball player!” I pushed my lips together and nodded.

“Have a good game!” he said, “You sure you don’t want your mom or me to come watch?”

“I’m sure”, I said, nodding my head as I kept looking at myself in the mirror. I was just done with having my teacher in charge of me and watching me all the time at school. And in today’s game there would be our coach and the other coach plus that umpire guy in charge of all us kids playing the game. And there might even be some moms or dads watching the game. I always hated it when they were there and yelled, even if they were cheering the team I was on. If they had to watch, they could at least shut up.

Out in our driveway, I put my glove in the pressure basket of my bicycle and rode down Wells and then down the sidewalk across the park in front of my school. Even though the school was always empty on Saturdays, it looked extra empty today. At the other side of the park where the sidewalk ended, I rode down Lincoln to Shadford where I turned right to get to Mike’s house. I saw Stuart and Mike sitting on the front yard in their uniforms, their bikes parked on the sidewalk.

“There’s our new first baseman”, Mike said, smiling.

“We won’t really need him at first or me in center with you pitching”, said Stuart.

“You’re delusional, Stuart”, said Mike, “I can strike some kids out, but I just like playing the game, and I’m sure you’ll get your balls to center. I don’t like putting pressure on myself and my teammates to win all the time.”

“SORRY”, said Stuart, making a funny face and not the least bit really sorry. Then he turned and looked at me and pointed a finger toward me.

“Smokey’s new song, ‘Tracks of My Tears’”, he said, “Have you heard it yet?” I shook my head.

“Oh man”, he said and started singing…

So take a good look at my face
You’ll see my smile looks out of place
If you look closer, it’s easy to trace
The tracks of my tears

“Awesome lyric”, he said, “Don’t you think? Pasting on a smile to try to hide that pain and anguish, but the tears give it away.” I nodded. It was a pretty good lyric, but really sad. I didn’t like sad songs as much as Stuart did.

Mike puffed out his cheeks and blew air out of his mouth. Stuart turned his head to look at him.

“What?” Stuart asked him, “You don’t think so? You groovin’ on the Kinks and the Rationals with your old buddy Arthur.” Then he pretended to play guitar and sang, “Der der der der der. Der der der der der.” That part from the Kinks big hit song that Arthur pretended to play on guitar all the time.

“No, no, no”, said Mike, shaking his head, “Smokey Robinson’s cool. I’m just, you know, thinking about the game and maybe we should get going.”

“What? You nervous?” Stuart asked.

“Yeah”, said Mike, “Honestly? A little. I just like playing a good, fun game of baseball. I’m not into all this ‘we gotta win’ crap.”

Stuart made a kind of coughing noise and asked, “What’s wrong with you man? You don’t want to win? You’re un-American!”

“Ha ha right”, said Mike, then he blew air out of him mouth and said, “It’s not that I DON’T, it’s just not at the top of my list of what’s important.”

“Well damn, man”, Stuart said, “Thanks for giving us a heads up. No daydreaming for me and watching the birdies soar overhead in centerfield!”

Stuart looked at me and Mike and asked, “Okay, so which way should we go? Packard to Independence to Essex? Or all the way on Packard?”

Mike stood up and asked, “You guys okay riding on Packard the whole way? It’s Saturday, there isn’t much traffic.”

“What ARE we”, said Stuart, “Little kids?”

“Good question. I’ll think about that”, said Mike, hopping on his bike and pedaling down his driveway. Stuart looked at me and made a funny face like “what’s with that guy” and jumped on his bike and rode after Mike. I followed behind.

***

“Okay boys”, said the umpire, wearing a catcher’s mask and that big dark blue protector thing on his chest and stomach, “Let’s play ball. Batter up!”

That was me. We were the “visiting” team and our coach decided that I should bat first. He said I didn’t swing at bad pitches and because I was left-handed I was more likely to get on base with a walk. But when I did swing at a good pitch, I had a “nice easy stroke” and didn’t try to “kill the ball”, so I was good at getting base hits “to start us off”.

Our coach was coaching at third base. He had Mike, who was our pitcher today, coaching at first.

“Okay Mister Zale”, he said, clapping his hands, “Make him throw you a strike.” That meant I wasn’t supposed to swing at a pitch until the pitcher threw at least one strike first. Our coach called us all “mister” and then our last names. That was kind of weird, but I think he thought it would make us play smarter, like we were grownups, and not do stupid stuff, like we were kids.

The pitcher on the other team was right-handed, kind of short and looked at me worried, maybe because I was left-handed.

“You can do it Joey”, yelled his coach, who was standing in front of the bleachers on the third base side of the field, “Just fire it in there.” Then he said, “C’mon infield, make some noise!”

All the kids playing infield for the other team started saying, “hey batter batter batter batter”, which I guess was supposed to make me nervous.

That Joey kid pitching did all that windup stuff before throwing his first pitch. It was high and outside, and the ump called a ball.

“That’s okay Joey”, their coach yelled, “Just fire it in there!” Joey, still looking worried, pushed his lips together and nodded his head. The other infield guys did their “hey batter” thing again. His second pitch wasn’t high this time and still kind of on the outside so I thought it might be a strike, but I didn’t swing, and the ump called another ball. Joey made kind of a growling noise because I guess he thought it should have been a strike too, and he looked at his coach.

“No problem Joey”, the coach yelled, clapping his hands some more, “Looked good to me. Just throw strikes son, he’s not swinging up there!”

My coach was also clapping at third base. “Way to wait son”, he yelled to me, “Make him throw you a strike!”

Joey’s third pitch came right toward my elbow, and I jumped backward so it wouldn’t hit me. Obviously another ball. One more and I would get a walk to first, which was my coach’s strategy.

“C’mon Joey”, yelled their coach, “Brush it off. Just throw strikes. He’s no hitter!”

“He’s no hitter”, yelled their catcher too from behind me.

“Let’s see if he can throw a strike first”, said our coach, clapping his hands slowly and more softly. I wanted to show them that I WAS a hitter, but I knew the coach wanted me to keep “taking”. The infielders did their “hey batter” thing and he finally threw a strike, right down the middle where I could have really hit it if I’d swung. The ump called strike one and I could see Joey relax a little but he still looked kind of worried.

“All right Mister Zale”, our coach said, clapping harder now, “Wait for your pitch!” Okay now I could swing, but only if it was a good pitch like that last one. Joey wound up and threw it just like the last one. I swung this time and there was that nice clunk sound as I hit it over the second baseman’s head into right field. I ran down to first and rounded the bag toward second as their right fielder got the bouncing ball and threw it in to their second baseman. I ran back to first. My teammates were cheering. Some of them saying “Coop, Coop” over and over.

Mike, coaching at first base, smiled at me, his eyes twinkling, and said, “Nice one, though that was a pretty fat pitch and a bit of a gimme.” Then he pretended to look fierce like the coach, but also like he was being silly and said, “Way to start us off Mister Zale!”

Our coach pointed at me from over at third base and said, “Nice rap Mister Zale. Remember, eyes on me when the next ball is hit.” I nodded.

Mike shook his head and made a funny sound in his nose and said to the first baseman for the other team, “Hey Riley, Is your coach as bad as ours thinking he’s got to be in charge of you all the time?” That Riley kid nodded and then shook his head.

“And Joey doesn’t look like he’s having much fun up there on the mound”, he said to Riley.

“It’s the first game he’s ever pitched”, said Riley, getting down in his crouch position getting ready for the first pitch to our second batter, “Our best pitcher couldn’t make it to the game today.”

“Tough break”, said Mike, “Someone should go out to the mound and tell him to relax and just have fun.” Riley nodded, still in his crouch waiting for the first pitch.

Then Mike said to me quietly, “You know what to do. Standard stuff. Run like hell on a ground ball, halfway to second on a fly.” I nodded. I wished Mike could be our REAL coach instead of Mr. Christo.

Our coach called out to Sam who was batting second, “Okay Mister Christo, make him throw you a strike.” It sounded extra weird for him to say that because he was Sam’s dad. The infielders started their “hey batter” thing, and I took my lead off first base and got in my own crouch.

Again Joey threw a couple balls before he got a strike on Sam, who didn’t swing like the coach had told him. Sam swung at the next pitch but fouled it off. On the next pitch, Sam hit a hard ground ball bouncing high by Joey on the mound as I ran “like hell” toward second base. Their second baseman, moving and crouching to get the ball, got in my way running to second. I tried to run behind him but he backed up a little and my foot caught his and I stumbled and fell, landing hard on my left shoulder. On the ground, I looked for second base and I grabbed it to not get out. The ball had gotten into the outfield and Sam had gotten to first base.

I stood up with one foot on the base. My left shoulder hurt a lot.

“You okay Mister Zale?” our coach called out. I wasn’t really, but you were supposed to be tough so I nodded.

“That’s a good man”, he said, “Shake it off. Watch me when the ball is hit.” I nodded again, but I could feel my shoulder hurting more and getting stiff.

The third batter was Stuart, and when he hit a single to left center, I ran to third and the coach waved me home and I crossed the plate scoring our first run. All my teammates cheered, but all I wanted to do was run to the bench to sit down. I tried to move my left arm up or around but it hurt bad and the stiffness wouldn’t let me. When we finally got out, Mike came over and stood in front of me.

“How’s your shoulder?” he asked.

“Really bad”, I said, “I can hardly move my arm and it hurts a lot.”

“Damn”, Mike said, and he told our coach I couldn’t play anymore. So after we finally got out, another guy on my team went out to play first. I stayed on the bench, my shoulder hurting and still stiff. After we finally got the other team out, the coach gave Mike a dime and asked him to call my mom and dad on the pay phone. I sat on the bench for a couple more innings until dad showed up and took me and my bicycle home.

***

It was a week later. My new Little League team was having another game but I wasn’t going to go because I couldn’t play. I’d broken my left collarbone, and the doctor said I couldn’t play any sports, or even run or ride my bicycle for SIX WEEKS. I had to wear a special “clavicle brace” on my shoulders all the time, except when I was taking a bath. At least I could wear it under my shirt so no one could see it, so kids or grownups I didn’t know wouldn’t ask me why I was wearing it and wouldn’t know that I was injured.

The day after the game, Mike had come over to my house to see how I was doing, and I told him what had happened and that I couldn’t play baseball for six weeks. He said that was bad, and he would tell our coach and the rest of the team, but at least he said, “You’re batting a thousand”, to try to make me feel better.

Because I couldn’t play any sports, I didn’t go to the park much like I usually did in the summer, because my friends and other kids would ask me to play baseball or basketball, or run around, or ride my bike with them. Since I couldn’t do any of that stuff, and I could only watch THEM play, which wasn’t much fun. They might also start thinking I was strange, that kid that couldn’t do anything.

But I could WALK places, and today I decided to walk to the Blue Front. Back when we lived in our old house, I used to go there sometimes with dad. He liked to drive there on Sundays and buy this special newspaper called the “Sunday New York Times”. He and mom would both look at and read different “sections” and mom would do the “crossword puzzle” and the “bridge hand”. While we were there I would look at all the other stuff they had, like comic books and “paperback” books, baseball and even civil war cards, and cheap little toys like balsa wood gliders, windup rubber band planes, frisbees, and those plastic rockets that you pumped up with water and air. Also, dad and I would usually get ice cream sandwiches, which were becoming one of my favorite treats.

When we still lived in our old house I had gone to the Blue Front with friends on our bicycles a couple times, and I had gone by myself on my bicycle since we moved here to our new house. But today I was going to walk there. I had my fifty cents allowance for this week plus another fifty cents for mowing the grass in our side yard and by the street in our front yard, before I broke my collarbone, plus extra pennies dad gave me, and I wanted to spend it on good stuff to read, since that’s what I figured I’d be doing a lot for five more weeks.

It was cloudy today but warm, and it didn’t seem like it would rain. If it was going to rain, the air would have that special smell like old metal pipes, or it would get windy and there would be dark clouds way off on the edge of the sky. The clouds today were white and looked like they were painted in long streaks in the sky.

I crossed our street and walked up the sidewalk on Wells by the school, hearing the little kids yelling and screaming across the street in the park where they had turned on that water thing that sprayed water up in the air so the little kids would run under it and get all wet. I crossed Lincoln and Olivia and started to head a little uphill to Forest and Prospect, to the top of the hill where the Board of Education building was. I always thought it was kind of a neat and unusual intersection, because the streets didn’t crisscross, but went off at weird angles to each other. Prospect was the most interesting street of the four, because as you looked down it, it curved to the left. I crossed Forest across from the Board of Education building and started down Prospect.

The street had some neat houses with stairways going up the side of some of the houses to upstairs doors that I figured were separate places to live in the same house, like our house was two houses hooked together with different front doors. I figured those upstairs places were where some of the college students probably lived, because they didn’t need a whole house. I walked by Church Street and Prospect curved to the left and it ended at East University Avenue. There was a little store there that I’d never gone it, that reminded me of the little store across the street from my old school. I turned right and walked up East University by the store and across a couple streets until I got to Tappan Avenue that went off at an angle to the left, creating a very small triangle-shaped block to my right.

I liked triangle blocks, and thought it would be really neat to live on one, specially at one of the corners that was an acute angle instead of the regular right angle. I remembered my friend Paul’s house was on a triangle block back in my old neighborhood by Allmendinger park. I missed Paul coming over all the time!

Now there were more apartment buildings than regular houses, and just up Tappan was Oakland Avenue where I turned left. I walked down Oakland and it curved to the right and across the street from where I was walking were those giant houses with the strange letters on the front, those “fraternity” and “sorority” places where students lived, like where dad used to work before he got his regular college professor job at Eastern. I crossed Arch Street and finally got to Arbor Street, the one where the Blue Front was down at the other end.

I thought it was kind of a neat walk because I had to go on five different streets, and some of them curved, and some of them you either had to walk uphill or down. I also wondered why some of the streets were called “streets” but others were called “avenues”. “Avenues” sounded like they should be bigger and more famous.

I walked down Arbor to the end at Packard and there it was, blue door and all. The door was heavy to open and creaked when I did, but also made that nice ringing bells sound. The place had that great just a bit sour smell of all the newspapers, magazines and books.

Just to the left of the door was that metal freezer thing with the glass top where the ice cream sandwiches and other ice cream bars were. It made a kind of humming sound, which actually sounded kind of nice, like you were in a spaceship or something. Next to it was a metal rack where the “Classics” Comics were. They weren’t like regular comic books about superheroes, but comic book versions of regular book stories, like “The Three Musketeers”, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, “Lord Jim” and even Jules Verne stories like “Around the World in Eighty Days”. When I went to the Blue Front with dad to get the Sunday New York Times newspaper, he would buy me an ice cream sandwich and buy me one of those comics, whichever one I wanted. He thought they were neat because they “introduced” kids to some great stories of literature that they could later read the real book version of.

Walking farther into the place, there was the counter part on the right, that the grownup guy that worked there sat behind. Behind him were the cigarettes and other stuff that only grownups were supposed to buy. Dad would wave his hand at him to say hello but the guy only nodded and neither of them would say anything. Dad said hello to some people that way without talking, who he saw sometimes but weren’t really his friends. Mom would never do that, she would ALWAYS say hi and even think of something else to say about why she was there or that was nice, like everybody was her friend. But now, in the place by myself, I didn’t even wave and he didn’t nod his head, though I could tell he knew I was there.

To the left before you got to the counter where he was, the first aisle went off to the left, where all the comic books were, maybe a hundred different ones. There were a bunch that didn’t look very interesting to me, like the “Archie” ones and the other comic books with the “Archie” characters in them, like “Jughead” and “Veronica”. I looked at them a little bit sometimes, because they seemed to be about those older “teenager” kids, but the stories and what they said seemed pretty stupid so I never bought one.

And besides all the superhero comics that I mostly got and read, there was another one called “Turok Son of Stone”, about these two Indian guys, one was a grownup and the other a kid, who accidentally went back in time to when there were dinosaurs. Since I had made up my own pretend stories about soldiers having to be with or even fight with dinosaurs, it was interesting to read these stories, and I would buy that comic sometimes.

But most of what I looked at and bought were the superhero ones. My four most favorite ones that I would look at and buy were Batman, Flash, Doctor Strange and Spiderman.

Batman was neat because he was just a regular rich guy, Bruce Wayne, with a “secret identity” like Superman, who used all his money to build a secret cave and laboratory, special car and plane, plus a special suit of armor and all these neat “gadgets” and “devices” he made and carried on his “utility belt”. He was kind of like Tom Swift, only Batman was a grownup instead of an older kid. I thought Batman was better than Superman because he wasn’t always a total goodguy like Superman. Billy Boyd, who also liked Batman a lot, said that Superman was a “goodie two shoes”, though Billy’s friend Teddy liked Superman a lot, I think because he WAS a goody two shoes. Batman’s stories also had really neat badguys that he had to fight, like Joker, Riddler, Catman and Catwoman.

If you asked most kids what Flash’s superpower was, they’d say he could run super fast. But it was more than that. He could move so fast that he could do a bunch of different things at what seemed to everybody else to be at the same time, even though he actually did them one step at a time. THAT was really interesting! So even though he had to cement together a hundred different bricks, one at a time, around a badguy he was trying to capture, to the badguy it seemed like the brick wall around him appeared instantly. AND, most of those badguys were really neat in the Flash comics too, like Mister Element, Mirror Master and Reverse Flash. Sometimes his badguys were even more interesting than he was, because he was kind of a goodie two shoes too.

Doctor Strange was neat because he had all these powers with magic and energies that weren’t like regular science stuff. He didn’t use regular “physics”, he used “meta physics” that came from these guys that lived up on top of mountains in India and China who had special religions and “mystic arts”. Stuart and Arthur both liked Doctor Strange a lot too. Arthur thought it was “super cool” that he had learned all this “ancient magical wisdom” from “other corners of the world”. Stuart said he was a “major league badass”. I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded pretty good, and there is no way I was going to ask him, because I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t as “cool” as he was.

And then Spiderman was neat because unlike all those other superhero guys who were grownups, he was one of those older teenager kids, so he didn’t think like a grownup. So sometimes he was still trying to figure out how his superpowers worked, like other kids like me had to figure out how to do the things we were really good at. He also had really neat badguys like Doctor Octopus, Sandman and Green Goblin. ALL the kids I knew really liked Spiderman, I think because he wasn’t a grownup.

Even some girls liked Spiderman. One day I was sitting at the picnic table in our front yard and Abby walked by on the sidewalk, said hello, and asked me what I was reading. I quickly looked over in the park to see if any of the guys I knew were there and could see me talking to her. I didn’t see any so I told her it was a Spiderman comic. She said she thought Spiderman was really neat and she would read the Spiderman comics that her brother bought. She told me not to tell her friends Myrna or Beth or any of the girls from school. I said I really never talked to any girls. She smiled, nodded, and said, “I know.”

Mike was the one kid I knew who really wasn’t into superhero comic books. He knew about all the different superheroes and what their powers were, so if the rest of us were talking about them, he could talk about them too. But he never seemed to read comic books, or have any favorite superheros. I think he liked to read regular books, but I wasn’t sure.

Regular comic books usually cost twelve cents, and those “annual” ones, that had much longer stories in them, were a quarter, which was actually cheaper because they were like three times as long. I had a dollar, so I could buy a bunch of comic books if I wanted to AND an ice cream sandwich.

After the comic book “aisle”, the next aisle to the left, right across from the guy behind the counter that worked there, had all the magazines and the “paperback” books. Dad really liked paperback books, because he said that let people with not as much money buy books to collect and read. He said the ones at the Blue Front were mostly “pulp fiction”, which he said were mostly adventure stories that weren’t too complicated that grownups and kids could enjoy reading. Some were about wars, or secret agents, or mysteries, or even scary stuff.

My favorite kind were the science fiction books. They were kind of like the Tom Swift books that dad read to me and I read for myself when I was little, but these were ones that older kids and even grownups would like too. They had some of those Jules Verne books like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Mysterious Island”, but LOTS of other ones about people from Earth going to Mars and Venus and even going to other planets in other solar systems. Or about alien guys coming from those other planets to Earth. And some of the stories weren’t about Earth at all. I would read the book titles and look at the picture on the book covers to get an idea of what they were about. Dad showed me how to look at the back cover too, because usually there was some writing there that told you a little more about what the story was about.

The magazines were mostly for grownups, though kids could look at most of them too. But even if you wanted to, there were some magazines that ONLY grownups could look at. They were magazines like “Playboy” and “mr.” that had pictures of naked women in them that only grownups were supposed to look at. Those magazines also had pictures of women on the covers, but I guess they had enough underwear type clothing on so they weren’t bad for everyone, even kids, to maybe see by accident. Other kids said that if you tried to look at the pictures inside THOSE magazines, the guy working at the store would get really mad at you, and maybe even kick you out of the place, even forever, which would be really bad because it was such a neat place to go to.

I was kind of interested to see pictures of naked women because I wondered how grownup women’s bodies were different from a girl my age like Molly. Molly and I had seen each other naked when we were five. I knew that grownup women had breasts that stuck out on their chests, that girls my age or younger didn’t have yet until they were teenagers. Older boys in the park called them “boobs” or “tits” or other nicknames. But I also really wanted to see what women had between their legs instead of a penis. I didn’t hear the older boys saying what that was or what it was called, they would just say “down there”. And some of the older boys said that they’d seen the “centerfold” pictures of naked women in Playboy but they never showed that part in front between their legs. They’d show their breasts and maybe their bottoms in the back, but not that front part. I wondered if that part was so bad that nobody could see it or even talk about it. Though I had spied on mom sometimes when her women friends were over and they talked about their “lady parts”, that didn’t tell me very much about what those “lady parts” actually were.

And then I wondered why those “adult” magazines only had pictures of naked women and not of naked men. I figured that part of it was that it was okay for men to take their shirts off and show their chests, like when they were wearing bathing suits, but it was not okay for women, I guess because women had those breasts. And it wasn’t like breasts were “bad”, because it seemed like older boys and grownup men always really liked them and liked women with nice ones. They’d say those women had “nice figures”. Breasts weren’t “bad”, but they were something else, they were “naughty” or “dirty”, and not “dirty” like they had dirt on them, but like you weren’t supposed to talk about it, even if there weren’t any kids around.

So if grownup men wanted to see those breasts, they had to buy the magazines like Playboy, or get a real woman to take off her clothes. But those magazines also showed women’s naked bottoms too, which I guess men really liked too. But neither men or women were supposed to show their naked bottoms to other people, even at the beach when they went swimming, so bottoms were “dirty” too, so you could only see them in the adult magazines.

But the front part of people’s bodies between their legs, where men had penises and women had something different that I still hadn’t figured out, the “holsters” from the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans joke, I guess were the dirtiest parts of all. So was it that men didn’t want to see that part, or was it that THAT PART was too dirty for even ADULT magazines.

But there was one magazine that was always interesting to look at, that was okay for kids to look at too. It was called “MAD Magazine” and it was a “comedy” magazine, where they did lots of silly and stupid stuff on purpose. It cost thirty cents, a lot more than a comic book, so I only bought it sometimes. The new June “issue” was out and I took it off the shelf and opened it up to look at it. The guy that worked there seemed okay if you looked at magazines like that one for just a little bit. It had lots of pretend comic book stories that were “takeoffs” or “parodies” of real comic books, TV shows, movies, or just regular stuff.

This issue had one called “MAD Visits a Typical Teenage Beach Movie” and another one called “The Lighter Side of Spring”. It had a pretend magazine called “Hair Goo – The Magazine Devoted to Beautiful Hair Styles”, and I read some of that one and it seemed so totally stupid that it didn’t seem funny to me, but I guess it might be funny to older kids, specially girls. It also had a pretend soap-opera called “Passion Place”, instead of that real one called “Peyton Place” that mom watched sometimes on TV. This grownup guy on the first page of the comic said…

Hello! I’m Matt Swine, publisher of the Passion Place newspaper! Here in our quiet New England town, we have all kinds of people… young and old, rich and poor, happy and sad, Republican and Democrat! And they all live here because they have опе thing in common… they’re making out!

And the rest of the picture showed all these people outside around a tree in maybe a park, kissing each other, including Lucy kissing Charlie Brown, though he didn’t look like he liked it.

But my favorite part of the magazine was the “Spy vs. Spy” comics. There was the white spy guy and the black spy guy, and they were always trying to get the other one and maybe even get them killed. Sometimes the white spy would get the black spy and sometimes the black spy would get the white spy. It was neat because neither of them ever said anything, they only did stuff, but you could always figure out what they were doing.

In the first “Spy vs. Spy” one in this issue, the black spy teased the white spy who wanted to get him but he couldn’t figure out how to get across this gorge between them, until he found what looked like a bridge made out of a log with ropes on either side to hold on to while you crossed. But when the white spy tried to cross it, the log was really a giant snake that came alive and was about to eat him.

That one was a little funny but not really super funny, but the second one was better. The black spy was zooming down in his little airplane, but then he saw a building and the ground it’s on upside down ABOVE him. So he thought he was going to crash so he turned his plane to go away from the building and what he THOUGHT was the ground, but then he crashed into the REAL ground. Turned out the white spy had used balloons to float a pretend piece of ground with a pretend building on it up in the air UPSIDE DOWN and it confused the black spy. Sometimes things weren’t what you thought they were!

I looked at the guy who worked there sitting behind the counter. He was looking back at me, so I put the magazine back on the rack and then he smiled just a little bit and looked at something else.

A lot of kids liked spy and secret agent stuff these days. There was that James Bond movie, “Goldfinger”, that I saw, and most of my friends had seen too, and a couple others I hadn’t seen. There was also that TV show “The Man from Uncle”, about these two goodguy secret agent guys, Ilya Kuriakan and Napoleon Solo, which I usually watched. And here in the Blue Front, in the paperback books, they had those James Bond books that dad had talked about. I remembered that dad had wanted to read one to me and David, but mom didn’t think that was a good idea. MAYBE, I thought, I should buy one and read it MYSELF, to see why dad liked it and mom didn’t. They cost sixty cents. That was a lot of my money, and if I got one AND an ice cream sandwich, I might only be able to buy one or two comics.

But this other sci-fi book looked really good. It was called “First Lensman”, and it had this really neat picture on the cover of these two maybe androids or just human guys in these really neat spacesuits at the controls looking out this giant round window of what I guessed was a spaceship. They were out in space and could see other round spaceships, probably giant ones like theirs, shooting ray guns at each other. I turned the book over and the writing on the back cover said…

Virgil Samms has a dream. He wants to establish the Galactic Patrol to protect civilization from the forces of evil, but he needs a reliable and unfakeable symbol to identify its members. He is guided to Arisia, a previously unapproachable planet, where he is greeted by a benevolent and telepathic Arisian who presents him with a “Lens of Civilization”. It gives its wearer the ability to communicate telepathically with any being or animal with a mind, as well as other powers. The Arisians know that Samms is incorruptible, a paragon of bravery and virtue, so they have chosen him to be the first entity to wear the device that can only be made by the Arisians and that can be worn only by the person that it is exclusively attuned to. Samms is charged with locating all “Lens worthy” individuals and directing them to Arisia to have their own Lens bestowed upon them, to build his force for good.

Now THAT sounded really interesting, and it was only FIFTY CENTS. I still wanted to read a James Bond book, there were a whole bunch of different ones I could pick from, but that could wait until next time when I had more money. So I decided to buy the “First Lensman” book, the latest Batman and Flash comics, the Classics Comic of “The Time Machine”, and because I had twelve of dad’s pennies, I still had enough left over for an ice cream sandwich.

I put the three comics, the paperback book and the ice cream sandwich on the glass counter in front of the guy that worked there. On the counter was one box with baseball card packages in it, and another with Bazooka Joe bubble gum. Under the glass were cigars for sale, and behind him were all those shiny packages of cigarettes and tobacco for pipes. Dad smoked a pipe sometimes and I remembered him buying tobacco here a couple times when I came with him. He liked to smoke it sometimes when his friends came over or when he was watching shows at night on TV. It smelled pretty good, but I figured it would taste really bad like coffee and beer tasted, even though those two could smell good too.

The guy behind the counter looked down at the stuff I was buying and then looked at me and said, “A dollar nine.”

I dug into my pocket and then dumped all my coins clinking on the counter. I pushed toward him the three quarters, the one dime, three nickels and nine of the twelve pennies from dad. That left me with three more pennies and I looked at the bubble gum. Then I pushed those last three pennies forward and took three pieces out of the box and put them on top of my other stuff. He pushed the keys on his cash register and then it clanged and the money drawer came out with a whoosh and the sound of clinking coins. His fingers slid each type of coin off the edge of the counter into his other hand before dumping them into the little tray for that coin in the drawer. Then he took a brown paper bag from somewhere down below and gently slid first my comics and then my paperback book into it. He then held it upright and dropped in the three pieces of gum and handed it to me. I took it with one hand and the ice cream sandwich with the other.

I ate the ice cream sandwich as I walked up Arbor back towards home. Having broken my collarbone and not being able to play baseball or do other sports was going to make my summer really different. I was used to going to the park most days, but now if I went, the kids would ask me to play baseball or basketball with them, or ride bicycles, and I would have to say no. Then so they didn’t think I was strange not wanting to play like that, I would have to tell them that I’d broken my collarbone. Maybe better I just shouldn’t go to the park very much and stay home and read, or play my wargames until I was better.

Mike and Stuart said I should come to our Little League team’s games anyway, even though I couldn’t play, and maybe coach first base when our team was batting, so I’d still be part of the team. But I couldn’t ride my bike, and most of the games were too far to walk. I could probably get a ride with our coach, but then I’d have to keep calling him to ask for a ride, and I didn’t like asking grownups for stuff.

None of my school friends liked playing the wargames I liked to play. Mike said he wasn’t into war, and that it was one of the worst things grownups did. He figured that maybe we had to fight World War Two because of Hitler, but now that it was done and in the past we didn’t really need to play it “over and over again”. That made sense, but I still liked playing the games, looking at the maps, figuring out the best places to put each unit, imagining all those army guys, like my dad, moving from one place to another and then going into battle against the other guys.

My old school friend Jake, who was in my class at Bach, had moved to Burns Park around the same time we did. He didn’t go to my school, but that other one, Angell. He liked to play wargames. Also that kid Vincent who lived on our street, he liked to play wargames too. He was a year younger than me and had only been in the third grade, but I played my first Avalon Hill game when I was his age. I would probably be playing with both of them more.

But even with my broken collarbone, it just felt great every morning to wake up and remember that I didn’t have to go to school or think about doing any of that homework stuff. Mom and dad had helped me get through the year, because they liked school way more than I did. I was really careful not to tell them that I really DIDN’T like school, because I knew that they liked it a lot, and that going to school was part of being a good kid, at least to grownups.

Now I was just looking forward to sitting in our big puffy “upholstered” rocking chair in the corner of the living room and reading my comic books and regular books too. That was my favorite place to sit and read in the whole house. I could put my feet on the carpet and rock myself while I read, or I could even sit in it with my legs crossed under me if I wanted, and still rock myself a little by moving the top half of my body back and forth. It felt all soft and cozy like a couch, and it was below me, all close around me and even a little bit above my head behind me, like I was in the giant cockpit chair of my own one-person magical spaceship, the kind of spaceship I imagined Dr. Strange would have, where I could go in my mind to all the places I was reading about.