M F Korn, page 5
"Ngrok 'nGrik," Danny Gregor said.
"Yeah. Ognibeany weinie," Donald said.
"Look, I'll be out in a minute, okay? Wait for me," I said, practically demanding it.
"OK," they said in unison, but Danny had to say something or other stupid or nonsensical like, "I know I will, but what are you?"
I went back inside as the guys just hung around the landscaped walkway until they finally sat in the chairs and began clowning.
Half an eternity later, I emerged unscathed from the house.
"What took you so long?"
"Yeah, we thought you snuck out the front to go see Linda Landiston."
"Hyuk, hyuk," I said.
"Har har de har har," Danny said.
Donald tried to grunt like a pig. But of course he couldn't do it. I had taught all of them, it was a process born out of me, one of the many things my father despised. And to the day he dies I knew that Donald Haroldson would never get it, much less his brother Johnny, much less Danny.
"Oh, look, it's a meatsweller!" Danny emphatically cried out.
Johnny chimed in. "What's a meatsweller?"
Danny shot back, "It's a steamroller spelled backwards." He made the sound that we all knew were special effects of a steamroller rolling and a scream slighted and a splat. Then a pitiful ambulance siren coming to the rescue.
Then Johnny said the inevitable: "What happened to this guy?"
"I don't know. I think he got run over by a meatsweller."
"Gee, what's a meatsweller...?" and so on _ad infinitum_. This went on for a while before Donald said, "God, Danny, why don't you run it into the ground?" and made pig grunt with his mouth to indicate he was mockingly joking.
We finally decided to walk a few years of lawns down, slowly down the sidewalk, lapsing into inanity as we were wont to do, until we wrapped around the half-block into sublime happiness. We goofed around like blithering idiots until the moon came up and Linda Landiston came out in her tank top. Linda was an early bloomer. She was blue-eyed, blond-haired, and growing out in wonderful places.
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For some reason, which we never noticed, she was always doing athletic things like springing around, bounding, doing jumping jacks, and letting us surreptitiously peer down her tank top because she had cleavage.
"Hey Linda," Johnny said. I had had a crush on her since the beginning of time. But her house, the Landistons', was right next door to Johnny and Donald Haroldson. But she just thought of them as brother/sister, and they went to school together. Danny Gregor, spoilt since he was born because his father was an optometrist, went to affluent Episcopal school. I went to St.
Thomas More run by priests and nuns. I had once been a dutiful altar boy, good compared to other altar boys at the time that used to chug the white wine out of Monsignor's chalice when he wasn't looking.
But our eyes diverted to Linda and her shapely youthful sexy body that she wielded like an atomic weapon. She did some jumping jacks. She did some hand springs and cartwheels in the evening moist cool grass, freshly mowed like every lawn in the neighborhood. The streetlights were on and all was well here in Sherwood Forest.
As we drank in her voluptuous curves in her short shorts and tank top, pirouetting on her front lawn, it was getting late. The wattage of the streetlights blazed against the constellations a bit further up. Donald Haroldson had gone home to listen to Janis Joplin records. Danny had gone home because his mother forbade him out too late. Johnny wasn't interested too much in Linda's wondrous body, at least not as much as I was. The grass swelled up in the loins of the manicured lawn about our feet. Dogs and cats lay about the perimeters of this bounded heaven.
"Did you and Danny Gregor really do all those things he said y'all did when y'all were growing up?" Linda asked me. I was taken aback by this sudden intrusion into my scalding looks at her legs all tanned and hips and flat stomach midriff. I did not feel like going into an explanation of my heroic childhood up to this point in the Pre-Cambrian period here in Sherwood Forest.
She, my little crush, was speaking of the dawn of civilization.
When only Danny and I roamed and trod upon this earth, this stomping of the terra. When the neighborhood was not that at all, but ferns and prehistoric beasts and new eras unknown.
I managed sheepishly a "Yes."
Linda laughed. "Like what?" she asked me. I didn't want this. I wanted her to make my body twinge by doing another cartwheel. I wanted to graze her face with my mouth. Johnny was goofing around like a terror of comedic rites.
"Running around with towels like they were Superman or somethin'," he said.
"They had a treehouse right where the Sproats' house is now."
"Really?" Linda yawned wide. "What happened to it?"
I had to clear up the facts. "No, it was a series of trails going from a central chamber to outer regions." It sounded so sinister the way I was describing it, making it sound better than it was.
"Oh," she said.
"We had Kern's Korner and Gregor Square," I said, indelibly these remembrances were with me.
"This was way before Johnny or I moved here?" she asked.
"Yeah. Mostly these were all vacant lots."
It was impossible to describe the way things were as seen through my eyes back then. All we were interested in these days was playing golf at Fairwood Country Club and going to the movies. We didn't care anymore about the feel and smell of plywood. We were growing up. The taste of a ten penny nail in my mouth and driving in that nail without bending it out of commission.
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*Chapter Three*
I don't remember the exact moment in the time line of the universe when the Kern family moved into Sherwood Forest. Most other boys a lot swifter and agile than I judged themselves by when they learned how to throw a football or started Little League baseball. I created a wall of DC and Marvel comic books Page 21
around me and my friends. EE Doc Smith Space Opera and X-men were our Bibles.
Doc Savage's headquarters was a haven in my mind that I could create out of my bedroom.
I remember first meeting Danny. He came over with his mother to meet me and my mother. He was wearing full regalia of football gear as if a miniature cossack. How on earth could he slide down the slide with shoulder pads on, I had wondered. But slowly we wove mysteries and went stalking with Casper the Friendly Ghost and compared Saturday morning lineups. We both knew inside our very sturdy souls that this fall season lineup Hanna Barbera was dominating the entire lineup. The Super Six, Dick Dastardly and Chumley, Frankenstein, Jr., and Top Cat were being fobbed off on us. The horror story of this became even worse when the Halls of the Justice League became a haven for the "Super Friends." They had betrayed us all. Belittled us with these unauthentic caricatures, a far cry below the standards of the "Aquaman/Superman Hour." At least there was Johnny Quest and Space Ghost wasn't too bad either. Tom Slick and George of the Jungle came on right before _Soul Train_ and though it was almost noon by then and football games were coming into the fray, it extended that paradise of television diet that we subsisted on.
The microcosm of a child-man Tarzan's extrapolated universe was that of teething on television and yearning for minibikes. I mean, we actually tried to build a rocket ship that really worked. Never mind the journals of Robert Goddard or the Gemini program, or mapping the moon's surface; we could build a working model with plywood and paraphernalia.
Danny came up with the idea of the liquid fuel tanks: blow up party balloons, the long slim ones, and coat them with paper mache. When the paper mache dried, _voila_! I cut out a piece of plywood to be the instrument panel.
I think we had drawn our "blueprints" and partially did other pieces like the triangular wings. But after that, the rocket plans just fizzled. But later, we made a much smaller version of a rocket which we called the X-1, which had as its means of propulsion a few clusters of bottle rockets. Needless to say, we launched it from the top of a motorcycle ramp in Davey Smithson's back yard, which is not where Jules Verne predicted a rocket port site would be at all.
It fizzled too.
"Well, back to the drawing board," was something we mentioned that fateful day.
It was Danny who came up with our actual super hero identities. "You'll be Mercury, and I'll be Jupiter."
"Wasn't Mercury the swifter one?" That's when he came up with the cardboard wings glued to our tennis shoes. Winged Mercury, like the FTD
Florist commercial. He glued them on, and although we didn't wear capes anymore, we had utility belts made of those cereal variety packs attacked to a regular belt. Inside were weapons, such as folded paper airplanes as crude origami, with messages written on the paper of each plane like, "Hey, do you want a knuckle sandwich?"
Thus the paper airplanes could be tossed at the villains and be extremely useful in crimefighting. Danny and I would walk into the air conditioned K&B drugstore to buy comics and our winged feet would elicit remarks of some kind. Doubtless the citizens felt safer among our presence.
Unfortunately, Danny's father meant well, but he ruined Danny forever by buying a metal-framed treehouse kit. To make matters worse, he put it together while Danny sat idly by. Where is justice? Who is the loser by this tragedy? I built a crooked, unplumbed mess on a dying elm tree in the middle of the back yard. It truly was a thing of beauty. A few beams of two-by-fours going this way and that, with a slapped on piece of plywood here and there to sit upon to survey the domain. My luncheon meat sandwiches were devoured in that very place. A perch for vigilant wholesome kids. Take Davey Smithson's treefort, for example. Endless packs of cigarettes and nudie books were stashed in his insidious den of iniquity. We would have none of that surliness. No sirree. We were fighting for truth, justice and the American way, just like Superman the way he was drawn by DC Comics before he became Page 22
invulnerable to Kryptonite. Mercury and Jupiter had no particular vices per se, with the exception of watching too much Saturday morning television and being really partial to Gigantor. We were on the cusp of the tail end of the sixties. It was a good time to be a kid. Of course, almost anytime is a good time to be a kid if you're as lucky as we were.
The phosphor images of test patterns were followed by such illuminating programs on early Saturday (or Sunday) morning as _Across the Fence_ and _The Louisiana Agriculture and Farm Report_ before the likes of Looney Tunes or the rugged pouty face of Popeye would show up in the remake of Arabian Nights and WWII propaganda cartoons with caricatured jap-teethed soldiers getting clobbered when Popeye got his junkie strength fix of raw canned spinach.
Hundreds, thousands of kids all across America were subsisting on a proper diet of cartoons in black-and-white and color both. Our minds reeled with action figures and GI Joe submarine and frogman equipment. I had two GI Joe equipment army chests filled with every sort of stiletto, army rifle, pistol. How many times did I roam Sears and Wilson's department store, looking for every accessory for our fighting man? My two sisters had Barbie and Ken and Mystery Date games. My forte was more of a Stratego, Risk arrangement.
Monopoly was for everyone and crossed all lines. How could one resist not popping the dice scrambler bubble one more time just for that extra "pop"?
Geographies of dollhouses and little trolls and tie-died t-shirts and swinger cameras enfolded our quarters.
Our biggest superheroic adventure besides the ones we lived through vicariously through Marvel and DC comic books, was attacking a villain named Johnny Love. Johnny Love was about twenty years old and at least two hundred pounds. He was just the friendly son of a next door neighbor who tripped through his heritage of Lovin' Spoonful and Strawberry Alarm Clock. We came into his villainous past right at the skewed corner of Danny's father's house.
He was caught unawares and we grappled with this demonic righteous nemesis until we couldn't take it anymore, or when he got a pit peeved and we ran away.
Collections of comic books are treasure troves. I had everything from Little Lulu to Baby Huey to serious literature like Classics Illustrated and X-men. The folded and rumpled remained for quite some time. Dogeared Doc Savage and torn Conan the Barbarian paperbacks were in the realm. Danny and Johhny Haroldson and I all subsisted on a diet of these, along with Doc Smith's Lensman series. As hearty and brilliant as we were rocket scientists, we were also men of letters. We tried to submit a story to _Analog_. The story went as follows: a brilliant race of aliens were hunting a lesser known species across galaxies for sheer pleasure. I don't remember how it came out, but we never sent it out. Needless to say, Ben Bova, the editor of _Analog_, didn't seem to miss it any.
Daredevil, Hulk, Silver Surfer were all our myths and truths. We enacted our baser instincts of noble savagery on campouts and tentouts. Many a doorbell was rung on the basis of sheer deviltry. Lightpoles were clanged with obtrusive sticks until porch lights came on suddenly. And we went our merry way into the long eternal night. We read reams of _Mad Magazines_ by flashlight. Renditions of prank phone calls erupted along invisible lines through the ether. _Cracked Magazines_ were not my style, really, but give me Don Martin's cartoons and Mort Drucker and the world was a bit better.
Girls were a preponderance of our mighty thinking in those times.
Aroused by cuteness I formed the most intense crushes upon the most cherubic fawns of femalia that one could imagine. The inked sirens, nymphs, and maidens were also ones to be partial to. Bodacious, voluptuous, smooth-thighed amazon creatures oozing sweetness across a bordered ink-dotted page or two were the acumen of sexuality for a wholesome group of boys.
Costumed beauties graced comic covers with buxom essence. That was literally our universe. Boyhood was good in those early years. Kids still wanted BB guns, go carts, but add to that now, Beatles albums for the rebellious. Lawn darts and Frisbees for the gamers. Lego blocks for the Page 23
plodders. Erector sets for the engineers. Footballs for the jocks. Comic books for the dreamers. Summer days of languid heat with the hurlings of basketballs and playground weeds sprouting all over second base in brutal twin suns of Krypton. Pet dogs that we could imagine were, in lieu of chasing cars, could slightly resemble Superdog, only if we could attach that cape.
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*Chapter Four*
But everything changed when we found the alien dog/horse in the drainage ditch. Jones Creek where we hunted for golf balls. It was a large sized dog-shaped creature. Well, not that big, actually, about the size of a poodle. It was weird and all scaly like a goldfish. And really slimy. But it was injured, bleeding bluish green fluid. It was not whimpering strangely enough. It stood proudly, almost, in the rushes of weeds and dragonflies and bugs. The creek sluggish and milky green with stench. Us in our shorts and by the Sherwood Forest Country Club first hole which was a real haven for golf balls, one had to carry something in a five or six, perhaps seven iron for beating down the brazen high weeds. One had to have a keen eye for spotting the white sliced-up beauties. One could often find Top Flite, Titleist, Wilson, and every one imaginable, even Exxon and other personalized golfballs.
Even ones that were swiped by the old codgers from the driving range somewhere.
Donald, Johnny, Danny and I were all in the weeds, carrying all the golfballs we could to sell for five cents apiece or ten or fifteen to some guy down the street. To be hawked to the old gentlemen by some enterprising boy who was more that than us.
We were in the woods minding our own business before we saw the animal that changed our lives. On our minds were Incredible Edibles, getting to first and second base. And of course, Space Ghost, _Outer Limits_, the Herculoids and stripping the net in basketball games.
Danny was saying his meatsweller routine. Donald was rhapsodizing about Ish Kabibble or some other vaudeville figure, or was it his Mae West routine?
And Johnny was mourning the loss of LSU football games to Alabama, Georgia, and whomever trod through this state. I was thinking about something beyond the stars. About vistas of unplumbed galactic space and star drives and ion generators and interstellar leaps into voids.
All of a sudden I spotted something that had the lustre of a large --
check that -- huge goldfish. Except it was crouched like a sitting lamb on folded legs. One appeared wounded by something. I was unable to speak.
Literally transfixed by the cosmic forces that I saw in the gleaming red aspect of its two doglike eyes. Its mouth was almost that of a rictus, a grimace. Like when dogs pant, but then make a terrible smile as in my own double-take unbelief to myself, and then after my jaw dropped with unfamiliarity to this oddity, I saw to my left that the others suddenly came right behind me. The obelisked sun was shanked out up to one side of the sky.
They decried to the thing in the rushes, each and every one of them. They gasped. Donald hooted with a curious afterword. Danny gave a "naaaa..." Johnny gave an expletive -- "$&%@*." I swallowed and came closer to examine the creature, so unfortunate its state. It wasn't dying, I observed.
It took an infinity before anyone of us managed to come to a state where we could collectively converse and discuss. We weren't anything but in awe mixed with stunnedness.
The golden sparkling of the scaled body gave root further down to sort of cloven hooves like it was some sort of resemblance to one of those miniature horses.
"What is that thing?" was remarked by someone, I don't remember who exactly. We discussed it for a good while as it sat there with its legs folded under itself.
"What are we gonna do?"
"I dunnoh."
"What will our fathers say?"
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"Who gives a shit?"
"Can we take it somewhere?"
"I dunnoh."
"Will you take it and keep it?"
"No, you!"
"I can't take it."
"Leave it here?"
"I dunnoh."
"Whatdoyathink?"
"I dunnoh."
