Shaking the dust

by David Benjamin

“… I don’t have good news. [The Artistic Committee] were interested in participating but the language was of great concern. ACT is very firm about not using swear words or using the Lord’s name in vain. Also our audiences frown upon any ‘f’ words so we really keep the dialog clean …”

— Sharon Larkin

 

PARIS — The touch I really like about the above rejection note is that Sharon—who’s a nice lady—excised the superfluous “ue” from the word “dialog.” 

A while back, I had suggested to Sharon that her local theater company read, in dramatic fashion, one or two passages from my novel, Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love. I had already scheduled a book talk in the town—Tomah, Wisconsin—where I lived for my first thirteen years. Like its predecessor, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, Fat Vinny takes place in Tomah on the cusp of the 1960s. 

Sharon’s was not my only rejection. I’d invited Koscal, my boyhood sidekick, to emcee the event, which took place last month at Murray’s on Main, a congenial new pub on Superior Avenue. A few weeks before the book talk, Koscal called to say he couldn’t, in good conscience, be my host. His explanation, although a little vague, echoed Sharon’s theme—that certain aspects of Fat Vinny are either linguistically or religiously objectionable to Tomah folks. I told Koscal that I respect his principles (or maybe those of his wife, who apparently disapproves of me, although she and I, alas, have never met) and that I’m still his friend.

Are we still friends? Hard to say. Koscal skipped my “big” event at Murray’s. A mere handful showed up, a hint that my celebrity in my old hometown has faded. On a positive note, Jim—the Tomah Museum director—sold a bunch of my books and came away pleased. Also, I also met Wilmer Roh, who said The Last Kid Picked had changed his life. And I got to hang out with my cousins Les and Dolly. 

Although spurned by the local Thespians and booted by my sidekick, I came away bemused, with a sense that the town had, after all, figured me out and set me straight. Thomas Wolfe wrote that “you can’t go home again.” But was Tomah ever home to me? More fitting, perhaps, is George Bailey’s wistful threat: “I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world.”

I’d grown up in Tomah, tramped every dusty inch of it in worn-out Keds and torn dungarees. I had explored it, biked it, loved it and resisted departing when Mom dragged me, my sister Peg and brother Bill off to Madison. 

But I never belonged. And unlike George Bailey, I’ve seen the world.

One of the first memories of my school days was fear. From kindergarten on, there were bigger boys. They were mean and threatening. I walked home some days looking over my shoulder and wondering, why me? What had I done?

In second grade, Mom switched me to the Catholic school but, whatever was my stigma, it followed me to St. Mary’s. Small towns peg kids before they know they’ve been pegged. The peg goes deep and can’t be dug out. But I tried. I played every game. I laughed off insults. I befriended fellow outcasts like Koscal and Fat Vinny. I learned a wariness among my peers, but I was stubborn. I kept trying. I wrote stories and read them aloud to my classmates. I entertained.

Sixty-odd year later, here I was at Murray’s, still with my stories, still the entertainer. But Tomah—still—wasn’t amused. Even Koscal stayed away.

I was reminded that I’d spent my childhood lingering on the fringe, but discovering that the fringe was fertile territory. It contained the Tomah Public Library, where I became a veritable pest. The Erwin Theater—where few kids went solo, but I did—made me a precocious moviegoer. Once, there was a one-night showing of a film called Mein Kampf, about the industrial slaughter of six million Jews by the Third Reich.  I barely knew what a Jew was. Half the adult males in Tomah had fought the Third Reich but no one had ever mentioned the Holocaust. 

But I knew. I was the only ten-year-old in town who knew. And I was the only eleven-year-old with a subscription—in the mail, paid for by my own money— to Mad magazine. When you’re lingering on the fringe, you cultivate irony. 

It’s ironic, of course, that I got rejected by a Tomah artistic committee for being profane. Growing up, I swam in profanity. Before I was twelve, I had frequented the town’s best taverns, where my Dad tended bar, where every overheard conversations bristled with “swear words” and “the Lord’s name.” My parents swore. My elders cursed. My classmates, too. Unless Tomah has suddenly gone Mormon, I suspect that the Area Community Theater is the only joint in town where no one says “Oh, shit!” after spilling hot coffee on their lap and where the guy that left you for a twenty-year-old floozie is not acclaimed a son of a bitch

When you linger on the fringe in a town without pity (thank you, Gene Pitney!), you read. When I wasn’t shlepping a pile of books home from the Library, I absorbed my grandfather’s weekly Saturday Evening Post, read his union tabloid and pored through news in the Tomah Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel. I found a cache of Big Little Books at my other grandpa’s house and devoured them all. I was addicted to comic books and had my monthly dose of Mad. Reading was solitary, reading was safe. But it alienated me from other kids, from Tomah. 

I didn’t know how alien I had become until, in Madison, I got on the bus and rode to the Franklin School. My baptism to the big city was a husky, brazen girl named Marilyn in the back of the bus who led a chorus of other girls in raucous renditions of songs by the Shirelles and Little Eva. Franklin School was on the South Side—an actual melting pot, rich and poor, black and white, Polish, Italian, Latin, German, Catholic, Protestant. There were Jews! 

Not one other kid there knew me, not yet. I hadn’t been pegged, except by the school administration, who knew I was from Tomah, so—they assumed—I was probably “behind.” But I wasn’t, thanks to the Library and Alfred E Newman. The faculty figured it out, and fixed it. In Tomah, I was the last kid picked. In Madison, I got picked according to my performance. One fine day, on a grassy field at the end of Waunona Way, I was the first kid picked.

Escaping Tomah opened possibilities. But a smalltown kid from a single-parent family still has a price to pay for roots that were planted in rural ignorance and poverty. You bumble through every passage in life without the head start bestowed on more affluent, urbified friends and acquaintances, on kids whose parents know whom to know. You cope, pretty much on your own, with privations inconceivable to most civic leaders, corporate executives, editors, second- or third- generation college graduates and the whole Republican Party. 

Even worse—rather than the career in insurance sales that Mom envisioned for me—I became a writer, a choice suggestive of sheer stupidity. I plunged into a vocation fraught with humiliation that requires me to prove oneself at every turn regardless of age—or because of age—and despite past accomplishment. A writer’s resumé is a sort of millstone, Every morning, you get up starting at zero.

And you don’t complain—which would be bad form. I’m not complaining now. Honest! All along, I’ve just kept trying writing, performing, entertaining, careful to keep hidden the chip that Tomah put on my shoulder before I had grown a discernible shoulder.

So, last month, back to Tomah—forewarned by Koscal and Sharon’s Artistic Committee that maybe I hadn’t oughta try coming home again. The feeling was familiar. But I stuck with the program as I had done at St. Mary’s, facing the other kids, focusing on showmanship and slipping a dash of irony between the lines. 

Afterward, I drove back down I-90 a little nostalgic for the rich lessons I had drawn from my thirteen hardbitten hometown years. As usual in Tomah, I learned more than I was supposed to.