Stories
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I inched myself on my back in the dry mud, until I found that one perfect big red ripe tomato and pinched it - and turned around and leg pushed in the hot one o'clock sun, myself back out of there. Why did I do it ? I don't remember eating the tomato.
And now I can't remember stealing another thing until sophomore year high-school perhaps, the inboard motor boat caper on ice skates. It was an abandoned house fully furnished on the lake and we had broken into it and made it our club house that summer. And in the boat house was an inboard teak run-about with perhaps a V8 Chrysler engine suspended above the winter's ice. On skates across the cold night's winter dark, I slid under the door, and with a flash-light I removed chrome and brass furnishings, and the wind-shield glass and brass frame. Why ? I took it home stashed it somewhere and never looked at it again. Was I in imitation of a cat burglar from TV - jewels on ice ?
Of course I was not for wanting things. My mother bought me everything my faddish little head desired, a fibre glass bow with arrows and bales of hay to shoot at. A BB gun. A shiny brass trumpet. She bought optimum quality for me even as I lost interest in a couple of weeks.
The next thing - I didn't do it, and it wasn't my idea to steal the beer from the grocery owner's garage. I only drove the car and drank the beer at the party in the church basement, probably junior year high-school.
And I suppose in that period, beginning junior-high, we would sometimes drive to Wisconsin, sometimes to a mud-track raceway, bowling in the winter or in the summer Lake Geneva, a summer resort for rich people from Chicago.
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