Of Garage Roofs and Witches

Exams are over!

Memory is strange. I’m trying to remember details from a fifth grade play and already I’m not sure if it was in the fifth grade or sixth. So I have to rationalize a little. We moved to England halfway through the sixth grade so there is less of a chance that I would have taken part in a school play that year, but it’s not impossible. So I am about 89% sure that the play was during my fifth year of elementary school. All I can really say for sure is that there was a lot of nine-square being played that year.

Two-square, four-square, and nine-square were the predominant activities for us outside of the classroom, during recess, where tricks of the real world were learned. Two-square is basically a game where opponents stand in drawn out squares and bounce one of those blood-red elementary school issue bouncy balls in a diminished, net-free game, similar to tennis. Four-square upped the ante by pitting four opponents against each other. The objective was to become king by working your way around the square to become the server. Once you gained this position, you could increase your clout around school by holding the position for a long period of time. To stay king until recess was over was pretty damn good.

The hit sensation of that year though was nine-square. This took the concept further by placing nine opponents on a grid of nine squares and let them have at it. To make king in this game was a joyful event, and, if it happened to me, it took all of the experience that I had learned in eleven years to hold on to the position for a couple of rounds. The guy in the square next to the king square was the one you had to look out for, he was gunning for you. As king, you would send your serve down to the peons at the beginning of the grid and hope that they would battle it out, and screw it up, so you would not have to defend your position. But if the ball came back your way, you may find yourself in a battle to see how softly you could place the ball over the line to force an out. Soft volleys and slams were usually the most effective weapons.

Nine-square was so popular that the two-square and four-square areas often sat empty, while the entire fourth, fifth and sixth grades participated in nine-square. There was always a line—a waiting list—with shouting and breaking in line, and scuffles and admonishments from the principle and taunts; and then you would step up and see how far you got. It was better than kickball, basketball (we were still too short), and dodge ball—where a game could end quickly with some kid’s glasses being knocked off by an early-growth-spurt victim wielding an under-inflated bouncy ball.

After recess the class would return with color in their cheeks and try to settle down. Mistakes and victories would be carried back into the classroom and reported, or distorted, depending on who was doing the talking. The teasing was carried on until our teacher, Mr. Richardt, a funny, hippyish young man who had a beer can pyramid in his living room and whom we all admired, came in and quieted things down. Then it was back to math, or religion, or social studies; and nine square was forgotten, unless you had made king that day, and then, periodically, you could privately bask in that pride.

It was sometime during the nine-square craze of ’78 that the idea of putting on a play was introduced to the class. I believe it was Mrs. Burroughs, the social studies teacher, who put the plan on the table. Most of the class seemed semi-interested, but a couple of the students really took to the idea and began asking questions and trying to develop ideas for topics and so forth. I believe I must have been interested because that night I remember mentioning it at dinner and my family helped me brainstorm topics. If it was up to me, we would do a WWII era action piece culminating with me heroically jumping off a structure as high as our garage roof. I had just learned to do this. I twisted my ankle on the first attempt, but the roof just sat there, taunting me, so when I got better, I mastered the drop and roll technique I had seen in the movies and, to my amazement, it worked. I made this the climax of every WWII scenario I invented from then on. Every game included a need to jump off the garage roof.

The topic I can remember choosing was the crusades. My father had a large book about the subject which contained alluring paintings of knights on the cover and dense, minute, unreadable text inside. The fact that I understood nothing about the crusades did not dissuade me from the topic. It had knights, and swords, and amour; the plot really wasn’t all that important. We could make it up as we went along, like the WWII games.

When the subject of the play came up in class, I was ready to make my case for the crusades, but before I could even formulate my first point, Mary Ann Lofton was already introducing her topic, complete with a script, casting, and possibly even social relevance. This was typical of Mary Ann, she was always prepared. I don’t believe she ever saw a B on an assignment in her life, much less a D given for a homework assignment hastily completed in a Datsun (that’s a car, young uns) pulling out of a gravel driveway. She had her hand up constantly, and led the class by default, but still, I could never picture her jumping off a garage roof.

Her topic was a good one; it was about a true haunting in some puritan town in the 19th century titled the Bell Witch. It was extremely topical because, at that time, the entire country, or at least its younger citizens, was scared shitless by a movie called The Amityville Horror, which is also based on true accounts of a bizarre haunting on Long Island. A dog-eared copy of the paperback based on the movie got passed around and read that year, and when Mary Ann introduced a topic of similar interests, she immediately had the class behind her. My topic, the crusades, never stood a chance.

[Brief note: Because my memory is somewhat shaky at this point about the overall plot of the Bell Witch, I’ve gone online to get a clearer picture. The events took place in Tennessee in 1819, and subsequent years, and involved a ghostly voice who haunted John Bell’s family and others, including future president Andrew Jackson. The story is widely respected as a well documented account of a haunting which was authenticated by many sources. For more, go to:www.bellwitch.org]

After I fell in line with the rest of the class, I found myself cast as Joshua Gardner a suitor of one of the Bell daughters. It was a bit part, but that was okay, because Wendy Debruin, the girl who laughed at my jokes, played the daughter. It would be an easy part, with only a few lines, and some physical comedy, and then I would be free to play nine-square again and not be subjected to too much admonition from the disinterested nine-square all-American types who could have cared less about the play.

Mary Ann was a good director. She started out very patiently, and we worked out our parts and walked through the scenes and generally made progress; and occasionally I would throw in a zinger and Wendy would laugh. It was boring at times though, and often I would sit off-stage and pick at the wood floor or flip through Life Goes to War which I brought to school everyday to display some of the more gruesome photos and paintings. It was a cheap way to get attention, but it worked. My scene was early in the play, but after it was rehearsed I was required to stick around for some reason. I began to get a little resentful. Why did they need me here? I already knew my part. I could vaguely hear the shouts and laughter of the recess session outside. I was missing it.

One day the boys who weren’t involved with the play started talking about a new game. They had taken the game of four-square and added a wall to it. This introduction of a perpendicular element added numerous possibilities. You could bank shots, you could force the ball into the corner and send it in unpredictable directions, the kid with glasses could have them knocked off in new and intriguing ways; it was a revolution in four-square development. And it was catching on fast.

It was just too much for me to resist, I had to play this game. I could hear it being played on the wall outside, behind the stage. When I decided to skip rehearsal and sneak around to the back of the school where the game was evolving, I was welcomed with open arms by my brethren of the bouncy ball. Steve Giljames was in charge here, he was the school athlete, with only one rival, Richard Turner. Richard had a temper, which cost him points at times, but Steve was always cool and was good at every athletic endeavor he tried. Steve seemed to own the position of king in nine-square.

As I learned new rules and techniques of the game, and went a couple of rounds, I got better and the steady progress I made caused me to become hooked very quickly. My gosh, you could zing the ball in strange ways with that corner, and wow did that extra element of banking throw your opponent off, and man did that kid get mad when his glasses flew across the pavement. I wasn’t sure how, but I just might have to forget about the play.

So when suddenly Mary Anne was shouting at me to get in to the auditorium because they were tired of waiting on me—she even used the threat of getting Mrs. Burroughs in on the act—I was lulled out of my dream state and became powerless over the determined daggers being hurled at me from the director’s eleven year old eyes. A shouting match between a couple of the other boys and Mary Ann ensued, and it seemed as if a group of dogs were barking at each other for a moment, but soon I found myself following Mary Ann back into the school, past the chapel and into the auditorium where the rest of the cast was milling around. I could hear the ball bouncing against the wall as soon as I left the parking lot.

So I persevered. On the day of dress rehearsals, Mary Ann had forgiven me, and she welcomed the idea that I suggested about how my character should leave the stage. In the story, Gardner has items hurled at him by the disapproving witch. The plan was to get someone to throw a boot at me from off-stage which would hit me in the head. At this point Gardner has had enough and basically freaks out and runs away, never to come back. I had the idea of having Gardner run all the way through the isles of the auditorium and around the building, screaming all the way. I would circle the building and come back through a door in the back of the building. Mary Ann approved. I only wished there was a garage to jump off of.

On the day of the play, my sisters made special arrangements to leave class to come and see my debut. I don’t remember being nervous, but I suppose I was. When my scene came around I played it well, but I wasn’t expecting to be considered a comic genius. I played the part a little rednecky I think, and by the time the boot hit me in the head the audience, especially the first grade, was howling. I ran around the building, screaming as planned, and all in all I felt that I was a hit. The rush of public approval had me spinning, I could picture myself with that academy award: “I would like to thank my parents, my sister, Wendy Debruin, and all the little people…”

The favorable reviews followed me home. My sisters passed on the reception of the performance to my parents in which I basked until my father took the wind out of me by calling me a ham. I sulked the rest of the night, a prima donna, misunderstood and underappreciated. Then I realized that the play was over! It was back to Nine-square—and the new game, and jumping off the garage roof!