The secret side of me

 

When I was a youngster, I was a straight-A student, the joy of every teacher in my school and the pride of my mother and grandmother. For a while I even sang in the church choir, I had a full-time after-school job and helped my fellow students with their homework.

     Sounds like a real saint, right?

     For a long time, even I had begun to believe that I was a model child, the one boy in the neighborhood that parents pointed to when their children misbehaved.

     But, alas, there was another side of me that had lain long buried. It was exhumed at of all places, a funeral.

     In the part of the country where I grew up, there is a tradition of holding a feast after the funeral when neighbors and friends bring food for the grieving family. Several years ago, when I attended the funeral of one of my younger brothers who died from a long battle with cancer, at the after-service dinner, I sat with an old classmate and two older cousins of mine who knew me from childhood.

     The conversation got around to what kind of children we had been and one of my cousins mentioned what an angel I had been. My classmate laughed and pointed out that during high school I had been the ringleader for a number of acts of mischief and that when they came to light the participants, who were always following me in my pranks, were punished, but I never seemed to be caught and no one ever told on me. Needless to say, I vaguely remembered it, though perhaps not in the detail he did. I had to admit, though, that he was right. I was always doing things that today would probably be called vandalism, like the time a friend and I rewired the school bells to ring late for the start of class and early for the end by one minute per class. It had all the teachers checking their watches all day long and took a technician almost a full day to correct. I did it because I was curious about how the system worked and wanted to test it. My friend confessed, did not mention me, and took the detention.

     Another time, I took some of my mother’s good cotton sheets and constructed a glider based on a photo I had seen in an encyclopedia of one that Michelangelo built. I tested it off the roof of our house. Actually glided nearly twenty feet before crashing into a neighbor’s hedge. Needless to say that sheet was ruined. My mother, so happy that I wasn’t seriously hurt, looked sad, but did not punish me for it.

     I fancied myself a kind of junior scientist when I was a kid and was always experimenting with things—my mother’s sheets were not the only things I ruined. I built a phonograph out of cardboard, watch springs and sewing needles and tested it on her 78 rpm records. It worked but ruined four of her favorite records. Again, she forgave me. The exception to her forgiveness was the day she found the snake I was keeping in a shoebox  under my bed. My mother hated snakes with a passion. I did get a bit of a thrashing for that, mostly because when she tipped over the shoebox and the snake crawled out, she almost had a heart attack.

     I got up to so many pranks before I graduated from high school a few months before my seventeenth birthday, one of our neighbors told my mother she seriously doubted that I would make it to eighteen. I think everyone in town thought one of my pranks would kill me.

     When I surprised them by celebrating my eighteenth birthday in the army, I was told that they had just revised their estimate upwards. When they found out that I had volunteered for paratrooper training when I was twenty, they bet I wouldn’t make twenty-one. Fooled them yet again and volunteered for Special Forces when I was twenty-three. That might have been the year they stopped predicting my demise, but whenever I went back to my East Texas hometown, people still talked about how amazed they were that I could do the things I did, including serving twice in a war zone as a soldier and once as a diplomat, and come out of it relatively unscathed. The old folks said it was because I was ‘blessed.’ My contemporaries just shook their heads. I put it down to dumb luck.

     I have finally come to terms with my secret side. On the one hand, it was kind of nice having people thinking that I was a ‘goody two-shoes,’ but I have to confess, I get a kick out of them thinking that I was a really clever con man who could talk his way out of anything.