The Perfect Playmate

 

CHAPTER FOUR

The Perfect Playmate

A few days ago I was browsing through a lawn and garden shop when I ran across an old friend - nitric ammonium sulphate - or so I thought at first. On closer inspection, it turned out to be his near relative, nitrous ammonium sulphate, an ingredient in a mildew treatment product. In a roundabout way, he introduced me to a real-life friend, Eugene Fulwider. I had just turned nine, it was the beginning of the school year, and there were many new faces in my classroom. The teacher had allowed us a half hour of free time to do what we liked and, as I was a bit shy about socializing, I sat at my desk and indulged my enthusiasm for chemistry by drawing a test tube on a sheet of tablet paper. I was trying to decide what color to make the liquid in the test tube, when a boy's voice spoke behind me. "What is that, nitric ammonium sulphate?" I looked up and saw a rather broad-faced, dark-haired boy of about average size, with a rather serious, almost scholarly appearance - possibly because of the glasses that he wore.

In fact, nitric ammonium sulphate was a reagent in my little Gilbert chemistry set, but I was surprised that another child my age was familiar with chemical names. I began to color my test tube liquid red, and answered his question, "No, it is phenolphthalein solution".

That was the beginning of a brief conversation about chemistry experiments, and the beginning of a long friendship. It turned out that he lived on Eighth Street, right at the end of the block below ours - in the same block that the Cooke family lived. I had never met him before because his family had only recently moved into the neighborhood. We got together a couple of times after school and conducted some experiments in the laboratory that I had set up in one corner of my bedroom.

But then I introduced him to Billy, and that ended our scientific get-togethers. His imagination equaled Billy's and mine, and the three of us became a kind of dynamic trio, playing through the gamut of fantasy games. He requested that we call him by his nickname, "Foo". Billy would come and call me to come out to play; then the two of us would go call Foo, or we would go through the same procedure in the reverse order.

Foo appeared to be grateful to have someone to play with, but I'm not sure why. It may have been that he was just eager to make friends in a new neighborhood; or it may have been that he was a bit shy because of having to wear glasses. In those days, it was unusual for a child to wear glasses, because most children didn't have their eyes tested or examined. I think, too, that in his old neighborhood there had not been many children to play with.

In any case he was a congenial playmate, and agreeable to a fault. Billy and I might disagree about what we wanted to "play like" but, once we had decided, Foo was always willing to go along with the decision. He would be the Indian in a game of Cowboys-and-Indians, the Nazi in a game of War, or the robber in “cops-and-robbers” far more often than was his fair share. He always applied a lot of imagination and considerable acting skill in playing these roles.

The silk mill had built a dormitory on Ninth Street at the end of the streetcar line, just outside the company gates. It had housed many of the single women that had come to Roanoke to seek employment at the rayon factory. But it outlived its usefulness, as boarding houses like my grandmother's took over its function; and by the time I was three or four years old, it had been razed, with only one little caretaker building left. We ignored the No Trespassing sign, and got yelled at by the caretaker whenever he caught us. We learned to stay out of earshot of his little building, and then he pretty much left us alone. The lot stretched out behind the former building for a good half-mile, and proved to be a near-perfect play area. The half that lay adjacent to the railroad track was wooded, and the other half was open rolling field; except near the rear where it was also overgrown. Also, near the end of the lot, construction trucks had removed tons of dirt from the hillside, leaving a sheer cliff face, whose edge was a couple of hundred yards long. I doubt that a movie studio could have constructed a better playground. We would tie a rope around a tree at the top of the cliff and lower ourselves down; not as mountain climbers descending, but as commandos conducting a daring raid.

One evening Billy and I approached the wooded area cautiously, trying not to trip over the matted net of honeysuckle vines that covered the ground, and peering into the deepening gloom under the trees for any sign of movement that might betray the presence of Nazis. Suddenly we heard a yell, "Schweinhund!", and, no more than fifteen feet in front of us, Foo rose up out of the honeysuckle vines and mowed us down with his Luger. The next time that we stalked him near the woods we kept our eyes glued to the ground to make sure that we didn't get caught by that trick again. Then, to our amazement and horror, the juniper bush right in front of us erupted with machine gun fire - and we were destroyed again. Foo must have scratched his arms terribly climbing into the middle of that juniper, but evidently he felt that it was worth it, to trick us so effectively.

One day we had a different type of experience in that dormitory lot. We were playing near the cliff when one of the older boys in the neighborhood came along flaunting a pack of cigarettes. At the time I was about twelve years old, Foo a few months older, and Billy a few months younger. It was time for us to learn to smoke. I should point out that there was no doubt in our minds that smoking was equivalent to sophistication, for the simple reason that every movie hero and heroine smoked. We each lit up, and I was having a great time until the older boy said, "You're just puffing. Why don't you inhale?"

So I inhaled - and that was my undoing. The ache in my chest was so disagreeable that I coughed desperately to get the smoke out and the air in. The older boy laughed. "Just take it easy," he said, demonstrating with a few smooth draws on his cigarette. I thought about it a few minutes - weighing the ridicule I would incur if I didn't smoke against the physical torture if I did - decided it just wasn't worth it, and quietly snuffed out the cigarette - my first and last.

Foo's house was at the corner of Eighth Street and Buena Vista Avenue. On the other side of the avenue, the hill dropped off steeply toward the railroad track at the bottom. The slope was too great for houses to be built there, and the steep hill was overgrown with wild cherry and stinkweed trees and other scrub brush. It was a great place to play, even though we were constantly slipping and sliding on the steep embankment. In a few places heavy vines had grown into the tree branches where they had established a firm hold. We severed them near the ground so that we could swing on them, pushing off and arcing far out above the sloping ground. We would play "Tarzan" there for many hours, until our arms and elbows were scraped and scratched from falling on the steep slippery hill.

Once, when we were lobbing rock "hand grenades" at the Nazis entrenched on the other side of the railroad track, two men came along and scared the wits out of us by identifying themselves as railroad detectives and accusing us of throwing rocks at the ceramic insulators on the telephone poles. "That," they explained, "is a federal crime." They took our names and addresses, ordered us to go home - and we never heard from them again.

Foo had an entertaining sense of humor, which probably derived from seeing Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies. He didn't tell jokes, but he made up funny little skits in which he played all the parts. One of these scenes depicted a German soldier who, in his enthusiasm for planting land mines, gets careless and blows up his own company. In another one he played a Nazi trooper who, upon being issued orders by his commander, automatically performs a snappy "Heil Hitler" straight arm salute, but is standing too close to the commander and punches him in the eye with the salute.

I don't recall ever having had an argument with Foo - only good times and lots of fun. When I stood in that lawn and garden shop, holding the can of mildew treatment containing nitrous ammonium sulphate and remembering Foo, I thought of my childhood friends, my own children, and all the other children I had known, and wondered if any one of them had been as fortunate as I was - to have found a perfect playmate.

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