Night Music

20x24 oil

When I was ten years old my step-father passed away and my mom had to get a job. But how could she do that with four kids at home? She needed help.

Amazingly, she found it.

So now there were six of us: me, my three younger sisters, my single-parent mom, and a sixteen-year-old nanny-person named Lynn.

Lynn was from Texas, and had somehow magically come to live with us. Mom needed someone to corral her constantly wandering kids while she was out working to support us. We were definitely too wild to be left home alone.

I never really knew Lynn’s story. How and why she came to the islands and ended up at our house is still a mystery.

But there she was – blond, cynical, and squinty-eyed. Not only that, she stole my bedroom.

Mom kicked me out of the house to go live in the garage, where an over-sized storage room had been transformed into a kind of bug-infested homeless-shelter for boys who got kicked out of their house.

And it was awesome!

It was like having my own apartment.

Anyway … when Lynn moved in, she brought something totally cool into our house — music — rock and roll!

Her major heartthrob was this guy named Elvis Presley. He had a big hit song called “Hound Dog,” and Lynn had the album. She played it over and over and over and over. And when Mom came home from work Lynn would play it again, and she and my mother would sing along so loud our neighbor once came over to ask if everything was all right.

Then one night Elvis came on TV, and we all saw him for the first time. Even before he came out from behind the curtains, the audience was going nuts. I mean, the guy had power! He had this huge acoustic guitar strapped over his shoulder, and when he sang he did this jaw-dropping wiggle-waggle kind of thing with his legs that almost made Lynn faint. Whoa Nelly, was he something!

I had a beat-up old ukulele in my closet, and one night I brought it out to the living room where the record player was. “Play Hound Dog,” I said.

Lynn, of course, jumped to it.

And I went to work on my uke, faking it along with Elvis, singing as loud as I could. “YOU AIN’T A NOTHIN’ BUT A HOUND DOG, CRACKIN’ ALL THE TIME,” and boy did I do it up. I made my legs wiggle and waggle like wet spaghetti. “YOU AIN’T A NOTHIN’ BUT A HOUND DOG, CRACKIN’ ALL THE TIME.” I knew Elvis was singing “cryin’ all the time,” but I liked “crackin’ all the time” better.

Lynn thought it was funny.

The first time.

After the third time I said crackin’, she started squinting at me, like sending mental telepathy -- “Do you want to die?”

“YOU AIN’T A NOTHIN’ BUT A HOUND DOG, CRACKIN’ ALL THE TIME.”

From then on whenever Mom had any of her friends over she’d make me go get my ukulele and come do Hound Dog in the living room. And I loved singing and making spaghetti legs, because it would make everyone crack up, and the more they laughed the more I poured it on. The amount of attention I got was dizzying.

Except from Lynn, that is, who had by then mastered her If-you-say-crackin-one-more-time-I’m-going-to-kill-you squint.

But to Mom and her friends, I was pure entertainment.

What was so good about this hound dog stuff wasn’t so much that I was finally getting some attention in a house full of girls. No, the good part was that doing my Hound Dog routine drove Lynn bonkers.

“You’re an idiot!” she once stammered when I’d spontaneously broken into song for no apparent reason. “You have an idiot face and an idiot brain. How you ever got born is a world-wide mystery. It’s like somebody built you out of rusty old spare idiot-parts and sent you here in a big fat old idiot box!”

I paused and looked at her, thinking, wow, that was pretty good.

Then I said … “YOU AIN’T A NOTHING BUT A HOUND DOG, CRACKIN’ ALL THE TIME,” and boy did that make her eyeballs twirl.

Mom tried to calm us down but gave up and left the room. Of course when Mom left, so did I, because with Mom gone, Lynn could do her favorite torture, which was to pull my ears out and let them slap back like rubber bands. Man, that hurt!

Then there was this one afternoon when Lynn’s boyfriend was over while mom was at work. He was this huge scary looking guy who had a homemade tattoo on his neck. In those days nobody had a tattoo on their neck, especially a homemade one.

I don’t remember his name, but he looked like a murderer.

So, Lynn and the murderer were sitting on the living room couch. His arm was around her shoulders and they were sitting very close. Mom would probably not have been too good with that, but Mom was still at work and my three sisters were nowhere in sight, so at least they wouldn’t get traumatized by the guy.

I had just been down at my friend Terry’s house and had come home looking for something to eat. After I burst through the screen door, I froze, seeing Lynn and the murderer sitting like lovers, right there in our house!

They both turned to look at me.

I gaped at them. Uh….

The place was silent as a grave.

Then, with a sudden burst of brilliance, I did something that proved I really was an idiot. With the murderer right there on the couch in my living room glaring daggers at me, I said … “YOU AIN’T A NOTHIN’ BUT A HOUND DOG, CRACKIN --”

At which point the murderer stood up.

And I ran for my life, banging out the door and heading back down the street to Terry’s house, where I stayed until I saw Mom’s car pass by when she came home from work.

That night, after sticking close to my mom so Lynn couldn’t turn my ears into rubber bands, I went out to my room to go to bed. I turned off the light and climbed up onto my top bunk. It was right by the window, and through the screen I could hear the toads down by the river and smell the gasoline from the beat up old lawnmower in our garage. My room always smelled like gasoline. It came in under the door. Bugs did, too. But the only bugs I cared about were centipedes and black widows, which I thought might poison me to death if I ever got bit by one. To this day I cringe when I see those things.

But anyway, there I was lying on my back with my sheet pulled up to my neck.

Ahhhh. What a day.

Then my eyes popped open. There was something weird down by my feet.

I moved my toes around, trying to figure out what it was. A baseball mitt? A softball?

No, it was kind of … squishy. And cold. And alive!

I whipped the sheet away and sprang down off my bed. When I hit the floor I tripped and crashed into my rolling desk chair, sending it clanging across the room where it punched a hole in my hollow-core closet door.

Crash! Bam! Boom!

Outside my window I heard somebody laughing.

It was the kind of laughter that tumbles out of you when you’ve heard or seen the funniest thing ever in your whole entire life and it sends you to the ground where you roll around holding your stomach.

Lynn.

I flipped the light on, crept back to my bunk, and lifted the sheet.

A bufo!

Lynn -- or maybe it was the murderer -- had stuck a huge bullfrog under my sheet. It looked at me with its throat bulging out.

From outside I heard, “YOU AIN’T A NOTHIN’ BUT A ID-EE-OTT, CRACKIN ALL THE TIME,” and then another round of maniacal gut-busting laughter.

But … I had to admit … Lynn got me good. Oh yeah.

So what did I learn from all of that?

Well, at that age, nothing. I was a ten-year-old boy. What can I say?

But looking back, it’s easy to see what I learned ... that it was fun growing up in Hawaii, to live on an island, to be a boy, a pest, an idiot.

Wow.

I truly enjoyed the time Lynn spent with us. It was so full of those hilarious, cynical, squinty-eyed, ear-stretching skirmishes.

Actually, that’s where all my Calvin Coconut books came from … those exhilarating hound dog days.

Being ten years old in the Hawaiian Islands was such a gift.

I’m truly grateful that for a while I got to be an annoyingly bothersome, wildly successful, crackerjack fool … with minimal consequences.