The Rise and Fall of Honest Boy
And the Unfortunate Birth of Crime Boy
1965, Flushing, Queens
A puny seven year old and his father go into Ryskind’s, a corner store selling candy, comic books, toys, and ice cream. Everything important.
That Sunday morning, my dad and I were on our way home from church, and Dad wanted the Sunday paper.
I went in and looked around at all the stuff I wasn’t getting. My gaze locked on something on the floor. A five dollar bill! I continued to look around as I made my way towards the vast sum and picked it up, unobserved. But alas, I was reluctantly filled with the holy spirit, having left church just moments before. I held the treasure out to the man behind the counter and explained where I’d found it.
“Honest boy!” he boomed in a thick Italian accent. “Mama, come here and see honest boy, he returned this money he found on the floor!”
A plump woman bustled over from behind the counter. “You come with me,” she said, leading me to the ice cream cooler. “You get you an ice cream, honest boy.”
My dad was proud of me –
a rare occurrence as I was something of a disappointment. I sucked at sports. I had a Peter Pan outfit that I wore regularly. I was into monsters, played pretend with girls, and to make it worse, I really loved The Monkees.
As far as my new persona, I milked that shit for rest of the time we lived in Flushing. Every Sunday, and sometimes during the week, I would pop into Ryskind’s, and always got the same greeting.
“Honest Boy! You go get you an ice cream!”
Sometimes other shopper would look quizzically in my direction, and my patrons would regale them with my selfless act of honesty. It felt good to be Honest Boy.
The following year
we spent two weeks in the country at Yaphank, a rural town on Long Island. We rented a cabin and there were a lot of other kids around. It was non-stop fun. We’d ride bikes at breakneck speeds, catch frogs, steal potatoes from a local farm, and have dirtbomb wars.
There was a German man who had a bear in his basement, and when we’d all gather around the basement door it would burst open and the growling bear would chase us. The littler kids were terrified. Us eight-year-olds were pretty sure it was the German in a costume.
My dad was only there on weekends,
and the vibe really changed when he showed up. He was always finding things to complain about. I would be dashing around the house in my tights and felt hat, singing about Wendy making us pockets, and he would wonder aloud why I couldn’t be more like Cousin Robbie.
My mom was not as much fun when he was around. My parents should have divorced then, instead of torturing each other and me for another six years.
In Yaphank, we didn’t go to church, but getting the Sunday paper was still a routine. My dad and I went to the local version of Ryskinds, and I had a quarter to spend. A quarter could get you a comic book and some candy, so I was pretty stoked.
That day, as usual, I went to the rack of comic books and looked for a good monster or ghost one. I flipped through a couple, and settled on a copy of Ghosts of Dr. Graves. Then I looked up and saw, on the shelf above the comics, a few glossy magazines the size of slim paperbacks. There were scantily clad girls on the covers.
I gingerly picked one up:
Barnyard Cuties. On the cover was a buxom blonde wearing denim shorts. She had her hair in pigtails, and her gingham shirt was tied right under her buxomness. She was smiling at me. I leafed through this treasure while my heart pounded in my temples. I saw smiling girls with exposed breasts, bare bottoms and huge smiles. I shuddered and put the magazine back.
I really wanted Barnyard Cuties instead of the comic book, but I knew I couldn’t buy it. In a flash, Honest Boy’s nemesis Crime Boy was born.
All I had to do was slip the magazine inside the comic book. A genius idea! How could it fail? I looked left and right, and with the stealth of a Ninja slid the magazine inside. I checked out with my comic and candy, and headed outside with my father, feeling like Al Capone.
“Hey, you! Hey kid, stop!”
A man crossed the parking lot towards us.
“Show me what you’ve got!”
He walked up and took the comic book out of my hand and the purloined porno dropped to the ground.
“I… I didn’t know it was in there! How did it get in there?”
“Kid, I saw you through the window. I saw you take it.”
My dad went ballistic.
He grabbed me and spanked me right there in the parking lot. Luckily my father had a fondness for the old country, so I was wearing lederhosen and it didn’t hurt as much as it could have.
The ride home was grim.
“You know, you’re going to have to tell your mother what you did, you little thief. What’s wrong with you? I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. Robbie would never do something like this.”
He gritted his teeth and fumed for the rest of the drive.
I tried to bargain — how maybe we could just keep it between us guys, or something equally unlikely — but he wasn’t having it.
He frogmarched me into
the cabin and my mother’s face fell as I shared the minimal facts of the case. My father expanded my attempt at shoplifting into a tale of moral turpitude.
“What do you think about mommy’s little sweetheart?” he boomed. “Things are going to change around here!”
My mother told me to get out of her sight, and I was subjected to the dreaded silent treatment. My dad went back to the city the next day. By Monday night, my secret power of being able to make my mom laugh had negated my crime.
I didn’t do that exact bad thing again, but the days of Honest Boy were over.
Robbie of course became a doctor and he’s a good guy.
Postscript:
Back when that all took place, I spent a lot of time being Peter Pan. I would play the record from Mary Martin’s portrayal of Peter Pan, and act out the whole show. I knew it by heart.
When my daughter Kiki was little she of course had a Peter Pan outfit. For music, we had choices: the soundtracks from the animated Peter Pan, the Sandy Duncan Peter Pan, and the Mary Martin Peter Pan. With no prompting from me she always (correctly) chose the Mary Martin version, which she pronounced May Martin.
Peter was pretty important in Keek’s early years. She liked me to make Peter Pancakes (regular pancakes with food coloring). Sometimes hers would be served with a bite already taken, and she would say, “Peter!”
He was always just out of sight, at the corner of our vision, just like Kiki is now.⁜
What’s something bad you did as a kid? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading,
Eric