Gardening is better. Everyone in New England will be eager to give you advice about a flower garden—too eager, in fact. By the time I’d spent a month listening to gardening advice, I was so confused the only thing I could remember was that you shouldn’t plant bulbs upside down. This is nonsense, and I have a septic tank full of daffodil blooms to prove it.
Vegetable gardening is even more frustrating. The last hard frost in New England comes about July 10 and the first autumn frost comes about two weeks later. Then there are the raccoons. If anything does grow, the raccoons will take it and you’ll have to call the Pentagon Rapid Deployment Force to get it back. What I do is just say I have a vegetable garden. I dig up some of the lawn, put on a raccoon suit, make tracks in the dirt, and go buy my vegetables at the local garden stand.
I’ve adopted similar techniques for home renovation. At first I thought it would be relaxing and a fine hobby to fix up my own house. But visits to the hardware store proved too embarrassing. Whatever it is you need, you don’t know what it’s called. And they’ll laugh at you when you ask for “a large metal thing which is heavy at one end but a good deal heavier at the other.”
While being careful not to fix up your own house, be especially careful not to fix it up in real Colonial antiques. There’s one place where the honesty of rural New Englanders breaks down in a woeful fashion. This is the antique store. New England antique stores are dens of iniquity. If you ever do go into one, keep repeating this to yourself: “It’s not an authentic milk-paint pre-Revolutionary hanging cupboard. It’s a dirty old box out of somebody’s garage.”
Moving to the country is, in general, a splendid way of finding out how ignorant and unhandy you are. I knew I didn’t know much about gardening or fixing things around the house, but I thought even I could burn a pile of brush. It’s worth noting that practically everything in rural areas is flammable. So much for the lovely scenery.
Indeed, by the time I’d lived six months in New England, all my good reasons for moving there had disappeared. Pastoral serenity is elusive in a town where every man, woman, and child over five owns a chain saw and starts it promptly at dawn each day. And as for healthy living, the state motto of New Hampshire seems to be “Can I freshen that up for you?”
I was feeling quite glum about all this one day while I was helping another ex-city fellow pull stumps out of his pasture. My friend George, a former resident of San Diego, had rented a backhoe, and he and I had spent all morning cutting, digging, and yanking at tree roots while I wondered why I’d ever left Murray Hill. George and I were down in a trench hacking at one particularly recalcitrant oak carcass when a local farmer pulled up in his truck. The farmer stared out across the pasture, surveyed the dozen holes with uprooted stumps sitting next to each, looked down in the hole where George and I were, and said, “George, you’ll never make any money planting those.”
Then I realized why I’d moved to the country. Neighbors gather from miles around to see me try to light a wood stove. My sojourns at the town dump with my Volkswagen convertible buried to its hubs in mud are local legend. And the residents of Jaffrey consider it a better show than Return of the Jedi to see a New Yorker try to get a porcupine out of the barn with two oven mitts and a broom handle.
You move to the country for the same reason that underlies many great artistic endeavors. It’s done for the sake of entertainment. And what better thing is there in life than bringing mirth and merriment to the people all around you?
The King of Sandusky, Ohio
My grandfather was King of Sandusky, Ohio. His father, King Mike the First, had ruled a small farm ten miles from town. There was a period of great disorder in Sandusky then, due to the City Ordinance of Succession. The throne of Sandusky cannot pass through a female heir. King Jim, who ruled in the year of my grandfather’s birth, 1887, had no sons and no brothers, nor had he had any paternal uncles. So the question of inheritance fell among an array of quarreling cousins, one of whom (though, I believe, only by marriage) was my great-grandfather Mike. But Mike was good with a broadsword and had friends at the county courthouse. Eventually he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer at one of the local banks and conquered a lumber yard and a livery stable. King Jim was old and growing senile and my great-grandfather had himself declared Royal Protector by taking care of the old king’s house and yard and making sure he always had a carriage if he wanted to go for a ride in the country. When King Jim died in 1901 my great-grandfather knew where all the legal papers were, and, with the help of my young grandfather, the future Crown Prince Barney, he fought a pitched battle with the other claimants and cousins in an office downtown. He was greatly outnumbered by his rivals, but they were leaderless and quarreled among themselves, and while they were consulting a lawyer they had hired, King Mike set upon them with archers and most of them were slain. A few retired on pensions, however, and one moved to California.
King Mike died in 1920, and his oldest son, my great-uncle Will, became King of the Farm, but it was my grandfather who was placed upon the throne of Sandusky. This was not in strict adherence to the Succession Ordinance, but few men ever defied my grandfather and lived or did not have a business failure.
Under the reign of my grandfather, Sandusky grew in power and prosperity. A grain elevator was built and a factory and then another. My grandfather was always at war. He conquered Norwalk, Fremont, Tiffin, and Oak Openings State Park, where there was a battle that lasted nearly two days in the dark and tangled woods of the bird sanctuary. In 1942 he defeated Port Clinton, using archers—as his father had—and massed infantry armed with pikes and swords at the bridge on Route 4. The mounted knights he fought, whose number made up nearly all the nobility and royal family of Port Clinton, were shot down with arrows or forced over the guardrail and drowned in their heavy armor before anyone could get to them with a powerboat. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Cavalry is important for mobility’s sake and for swift forays, but the true strength of an army lies in its well-trained foot soldiers. Also horses have to be fed and groomed every day and usually boarded at a stable on the outskirts of town.
King Barney commissioned a navy for Sandusky, with three-masted galleons. And he fought sea battles at Put-In Bay, at North Bass Island, and even at the mouth of the Maumee River, in Toledo harbor. Thus my grandfather wrested much of the freighter traffic in western Lake Erie from the Businessmen Princes of Toledo and Detroit, Michigan. He also fended off attacks from the barbarians who came down out of Canada in their war ferries. They wore no armor, only hats, and fought with axes, but they were fearsome warriors nonetheless and were driven from our shores only after they had sacked many fishing camps and a boat dock. There was an uprising, too, among the peasants who were in a labor union at the Willis Overland plant, and my grandfather put down that rebellion with great force. And he quarreled with the deacon of the largest Presbyterian church in town, a man who commanded powerful forces and wanted to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, which commanded Prohibition and caused a great schism in Ohio. My grandfather, at last, seized all the deacon’s property and foreclosed on some empty lots and small businesses that he owned, distributing them with his customary largess to the earls and counts who owned restaurants and bars and had fought loyally by the king’s side. He took for himself a Buick dealership. And built a palace for the royal household on Elm Street. By the time I was born, in 1957, King Barney ruled nearly all of north-central Ohio from Lorraine to Bucyrus and as far west as Perrysburg. What he hadn’t conquered by sword and fire had been annexed by the city government, and dukes and barons from surrounding towns swore fealty to my grandfather, even, in some cases, sending their own children as hostages on vacation visits to the royal court. Where, of course, they were treated with the greatest courtesy.
King Barney, though fierce in war, was at heart a kindly man, loved by his subjects. Very few were the times when he threw anyone into the dungeon at the Buick dealership, and only then when they had commited some heinous
crime. And he hated to order an execution. Even when Lenord of Fostoria married my second cousin, Duchess Connie, and treated her cruelly, and was cast into the dungeon and broke $300 worth of distributor caps and taillight lenses which were stored there, Grandfather did not have him killed but just talked him into joining the Marine Corps.
My grandfather, King Barney, had five children. Crown Prince Bob was the oldest; then my father, who bore the title Prince of New Car Sales and was also the Captain of the Royal Guard; then Princess Annie; then Prince Larry, who ran the used-car lot; and my youngest uncle, Prince Fred. My father married Princess Doris, whose father had been the Emperor of Michigan City, Indiana, but who had been deposed in the stock-market crash of 1929. Her family had fled Indiana, and her brother Sam took refuge in a monastery owned by the New York Central Railroad, where he became Chief Abbot and a freight-train engineer. Her sister Dorothy married a real-estate salesman from Chicago who was very successful because he was the duke of a suburb.
I led an idyllic childhood, partly at the court of my grandfather the king and partly at his summer cottage. I was trained in the arts of warfare and at falconry and baseball and playing the trumpet. My father was a great favorite with the people. It was assumed that someday he would be king, since Uncle Bob had no male heirs. Oddly, I must have been nearly ten before I realized that I myself was therefore in line for the crown. And it was not long after I had made that realization that my father was tragically struck down. There had been trouble at the car dealership. A White Castle restaurant across the street had rebelled, and my father and my Uncle Larry, who was his chief lieutenant, gathered their troops and some of the mechanics from the garage and laid siege to the Amazon waitresses. It was only a glancing blow of a halberd that struck my father’s helmet, and Prince Larry told me that in the victorious glow of the burning lunchroom my father complained of nothing but a slight headache. But that night he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and went into the hospital and died. A hundred lancers on horseback and many people in a long line of cars accompanied him to his grave in Woodlawn Cemetery, where our family owned a plot.
Less than a year later my mother married again, to Count Ralph, a minor nobleman from a shopping center on the south side of town. And thus began the intrigue that was to mark the next dozen years of my life.
At first I didn’t care much one way or the other about my new stepfather. He seemed nice enough, in a way, but he drank too much beer and his armor was the cheap foreign kind. And he did not have a charger of his own. Anytime there was an argument with a neighbor over feudal obligations like keeping their lawns nice, he would have to rent a horse in order to settle the quarrel with a jousting match. But I didn’t really mind him. Anyway, I was much too busy with the Grade School Wars. They caused great destruction and suffering, especially to substitute teachers. My grandfather should have put a stop to these fights, but he was growing old and he never recovered from the death of my father, who was his favorite. He began to grow feeble after that and wound up in a royal nursing home. And my Uncle Bob, the crown prince, cared about nothing but business and golf.
There were three grade schools in the local school district, and we were at war with each other constantly. And the four public high schools in Wood County were fighting each other, also. Not to mention the two parochial high schools, each of which had elected its own pope. And this caused rioting among the Polish and Italian people who worked in the factories. At school we fought with wooden pikes and swords. Most of our parents wouldn’t let us have real swords until we were sixteen. Although some kids who had paper routes saved up and bought them anyway. We had real arrows, though. And I was grazed on the arm once and had to have stitches.
The school wars were exciting. They were fought from classroom to classroom. I was one of the leaders, of course, because I was of royal blood. But I was in the sixth grade, so I was only a lieutenant. Still, I led my men in many sword fights, especially on the staircases. We would fight up and down the staircases. They were the best places for sword fights. Our school, McKinley School, was a big building, like a fortress, and we fought from barricades across the corridors, and even the principal couldn’t get us to behave. Once we were besieged by the kids from Nathan Hale Grade School, and they drove us to the second floor and conquered our gym. We might have starved if the girls hadn’t had to go home when the streetlights came on. And they were able to get back into the school auditorium that night because there was a PTA meeting and they came with their parents. We hoisted picnic baskets full of provisions up from the auditorium floor to the balcony, and so we survived until morning. We had new sword fights on all the staircases that next day and drove the Nathan Hale kids back to their own neighborhood. We captured one of their sixth-graders, who used to be in my class but his parents moved. He was a spy, and we proved it with a trial by fire, and he died in the hospital. After that our grade school couldn’t fly the green safety pennant on our flagpole under my family’s royal banner. The green safety pennant meant no student had been hurt that year and had a picture of Amber the Safety Elephant on it.
I was so busy that I didn’t notice that Count Ralph, my stepfather, was conspiring against me until my grandfather died and Uncle Bob was crowned King of Sandusky. This made me crown prince, and I always led my class when we marched to school assemblies or to drop our contributions into the March of Dimes collection. Count Ralph’s first plot was to poison my uncle so that I would be king and he could be appointed regent until I was twenty-one. He tried this at a weenie roast but King Bob only vomited and the poison hot dog did not have time to do its work.
But then my stepfather decided upon a different and more treacherous scheme. I believe he realized that I knew about the poisoning attempt, for I had spied on him when I worked after school at his hardware store in the shopping center. And he knew I had come to hate him because he would not buy me an English racer bicycle and because he continually ranted and raved at me for not cleaning up after my brace of coursing hounds. He and my uncle came to a rapprochement. And despite my warnings to the king, Count Ralph was made my protector and Head of the Royal Guards. It became clear to me that the two of them were in league when my cousins Prince Buster and Prince Kevin were waylaid on the street and killed by a hit-and-run driver. This left no other male heir but me, and if I could be gotten out of the way, King Bob’s grandson, my second cousin Prince Dickie, could be made crown prince. I knew, also, that Count Ralph was aiding my uncle in urging City Council to change the laws of royal succession. Either way I would never become king. They couldn’t kill me outright, not yet. It would look bad in the papers. But they were going to get rid of me somehow. My mother was weak. She feared for my safety, but she also wanted to save her marriage and was afraid of what the neighbors would say if she got divorced. I went to my uncles, Prince Larry and Prince Fred, whose sons had been murdered. I asked them for help raising a troop of armed men. I could muster a hundred boys from McKinley School and at least my own patrol from my Boy Scout troop, but we were poorly armed and had no siege engines or cavalry. But my uncles were scared they’d lose their jobs. Only Princess Annie was any help. She gave me a packet of poison to spread on the fabric of my stepfather’s sport coat. But I lost it on the way home.
There was nothing to do but flee, so I sought sanctuary at the home of my mother’s brother, the Duke of Evanston, Illinois.
This was not a happy time of my life. I was among strangers whose customs and manner of dress were unfamiliar to me. And it was a cliquish high school. I didn’t fit in. Then the duke, my uncle, had a massive coronary. I had hoped that he and his son, my cousin Eddie, would help me raise an army. Perhaps, also, Reverend Stevens at Evanston United Methodist would declare a crusade, and I could return to Sandusky and topple Uncle Bob from the throne. Cousin Ed was a bully and I had never liked him, but he had powerful friends on the football team. But my hopes were dashed, and instead of raising an army, I was caught in a quarrel between my cousin, the new duke, and hi
s mother, who still held the purse strings of the ducal treasury at the local branch bank and would not let Duke Eddie have even his own checking account. And Lady Sue, Eddie’s sister, was contemplating a totally unsuitable marriage to a commoner, a bread-truck driver. And, worse, this man was a heretic, a Seventh Day Adventist whose family had been slaughtered in the general massacre of Adventists the year before. He had escaped only because he had been out in the garage trying to fix a lawnmower when it happened. But he lived in fear for his life and planned to emigrate to the colonies in Wisconsin, where he hoped religious toleration would be found. And he planned to take Lady Sue with him. No one had time for me, and I never did make many friends in school.
Before my senior year, I decided to return alone to Sandusky. I knew I faced likely death or imprisonment in my bedroom on some slight pretext. Nor did I have any plan. Uncle Sam tried to convince me to become a railroad monk. But I must have a life of action, and if I could not find some way to succeed in Sandusky, then perhaps I would become a brigand and live in the forest and rob picnickers.
Once I was home, however, a streak of good fortune came my way. My high school was in the wealthiest part of town, but our athletic teams were not very good and in the various skirmishes and battles with the other schools in the parking lots after football games we had lost many dead and wounded. We had no archers, our single troop of lancers was decimated, and our infantry was a rabble of kids whose parents were not very well off. Because I was still, in name at least, crown prince, it was easy to get elected to Student Council. And since no one else wanted the job, I became chairman of the Battle and Pillage Committee. I knew there was no way that I could form our high school’s dispirited and disorganized army into an effective fighting force, not even against other high schools, let alone against my uncle, the king, and my stepfather and his Royal Guards—especially since my stepfather had grounded me for a month for getting a speeding ticket. Still, with even a few troops I had some options open. You see, of the six high schools in the Sandusky area there was one, Scott High, which was nearly all colored. We were at peace with them, just then. And, in fact, since they were in an isolated part of town, they were at war with no one but some eastside rednecks who were high school dropouts anyway. But what I did was bully our Student Council President—a little bespeckled fellow and a great coward—into making belligerent noises toward Scott High on the pretext of a Negro family or two moving into our school district. We could not beat them in a set-piece battle. I knew that. But their school was far enough away from ours that it would not come to outright war for a while, I felt sure. Then, one night, I took a dozen of my best and most trusted swordsmen and we dressed ourselves as colored people, wearing gauntlets and keeping our visors down so that no one could see the true color of our skin. Then I led a small raid on some houses in a nice neighborhood near our school. We burned the places to the ground and killed the families, being sure to perform the worst mutilations on the bodies. It got a lot of coverage on television, and the first result was a much larger military budget for my army. We took, in fact, all the money from the Prom decorations fund—everything that had been made from car washes and bake sales for a whole year. I purchased arms and horses and even a siege engine or two, which did much to raise morale.