Catchy title, huh?

       Have a catchy title was the best advice I got for doing my story. `Let your title express something to live up to,’ Mrs. Marx said in composition class. I wrote that down. My theme about Jesus being a liberal was something I gave a lot of thought to. Mrs. Marx said right away I had a catchy title.
       My mom, Dot Hodges, is a liberal.

       She gives teas for every liberal cause that comes down the pike, according to my dad, Johnny Hodges, who hates all liberals except my mom. Dad comes home, peeks in on Mom and her friends having what he calls one of their regular bitching and moaning sessions. He shakes his head, goes off to shoot skeet with his buddies, never minding a bit that his wife is serving green tea and seaweed cookies to people he hates.

       My dad’s a conservative.

       He has four Johnny Hodges Motors locations on Long Island, famous for the giant Indian sign, SAVE BIG WAMPUM WITH JOHN, which Native American pressure groups and their do-gooder friends tried to force him to remove. My dad’s actually kind of a celebrity, mostly for the big Indian sign court case, but also because he’s always on TV hawking used cars. People he doesn’t know come up to him on the street and want to shake his hand. ‘Hey, you’re the guy on TV,’ they say, like he didn’t already know that.

       “I’d give ‘em away, but my wife won’t let me,” is one of his hooks. He borrowed that line from a dealer out in Indianapolis, but most of his stuff he makes up himself. `Drive it in, push it in, mail it in, we don’t care. Bring anything with wheels on the lot, and you’ve got yourself five hundred bucks in trade,’ is another one of his tag lines. My mom says that these pitches pour out of him like sweat when he gets rolling. `My competitors speak with forked tongues,’ is my favorite. We were having pizza the night he came up with that.

       In my story about Jesus being a liberal, I pointed out things that supported my theme, which is what you’re supposed to do. Jesus came from a poor background. He was born in a stable. He apparently didn’t accumulate much material wealth during his life, so, He didn’t have much to conserve. That was one point. Having something to conserve is a cornerstone of being a conservative. A ‘conservative’ is ‘one who conserves’. In class, we discussed the idea of conservatives being the `opposite’ of liberals, and I had some trouble with that because I wasn’t sure about the differences. Mrs. Marx said conservatives wanted to conserve abstract things, which are things you can’t see directly, like ways of life, values and wealth. I wrote that down.
       I told my dad about what Mrs. Marx said.

       “What’d you expect from somebody named Marx?” was his answer. Turns out, Karl Marx was this extreme liberal guy who invented communism, which is a form of liberalism, according to my dad. Not only that. Jesus couldn’t have been a liberal because liberals weren’t even invented when Jesus lived. This last part poked a pretty big hole in my theme, leaving me with a catchy title and no story. I was going to have to scrap what I had and start over unless I came up with something.

       I told Mrs. Marx what my old man said and she laughed.

       Mrs. Marx originally came to Brooklyn shortly after the Canarsee Algonquin tribe, she said, which I realized was a joke when I found out there was nothing but woods in Brooklyn when the Indians came here. Mrs. Marx was actually pretty young-looking for a lady teaching twenty two years, and she made jokes about her age all the time.

       In class, we talked about the eye of a needle and the rich man getting into Heaven, and somebody asked if you had to be rich to be conservative, and if getting into Heaven was going to be a problem for rich people.

       It set me to thinking about my story.

       My old man has four car lots and does pretty well. Our house is one of the best on the street. I always thought we were rich until I started hanging out with this kid, Danny Mack, and his friends. When I saw the mansion Danny lives in, with fancy cars everywhere, and not the kind my old man sells, I rethought it. Danny and his family have a garage bigger than our house, just to keep their Bentleys.

       It made me realize. We aren’t rich. Danny Mack is rich.

       Mrs. Marx pointed out that there were many other things to be conservative or liberal about besides wealth, which sent me off in a new direction: `causes’. “Causes often create opposite causes,” Mrs. Marx said.

       I wrote that down.

       She said it was okay if I used stuff like that in my story, as long as I gave proper credit and didn’t overdo it. “These days it seems like everybody and his brother has a cause,” was another one I wrote down.

       There was this guy in Brooklyn history, Edwin Litchfield.

       Mrs. Marx told me to check him out because his cause involved the Brooklyn neighborhoods where I’m from, and we decided I could let Edwin Litchfield’s cause stand for causes in general in my story because both sides had their cause, and each side thought they were right and the other side was wrong. I could listen in on Edwin Litchfield with my time microphone just like I’d listened in on Jesus’ times
.
       Down in South Brooklyn many years ago, there was a clean, clear stream called the Gowanus Creek. You can look it up in a history book. The Gowanus Creek was this stream that kind of ran from up around Boerum Hill somewhere and came down past Red Hook to what they call the Erie Basin, which is a stretch of water connected to Upper and Lower New York Bay and the ocean. Everybody in those days associated the creek with the Indians who settled there. It was a pretty pure creek, bubbling along through the reeds and washing over the pebbles, just about the way Nature laid it out, until Edwin Litchfield came along.

       There were some people who wanted to keep the Gowanus Creek the way it always was, and there were some other people, led by Edwin Litchfield, who wanted to widen it, dredge it deeper, and turn it into an industrial canal. This wasn’t something Edwin Litchfield was doing for fun. Bigger ships would come in to pick up and deliver more stuff, opening up the Brooklyn neighborhoods to industrial development.

       Edwin Litchfield called it progress.

       Some said Edwin Litchfield was beholden to a bunch of industrialists. Beholden means ‘owes’. They said Edwin Litchfield didn’t care about progress so much as he cared about making money for himself and his friends. Edwin Litchfield said the people opposing his cause had their heads in the sand. He said they were stuck in the past and needed to come over to the side of progress.

         For my story, I labeled Edwin Litchfield and his rich, industrialist friends as the liberals. They were for liberal freedom of the navigable waterways, which is what creeks like Gowanus were called. They were for liberal laws to allow free navigable waterways to be dredged, widened and made more free and navigable. They were also for liberal business deals between wealthy industrialists like themselves, with the government keeping off their backs because they were doing just fine and sure didn’t need the government nosing in. That’s something I’ve heard my dad say, which shows how mixed up labels get.

       Maybe Litchfield and his friends didn’t get worked up like my mother and her friends, but they were definitely for the rights of others, like liberal rights for trading companies, ship companies and business people like themselves, which made them liberals in my book. It also seemed to me that the people who opposed Edwin Litchfield were conservatives. They wanted to conserve the land the way it was. The talk that came drifting back through the time microphone I was using at the time (later replaced by a time machine) had it that if Edwin Litchfield and his friends got their way, the Gowanus creek would be turned into a stinking mess of oil soaked weeds, foul smelling gunk and bird carcasses. They said they’d be left with water which nobody could drink, swim in, or avoid the stink of.

       Edwin Litchfield and the liberals won.

       It turned out everybody was right. The liberals were right about prosperity coming out of the dredging. Turned out the new canal opened up South Brooklyn to all kinds of development. The conservatives were right that the canal would be smelly and dirty, and would have garbage and oil floating on it.

       I was kind of siding with Edwin Litchfield and the liberals all along, because of my central idea about Jesus being a liberal. I asked Mrs. Marx about Jesus loving everybody, which was kind of a liberal idea, and she said there were people on both sides, for sure, who were hard to love, but that if anybody could do it, it was probably Jesus.

         Another point in my story was that Jesus was a pacifist, protesting against fighting and hate. My dad says liberals are always protesting something, so, I asked him about another one of Jesus’ sayings. If somebody smacks your cheek, you turn and invite him to smack the other one. He said Jesus was probably misquoted about that, and that if somebody smacked me, I should deck the sucker. I asked Mrs. Marx about it when she was looking over my story. She said maybe Jesus was trying to make a point about keeping hate out of your heart. A look passed over her face, sad-happy, replaced by a gentle smile. “Your story needs a little salt,” she said.

       “Salt?”

       “Conflict.”

       “Conflict, ---?”

       “Conflict.”

       My face must’ve dropped a mile. Mrs. Marx’s look reminded me of the time my mom came around the corner and heard me calling this kid a dumb ass. No way for a young lady to speak, she said, or anybody. A look of disappointment, you could call it, wrapped in sadness. First, my mom, then, Mrs. Marx. It made me wonder if stories were even worth it; all the crap you went through to hatch one, only to learn it wasn’t so hot as you thought. Made me think that some words were better swallowed along with all the damn conflicts they stood for.

       “Life is full of, ---” she stopped, as if saying any more would only make things worse.

 

       Oh, boy.

       I saw the problem, I think. My mom and dad argue once in a while, sure, but she laughs at his jokes and he calls her his BHL, which stands for ‘Bleeding Heart Lady’. Their conflicts are constant like rocks grinding together, but never volcano explosive. I go to my cave. I keep my blank sweet face screwed on tight when I venture out. My dad stalks off to the den and shuts the door. My mom reads in the kitchen, at the far end of the house. Not a whole lot of salt there for my story.

       I was thinking that maybe I see the world crooked. Maybe conflict is all around me all the time but I choose to ignore it, like going to Danny Mack’s parties even when my friends aren’t invited because their parents didn’t have money. Truth is, I heard some of his friends laughing about the big Indian sign and the hokey TV commercials. One said his mom’s housekeeper bought a car there and it later caught fire on the freeway. When I heard ‘major fool’ during hushed talk about my dad’s commercials, I guess I got a little riled. The kid who said it was this ass of a girl by the name of Cheryl who was always throwing herself at Danny. I told her I didn’t appreciate her remarks, and she smirked and ignored me. My fists were all knotted up. My heart was pounding. I came very close to smacking her face, but something stopped me.

       I remembered what Mrs. Marx said about keeping hate out of my heart, so I poured Coke over her head instead, ice and all. Danny was there trying to calm me. Cheryl’s hair was all down in her face and she was shaking like crazy. There was ice all over the floor. I was sobbing and laughing at the same time, and I ran outside without saying anything. Some girls came over and gave me some tissues, and I stayed there without saying anything until my mom came and got me. On the way home, I told her about Cheryl. At first she was shocked, I think, hearing the gory details about Cheryl’s hair, all stringy and sticky, falling down in her face like a tangle of wet snakes. We both started laughing. My mom is cool.

       Ever since Mrs. Marx brought it up, I see conflict everywhere. My dad’s on the phone in the den arguing with some guy named Lou about the new floor plan, whatever that is, being screwy. There’s been a problem between two of my mom’s friends, Grace and Helen, who have stopped speaking to each other and are trying to force my mom to choose between them while she avoids both of them. No more meetings. No more green tea and seaweed cookies. More salt for my story when I figure out how to work it in.

       Cheryl called me a scag. When they told me about it, I laughed and said I didn’t know what a scag was and didn’t want to know. Had to be something ugly, right?
       Meanwhile, I had another run at my story driving the time machine. At Mrs. Marx’s suggestion, I gave the conservatives a leader in the person of George Joseph Wilson, Jr., a guy I kind of invented to go up against Edwin Litchfield. I made Wilson a pot-bellied rat from Red Hook, smoking a big cigar and calling Litchfield’s wife a scag, causing a scuffle beneath the great dome of Brooklyn City Hall where the liberals and conservatives were trying to `out-fix and out-fox’ each other, in the words of my conflict-packed tale.

       One more draft, and I put the time machine over on the junk heap with the time microphone and decided to cover my trips into the past with dreams. I had Edwin Litchfield helping a mama duck across the road while the dredging equipment waited to pass. Mrs. Marx said it was time to read my story to the class.

       Some kids laughed in the wrong places. Some didn’t like the title. They said it might be catchy, but it was disrespectful. One kid said Jesus would’ve never stood by while they dredged the Sea of Galilee and messed up all the fishing for His disciples. Another kid said Jesus was a conservative and would have been against raising the minimum wage. He said Jesus talked about the poor always being around like they didn’t matter, and I remembered wondering about that at Sunday school and thinking that maybe Jesus was misquoted, like with the thing with the cheek. It could happen. I skipped Sunday school pretty often helping out washing cars. I’m probably not the one to ask.

       I try to keep hate out of my heart.

       I don’t hate Cheryl, but I don’t exactly love her either. If I had to do it over, I’d still pour the Coke on her head. It was sticky and they said it took three days to get it out. Maybe I shouldn’t feel glad about that, but I do. I believe everybody should try to keep hate out of their hearts, but it’s not like it’s a big cause with me or anything. I’m working out how to tell my dad my side of the TV commercial / hair thing with Cheryl. I know what he’ll say. ‘Everybody’s a critic.’

       I know some people get off hating other people. I talked to my mom about it. She said she hates people like that.

                                                           END