Mappy Fitchaboomboom
Fading memories of a make-believe boy.
I grew up with two older brothers, a younger sister, mostly no father on the scene, assorted dogs and cats, a pair of hamsters named Dick and Pat (Nixon)—one eaten by a surly Tom cat—…and a never-seen but often referenced boy whose name rolled off one of our tongues one day. I think it was Brad, my fishing partner in crime, who conjured him, though I could be wrong. One day, some one of us (and it may well have even been my cousin, Mike, who for many years was like one more brother to us) uttered those ridiculous syllables into the air…and Mappy Fitchaboomboom came to be.
As I write that, I realize this is perhaps the first time in my life I’ve seen his name in print, have had to figure out a way to spell it, set it down, coldly on the page, which seems wrong somehow, since saying his name out loud was such a big part of it—looking at my brother, Brad, both of us knowing suddenly what one or the other of us was about to whisper aloud. Mappy Fitchaboomboom.
He quickly morphed into many things, mostly becoming the one to blame for all manner of mischief and mysterious happenings.
We are about to play one of our only-ending-when-darkness-makes-it-impossible neighborhood games of two-hand touch football, teams always shifting and shrinking as more and more of us are expected home, when it starts to thunder and rain, then lightning—and we all head home. Mappy Fitchaboomboom.
We find the hidden Oreos, four of us, but only three cookies. Mappy Fithchaboomboom.
We hear an eerie, blood-curdling screech in the night at the summer house we rent near the shore of Sacandaga Lake, Mike and Brad and me hunkered down in our upstairs bedroom with no ceiling, no plaster walls, just the insides of the exterior clapboards, bare studs, the roof trusses reaching up far into the high dark where every summer a bat will come swooping down and my father has to try to catch it with a fishing net. Mappy Fitchaboomboom.
We are riding our banana-seat, high-handle-bar stingray bikes along the cracked, heaving concrete sidewalks of Schenectady New York, some sections set at just the right angle so they become jumps, racing to street corners, racing around the entire block, when one of us has a flat, the air suddenly gone in a rush—a pinched tube, a nail, a shard of glass—and we all dismount to walk our bikes back together to our street. Mappy Fitchaboomboom.
We gather in the closet beneath the stairs and pull the door tight, so dark you can’t see your own hand in front of your face, and tell scary stories, the ruthless murderer with the hook arm, escaped from prison who finds his way to your yard, your house, noises in the night, creaking, sighs, so you hide and pray, and in the morning the scratch of his hook marks are everywhere, your very name—LISA—etched in the shredded wallpaper….There’s a loud crash from just outside the door, and we all jump, and my little sister, Lisa, is frantic now, bursts out screaming, crying. We are punished. Mappy Fitchaboomboom.
One of us lets out a particularly stinky fart in the car on a trip out to “the country,” to Galway, to visit Aunt Jerry and Uncle Jack, to explore in the fields and woods behind their big farm house, and later listen to the adults argue and laugh, the clinking ice cubes of their drinks, the incomprehensible complexity of their endless, cutthroat pinochle games.… “Who did that!” “Gross!!”
“Mappy Fitchaboomboom,” one of us replies.
There came to be times when I was all alone, maybe doing my paper route, maybe staying later than Brad wanted to on a fishing outing, and there’d be a rustling in the nearby forest, and I’d be struck with the sensation that he would step out into the open, right out of our imaginations. Though I never admitted it to my older brothers and older cousin, I was just old enough to believe that a made-up character could somehow become real. In my mind, I could see him so clearly.
Sometimes at night in our shared room, Brad and I would fill in the back story on Mappy Fitchaboomboom. Mostly he had red hair, wore torn jeans, was a kind of Huck Finn/Dennis the Menace trouble maker. He lived alone, like one of the Boxcar Children. He was always close by, hiding. He chewed tobacco. He ate Slim Jims. He always stayed up past bedtime and wasn’t afraid of the dark or anything. He hoarded our missing socks and put scratches in our favorite records and was ultimately the one really to blame for any of our own indiscretions.
I’m not sure what brought him into my mind—back into being—this morning with no blame to claim, no mischief afoot. I woke to my dog howling at a distant siren. Outside the mist was thick, and rain was falling. I was warm and utterly at peace beneath our big winter comforter. My wife was downstairs talking to the dogs, feeding them, taking them out front to avoid the muddy backyard. Then I found myself saying his name, and, like magic, the whole rush of my boyhood was upon me.
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This was right up my alley. Poignant, humorous, evocative writing.