They say it’s supposed to be cooler tomorrow. But like Orphan Annie put it, that’s always a day away. (And the goblins’ll get ya if ya don’t watch out.) 
        What makes it doubly frustrating is the idea that there’s people out there cooler off than we are, RIGHT NOW. And I don’t just mean wolves in the Yukon or Eskimo Piemakers. Is there some religious reason why you object to having an air conditioner? 
        All right, all right, don’t have a spaz; it was just a suggestion. Quit being such a grouch. 
        I mean, it’s not like I’m some pampered la-de-da debutante who’s never been un-air-conditioned. We didn’t have one when I was a kid in Marble Orchard; we had porches instead. Front porch, side porch, back porch—all full of gliders and rockers and suchlike. We’d sit out there to catch the breeze and swat the bugs and gulp lemonade and so on. 
        (I’m going to make myself a little drink. You want anything?  Did you get more Gilbey’s? Hey, this is vodka! Oog! Don’t you know how they make vodka? They pour rubbing alcohol over a peck of Polish potatoes! Oh well—thank God for V-8 juice, at least. Two Bloody Marys coming up—oops—um, make that one Bloody and one Hemophiliac.) 
        So anyhoo…what was I talking about? What do you mean, “when?” All the time! Oh right, the House With All the Porches. It wasn’t that enormous indoors, but we had all those porches plus a treehouse out back and four acres of yard, including this big honking vegetable garden. Flowers too, but mostly veggies and berries and other edibobbles. For the longest time they had me convinced it was fun to work in that garden, pulling weeds and stuff. It even had a scarecrow called Clem, but he was mostly decorative so there was also this bell on a pole you could ring to send the crows packing. At family get-togethers I always got to ring the bell to signal dinnertime, ‘cause I was the youngest one there. And every time it just tore up my cousin Jerry-the-Creep Hungerford’s jealous guts, ‘cause he’d’ve been the youngest if I hadn’t happened along. 
        (Slurp.) 
        That garden. The stuff we grew—everything imaginable, right down to sprigs of parsley. Grampa Otto used to spend hours tending it and winning prizes for it and calling it “the envy of the neighborhood,” before he got sick. We didn’t grow it just to make the neighbors green-eyed, or even just to save money; Gramma’d say you could “taste the goodness” when something was homegrown. But then she always insisted on storebought potato salad, too; so there you are. 
        (Slurp.) 
        There was a brook out back that was too shallow for doing anything really adventurous, but you could paddle your feet in it on hot days. It was out along the railroad tracks. I got so used to hearing trains go by at night that I had a hard time falling asleep after I moved to Demortuis. We’d put pennies on the tracks, ‘cause my cousin Dougie-the-Kook Hungerford claimed you could derail a train that way; but none ever did. (Doug’s spent a few years in rehab, though.) 
        (Want a refill? These V-8 Marys kind of grow on you. Must be my green thumb.) 
        Have I told you yet about the treehouse?  It was an actual sure-enough House in the Trees, straddling these colossal twin oaks I forget how many feet high, with real shingles on the roof and real glass in the window frames, and this real long rope to swing from.  I remember the first time the Hungerfords took me up there, to show me the swing and where to jump from and so forth. “You’ve got to hold on tight, with both hands,” Mickey’s saying (he hadn’t bought the farm in Cambodia yet) when Jerry the Creep butts in: “Yeah! Otherwise you’ll wrap the rope around your neck and hang yourself!” 
        “Like Uncle Murgatroyd?” I say, and ad-lib this neat-o story about a mythical uncle who had hanged himself on the treehouse rope after getting jilted by a cruel figure skater named Heidi. Boy, did I lay it on—even had the Creep half-believing it, till I went “Heavens to Murgatroyd” in a Snagglepuss voice, and then he got mad and broke every commandment in the book by shoving me (the bastard!) so I stomped on his creepy bastard foot, and while he was hopping around it was easy to trip him and knock him on his sorry ass. 
        I learned some good cusswords that day. 
        (Slurp.) 
        (Thirsty tonight.) 
        I spent a lot of time up in that treehouse by myself. As much or more than in my regular bedroom, which was the little one back by the linen cupboard. It had this bitesized four-poster bed, just right for somebody my height but with the noisiest springs you ever did hear. Luckily this was ages before I started doing any serious bed-squoinketing. 
        The bed had a velveteen patchwork quilt and these enormous feather pillows from which tiny wisps of fluff kept escaping, tra la, off to Feather Adventureland.  I inherited them all—bed, quilt, pillowfluff—from Gramma’s Aunt Livy.  Who would be my great-great-(or maybe it’s great-great-great-) aunt, if you’re still trying to follow this. Everything in that room, practically, had been hers. And as I was reminded umpty times, “Aunt Livy kept it in apple-pie order every day of her life, even when she was over eighty.” 
        (I didn’t, when I was eight.) 
        (Slurp.) 
        I guess I can be a little homesick about the place, now. But GEE ZUSS it got to be boring. Not a whole lot ever happened in Marble Orchard. I’m not saying it was a bad place to live; just that it was so DEADLY DULL. My mom fell into the nostalgia trap a few years ago and made Arnold move back there with her after Gramma died. And now Mom’s stuck out there, in the house she grew up in, bored out of her skull. 
        (Slurp.) 
        You know what that’s like? Always feeling restless? At loose ends? Like you’re wasting your life? Despite knowing, deep down in your heart of hearts, that you’re better than well-adjusted? And uniquely unforgettable? Except that other people have somehow lost sight of that fact—lost you in the crowd, and your name from their brains—despite your being the Onliest One of a Kind of Distinct Significance? 
        (Do I have a way with words, or what?) 
        Told you I wasn’t any ignoramus. You may not think it to look at me, but I am a voracious reader. Been one all my life. Even when I was little, I collected hilarious vocabulary words like “voracious” and “obsession”—and “sotto voice,” which I thought was the way you talk when you get drunk. 
        (Har har.) 
        I read this book once that had a character who was a “B-girl.” I thought that meant she dressed up in a little bumblebee outfit—a striped teddy with a stinger on her tush instead of a Playboy cottontail, and spring-antennas instead of rabbit ears. 
        But it’s not like that, not at all. It’s just lame and bleak and nothing but near dowels. That’s how I thought “ne’er-do-wells” was pronounced, when I was a kid and didn’t realize how goddam accurate I was. “Near dowels” is right, all right; as near as you can get. Till you think there’s nothing left for you but Chinese Communism: no more pretty clothes, no more steppin’ out, no more parties or clubs or fun of any kind. Spend New Year’s Eve alone in some crummy hole with a leaky ceiling and a bottle of tequila but not enough lime so that next morning you feel like molten lava laced with barbed wire is pouring in through your eyeballs but even that’s better than, than—than ending up a raddled old callous old star attraction at some, some—some Ramada Inn when you’re forty and feeble-minded and fat as a goddam sumo wrestler while everybody else STILL think they’re cooler off than you are, right now, all the time, summer and winter, and you wanna know something I don’t CARE I don’t care I don’t give a good goddam I don’t it makes no diff to ME— 
        Wha’? 
        Oh. Kleenex. Thanks. 
        (—phonk—)
        (Shniff.) 
        (By the way, you’re almost out of vodka…) 

[Sadly, The Sidewalk's End is now gone from the Web.  Above is a replica of their July 2002 publication.]

Copyright © 2002-2008
by P. S. Ehrlich; All Rights Reserved.