LAMPWICKS
I HAVE KNOWN As
a kid growing up, I loved all the great creations of Walt Dysney, but
my favorite among them all was the magical story of Pinocchio. That
film had everything: adventure with Monstro the Whale, Hope with Jiminy
Cricket, wishing on a star, and mischief in the person of Lampwick,
the embodiment of bad company. I
was fairly innocent as a kid. I did tease my siblings, raid the kitchen
for cookies and cake, and shoot an occasional song-bird with my Daisy
Red Ryder BB gun. But my first Lampwick was a kid named Elmer. He taught
me how to cuss, and hanging out with him gave me a whole new vocabulary.
Before I bumped into him, I was a nice, moral little Methodist, trained
in the Boy Scout rules to be “brave clean and reverent.”
But thanks to Elmer,”clean” went out the window. Pinkney
kids were also given lots or rules—my mom's from a biblical and
my dad's from a nutritional point of view. Dad's dietary no-no's included
no junk food. Anything sugary, white-floured, or heavily processed were
absolutely condemned. He did agree with my mom about the evils of smoking,
drinking, and God forbid, drugs. “See what they did to Robert
Mitchum—those drooping evil eyelids? Anyone can see he's been
using narcotics!” The
thing they didn't get was that the more rules, the greater the temptations
to break them—especially if a Lampwick entered the picture. My
mom was a Lampwick about sweets—she loved baking cookies, cake
and pie which she enjoyed with us—much to my dad's dismay; and
he was down on smoking mainly because of lung damage. I found his corn-cob
pipe, and he admitted to once in a while puffing on it. Huck Finn's
aunt got down on him for smoking, “and she took snuff; but that
was ok because she done it herself.” When
I got home to Fairmount after my year in the air force, I began hanging
out with an outcast named Pat—the same guy that hooked me up with
the bewitching Merza. Pat was the only child of quite elderly parents
who gave him nearly anything he wanted. They were wealthy farmers whose
idea of discipline had long since evaporated. Pat was, to say the least,
pampered. He wasn't pressed to do farm work and always had plenty of
ready cash, which was likely why not a few of his peers disliked him,
but I found him bright, creative, sardonically witty, and fun too hang
out with in small doses. He could be downright morose at times. It
could be that, time to time, we may have to supply the voice of Jiminy
Cricket to a present Lampwick. Gene
Pinkney - - edited html update 08-15-2021
Pinocchio met this tempter after he had run away from home, and Lampwick
taught him how to make it in his world—how to smoke, how to lie,
and how to live on the streets. He was a true “artful dodger”,
a true Huck Finn. Each of us will sooner or later deal with Lampwicks—darkside
tempters out to steer us wrong.
Pat loved breaking rules just to do something exciting. Here were a
few of his schemes:
“Let's go to farmer X's place later some night and steal gas out
of his pumps. I've got this 20 gallon barrel I can roll out to the car.
All you have to do is help me load it up.” My response, “Pat,
are you nuts. Your dad's got gas he'll give you free! Include me out.”
Then he got an aqua lung. I did
hold the rope for him while he explored a couple lake bottoms, but I
refused to go with him while he swam out to pull down migrating spring
geese. I persuaded him that that wouldn't work, but I was foolhardy
enough to go with him in his dad's brand new 58 Chevy width Warren while
he put it on the Milwaukee RR track so we could glide along and shoot
pheasants out the windows. We ended up having to drive a mile through
a plowed field when our wheels slipped off the tracks. Certainly, “the
idle mind is the devil's workshop.”
When Warren and I hunted ducks with Pat, he never fired just one shot—always
five. He illegally had the plug out out and loved blasting away. We
never hunted close to him. We always dropped him off at the far end
of the slough.
