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By Root 1404 0

The Willoughby boys were always doing something large-scale and ambitious. They made their own helium balloons. They made their own rockets. They made their own gunpowder. One day I arrived to find that they had built a rudimentary cannon—a test model—out of a piece of metal pipe into which they stuffed gunpowder, wadding, and a silver ball bearing about the size of a marble. This they lay on an old tree stump in their backyard, aimed at a sheet of plywood about fifteen feet away. Then they lit the fuse and we all retired to a safe position behind a picnic table turned on its side (in case the whole thing blew up). As we watched, the burning fuse somehow unbalanced the pipe and it began to roll slowly across the stump, taking up a new angle. Before we could react, it went off with a stupendous bang and blew out an upstairs bathroom window of a house three doors away. No one was hurt, but Willoughby was grounded for a month—he was commonly grounded—and had to pay $65 restitution.

The Willoughby boys really were able to make fun out of nothing at all. On my first visit, they introduced me to the exciting sport of match fighting. In this game, the competitors arm themselves with boxes of kitchen matches, retire to the basement, turn off all the lights and spend the rest of the evening throwing lighted matches at each other in the dark.

In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implements—more like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldn’t go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of one’s sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail. The idea, in any case, was to get matches to land on your opponents and create small, alarming bush fires on some part of their person; the hair was an especially favored target. The drawback was that each time you launched a lighted match you betrayed your own position to anyone skulking in the dark nearby, so that after an attack on others you were more or less certain to discover that your own shoulder was robustly ablaze or that the center of your head was a kind of beacon of flame fueled from a swiftly diminishing stock of hair.

We played for three hours one evening, then turned on the lights and discovered that we had all acquired several amusing bald patches. Then we walked in high spirits down to the Dairy Queen on Ingersoll Avenue for refreshment and a breath of air, and came back to discover two fire trucks out front and Mr. Willoughby in an extremely animated state. Apparently we had left a match burning in a laundry basket and it had erupted in flames, climbed up the back wall, and scorched a few rafters, filling much of the house above with smoke. To all of this a team of firemen had enthusiastically added a great deal of water, much of which was now running out the back door.

“What were you doing down there?” Mr. Willoughby asked in amazement and despair. “There must have been eight hundred spent matches on the floor. The fire marshal is threatening to arrest me for arson. In my own house. What were you doing?”

Willoughby was grounded for six weeks after that, and so we had to suspend our friendship temporarily. But that was okay because by chance I had also become friends at this time with another schoolmate named Jed Mattes, who offered a complete contrast with Willoughby. For one thing, Jed was gay, or at least soon would be.

Jed had charm and taste and impeccable manners, and thanks to him I was exposed to a more refined side of life—to travel, quality food, literary fiction, interior design. It was strangely refreshing. Jed’s grandmother lived in the Commodore Hotel on Grand Avenue, which was rather an exotic thing to do. She was more than a thousand years old and weighed thirty-seven pounds, which included sixteen pounds of makeup. She used to give us money to go to the movies, sometimes quite enormous sums, like forty or fifty dollars, which would buy you a very nice day out in the early 1960s. Jed never