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Taking down a red toy soldier, I began my task of dismantling the Christmas tree. We had rung in the New Year, 1989, and, having run out of holidays to celebrate together, my younger brother Ponyboy had left with his family back to Chicago. He was the successful writer we always knew he would be, having lived in Los Angeles and New York before settling down with his wife and accepting a job at the Chicago Sun-Times. We were all real proud of him.
I was still working at the same auto shop in Tulsa that I had been since I got out of the Army eighteen years ago. I thought it was a pretty good life. I was still messing around with cars and still getting hit on by female customers, which I thought was pretty good for someone who just turned forty. Luckily I was single or that might have caused problems. Oh I was married once, after getting a girlfriend in trouble, but it didn’t last long. My son and daughter, who were just beginning their teenage years, spent most of their time with their mother, though not for my lack of trying. Courts tend to favor the mother, my buddy Stevie told me, and it seemed to be true.
It was on account of my son, Mark (His mother picked the name. I preferred to call him Marble ever since he swallowed a marble when he was four, even though now that he was thirteen he found that uncool), that I discovered this thing . See, Marble was always a lot like I was as a kid - fast paced, easily bored, always getting into trouble. He didn’t do too hot in school either, but I hoped he wouldn’t end up dropping out like his old man. His mother was real bothered by it, though. She got him tutors and those cassette tapes that help with your reading, but nothing worked. Finally she decided to take the kid to a shrink.
I had a lot of experience with shrinks. I had trouble adjusting to civilian life after the military, and I was having a lot of what they call anxiety and I had trouble sleeping and was just remembering a lot of things I didn’t want to remember. Eventually I wound up on some doctor’s couch, but it ended up not being so bad. Actually, it really helped me a lot. A lot of people think if you go see a shrink it means you’re really crazy, but that just ain’t true. Still, it’s not the kind of thing I tell the guys at work about.
I talked about that kind of stuff with my older brother Darry, though. He stepped up to take care of me and Pony after our parents died when I was sixteen, even though I didn’t think I needed a lot of taking care of. I could have laughed thinking about how I thought I was grown then. Man, to be sixteen again.
“What are you laughing at?” Darry asked, bringing in some storage boxes to place the decorations in.
“Just remembering the hell I used to put you through,” I grinned at him and he smiled back knowingly.
“You sure did. I remember that time you ate my homework, but I had to tell my teacher it was the dog.”
I laughed at the memory. “I just wanted you to play with me.”
“Well you learned I wasn’t playing after you couldn’t sit down for a week.” Darry shook his head but he was still smiling. “Guess you never did care much for schoolwork.”
I took down a small glass ornament and turned it around, watching the light reflect off of it.
“Hey Darry,” I said quietly after putting the ornament away.
He looked over at me.
“Were you real upset when I dropped out of school? I mean, I know Pony was, but…” I trailed off, not sure exactly where I was going with this.
From a real young age I knew I wasn’t smart like my brothers were. Darry brought home report cards that got hung on the fridge - I brought home notes explaining why I had to stay after school and clean the blackboards. I tried hard to be good. I tried real hard to keep my voice down, to stay in my seat, to leave the girls alone, to not make jokes when I was asked to read aloud. The thing was I knew the kids would be laughing at me if they realized how bad my reading was, so I thought better they laugh with me than at me. I mean that wasn’t a dumb thought, was it? When I could get the whole class laughing, god I felt like the king of the world. But the feeling was always short-lived.
When I snapped out of my thoughts, I saw Darry was just looking at me while holding the angel tree-topper in his hands. I noticed he was getting more wrinkles around his eyes.
He sighed. “Soda, I wasn’t upset that you dropped out. I was upset that I let you. I always thought if mom and dad had been around…”
I shook my head. “I don’t think it would’ve made a difference. I was failing out long before the accident happened. Dad even told me that he didn’t think school was for everybody.”
I didn’t tell Darry how much it had hurt when Dad said that, but he could probably tell from the look on my face.
“Hey,” Darry said in his stern voice. “I don’t want to hear any of this you calling yourself dumb business, alright? Dad was right, school isn’t for everybody. That doesn’t make you dumb.”
I had been hearing that story my whole life. Whenever I showed my jealousy at Darry or Pony’s accomplishments (which wasn’t often ‘cause I was always also real proud of them), it was ‘ but you’re good at other things’.
“But Darry I always felt dumb,” I explained. I could feel tears starting up, and I tried to hold them back. “When my teachers would make me sit in the corner, or copy pages of the dictionary while the other kids had recess I felt like an idiot. I was ashamed. Even mom and dad talked about me when they thought I couldn’t hear them and they wondered what was wrong with me!”
“Soda,” Darry began, his voice full of concern.
“But I think I know now,” I said, though my voice trembled. “I know what’s wrong with me!”
Darry sat the angel he was holding down on the coffee table and put a hand on my shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said.
“There is! There is and I know what it is!” I told him. “It’s called ADD.”
Attention Deficit Disorder. I could tell from the look on his face that Darry had never heard of it.
“Marble has it. His school had him tested for it, so I did some research of my own,” I explained. Well, really I had Pony do some research for me, since that’s more his area of expertise, and I always changed his oil for him whenever he came to visit so it was fair.
“It means your brain is just different . It makes you have trouble sitting still, and it can make you be more forgetful, and a lot of people that have it have trouble in school. Darry, what they said about it sounded just like me. It was like a list of all the problems I had growing up. I mean, not that I’m just trying to pass the buck, some of my problems were just me, but I think… I think that might be why I struggled so much.”
Darry and I stood in silence for a moment. I was nervous about what Darry would say to that. Darry was an old-fashioned type. He used to worry that me and Pony watched too much TV, and even in his twenties he was complaining about “kids these days.” He hated a lot of new things, the music they played on the radio and how much a gallon of milk cost. I wondered if he’d be able to accept something like this.
“ADD,” he repeated. “So what do they do for it?”
I breathed a sigh of relief that Darry didn’t immediately call it bullshit.
“There’s medication you can take. It’s been helping Marble a lot. I’m going to see if maybe it can’t help me too,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Darry said. “I didn’t know.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I told him. “How could you have known? Nobody really knew about it back then.”
“No, I mean, I didn’t know how much you were suffering. You always seemed so happy...” he explained. His voice sounded like he might start crying too.
“It’s okay,” I assured him. “I’m just grateful to have an explanation, for things to finally make some kind of sense. And, god, it’s a relief to know my son won’t have to go through what I did.”
“You’re a good father, Soda,” he told me, wrapping his arms around me in an unexpected hug. “And you were always a good kid, you just didn’t know it.”
I hugged Darry back.
I was a good kid , I thought. Maybe there aren’t even any bad ones. Maybe there’s just the ones who are misunderstood.