Wild Ones

When I was a boy my friends and I had a simple moral code: don’t commit felonies, they’ll get you in real trouble. All other crimes, however, especially your petty misdemeanors, were not only permissible, they were to be pursued routinely as a means of displaying childhood bravado. The fellas always admired daring.

That’s why we shoplifted. I’m not proud of this, but it’s a fact. We stole. And I mean often.

We used to hit a five and dime in the neighborhood, run by elderly twin sisters from Alsace Lorraine. They were overwhelmed by our descent on their operation each afternoon, so when our lunch break would come and we’d beeline from our elementary school to their little market, the ladies would enlist the help of a butcher in the back room. His name was Louie, and he was summoned at the first sign of our tangled hair passing by the store front window.

“Louie,” the women would yell. “The boys are here.” And into the main room would lumber a somber, stocky, Eastern European fellow with meaty paws, a graying crew cut and a mug that looked like a slightly more at ease Boris Karloff.

Louie would monitor the candy racks while we “shopped,” returning to the back room only after we had paid up and left.

For us, the trick was to try and get some candy into our sleeves before Louie could make it up to the front of the store. If we didn’t move fast enough, we faced a challenge few of us were up to: nabbing a little Turkish taffy with Louie hovering six feet away, moving his eyes from one set of hands to another, all the while staring as if he’d just as soon fillet us as watch us.

It all seemed like a grand game back then, a grand and dangerous game. It’s all we ever sought in life, danger. Testing ourselves, challenging one and other, learning where the lines were, where our own lines were. If it wasn’t taking on Louie, it was taking on the cops. Could they find us in the dark, on the shores of the Mississippi, with our eight gallon keg of Pabst? What about our teachers? Would they figure out we’d unlocked windows before the final afternoon bell, so that at night we could double back, sneak into school, ride bicycles down the hall ways? And the drivers of those cars on winter roads, did they see us sneak up behind them and grab on to those quarter panels so as to slide at high speeds along the icy streets. What would they do if they stopped? How far would they chase us?

Pushing, pressing, testing, experimenting, recording and collecting data in our minds, learning how to live, how to fly, how to make it in a wildly mysterious world that seemed wondrous, strange, and at times, foreboding.

What did we learn on those streets? What did we learn from the trials of family life, from the pain of our crimes? What was the right way to be raised? I don’t think any of us ever found it. We raised each other. We were brother and father to one and other, sometimes mother, too. Perhaps that’s why these boys are still with me today. Perhaps something happened in those alleys, on those roof tops and in those frenzied late night chases. Our moms and dads were asleep at home. Tired, old, ready for a different kind of life, fed up with the chore of raising so many kids. We were on our own. So we clung to one and other. And something was fused. And it remains, decades later.

Louie, the boys are here. Right here, in Saint Paul. Still.

We have kids of our own now. And we’ve matured a bit. We don’t want to see our youngsters as feral as we once were.

But at night, sometimes, when the children have been put to bed, we all meet down at the corner bar. And beneath the graying, thinning hair, we notice those same eyes from our youth, wild as ever. Looking longingly for the edge, for the lines. So that we can stand just this side of them once more, and peer over.