Where Have All the Children Gone?
By Kendall Giles
I have to make a confession. When I was in the fourth grade at Sandusky Elementary School, I was one of those kids who dealt in the black market. See, there was this other fourth-grader there named Jerry C., and I had inside knowledge that he was in the market for a certain something–a certain something that, if brought to school, would get that person in really big trouble, like with the Vice-Principal Rubinberg or even Principal Fauber.
Jerry was careful though, and he never really talked about “it” when other people were around. But one day when we were out on the playground, we wandered down onto the lower soccer field where no one else was around, and that’s when he mentioned he was in the market for a snake.
There was actually a pretty healthy black market back then in our elementary school for lots of things. You just had to know where to go and what to ask for. Like one time I sold Allen F. some drawings of some dinosaurs I made. And when I found a small bottle of that glue that you could put on your fingertips, let harden, then eat the waxy residue off, well, I traded that to Jason J. for his pencil box. He didn’t ask me where I got my glue from, and I didn’t ask him were he got his pencil box from. It was a simple playground exchange, and no one suspected anything.
Another time Robbie D. was going to sell me four drawings of Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss from the rock group Kiss, but I couldn’t get Robbie to drop his asking price below 25 cents. He drove a hard bargain. But I played it cool, and the next morning I got to the school early, and made a deal with one of the cleaning staff. I vacuumed the carpet on one wing of the school so he could slip away for a few minutes, and in return he paid me 25 cents. Oh, yeah.
Anyway, my biggest deal happened with Jerry, though one lesson in the black market is that sometimes it’s all about being in the right place at the right time. Jerry was really into snakes, and I was too, so we hatched this idea of writing our own book on snakes. We’d read all the snake books in the library and we thought we could write an even better book. So our first idea was to cut sentences from all the different snake books and then combine all those sentences into one great, big snake book.
We thought about this idea for a while, and over the course of several days discussed the plan on our walks around the lower soccer field. Then one day, I don’t remember whose idea it was, but one of us pointed out that our snake book would be even better if we had a real live snake to talk about. Like, if we could write about a snake after actually having seen a real one, then that should be better than writing about a snake after having only read about it in a book, right? It made sense at the time. So Jerry was now in the market for a snake, and he was even willing to pay money for it.
Well, that’s where being in the right place at the right time came into play. Each morning my mom would drive me to school by the Sandusky Park and Pool, which were set in some woods by a big creek. The pool was super fun, and if you got tired of swimming in the pool you could cross this wooden bridge over the creek and play on the playground or play basketball on a small court, or you could hop down the bank and splash around in the creek itself.
Moreover, in the springtime, before the pool had opened, a few of us knew a secret way to get into the pool and we could collect all the tadpoles we wanted. Except that time Russell K. and I got caught by the neighbor lady in the pool with our jar of tadpoles. No, I’m no longer bitter about the incident, but, I mean, what, she spent her whole day looking out her window watching over the pool?
Anyway, unless there was a water moccasin slithering in or something dead washed up on the basketball court or the creek overflowed its banks and dumped muddy water into the pool, the Sandusky Pool and Park were fun places to hang out as a kid.
I mention this because one morning I thought I had seen a dead snake by the side of the road where it dipped next to the creek by the pool and park. So I asked Jerry if he’d put up money for a dead snake.
We looked at each other for a minute and, again, I don’t remember whose idea this was, but one of us suggested that a dead snake was even more valuable than a live snake, since you could put the dead snake out in your yard and it would attract other snakes to it, like the live snakes would come around in sympathy, or mourning, or something. We weren’t sure about the exact scientific explanation, but somehow it seemed reasonable that the dead snake would whisper to the live snakes, attract them, and then all Jerry’d have to do is catch the live snakes.
It seemed like a good plan, so in the end Jerry offered me one dollar for my extremely valuable dead snake. Now, all I had to do was connect the buyer with the goods. Oh, yeah.
The next day on the drive to school I managed to convince my mom to drop me off at the pool and let me walk the rest of the way to school–it’s about a half mile from the deceased snake point to the school. Somehow my mom relented, and so dropped me off about ten feet from the dead snake.
The snake was belly up by that point, and there were a few flies around, but only one end of it was squished. I thought for a few minutes about how to actually get the snake to school. After a flash of insight, I took out from my brown paper lunch bag my peanut butter sandwich. It was in a plastic bag, and so I took out the sandwich and put it back into the paper lunch bag, then picked up the snake off the ground and put that into the plastic bag, then put the plastic bag with the snake into my paper lunch bag. Boom, just like that. I then walked the rest of the way to school with my extremely valuable lunch bag. During recess, Jerry paid me the dollar and I gave him the snake. Entrepreneurism is good!
I quickly forgot about the deal, but then a couple days later Principal Fauber tapped me on the shoulder and summoned me out of social studies class. That’s when I learned I was in big trouble. See, Jerry had left the snake in his locker the whole time and there was this awful smell and mess everywhere. I was soon fingered. Needless to say, it wasn’t a pretty sight nor was the aftermath. Let’s put it this way–thus ended my experiences as an elementary school black marketer.
That was all some thirty years ago, and for the most part I’ve put the matter behind me. I guess it’s a bit underwhelming for me to confess to being an elementary school black marketer now, perhaps much like Paul McCartney a few years ago finally confessing what the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was really all about.
So why am I bringing this up?
I drove by the Sandusky pool the other day and it’s been filled in and covered with asphalt for a parking lot. The creek is still there, but the playground and basketball court are gone. And I saw recently where several resorts with Bumper Car rides are too worried that kids will get hurt bumping cars, so they are forbidding that the bumper cars actually bump each other; they’ve re-named the rides from Bumper Cars to Dodgems. And it seems that some elementary schools are providing condoms for their students. And I read in the news about an elementary school student bringing a loaded 9mm semi-automatic pistol to school to sell, for $3.50.
I could go on, but I have to ask: Where have all the children gone?