Prose: The Baron's Childhood

Introduction by the Author

THIS PIECE IS COMPRISED OF TWO EPISODES FROM THE VERY FIRST THINGS I EVER WROTE ABOUT THIS CHARACTER CALLED 'THE BARON.' I THINK I'VE CORRUPTED HIS CHARM A LOT SINCE THEN, SO WHILE THIS PIECE IN PARTICULAR, BEING ONLY 5 PAGES INTO THE FIRST 100-page BARON DRAFT, MAY SEEM HALF-BAKED, I THINK IT HAS A CHARM ABOUT IT...

The Baron's Childhood

I am a lover of words, yet in the castle where I spent my formative years, it was words I was denied. Father once said:

“The greatest constipation and procrastination in the history of our species has been the fault of words.”

Before I could open my mouth in defence of language, my father would bark for me to eat my caviar and be grateful I hadn’t been sent to a workhouse years before, as all his other children had, and his father’s children, and his father’s father’s children, ad infinitum.

Though my father detested language, he realised it was the bread upon which the outside world was buttered, so, to acknowledge this, he bought me a wall-chart of the different titles one must use to address those at different strata of society, which everyone knows is the most trying social law a boy must learn. Here is a sample for your pleasure of “The Forms of Address” chart by Franz Kafka:

If addressing a lady one does not wish to wed, the title “Dear Lady” is fine.
If addressing a lady one wishes to wed, the title “My Lady” is kosher.
If addressing a woman who is not a lady, the title “woman” is common.
If addressing an old lady who is rich, one says, “old lady.”
But if addressing an old lady who is not rich, one says, “old woman.”

If addressing the son of a rich man, one says, “Good Man.”
If addressing the son of a poor man, one says, “you boy.”

The chart was impressive indeed, I remember, almost covering an entire wall. A number of my peers, on Sundays when Visitors were allowed, remarked upon its forbidding massivity. Father was proud that I put it up and was determined to learn it; and I felt it was a good present indeed. I was well on my way to starting off in society by learning it, my father said.

“Your father did alright for himself without learning it,” mother said. I was puzzled by this.

“Why did you not learn the chart, father?” I asked him.

“I was raised as a stinking rat in a workhouse, like your brothers,” he replied. And I never brought up the subject again. He used to speak at great lengths about his life in the workhouse, relishing in descriptions of grime, languishing in descriptions of pain – but never did he tell it to me, and nor did I ask about it, but I’ll get onto that later.

The driving force of my family has always been lineage. Our great quest has been to march forward, on and on, into history. You might call it a modest cause: some families aspire to greatness in their group profession, some to smuggle their way into the royal family. But the Spanglers were satisfied with merely pushing on, with existing ad infinitum. And with any luck, centuries from now, some noble descendent of mine might remark that in some way every Spangler from back in history has lived forever. And what more could the world ask, but to be enriched with Spanglers to all eternity!

I do over-simplify the cause, however. It is not sufficient merely to blow one’s seed on just any willing participant; one must extend the line within the confines of The Social Code, at all costs. Which generally means obtaining the most socially respectable applicant possible, to give the line the greatest chance of vivre eternal. And “applicant” is not an un-apt term, for auditions were held for the position, in the days of my mother’s reign. You see, my father ruled the castle during the first ten years of my life, after which he got lazy and allowed my mother to usurp his position; so it was that my mother was in charge of finding me a suitor during my adolescence. Woe betide she who presented herself to my mother as my potential mate. My mother took out a lease on a storefront in town, to my great embarrasment, and called it “Auditions for Good-Quality Wife.” I remember on our first day of business we were bombarded by a horde of desparate spinsters, to who, naturally, it was my job to break the bad news that the husband in question was none other than myself. The horde voiced their displeasure at this information by hurling insults and spitting on me, until suddenly a bottomless supply of rotting fruit materialised, which seemed to do the job much better. I took these complaints on board while mother waited patiently inside.

Mother had to amend the sign to read “Auditions for Future Wife of Society Child.”

I’ll never forget the day a girl called Ursula took us by surprise outside the scheduled audition times one day at a pet store, where we were looking at fertiliser.

The girl tugged at my mother’s skirt, then blushed and curtseyed. She seemed totally unaware of the chocolate smudges on her cheek.

I liked the way the girl looked, even her little stomach that poured over the top of her pants. But mother broke out in laughter at the sight of her, much to my distress. “Well, what do you expect to find,” she remarked, “when you go to a pet store, but an animal.”

Ursula looked at us like a little Buddha, as if with some secret knowledge, as my mother led me out the store, cackling as she went. I fell in love with Ursula that day, and began my courtship the next. It did not last, however, as she was not faithful. She was five years older than I, as were all the girls my mother introduced me to, for she was an ambitious woman.

My mother prided herself on being the best at everything. Or, at least, if she were not, we would all have to pretend she was, including my father and homeless uncle Milton, for fear of a smack. To my great misfortune, this pride of my mother’s also applied to finding me a beau. I was to have a beau before any other boy in polite society, for fear of a smack, even if it meant starting at an age where girls are generally believed to possess certain toxins fatal to boys.

I’ll never forget the day my mother showed me the correct way to squat and relieve myself, which owing to the painfulness of the memory, I have never been able to do any other way. It was a Sunday Evening at Lord’s, a gigantic department store which was having a clearance sale of wedding dresses. My mother and all her girlfriends, all seventy-seven of them, made up a large part of what the Ancient Romans might have called an angry mob, who rat-a-tat-tapped on the big imperial doors of the shopping palace at exactly nine o’clock in the morning, like so many screaming banshees. It was a frightful scene, and enough to turn any boy against marriage, let alone courtship. Boy I was, and boy was I expected to start early, which was not helped by the fact that mother insisted on publically shaming me at every possible opportunity. I still hold that she did it accidentally, like at the department store, for instance. We were in the dressing room, and I told her politely, reasonably, that I would really like very much to go to the bathroom. She ignored this request, so I dropped my pants and pissed on the hospital-smelling carpet.

This was, I admit, a gross error in judgment; but I was, after all, only eight years old. Well past the age of pissing in public, I am aware, but it wasn’t something I considered appropriate, more an act of desperation. My mother was, to say the least, not understanding of my plight. She began to scream bloody murder at me, at the top of her voice declaring what an inviolate little brute she had for a relation (she used this term). She began to spank me, and drag me out of the change rooms, before I had time to pull up my drawers. She managed to drag me, against my will, along the floor of the department store (which can’t have been sanitary on my bare rump), still managing to bend down and aim a good spank at my person every now and then. But the worst part, her favourite torture, was when she began to list a catalogue of my previous wrong-doings:

Just like the time you pulled down your pants for the girls at kindy, you pervert;
Just like the time you embarrassed us all by spanking the bottom of the Jenkinson’s daughter,
Or the time you ran away from me at the grocery store,
Or ran onto the road in Lodge City,
Or threw that tantrum at that Jetson’s theme restaurant because George wouldn’t sign your autograph book. I told you, his hands weren’t real, how could he hold a pen! And you cried like a little girl.

After each item, she would shake her head at me, and steam would emanate from the bolts in her neck. As I said, my mother was a determined woman. She was determined, on this particular occasion, to have my offending organ displayed to the entire department store community, and drag me, body and soul, to the front of the store, where I was to apologise to the store managers for so foully defacing their property. This was her plan of action, and by golly she was going to carry it out. By the time we did reach the front of the store, the store manager was not difficult to find, since he was busily trying to find us, and usher us out of the store. It seemed nobody felt I was welcome there. What had previously been the angry mob, now seemed like merely a lot of separate people, quite normal people, staring at us. The shoppers, including mother’s seventy-seven society mothers, watched as my mother shaped my body into a squatting position of the floor in front of the manager and said “that’s how polite girls piss, not standing up like brute – if you cry like a girl, piss like a girl,” she told me.

The onlookers, who included mother’s seventy-seven girlfriends, looked on, with dropped jaws as the manager tried to calm my mother, saying things like “ma’am, he’s just a child,” or “he seems like a fine boy,” or “really ma’am, I’m sure it was just an accident,” but she would not be consoled. At this point she re-directed her fury at the manager (who turned out to be a university-educated public relations man, instead of a manager, someone with real authority, which only seemed to inflate her anger), which seems like an appropriate place to end this episode, since my mother used words that would be considered inappropriate if this writing is to maintain its (g) rating.

"I don't know," Mother told me, on our way out to the carriage, "if your behaviour is acceptable to the outside world, it will do danger to you to be in it. Quickly, to the castle before we're corrupted any further."