Chapter 2: Kilroy was Here

By the time Olney Garkle was a year old, instinct had already been nagging at him for what seemed like eternity. Walk, it said. Don't be a beetle-brain, stand up and be counted. Though his brain's baby neurons still swirled in the chaos of pre-experience, googoo-boy Garkle was stung by the latter remark. Yet, how to implement the great task. The giants who looked after him were apparently unable to help; the small one whimpered all the time and the big one either glowered or made booming noises, usually at the small one. What was a baby to do?

One evening, infant Olney was sitting in his crib and gurgling with delight over the soft little dimples on his fat little knees, when he heard the big giant raving again in the next room. The boy baby didn't know it, but World War Two was in full bloom and dad was delivering another patriotic speech to mom. Mom fretted as she ironed dad's shirts and listened to his tirade against the Nazis and Japs. She was trying to make herself invisible at the ironing board because her husband's fervent explosions of hate for the enemy, coupled with a wildly enthusiastic love for America, so often ended in a beating. Or worse. Interpreting her attempted self-compression as disinterest, he would turn on her. "You don't care about your country's future." he yelled as he slapped her black and blue. When it was worse, he would push her to the cold linoleum floor and take her from behind.

Olney had no idea what dad was saying or doing, but the tone of the big man's giant voice worked on him, urging him to reject the simple pleasures of dimple fondling and meet the two-fisted world head-on. Indeed, his father's voice instilled in him a complex set of mechanisms. Among them: the urge to act without thinking, a penchant for bombast and hysteria, and a need to subjugate the mom-types of the world into loin-warming submission. Later in life, inklings of his father's founding impact on his psyche would often rise to dampen his forehead. But now he was overwhelmed by excitement. The time had come.

Olney Garkle stood up. He walked from one end of his crib to the other, and back again. He walked and walked and walked.

Neither instinct nor dad's powerful baritone had prepared him for such a joyous moment. His infant whoops and hollers gave vent to the pre-verbal power coursing through his jubilant veinlets: immortality was his. Instinct, now posing as experience, told him that self-determining perseverance always paid off in miracles. In a state of divine praxis, little Olney tore off his cuddly Dr. Denton's and thrust a hardon of accomplishment and glory through the slatted ramparts of his crib. Mission: first upright encounter with the two-fisted world.

As karma would have it, the two-fisted world punched back, and pronto.

In whom were the bully-blows of the ignoble world embodied? In Mom and Dad America (the latter refreshed by a bottle of Acme beer), who came a-running to see what all the noise was about. "What on earth," exclaimed dad as he slapped the lewd little penis. "Bad boy. Bad boy," brayed mom in church-hymn rhythm to the metronomic finger of stern Citizen Dad. Fetching the boy's rent jammies with disgust, dad said: "If you think our fighting men are dying like flies to protect sex perverts like you, then think again, chum." As Olney cowered in the furthest corner of his crib (while caprice and irresolution claimed the smoking ruins of a glowing future based on confidence and sound political judgment), he couldn't know that America's Christian soldiers were then digging trenches against rapacious cultures in Europe and Asia. "Now stay put until you learn to behave like a good American boy. This world is full of heathens who need a good killing, and in the name of God I won't have you trying to be one of 'em."

Dad was thrilled to death with World War II. The idea of young men (in particular, those of the greasy minorities) blowing each other to bits electrified his imagination. He was too old to go, but often dreamed of being one of the generals who planned entrail-splattering battles while sipping coffee in a comfy tent, miles from the action. Instead, he counted on his son for the fulfillment of his dreams; the seed of his loins would serve the country in future wars, giving dad due cause to brag to his cronies at the chemical warfare plant. Dad's motto: Stand tall and be killed!never failed to send his right-thinking mind into feverish fantasies. Pitting nation against nation until they reached the glorious breaking point, he would rejoice as the world once again slaughtered its youth. "Sacrifice!" he often bellowed from battles raging deep within the 40-winks he took every evening in his easy chair. "The United States of America is under attack. Spare the life of no one."

For mom's part, she stood by her man through the good times and the bad. Her soul, woven tightly with Protestant fibre, was the doormat upon which he strode with dignity. Whenever the hell of peace on earth should prove too much for him, she was there to comfort him with the slogans he had taught her. Together they tried their darndest to suppress evolution. Olney Garkle, their only child, was to be the model of that righteous suppression.

As karma would have it…

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The age of reason was just around the corner when Olney discovered his alter ego. He and his mom had been walking to Van de Kamp's bakery to buy some cookies. As usual, Olney was excited at the prospect of eating more than his share without being caught until long after he'd eaten them. He'd get a blistering, no doubt, but gorging himself on all those chocolate bit cookies would be worth dad's welt-raising outrage. Besides, he could always concentrate on sucking chocolate from his teeth while the old man pounded away.

His mind was full of these courageous and naughty thoughts when he saw The Face for the first time. Young Olney was so moved he stopped dead in his tracks, making mom stop too. "What's got into you," she asked irritably. "I'm looking at my friend," he replied. "Friend? What friend? There's no one here." And she whisked him along with such force that his Buster Brown's left the sidewalk. As he stole a backward glance, he knew the fat-cheeked fellow was just like him, though at the time he couldn't say why.

Olney wanted desperately to meet this new friend, this intriguing other Olney. An impossible dream, of course, for Kilroy was only an image chalked on a wall near the bakery. Written beneath the round face with its big drooping nose and examining eyes was the legend: "Kilroy was here." Olney pondered the enigma as he and his mom passed by the wall again on the way home. Slipping two cookies from the sack instead of one, Olney wondered how he could get hold of this person. It posed a problem, for Kilroy hadn't been here the last time they went to Van de Kamps and, now that they were well past the wall, he still wasn't here. So where was he? There? Where did people go when they weren't here? Did they all huddle together in a place called "there"? "There" could even be many places. People were always talking about how much it cost to go "there" or "there it goes," or "stay out of there," and all of them together added up to everywhere but here.

But what did that mean? If "there" was "everywhere else," did people's bodies fly apart when they weren't "here?" Did they just evaporate and blow away? Mom's too? Olney was the only person he knew who was always here. Even when Mom would demand "What were you doing in there." he'd still been here when he was in there.

To make matters worse, mom was always saying that God lived everywhere. She even corroborated Olney's theory by saying God didn't have a body. But if God lived everywhere and didn't have a body, then God and everyone lived together most of the time, at least when they were all over there. Maybe God and everyone was even the same person.

Olney remained suitably awed by these considerations on the way home, vowing to investigate soon. For the moment his practical nature had the upper hand; the hand which shoved another cookie into his mouth while adding one more to the secret collection in his pocket.

He spent the next couple of days running commando raids on mom and dad's bedroom, sure he'd catch them in the act of being there. It gave him goosebumps to sneak slowly down the hall, then rush on tiptoes for a quick peek into the certain horrors of his worst nightmares. He never had any luck, but once his young heart nearly gave out when he realized that if he'd arrived a split-second earlier, he would have seen dad whizzing his body back to stand nonchalantly before the mirror. The awful monster had known Olney was coming.

Taking up where mom left off, dad introduced his only beloved son to the wonders of paranoia by saying that God was watching everything Olney did no matter where the little devil was doing it. Dad was probably right, because Olney knew lots of kids who believed they were surrounded by God; one of his friends was even terrified by the thought. "God's always breathing down my neck," the boy once told him while munching furiously on a Clark bar he'd bought with a nickel stolen from his big sister.

To keep from going under, Olney devised a belief system that finally allowed him to come to terms with this divine glitch in the unfolding of life. Resourcefully, he enlisted God as the sidekick to his cowboy adventures. In this way, he could keep his eye on the Almighty while doing as he pleased. Together they spent many afternoons rounding up critters and varmints while glad-handing cookies every time mom turned her back.

Where God really lived was probably on the other side of the mountains, the ones Olney could see best when he and mom went shopping at Bullocks and they took the escalator to the third floor. From a window near where mom tried on girdles, the mountains were clear and huge; he was sure the world ended there, where they met the sky: the beginning of everywhere. Maybe Kilroy lived in that strange land, too. Maybe Kilroy was God. No, mom was religious--a little nutty about it, Olney was beginning to realize--and she would have recognized him/Him. As it was, she hadn't noticed Kilroy at all.

Neither Olney nor his friends had ever met or even seen Kilroy, yet the stranger's message kept popping up, and sometimes in the craziest places, like the bathroom at the public library. Olney giggled when he saw it just above the toilet paper dispenser; somebody'd turned Kilroy's nose into a stiff pecker. He figured Kilroy would've laughed too. And that's where Kilroy and God parted company. According to mom, and especially dad, God never laughed. As far as Olney was concerned, they were right. As a sidekick, God had been a real whinger. Despite Olney's best efforts at heroism and humor, the Almighty was always bitching and moaning. All He wanted were the cookies.

After awhile, the boy Garkle came to wonder if his idol Kilroy was a member of the criminal element, a crook who never dared show himself in the flesh. Olney spent a couple of years acting out disappearing Kilroy-the-mobster routines. Only trouble was Kilroy always turned into his sidekick, God's successor, and a good sidekick at that. And he never disappeared till he'd done good. Olney knew that criminals never did good. Kilroy, the cowboy's chum, was always saving people from wrongdoers and then riding out of town without letting anyone get to know him, like the Lone Ranger. Only trouble was, nobody ever saw him ride in to town. Olney tried explaining the situation to the townsfolk, but they wouldn't hear of saviors they couldn't see. Olney felt sorry for his invisible hero. Until, that is, he felt the legend building and himself turning into Kilroy's sidekick. It was around then he changed playtime scenarios.

Yet, like mom's God's little boy, Jesus, Olney had to believe that Kilroy had been here all right. He'd drawn his picture and signed his name, hadn't he? And there was something mystical about his proclamation: "Kilroy was here."

Over the years, Kilroy's manifestation appeared in different places around town, and always with the same message. The other kids had long since lost interest, but Olney was more impressed than ever. He learned, through a cousin who lived hundreds of miles away, that Kilroy had been in his town too. Jeepers, that other Olney was the biggest mystery of all times.

Naturally, the kids all laughed at him for being so naive. "Kilroy's like Santa Claus, stupid." "He's like the Easter Bunny, idiot." Yet to Olney the question drilled straight to the core of his being. "Who am I," he was later to blurt, rephrasing the question during the heyday of his adolescence. By then it was obvious that he and his peers were going to eternity in different directions. They never asked the question, but for Olney, once asked, it never went away. A simple thunder and lightning request to solve the riddle of life that demanded the efforts of Job to answer.

Where to begin? Howto begin? Olney hated Kilroy for awhile. Somehow that fat-nosed absentee had started all this, and Olney wasn't sure he could finish it. "Too hard," he wailed.

It was hard, all right. Olney had to put "who" on the back burner for several decades while he wandered the oasis-ridden desert of his life's lessons. Like Kilroy, he was destined to spend life moving on, with his nose dangling from the O of Outsider.

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Chapter 3: Secrets of the American Dream

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