The Cardboard King

One dark morning in March, in a land far from the lands portrayed on TV and in the movies, at a time when the winds blow as black as forests and the rains fall as fresh as homemade bread, Homer finds himself standing in front of Mr. Zarcoccovich’s language arts class, trying to read what he’s written with regard to all the uses one may find for a paper clip.

“You can use it …” he mumbles, face white, paper rattling. His small mind hurtles about, lurching and lunging, even at this late hour, for the magic answer. “You can use it,” he says, stomach aching, “er, to hold papers together?”

The room is silent.

“You askin’?” Poppin’ Fresh pipes up. “Or tellin’?”

Standing against the back wall, Mr. Zarcoccovich shushes Poppin’ Fresh, then glares at Homer and makes a whirling motion with a hand.

“And?” he says.

Homer feels faint. Sweat droplets have formed on his upper lip. He hears titters. He could swear he hears titters.

“And ...” Homer says, wondering whether he should break for the door.

“Yes?”

“Er, that’s about it, I s’pose.”

The class brays with laughter. Even Lolly giggles.

Even Lolly.

Homer sidles back to his seat, shrugging the whole way, teeth clenched in a smile. One by one, his classmates take their turns at the podium, reciting the multitude of uses for a paper clip. They won’t stop. Homer tries mental hexes, selective listening, but their ideas seem bottomless. They go on and on, on and on, their lips disclosing use after brilliant use. Following the onslaught, Mr. Zarcoccovich summons Homer to his desk.

“Listen, I don’t mean to be the bad guy, here, but you had twenty minutes to come up with uses for a paper clip,” he says, red lips moving like some kind of small animal in his black beard, “and that’s all the better you could do?”

“I, er …” Homer stammers, heart pounding against his rib cage, “reckon so.”

“You did the same thing with the pencils,” Mr. Zarcoccovich says. “Remember?” His voice squeaks. “I gave you twenty minutes there, too, and all you could come up with was ‘something to write with’? Hey, I’m not asking for miracles, just better time management; that’s all. It’s called using your time wisely. Make sense?”

Homer nods. But he knows, deep down where nobody can find it, he’d pushed and grunted with the best of them, pushed and grunted in his mind for each of the twenty minutes allotted for the paper clip and pencil exercises—pushed and grunted and pushed and grunted until he thought his brain would burst.

His cover’s been blown once again. His total lack of imagination’s gone public.
His best friend Grunter knows. Crazy Larry and Poppin’ Fresh know. And possibly worst of all, Lolly knows—Lolly with the cobalt eyes and pale crimson cheeks, with the white-gold cool-whip hair like the sun at high noon, with the one hundred one uses for a paper clip.

“Hey pal, what do you do with a paper clip?” Poppin’ Fresh says with a chuckle in the hallway after class, his Cro-Magnon face exhibiting evidence of unwashed splotches of acne ointment. “I can tell you. Tell me if I’m right. You can use it ... let me guess ... to hold papers together? Yuck, yuck.”

He whacks Homer on a shoulder.

“Pretty classic,” Grunter grunts. “Pret-ty classic. Even I came up with a gob.”

“You’re some comedian,” Crazy Larry says, mussing Homer’s hair.

Homer smiles politely. He resolves, at this moment, but only deep down where nobody can find and ridicule it, to erect a terrifying superstructure of imagination. He vows, from this day forward, to find more than one use for a paper clip and at least thirty-five for a pencil. He swears to make sense of what goes down in Mr. Zarcoccovich’s language arts.

So when nobody’s looking or keeping track, particularly, Homer steals to the high school and public libraries and spends ungodly amounts of time grinding through microfilm and scholarly journals on the history and workings of practical creativity and the imagination in general.

He even orders filmstrips.

But the more Homer studies, the less he understands; the more he gets in theory, the less he gets in practice, and the more hopeless it all seems.

“So much for the superstructure,” he laments. “I’m nothing but a grunt.”

With Homer’s language arts grade-point plunging at a horrific rate and ponderous units on imaginative literature racing up to kiss his face, along comes Martin Finkmeyer, Smoky River Junior High’s resident egghead, the one who wrote the book on paper clips and pencils, the only one in the school who once figured out “If Kenn is older than Rod, and Rod is younger than George, and Josey’s age is one-third of the way between Kenn’s and George’s, which one can sell the most Kool-Aid in February?”

“Next time you’re asked to do something like that,” Finkmeyer rasps one jaded afternoon in April, leaning forward across the library table in study hall, gentle eyes bulging from a triangular face, “give yourself five minutes ...”

“Five minutes?” Homer says, leaning toward him with anticipation.

“Yep. And then call, ‘Taxi!’” Finkmeyer hisses, looking around.

Homer pops back, blinking.

“Taxi?”

“Taxi,” Finkmeyer confirms, touching an index finger to his lips. “Like you mean it.”

And for seven dollars and a bag of circus peanuts, Martin Finkmeyer reveals to Homer the secrets of surviving Mr. Zarcoccovich’s language arts class.

“Many people don’t know this,” Finkmeyer says, while practicing extracurricular electromagnetic meditation in the school’s photo developing lab a few days later, “but for most teachers, all it takes is a lot of nodding of the head, like this.”

And Finkmeyer shows Homer how to nod his head.

“But the Golden Rule,” Finkmeyer warns, “is never, ever, go for more than you can fake.”

So armed with this information, Homer returns to Mr. Zarcoccovich’s language arts class a new creature, and as remarkable as it may sound, he begins to nod his way out of the grade-point cellar.

He keeps a stiff upper lip while Mr. Zarcoccovich employs his most musical inflections to bring various and sundry bardic illustrations to life. He goes along with the lessons on allegory and foreshadowing, even though deep down where no one can find it, he giggles at Plato for going to all the trouble. He rigorously records group responses to questions on theme and symbol in The Scarlet Letter. He even plays along for two weeks’s worth of the Yin and Yang travesty.
When he’s called upon to imitate the style of a great poet, he pays Martin Finkmeyer an additional fee to write him a doozer. And when Mr. Zarcoccovich assigns the unpleasant task of memorizing and reciting a favorite poem, Finkmeyer teaches Homer one about a cold hand and an icy tomb.

“Cool,” Homer says.

And he means it.

Everybody’s impressed—Mr. Zarcoccovich, Grunter, Crazy Larry, even Poppin’ Fresh. Even Lolly, the long-time specter of Homer’s most secret yearnings, the private hemlock for his public image of equanimity.

“I loved your poem,” she says in the hallway after class, standing there in a baggy maroon cheerleader sweater and pleated old-gold skirt, cobalt-eyed, creamy-faced and pug-nosed, legs the usual texture of honey dew melons. “It was very moving.”

And that’s the moment Homer forgets everything Martin Finkmeyer’s taught him. That’s when the nod gives way to hubris, when Homer begins to believe he’s become a language arts wizard, begins to believe paper clips and pencils actually mean more than meets his eye.

From that moment on, Homer believes imagination has descended from on high to indwell in him. He puzzles Mom with quotes from Byron. He frightens Grunter, Crazy Larry and Poppin’ Fresh with lengthy discourses on the structure of Trollope novels. He builds a necklace and a bracelet out of paper clips and a cute little crown out of worn-down pencils and presents them to Lolly.

And it comes to pass that one morning Homer finds himself volunteering to be Lear in the annual school play put on by Mr. Zarcoccovich’s language arts class.

To be whom?

Indeed, that five-fingered extremity raised eagerly toward the ceiling tiles would in fact appear to be Homer’s.

“Hey pal, do you feel hot?” Poppin’ Fresh says.

“You?” Grunter says. “Lear?”

“Some comedian,” Crazy Larry says, mussing Homer’s hair.

“I do it for Lolly,” Homer says, numb and slightly out of breath. “She is my daughter Cordelia.”

And with that, Grunter, Crazy Larry and Poppin’ Fresh hasten away.

On the eve of opening night, the omnipresent Finkmeyer’s waiting for Homer backstage after dress rehearsal.

“Good luck,” he says, limply shaking hands with the new King. “Good luck in whatever you do.”

And then he blesses Homer, or seems to, looks around, and vanishes.

Funny man, Homer thinks. Funny, funny man.

The big night arrives. Homer takes his place behind the auditorium curtain. He feels good. He’s in character. Mr. Zarcoccovich beams off in the shadows, clenching and unclenching his fists. Parents, students and concerned citizens of the community shuffle in. Programs are distributed, pop and popcorn sold. Voices murmur; voices buzz. The feeling is magical.

Then the curtain rises and the spotlight hits Homer sitting there in a done-up recliner and glowing in tent-like vestments from the local parish, pretending to be King. He wears a cardboard crown, plastered with glitter and those paper stars Mrs. Schlitvit, his third-grade teacher, used to stick on his spelling quizzes. He wears a wig, too—a wig! and a pinky-finger ring with a green stone as big as a boiler.

He hears titters in the audience.

Suddenly, Homer feels lightheaded, and his brow begins to bead with sweat.
He could swear he hears titters. Or is it popcorn crunching?

“Look at the fems!” someone howls from the dark of the audience.

“Nice prop!” another exclaims, referring to the cardboard castle wall behind Homer, the one that could go tumbling down should Mr. Underwood, the janitor, open a door to get a broom.

And everyone knows right off it’s only Lolly, sitting next to Homer in a huge hoop skirt; knows right off it’s only Homer’s good friend Grunter, with a red face, decked out in gray tights and bedroom slippers, straddling a broom handle attached to a papier-mâché horse’s head; only Crazy Larry and Poppin’ Fresh, dolled up in furry robes and eye shadow and having trouble with their vocabulary.

No matter how hard Homer tries to pretend it isn’t happening, his imagination turns back into its old pumpkin self, begins to assert with authority that, at the very most, this pompous exercise is a play, and it has no apparent purpose but to put Homer on display before the giggling public. Zarcuckoo for Coccovich is off in the shadows, the safe shadows, beaming and biting his knuckles, but that’s because he’s not out here sweating in the light, wearing a wig and a necklace, faking like a Broadway star and shouting lines that don’t have any words to make them go.

If Shakespeare were around, Homer reasons, he’d be of a mind to introduce him to one serious haymaker. And as the bard lay there on the ground, bleeding from the nose, fingering his fat lip and looking up at Homer with those wide, terror-stricken eyes, Homer would utter with impeccable projection, “Doth any here know me?—Why, this is not Lear: doth Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, or his discernings are lethargied.”

Homer would tell him, “Chew on that one, Billy boy.”

Homer would tell him he knows what it’s all about. He knows, all right. He’d tell him it’s all about making a buck. It’s all about sitting out there in the dark and having a good laugh. It’s all about rings and crowns and robes and nouns.