The Wild Huckleberry Boy (a short sketch)

The Wild Huckleberry Boy
(1955-1958)





I called my friend, Michael Rosert, Huckleberry, or Huckleberry Mike; perhaps the reason being, he was wild, like the Huckleberry plant, he grew wild in the conservative City of the Midwest, a native St. Paul boy.
The Huckleberry is a fruit of Idaho, but the wild Huckleberry grows in the woods kind of a false berry. I might have chosen to say I was like Mike, but I think as I look back, he being a year or two younger than I, I followed him usually, not the other way around, and probably I was more influenced by him, then he, I.
The huckleberry comes in red and blue I am told, depending on the species, and they are grown according to the customs of the environment, the area they live in, and he accordingly became who he was because of that—and as you read on, that statement may make more sense.
I suppose also I called him the wild berry, or Huckleberry, because of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, they were like one another in many ways a century apart but nonetheless, of the same stock; there are so many reasons when I look back, at Mike, that I can relate him to the Wild Huckleberry, and now the quick synapse of Mike and me.
We did a lot together in those few formative years (1955 thru 1958). He lived in the inner circle of the city, I perhaps in the middle circle of the inner city, he lived in the more rummaged area, you could say, near Linda Macaulay, a girl we knew from school (St. Louis, by 10th and Cedar streets), and once I fought Mike over her, that is to say, over her honor, something like that, or perhaps it was my honor, and he said something I didn’t like and he wouldn’t take it back, and eventually he did, because I won of course, the fight, since I was a half foot taller than he.
On manly occasions before we went out for our adventure of the day, I’d have to wake Mike up, this was a process. I’d climb his apartment complex, up the side by the drain pipes, onto the second floor, scale the window ledges, knock on the window, and his mother and father, one would wake up, they all slept in one big room, two beds, a sofa chair, a divider for Mike (a table to the side, in a little cubbyhole of a room, called he kitchen, with three painted white wooden chairs) the divider, consisted of a cloths hanger, and a sheet draped over it, and I’d knock on the window and the mother or father would say:
“It’s your friend again Mike, he’s at the window, why’s he got to knock on the window, tell him to use the door.”
But the downstairs door was always locked, and one of the other tenants never came down to open it and neither did Mike or his family, so it was as it had to be I felt.
Fine, Mike would get up, open the window, and I’d wait in the kitchen as he readied himself.
Then we’d often head on downtown, walk along the Mississippi River bank, look into the caves, find an old bum or drunk, go kick him in the feet, throw sand in his face, and run like heck. Usually we’d end up on the Robert Street Bridge, looking over it as he scolded us from below, laughing our hearts sick.

I think Mike liked to tease the bums a lot, fill old wine bottles with unthinkable substances and give it to them, and again we’d jump on our bikes and peddle like the Roadrunner would, down to that old bridge. Then in the afternoons we’d go into Woolworth, or Grants department stores, and buy cigarettes out of the vending machines, and if the manage was looking, run again. In Junior High School, I went out for track, and the reason I think I was so good—for I won all state—was because I had so much prior experience with Mike running from those bums, and managers and so forth.
Once we went out to a farm, we talked Mike’s father into taking us, and we never saw a pigs, giant hogs testacies so huge, and they were huge, and we laughed so hard in front of his mother and father, we had gut aches, and when we had to explain why we were laughing, insanely, it made it worse, and the father laughed, and the mother didn’t know what to do and said, “You guys are so silly.” And we were, and even she couldn’t hold it back, and had a little chuckle too, but was a little red in the face.
There was a summer, one summer if I recall right, we went searching through vacant houses, rummaging through, they were building new government buildings, and many bridges, and highways, in downtown St. Paul—in time people would refer to that section as ‘Spaghetti Junction,’ (and in a decade have to tare down half those multi million dollar bridges for wider ones, and replace them elsewhere) well, it was tenant housing for the most part, and my brother had his paper route there, and I and Mike searched those houses, got a few items, and jumped over a few bums sleeping, again running from them on occasions, but once I found a map of the United States, 1846, and I treasured that, and told myself: someday Dennis you’re going to see it all, and I have seen 46-states out of fifty to this writing. On another day, I found an old picture, framed, it was of Notre Dame de Paris, again I treasured it, and I went to Paris four times in my life, and perhaps forty-times inside that cathedral. It’s funny, but true; we sometimes fulfill childhood dreams, even if it takes a life time.
We’d go out to Como Park, Mike and I, walk around, and if he or I had a few dollars, or cents, we’d go on a ride. Once we had our picture taken from one of those old camera men, with an old camera on an old tripod stand, and for half an hour the old man tried to get us perfect, “Stand here, stand there, over there, its to sunny there, move over here in the shade,” and so forth, and then took the picture, and it got sun in it, and Mike had fifteen cents, and I had a dime, and the picture was thirty-cents, and so we were five cents short, and Mike told the man, “Look, the sun got a portion of the picture, so why not cut us a deal, make it twenty-five cents,” and the man did, and we got the picture. Mike got the negative; back in those days with those kind of cameras, you first made a negative, then the picture, and I got the picture, not sure why, Mike paid the better half, if I recall.

Well, this writing is more of a tribute to Michael Rosert, of those far-off days, the wild huckleberry, the one who used to push all those buttons on the elevator, at the Emporium Department store riding up and own the elevator as if it was his private jet, and perhaps it was.

May 31, 2008