When it finally came time for me to go on, I had secured the bouquet of buttercups and the red balloon under my shell. Hurriedly I had scribbled whatever came to mind across a corner of a program, and tucked it inside the bouquet.
It was the second verse from “La Cucaracha,” which I wrote out in Spanish (Cuando uno quiere a una, etc.), to make it more secret and romantic. Translated, it simply said: When a fellow loves a maiden, And that maiden doesn’t love him, It’s the same as when a bald man Finds a comb upon the highway.
My theme song was a strange song, anyway. Most people came to know that “La Cucaracha” meant “The Cockroach,” but few people knew the verses. Once at a Wilton High School assembly I sang the first verse in Spanish, as the song was written.
The principal called me into his office later and said, “You’re some kind of a smart aleck, aren’t you, Cinnamon?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Singing about marijuana that way.”
“That’s the song,” I said. “I didn’t make up the words.”
“You didn’t make up porque le falta, marihuana que fumar?”
“That’s the song,” I said. “La cucaracha, la cucaracha, doesn’t want to travel on Because she hasn’t Oh no she hasn’t Marihuana for to smoke.”
I don’t think he believed me. I think he thought marijuana was some new weed discovered in the seventies and couldn’t possibly be referred to in a song written when he was a boy my age.
I had smoked marijuana only once, with a three-foot girl who worked at Leprechaun Village. One of her jobs was in the dining room after dinner, when she would pass from table to table wearing fairy wings and passing out chocolate mints on a silver tray. We smoked grass under the porch of the boathouse one night, watching the moon on the lake. I had heard that pot made you more romantic and I was trying to screw up the courage to kiss her, but after I smoked it, all I could think about was food, and the only thing she was curious about was whether or not someone with a hump could sleep on his back.
I told her no, not very well, it was easier on the sides or on the stomach, and we scampered hand in hand up to raid the kitchen of French pastries.
My big romance was with a normal-size girl whose parents had hired me to be BABY 1979 at a New Year’s Eve party. Her name was Andrea Applebaum, and she wore braces across her front teeth that made my lips bleed after I kissed her. She told me she had a genius-level I.Q. and intended to become a Phi Beta Kappa when she went to college, and she made out a reading list for me of books even Cloud hadn’t heard of, like Goethe’s novella The New Melusine, in which a young man falls in love with a dwarf and becomes one himself in order to marry her.
We’d sneaked down to her family’s rec room in the basement, where she played me tapes of old songs by The Beatles and held me in her lap, kissing my hair.
“Andrea Applebaum,” I said at one point, “tell me you mean this and I’m not just an experiment.”
“I don’t mean anything I do,” she said. “I’m having a good time, though.”
I wrote her three letters after that night and she wrote me four.
Interesting that you’ve become The Roach, she wrote in the last letter. I’m just reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which a man is changed into a roachlike character and everyone shuns him. I suppose I would find him attractive. I did you. My mother keeps asking me who this Sydney Cinnamon is who writes to me. God! If she knew!
I ran out of the energy to keep up my correspondence with Andrea Applebaum, but I am still reading the books on her list and have never since had such a good time on New Year’s Eve.
Once I got the shell over my body, and the sun came beating down, the stink of Endust almost made me upchuck. But I danced until I thought I’d drop, and right in front of where Little Little La Belle sat with all of her family.
I could watch her through the peepholes at the front of my shell. She was standing in the front row of the bleachers, clapping for me and laughing.
At the very end of my dance, I stopped in front of her.
From under my shell I stretched out my arm, my hand holding the red balloon and the bouquet of buttercups, with my note inside.
For a moment she just stared, a look of surprise on her face, her tiny mouth an O of wonder, until she took a few steps forward and accepted my gifts.
Then everyone cheered and applauded, and while I hobbled away under my shell on my poor aching feet, the band played the old Beatles hit “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
I remembered hearing that same song standing in my stocking feet on Andrea Applebaum’s lap, smelling the Joy perfume in her hair, and her saying, “Cinnamon and Applebaum. Put us together and we’re a pie.”
12: Little Little La Belle
“LITTLE LITTLE,” SAID MY father, “I’ve never told you that you had to do something, and I’ve never told you that you couldn’t do something.”
“But you’re about to now,” I said.
He lit a cigarette.
The Bombers had beaten the Boots 14-7.
Soon the TADpoles would be getting off the 3:30 P.M. bus from Syracuse, and making their way to The Lakeside Motel. There was to be a buffet there that evening, and then a showing of the old film Star Wars.
Cowboy and Mock had taken my mother home during the last quarter of the game, in my father’s car. She’d fallen asleep against Grandfather La Belle’s shoulder, after a severe attack of hiccups.
I was dropping my father off at La Belle Shoe and Boot, Inc., where he planned
