Fred Wemyss

Here's a reply I wrote to a post on a friend's blog. It was too long to fit as a reply, so I've posted it here. My friend had written about co-creating stories and drawings with a friend in his middle-school years. They stopped talking to each other. This reminded me of something, and I wrote this:
When I was in the seventh grade I began a whirlwind friendship with a classmate named Kevin. We discovered we each wrote short stories. The other kids din't know this about Kevin. They didn't know he took piano lessons either. He read hard-boiled detective novels from the 1940s and stayed up late watching old movies. We challenged each other, just before summer started, to write a detective story. I wasn't used to detective stories. I never read them. I only read funny writers. But Kevin was steeped in Dashiel Hammet. So he was supposed to come to my house and give me his story and I'd give him mine. His father worked in the city so he was dropped off at my house at 7 a.m. the first Saturday after the school-year ended. We spent the day walking around Greenlawn. We took a bus to Huntington and watched a tape of the Marx Brothers at the Huntington Library. We got the bus back to Greenlawn, walked to my house and I almost gave him my story. I'd stayed up the entire night writing it on typewriter my mother had given me. It was built in 1926! The story was 11 pages, single-spaced and was about a detective named Sylvester J. Iaganarella and his sidekick, Account. I finished it at 6:45 and went outside to wait for Kevin's father to drop him off at the corner. I don't know why I didn't just say they could pull up in the driveway. Well, I do know why. I had a crush on Kevin. Any other friend of mine would have been allowed to just knock on the front door. But my appointment with Kevin was secret. I don't think he knew it was secret. Anyway, I think I told him the driveway would be hard to find so we met at the corner of Oldfield Road and Tilden Lane. So, after our long day walking around and taking the bus to see the Marx Brothers videoptape at the library, we went to my house and I took hold of my eleven-page. single-space near novella and waved it in front of Kevin. "I can't show you this. But you can see this." I showed him a story I'd written in class that year. I didn't offer it to him to read, but I turned the manuscript over and showed him the praise Mrs. Doon, our teacher, had written. Kevin looked disgusted. His perception of me was crystallized then, I think. He considered me an egotist. The first thing that morning after he'd been dropped off he handed me his story. It was about a rough-and-tumble detective, miles away from my Sherlock Holmes knock-off. His detective stumbled home drunk and knocked a lamp over. Mine tossed off punning remarks to his assistant. Anyway, before Kevin's father drove his weary way from whatever semi-urban headquarters he'd toiled in that day and picked him up (again, at the corner of Tilden Lane and Oldfield) Kevin and I had promised to co-write a story about a mysterious figure. Kevin wanted to call it THE JANITOR. I daresay he envisioned some sort of lurid, three-in-the-morning study in psychology, while I wanted to write whatever Kevin might dictate. But he dictated nothing. We saw each other throughout the summer, Kevin getting increasingly short-tempered with me. It became pretty obvious what he had been prepared for was a friendship and I wanted some acknowledgement of longing. The first day back at school, after two weeks of Kevin not answering my calls (I learned early, but still haven't quite taken the lesson) I was walking out of my driveway, the school being a block away. A car which was sitting there honked. I looked and saw the driver wave at me. I saw a red-haired person in the back. I thought, "Oh! Sue from two doors down is being driven to work by her father and I'm being waved in." In to the car I went. I smiled at the driver, and then I turned to look at the person in the back seat. It wasn't Sue. It was Kevin, whose father looked, I realized then, a whole lot like Sue's father. The car drove on. I was too afraid to start a conversation. Kevin wasn't starting one. Why had they been sitting in the car outside my driveway. (I bet now that Kevin was trying to get his father to drop him off somewhat before the school so he wouldn't be seen being dropped off by a parent instead of on the bus like all the other kids.) We drove the block or so to the school. I actually managed to utter the words "Thank you," to Kevin's father as I got out. Kevin and I walked toward the door of the school. I was beginning to say, "I didn't know that was you in the car," when Kevin ran ahead quickly. Just before he went in he turned to me without looking at me. "Don't talk to me," he said and walked inside. From the first day of eight-grade until half-way through eleventh grade we never spoke a word to each other. (Except for the day after the day in ninth grade when I passed him in the hall talking to David Schwartz (who is now curator of the Americna Museum of the Moving Image.) I went up to Kevin, stopped, and punched him in the stomach. The next day Kevin went up to me, and, in spoken prose worthy of Dashiel Hammett, told me just what he thought I was. It's what I thought I was, too.