Vanity Insanity Read Online Free PDF Page B

unaware of the racial tension in our city and most other cities even though the adults were hyperaware of the awkward relations between black and white people at that time. It had only recently occurred to me that A.C. was both black and white—chocolate milk—and I envied his unique birthright.
    Before
The Flip Wilson Comedy Hour
started, I quickly pulled A.C. into the kitchen to show him my mold garden that I was growing for my science project.
    “Man, Ben, you’re going to get some major extra credit for that!”
    My mom popped her head in the door and interrupted our serious discussion. “This may be your last night to go out and play since winter is around the corner.” My mother scooted us out the door as she spoke. “You can look at that another time and watch Flip Wilson on the snowy Fridays when A.C. and his mom come by. Now go. Grab your windbreaker, Ben. And don’t go near the creek.”
    My mom’s words hung in the air around us like anxious moths at a light. Not like we hadn’t heard the warning every day for the past two weeks. The words forced us back to the reality that a twelve-year-old paperboy had disappeared weeks earlier. His bike had been found down by Papillion Creek. Next to the boy’s bike was the bag of newspapers, not one of which had made it to its destination. Many phone calls to the
Omaha World-Herald
from paperless homes led to a phone call to the parents of Johnny Madlin, which ignited the nightmare they must be living as we stood in my safe little living room.
    Just before the bad thing at the creek, before the unspeakable and reprehensible crime, my buddies and I spent any non-school-or-chore moment down at the bed of the creek. A.C., Will Mangiamelli, and I led the younger boys down by the creek bed as we orchestrated our “projects,” as A.C. called them; A.C. was our idea man. We shed our shirts and our childish games as A.C. directed us to build tree forts and underground forts and commiserate until our moms called us. As soon as breakfast was forced down our throats, we grabbed food, tools, and pitchers of ice water so that we were equipped for the day of building and scheming. Whatever we could sneak from our homes—boxes, stools, a transistor radio, utensils, and old
Playboy
magazines that Stinky Morrow smuggled from his father’s stash in the back of his parents’ closet—became treasures that the group praised. Though we didn’t know it at the time, pending testosterone was quietly beginning to pump through our veins; we only knew that wefelt eager and alive. Daily we prepared to fight the enemy. We were brave in defending our territory, all the while hoping that Lucy Mangiamelli and her friends were watching us from the backyards, admiring our naked upper bodies that were anxiously anticipating manhood.
    No one wore a watch at the creek, so our mothers whistled and rang bells to call us home on perfect summer nights to wash our faces and hands and eat dinner as quickly as we could so we could race back down to the creek with coffee cans under our arms to catch fireflies before we were summoned again for the night.
    The creek was a perfect place to play as a kid.
    It was also, evidently, the best place to abduct children on the way to their afternoon jobs of delivering papers. Johnny Madlin’s red banana-seat bike had been found by the creek several miles south of our neighborhood, and consequently, the children of Maple Crest subdivision were thereafter warned daily and emphatically: don’t go near the creek. The very nature of the warning had most kids worried that the creek itself was guilty of snatching the boy and harboring him, waiting for more children to come. But I knew differently. I loved the creek. The creek was no criminal.
    Speculation would continue for years about the case. Most agreed that the boy had been abducted. Some thought his body had been swept away in the creek and just never found. Still, a few believed that Johnny might have run away.