Kenneth

Kenneth is another character in my coming-of-age story about Chad, a precocious eleven-year-old boy and the people in the fictional town of Big Fish, Montana. The story is based on reminiscences from our friend Tom about his formative years in the real town of Whitefish, Montana.

Background: Chad's father died when Chad was eight. He and his mother Emily live alone a few miles outside of town. Emily is bitter and unhappy. Chad is bursting with curiosity and most everyone takes an interest in him including the gay jeweler Kenneth. But it's not what you think! Kenneth's a good guy and he and Chad have a genuine friendship.  Most of the parents of young boys in town have warned them away from Kenneth including Emily. However, Chad ignores her and sees Kenneth often. Kenneth teaches Chad magic tricks, card tricks, bird watching, model making, and about watches. This story is told in Chad's voice. An eleven-year voice.  

A real Whitefish Town Council meeting inspired this story. 

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Whitefish Town Council Meeting. This meeting was called by Mayor Carpenter at 7:30 PM for the purpose of considering the purchase and installation of parking meters for the city. All members of the council were present at the meeting. Mr. O' Brien of Seattle representing the Duncan Parking Meter Co. was present at the meeting to outline a plan for the purchase and installation of meters. Quite a large delegation from the Whitefish Chamber of Commerce was present who expressed a unanimous disapproval of installing parking meters in the city. After a general discussion was had, LaBrie moved and Duff seconded that the matter be tabled for future consideration. All voted Aye.

Before I went into the jewelry store to collect the paper money, I looked through the window to see what watches Kenneth had on display. The big sign outside the store said Jameson’s Jewelers in script and even though Kenneth’s name was Clemens, he left it alone.

                    Jameson’s Jewelers

“Jameson is a better name for a jewelry store,” he told me when I asked. Kenneth explained about alliteration and how it sounded good to people’s ears. We thought of a few allits for my name: Cheerful Chad, which I liked. Chubby Chad which I didn’t like. But I got the point.

On the street in front of the shop, a red cone marked where a parking meter was to be installed. Kenneth and most people in town were against the meters saying they were “bad for business.” Kenneth told me he’d moved to Big Fish from Seattle to get away from that kind of thing.

The display window shelf was lined with a white satin cloth swirled into shiny nests where black velvet and navy-blue satin watch cases sat open for view. Kenneth showed me how he used empty tin cans under the satin to make the bumps and hills and valleys. I could see a Hamilton, Waltham Ball and two Elgins, all well-known brands in our town.

“In the old days, train engineers and conductors needed accurate timepieces,” Kenneth told me.  Although their most important job was to keep time, some of them had complications—specific extra functions beyond keeping time: a moon-phase, calendar or date window. I loved looking at the faces of the watches with the roman numerals and dials and sometimes into the insides if Kenneth had one on the workbench.

People sold their deceased father’s and grandfather’s pocket watches to Jameson’s. Kenneth gave them a fair price and took them to Portland, Oregon twice a year for the big fair where he’d make a profit from the resale.

I was excited to tell Kenneth about the early falcon I’d seen on the ride into town. He had an Audubon book in the office and kept a chart where he noted every bird he saw and when. If I saw something new or early and told him, he wrote it down with a “C” next to it.

              When I opened the door, Kenneth’s big Maine Coone cat, Gio, ran from behind the building to get inside. Kenneth named him after a friend of his, Giovanni, who’d died in the war. The biggest cat in town, Gio was an imposing beast with a thick tabby coat and muscular shoulders. Because of their ringed tails and large size, Kenneth told me that people thought Coone cats happened after a cat and a raccoon mated. “It’s biologically impossible,” Kenneth said adding “but that’s how they got the name.” Proud of Gio’s size, Kenneth mentioned he’d been putting on weight since he was fixed last year. “He weighs twenty-one pounds—can you believe it? I’ll have to change his name to Godzilla!” Good at his job, no rodent for blocks around was safe when Gio was on duty. I laughed at the wet cat prints he left behind as he padded along the wooden floor. The hairy tufts on his feet were like snowshoes; when he dug in the melting drifts to do his business, slush caked in a little pad on each paw.  As soon as I looked at him, he trotted over and rubbed against my legs. He reared up under my hand, pressed against my fingers, asking in his body language for an ear scratch. I kneaded his ruff and stroked underneath his chin. He rolled over for a tummy rub making little chirping meows, purring and snorting.

Gio

Although I patted my chest and gestured for him to jump up, he threw me a dismissive look and swaggered over to his chair,  the yellow wing chair, by Kenneth’s desk. He executed a perfect, graceful cat jump-up, with a silent touchdown. To show us how blase he was about his athletic feat, he yawned, made two perfunctory licks at his tail, nestled into the chair and fell asleep. Kenneth smiled and said, “Cats work hard and sleep hard—about eighteen hours a day.” Gio was another reason I liked to visit Kenneth.

Even though Kenneth lived alone, he never seemed lonely with Gio there and he was always in a happy mood. Emily and I seemed a lot lonelier and sadder even though three years have passed since Dad died. I wanted a dog but would have been happy to have a cat–especially one like Gio, who always made me feel good, but we couldn’t have house pets because of Emily’s allergies.

The model of Big Ben Kenneth was working on had gotten larger since my last visit. He bought the plans from Scientific American and let me look them over when he got started.

“Sit down, Chad,” he said. “How are you, boy?” He removed his jeweler’s loupe and switched off the strong magnifying light he used when he repaired the clasps on necklaces and bracelets. Gesturing to the Big Ben model, he rolled his eyes. “No place for that turret. Made a big mistake. Always read the instructions through completely before you start anything, Chad.”

He stood up. “Hey, I have a new illusion for you. Be right back.” As he left the room, his boots clicked on the wooden floor.

I could still smell the fresh paint Kenneth used when he’d painted the store last month—some kind of yellow color that made the place seem sunny all the time. He’d rehung his three certificates of Gemology in new black frames and arranged them on the wall with photos of himself when he was a magician in Seattle.  

The store was so tidy it was surprising that his green wool jacket was draped on the back of the chair. He kept it there on purpose. ”Keeps the shape of the shoulders. On a wire hanger, at the end of the day, there are pointy places near the shoulders. Looks funny.” He always wore a vest over his shirts. “I’m a fuddy-duddy, Chad. My dad always wore a vest, so I do too.” Some of the vests were plaid, some solid colors. Every time he came back from the big show in Portland he’d have a new one. Outdoors, like most of the men in Whitefish, he wore a cowboy hat to protect his almost bald head.

I wondered if that necklace he was repairing came from the house of ill repute. Ricky told me he’d overheard his dad talking about those ladies and all the jewelry they bought.

“They signed up for life insurance policies with us. Judy must be the richest woman in town,” said Earl.

We didn’t see Judy, the Madam, or her girls often around town. Roger, the taxi driver, did their errands. Supposedly, once a month Judy drove the girls over to Missoula for beauty salon visits, to buy clothes and to eat rare steaks at Sal’s, the famous steakhouse. Kenneth ordered jewelry for them through a catalog and when it arrived, Roger delivered the packages.

Although I tossed the newspaper on the whorehouse porch every morning, I collected from Fred, the only black man in town, for the subscription. He shined shoes in front of the barbershop for six months of the year. During the cold winter months, he moved his gear indoors. In a town full of boot wearers, there was plenty of shining work. Kenneth said Fred made most of his money as the security man for the House, where he had a room in the basement. After he paid me, he’d pull out a small spiral bound notebook and a pencil from his back pocket and make tiny notes, so small he squeezed two lines in the space for one. Fred never said much to me but he and Kenneth were friends.

I looked up at the blank trophies on the high shelf behind the work table. Fake silver and gold, they were arranged in order of size. Kenneth supplied engraved prizes for the bowling leagues in town, the little league teams, and the lodge events. He told me that someone always needed a trophy or plaque in a small town. “Competing for awards and awarding awards keeps us busy, doesn’t it Chad?” He engraved them too–did it himself with a complicated engraving machine he bought from the former shop owner.

I had two of the small silver cups, both for winning cribbage tournaments. The trophies lived on a shelf in my room along with discarded books from the library I’d repaired with electrician’s tape from Dad’s toolbox. Last month Miss Calloway, the librarian, gave me two damaged books she saved — Reader’s Digest Condensed Book from 1950—the one with Will Rogers’s autobiography and The Swiss Family Robinson. Miss Calloway didn’t call them damaged; she said they’d been over-loved. The pages with the good jokes were loose and falling out of the Will Roger’s book, but I got them all pasted back. Someone must have dropped The Swiss Family Robinson in the bathtub because the pages were all wavy and wrinkled.

"I don't think you'll be able to do much with The Swiss book, Chad. We might have to give up on this one," said Miss Calloway.

When I took it back in, all flattened out, she was surprised.

"How did you do that, Chad?" she asked.

"I used Emily’s iron and a damp towel to flatten it out, page by page," I said.

Emily called the shelf in my bedroom my book hospital.

I dreaded the awards banquets although we enjoyed the food. Everyone brought their family’s favorite dishes: fried chicken and biscuits, macaroni and cheese, jello desserts, beef brisket and that special chili from the family that moved here from Texas. Kenneth didn’t attend all the banquets—he never came to Boy Scout events or any of the ceremonies for us kids. When he did attend the civics event, he brought Coq au Vin, a chicken dish everyone liked despite the Frenchie name. He sat with Miss Calloway the librarian and Mr. Weber, the accountant. I never told Kenneth that Emily didn’t like him but he seemed to know she wouldn’t want him at our table.

We always brought banana bread, the one thing Emily could bake. Someone sang Day-O Si-da-ay-yay-O when she put it on the banquet table. Emily embarrassed me when she called me her date and used the events to drill me on manners: how to pull out a lady’s chair, unfold a napkin on my lap and use a toothpick while covering my mouth with my hand. “Just because we live in the country doesn’t mean we’re uncivilized,” Emily said. She insisted on practicing our table manners at home too, even when it was just us and our spaghetti and ketchup dinners. “Sit up straight, Chad," she said. "Elbows off the table. Don’t eat with your mouth full.”

My eyes wandered back to Kenneth’s workbench. A glow came from the back of his Motorola. I reached over and turned it around so I could see the tubes and other guts better. Kenneth had the latest model with the station stabilizer and built-in antenna. He told me his friend Jack, a colleague, had sent it to him from Portland, Oregon. I didn’t know what a colleague was, and I didn’t want to ask Kenneth—afraid it meant Jack was his boyfriend or something. When I stopped by the library to get the money from Miss Callaway, I looked it up in the big OED that sat open on the stand. Ah, a colleague was a business associate. Right away, I asked Miss Calloway, to try out the word, “How are you and your colleagues today?”

She smiled and said “Just fine, Chad. And how are you and your mater doing?” Miss Calloway was the person who first taught me about Latin. “Knowing Latin is like having the key to a puzzle,” she said. “You can figure out what any word means by knowing the roots.”

When Ricky got the first octopus, and I asked her if there were any books I could read about them she said, "Do you know the Latin root word for octopus, Chad?”

“No.”

“Octo means eight and pus means foot. So octopus means eight feet or arms.” She told me aqua meant water and whenever I saw it in a word, it would be about water, like aquarium and aqueduct and Aqualung. She taught me a new word almost every time I went in. When she told me homo meant man, I understood better what homosexual meant.   

Were Kenneth and Jack homosexuals together? A thought flashed through my mind about men kissing each other on the mouth. Sex was still a mystery to me at eleven-years-old. I knew about the mechanics of “doing it” and I’d seen farm animal sex, but although I’d spent plenty of time imagining the sight, I’d never laid eyes on a live naked woman. At home, Emily zipped herself up to the throat in her blue-quilted housecoat after her baths. I’d looked down into the dark vee of Ricky’s mom’s cleavage once when she bent over to see Nova in the aquarium with us. Another time when I was in Ricky’s room she ran past the doorway wrapped in a towel. One breast had slipped out of cover and I got a glimpse. Lined with purple veins, the breast bobbled as she ran. Both repelled and fascinated I’d done a lot of thinking about that breast. I divorced it in my imagination from Ricky’s mom and transplanted it onto one of Judy’s ladies where it jiggled and bounced through my almost-adolescent brain and joined the image of the teasing Catholic girl’s foofie wahwahs.

I turned the radio back around. A kid at school had something called the Tijuana Bible he’d stolen from his dad’s garage which showed Olive Oyl and Popeye doing it together in lurid cartoon drawings. Ricky and I Iiked the sound of Olive Oyl’s poem and would say it to each other, loud and fast when we rode our bikes. That was before Ricky got polio.

“Lay me down in a bed of spinach

And don’t you stop until you’re finished!

Oh! Popeeeeeeeye!”

I knew what being queer was, but I’d never thought of Kenneth’s life aside from his business and the magic, except that he was different. He wasn’t married and didn’t have children. I couldn’t imagine him doing something like Sick Dick Tracy and Popeye did together in that dirty bible book. Although he was queer, he was a magician—the only one I knew. I liked him and that counted for more than anything else.

My thoughts about Jack and Kenneth together, in that way, made me uncomfortable. Usually, I hung around at Kenneth’s, but today I wanted to get out of there. Maybe Emily was right.

He returned to the room with my newspaper money and a thick envelope. “Here’s the Missing Thumb illusion for you Chad. Study the instructions and work out the theory yourself. Drop by after you get the hang of it and we can polish it together.”

“Thanks, Kenneth,” I said and stood up heading for the door. “Bye Gio. See you soon.” One of his ears twitched.

I tucked the Missing Thumb envelope in my bike bag. I couldn’t wait to try it.