Wicked

by Dennis Green

When pop psychologists say, “Nurture your inner child,” they don’t know what they’re in for. Most of us still harbor deep within ourselves that five year old kid who is positively wicked.

And I don’t mean that bad seed, demonic, malevolent force portrayed in so many bad movies. I mean the little rascal, the naughty little boy or girl who has an unerring instinct for what makes adults squirm. That instinct for the verboten that serves us so well later in life, if only as a highly-developed bullshit detector and cussed sense of I-don’t-give-a-damn!

My Granpa Fred DuVall was the prototype, and taught me well the puckish arts — to laugh at myself and at others, to know that nothing that isn’t fun is worth doing at all. He was the Imp, the Perfect Anti-Puritan!

“What fools these mortals be!” Does that include me? Only if I forget myself, who I really am, the Roadrunner, the Court Jester, The Scamp, The Little Tramp, the Fool, the Clown. Wicked.

Granpa Fred was born in New Orleans, of Cajun stock, his ancestors from the Province of Normandy in northern France by way of Arcadia. They had been aristocrats, and he inherited their disinterest in riches, and their disdain for disaster. As a boy, raised in Hannibal, Mo, he met Mark Twain, and as a young man worked briefly as a riverboat gambler on the Mighty Mississipp.

When he lost his farm in South Dakota to the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, he packed up his family, with all their belongings roped to the top of an old Model-T Ford, and drove them out the Oregon Trail to Eugene. He worked odd jobs as a janitor, for jewelry stores, for a bank, and always had money for the house payment and a pocketful of spare change. In 1949, he grew a Colonel Sanders beard and led the Forty-Niner Parade down Main Street.

And he taught me that life is delicious. Delightful. No matter what. Whether we were picking cherries high in the trees behind his house, (“One for the bucket and one for me!”), or sneaking over the fence at the Fairgrounds into the motorcycle races, or razzing the batter at a ballgame, or betting on “Hollywood Wrestling” or visiting the radio and TV studios or the magic shops on Melrose Boulevard when he moved to L.A., we were always laughing and having the time of our lives.

So, no matter what life brings my way, I always find my way back to my wicked sense of humor. Even when Granpa, who suffered from asthma, was in the hospital, in an oxygen tent, he always cracked a joke, cracked wise, and got us laughing.

And when he died, I was, of course, devastated. I was only 12 years old at the time, and refused to attend his funeral at Forest Lawn Cemetery in L.A. I was angry with him for a long time. “How could you go away,” I would ask his spirit, “and leave me all alone here with these mere mortals?”

And one day he replied to me, “Denny Boy, just don’t forget how to laugh!”

©2010 Dennis Green