published in Epoch, Cornell literary magazine, fall 1975

If Schildtkraut had any aspirations, any goals at all, it would be to stay home from school. In some big, permanent sense. Schildtkraut was 38, and still angry at Miss Tucker for all the mean things, the public embarrassments: sitting in the corner, staying after school, writing, ‘I will not eat my crayons’ 400 times.

“Where are the crayons now?” Schildtkraut mourned aloud, directing his question to a group of children playing on swings. “Midnight blue, lemon yellow, raw sienna.” He missed his crayons. He could eat a boxful.

Schildtkraut was walking in the park, committing livicide, a sin he invented for his own particular condition. Livicide was “the act of consistently not taking one’s life despite all one’s better judgment.” He had written the definition down in a little book where he kept a list of new words he someday planned to submit to the dictionary people for publication. Other words on the list were bloddick — “one who constantly smears wet ink” — and dentaur — “a mythical creature, half-horse/half-dentist.” Since a word must be in common use before a dictionary will add it to its pages, Schildtkraut once spent an entire week telling the girls in his office that “Glitzman is a stinken bloddick,” but the word somehow failed to catch on. Glitzman was never told.

Schildtkraut was not crazy. As much as he tried, he really wasn’t crazy. He was just upset. His little book of words was calculated madness, contrived lunacy, because he would have preferred being crazy to being upset. Schildtkraut
had an upsettion. It was very frustrating for him, because everyone knew that he was basically pretty normal, mentally sound, a sane citizen. No matter what he did — the public spectacles, the unnatural acts (shouting in libraries, chewing scotch tape) — no one would really believe that he was off his rocker.

“I guess I’m really on my rocker,” he confessed bitterly as he passed some little boys playing catch with their fathers. The sight hurt him.

“There ought to be a law requiring picnics, requiring that every resident of the state go on a picnic with his father, regardless of age… Failure to picnic punishable by law!!!” he screamed at an old woman walking past him in the opposite direction. He grinned. She, at least, would think he was deranged.

Schildtkraut had some redeeming qualities, (empathy, for example) but he felt he could use a few more. His life was like a job he was forever applying for and being told “I’m sorry, but we have so many qualified applicants.” He thought his application had not been processed properly. Key sections had been overlooked. They had read his factual data and skipped the essay questions. “Ah you gotta know someone,” he said.

He did have empathy. It would look good on his record, his resume. At least four times a day he passed his nothing landlady sitting just inside the door of his apartment, and if she said “It’s cold out, isn’t it?” in her clogged nasal Olive-Oyl whine, he would say, “Freezing!” If she said “It’s nasty, isn’t it?”, he would say, “Miserable!” “Hot, isn’t it?” “Boiling!” “Really coming down?” “Pouring!” It was empathy. Once he was passing a restaurant with Glitzman. “We gotta go here someday, I heard it’s great,” Glitzman said.

“Naw, I’m not hungry,” Schildtkraut yawned.

“Yeah, I know. but if someday in the future by some far-out unbelievable chance it occurs that you’re hungry again, maybe we could eat here.”

“Nah, I’m never hungry.”

“I hate people like you.” Glitzman said, without malice.

Schildtkraut smiled — he knew exactly what Glitzman meant. He couldn’t have agreed with him more. That’s why they were friends. They both hated Schildtkraut. It was empathy. It made him livicidal.

When Schildtkraut was a few years younger and still trying to improve himself, make a go of things, he had decided to work on his sense of humor. He knew that a good sense of humor would make an excellent redeeming quality. He took books out of the library and memorized jokes — one-liners, puns, riddles, ethnic jokes, dirty jokes, limericks. But his audience conception and timing was terrible. He told nigger jokes to Black people, puns to the illiterate, riddles to deaf mutes. Jokes or not, Schildtkraut had no sense of humor. Literally, no sense of humor. He laughed during eulogies, giggled at bad news, became angry with circus clowns for tripping people and misusing seltzer bottles, and was incensed no end by game show emcees’ saying “Five seconds Mrs. Blender.” He would shout at the TV screen, “Take your time Mrs. Blender, who the fuck does he think he is?” In short, he was humorless, void of mirth, the very absence of fun. He was unlive, a word he planned to add to his list: “To be alive only in theory. To never put one’s money where one’s mouth is, in a metaphorical, metaphysical sense.”

Schildtkraut concluded that his was a problem of gears — he needed to go in reverse and the world’s clutch was shot to hell. He turned around and walked backward in the park for awhile, passing all the happy people. He wanted
to be 2′ 4″, holding a balloon, a pinwheel, sipping Sunday lemonade, wearing a bright-striped polo shirt and birthday hat. He wanted to stay home from school and watch morning television reruns. Donna Reed, Leave it to Beaver. He remembered fondly the opening credits sequence with Wally and the Beaver cutting the lawn with their father, Ward Cleaver, and then “Barbara Billingsley, as June,” appearing in the doorway with a tray of cool fruit drinks for her family. The great. great, beautiful, pretty Cleaver family, Schildtkraut cried. He grew nostalgic for things he’d never done. He recalled with longing the moon-lit walks on the beach, arm-in-arm with beautiful blonde girls he was in love with. There were no beaches, no blondes, in Schildtkraut’s past. He wished he could do something about that. He needed more pleasant memories, but all he could come up with was Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet.

Schildtkraut could hardly believe his eyes. On the side of the path up ahead was a little boy with a little red wagon selling little red cups of pink lemonade.

“How much is it?” Schildtkraut asked. He had once monopolized lemonade sales for a five-block two-playground radius.

“Twenty-cents.”

“Robbery! Twenty-cents? You gotta be kidding, buddy. You’re a discredit to the industry… okay, give me a cup.” Schildtkraut took a cup from the frightened boy and raised it to his lips. His face contorted into an ugly grimace
and he spat the liquid out. “WATER!” he shouted. “Water! Twenty-cents for a goddamn cup of pink water. I ought to report you to the Better Business Bureau. I’ll run you right out of this town, mister, … you stink, kid, you know that?”

The boy burst into tears and it made Schildtkraut cry. He stooped over on one knee, sobbing, and said to the boy, “I’m sorry, kid, it’s not your fault. It’s the same all over. Prices go up, quality goes down. It’s the goddamn economy. Inflation. It’s all over the country. We’re heading for a depression, kid, you just hold on to your business and don’t take any guff, hear me? You hear me, mister? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you didn’t do anything wrong, you still mad at your Uncle Schildtkraut?”

The tears were streaming down Schildtkraut’s face. Where were his kids? His nephews, his grandsons? What of offspring? And reproduction and immortality and perpetuation of race? He forgot to have a family, he realized for the
first time. He just forgot. His life had gone by and he had clean forgot to get married and have a little son to love. The lemonade salesman patted Schildtkraut’s head and told him everything would be okay. Schildtkraut nodded and got up. He started to walk away, but then reached into his pocket and turned back and said, “Give me another cup of that stuff, will you?” He drank it down in one continuous gulp and then patting his belly, he groaned with pleasure. “Ahhh, they don’t make it like that anymore.” And he meant it, too.

Schildtkraut was upset. Once. many years before, Schildtkraut decided he was different than everybody else in the world, and this discovery led him to believe for a few moments that he was an artist. But he wasn’t. His artistic vision was that of a shoemaker’s. Then, years later, the same feelings of being unique told him he was a social worker. Then prophet. Most recently, it told him he was crazy. This too seemed to be failing him. To be simply upset upset Schildtkraut the most. How could anyone be so miserably upset and not be an artist, a madman? It baffled him. He felt cheated, tricked. His was the artist’s condition in the body of a shoemaker, the madman’s madness in the mind of a PTA chairman, the prophet-turned-kvetch. It was a trick. He pitied Schildtkraut. Schildtkraut was a poor son-of-a-gun, and he had done all he could to help him. He had empathy for Schildtkraut. He remembered a dinner at Glitzman’s where this had first become clear. “Delicious, really delicious,” Schildtkraut had said about a dozen times.

“I’ll give you the recipe,” Glitzman’s wife said.

“Nah, I could never do it.”

“What’s to do? You throw a chicken in a pot of water and add some fresh carrots, onions, and noodles.”

“Yeah… but where would a guy like me get fresh carrots?”

“At the market, for chrissakes,” Glitzman said.

“Yeah… but how would I get there?”

Schildtkraut ate sandwiches. Other people went to stores and cooked meals and ate them. Schildtkraut felt he had been exiled from the marketplace, quarantined from the fruit stands. Schildtkraut was contagious. He imagined schoolchildren getting tetanus shots, polio shots, and Schildtkraut shots.

“There’s nothing worse for the country than a contagious, livicidal, unlive, upset bloddick,” Schildtkraut said, and decided at once to kill himself. He climbed up on a park bench and began shouting.

“I’m gonna jump. I swear to God, I’ll jump. I’m gonna do it.” A crowd of people gathered around the bench.

“Don’t try to stop me. This is my life. I’m warning you, anyone comes a step closer and I’ll jump.”

A policeman was called to the scene.

“Oh no, you’re not talking me off of here, copper,” Schildtkraut said. The policeman climbed on to the bench and edged towards Schildtkraut.

“Easy, fellow, easy. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll talk about it. Easy does it, no one’s gonna hurt you.”

“Get away from me. I’m warning you, another step and I’m flying right off of here.”

“Calm down, now, we’re all your friends.”

Schildtkraut’s eyes lit up for a second at this remark, and the officer took it as a glimmer of hope and moved another step.

“You shouldn’t have done that, goddamn it, I warned you. I’m a man of my word. Ask anybody. Ask Glitzman. Where’s Glitzman? Where the fucking hell is Glitzman? I warned you. I’m jumping, this man is jumping, consider him a
jumped man, I told you . . . byemommybyedaddylreally-didn’tkilltherabbit AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.”

Schildtkraut tumbled down the two feet to the ground and lay there slumped over. His shriek had been from a much greater height, it seemed.

“We lost him,” the cop said, looking down, shaking his head. He dragged Schildtkraut to his feet and walked him to the squad car. Schildtkraut offered no resistance. “I’m really not crazy,” he whispered to the cop, as if he was confiding a great secret. “I’m just a little upset.”