PIOUS little boys pass much of the time on the hard pews of churches playing war with pencil and paper.
First, the planes and battleships, soldiers and machine guns, are drawn, slowly with meticulous detail. The killing power of the imaginary weaponry is obvious in the vicious spikes of bayonets and the crude fins of bombs.
As the sermon drops farther and farther away, the final touches are applied: stars on the wings of the jets to mark the good guys, swastikas on the helmets of the stick men to brand the bad guys.
The boy's expectant tension grips the air. The battle begins. His pencil traces the deadly trajectory of each bullet and shell. A direct hit. The objective explodes in a burst of scribbles.
Inside the boy's head, the flash is fiery red and yellow. Written across the rising clouds of dust and debris in big, black, block letters is the word "KABOOM!"
As the fighting intensifies, the pencil itself becomes a weapon to punch holes in the paper soldiers. In his excitement, the youngster lets the racket of the mental war slip hissing through his teeth.
"Pssh-pshh! Tchoo, tchoo!"
His mother snaps the paper away, grabs his pencil and locks it in her purse. She twists his ear. "Sit still. Keep quiet," she says.
The neighborhood war game has become a universal institution. It is played all summer long with sticks for rifles and forts built out of soil, hay and scrap lumber.
The game I played in my wonder years was based on movies we saw, enlivened by our own imaginations. A few weeks ago, I overheard children playing outside our yard, reenacting a B-movie gun battle. The game was basically unchanged.
"Bang, you're dead."
"You missed me."
"Did not."
"Did too."
This argument led to an arms escalation on my block. The kids broke out their B-B guns and played a suburban version of the Lord of the Flies.
The bite of a B-B fired at point blank range raises a swollen red lump like a bee sting and leaves little doubt as to who is dead and who's not.
The role models with the most apparent influence on my peers were the Three Stooges. We delighted in making embarrassing sounds and slapped each other repeatedly on the back of the head and tried to poke our fingers in one another's eyes.
Early adolescence brings the joys of torching plastic model airplanes in the backyard and inventing grisly torture scenes to inflict on the little girl down the street.
Toads and beetles are clumsily dissected with dirty hands, half in curiosity, half in mischief. I remember one older boy, thirteen or so, who specialized in lighting firecrackers in frogs' mouths.
I thought he was pretty weird. But I watched, mesmerized by the violence.
A semblance of civilization appears in high school. Fraternity rumbles provide the opportunity to "get out there and hurt 'em" with impunity.
In gym class, boys bully the nerdy kid who's stuck with the nerdy eyeglasses. They get their hands on cigarettes, one of the few symbols of man hood that can be acquired instead of gained.
The first amazing scraps of adult magazines are surreptitiously circulated from backpack to backpack.
Then, they are Men.
What does a Man do? A Man stands alone against impossible odds, meets villain in a single combat to protect the treasure chest, plays guitar and gets the girl, leaps tall buildings in a single bound, falls on a grenade to save his buddies and then takes a bow to thundering applause.
Mortality only threatens pets and grandparents.
One thing is certain. Whatever it is that men do, they must leave home to do it. Surprised and frightened by the inevitability of meeting the world head on, for all his bravado, an eighteen-year-old is a child again on the high diving board for the first time.
Everything seems like fun, until he sees the water dancing so far beneath his toes. He falters on the brink, wanting to be a big boy, aching to be shoved.
Out there in the real world, boys are forced to become men. Not one of us really knows where we are headed.
And we now know so little about where we came from.