puttering with putt-putts

The first time I saw the Wilson’s they came bounding down my road like two excited frogs on a rainy day. I was probably eight years old at the time and very interested in changes to our neighborhood where two out of every three houses were occupied by geriatric shut-ins. Turnover was exciting, especially because there were usually new kids involved.

Tom Wilson was two years older than me and his brother T.J. was my age. They had just moved from California into a house a few doors up. The story I remember about their father was he raced cars until a friend was killed in a crash, at which point he turned to finance. It was hard to imagine as the whole family seemed so painfully straight-laced but the kids talked about dad's racing often.

I barely remember their father, but their mother looked like a model. At the time there was a Maybelline nail polish commercial on TV where two woman were playing a game of ping-pong to show off the strength of the nail polish.

“Maybelline nail color, meant to bounce back…instead of breaking…”

I was convinced at the time that one of the women was Mrs. Wilson. Looking at the commercial today, I can see the only similarity is the color and style of her hair, but when you’re a kid I guess that’s enough.

Mrs. Wilson was also strict in a way that I had never experienced in my house because my parents were usually gone. The Wilson's weren’t allowed to watch a lot of TV, including the my favorite show The Dating Game. I tried to put it on once and they immediately changed the channel reminding me their mom thought it was way too inappropriate for young boys. In hindsight she was probably right, but this was the 70s and at the time it felt weird to me.

The boys were also not allowed to swear to such an extent that they wouldn’t even when their parents weren’t around. They also lowered the bar on what actually constituted a swear word. The most serious offense in their house was when one of the boys called the other a “putt-putt”.

What is a Putt-Putt? I’m not exactly sure to tell you the truth, because I only saw it used a handful of times but if I had to stretch my memory I believe it was a fart. One time we were eating on the wall in their backyard and T.J. called Tom a putt-putt, to which Tom immediately put down his unfinished sandwich and ran screaming towards the house.

“MOM, T.J. CALLED ME A PUTT-PUTT!!”

This was odd for several reasons, the first being that putt-putt didn’t seem like a swear word to me. In my house “shit” and “fuck” were dropped like loose socks when you tried to hand scoop an entire dryer load. Not only did I know the words, I knew not to use them around other families which suggests a familiarity in just how explosive of an event it would be if I ever said “fuck this shit” at the Wilson’s dinner table.

Secondly, Tom was older by two years which is a lot when you’re 9 and 11. The idea that he would tell on a smaller T.J. Instead of the customary punch that even I would get from my older sister was another clue that life at the Wilson’s wasn’t exactly in line with the way the world as I knew it was operating.This was also around the time that I began to observe that Tom wasn’t exactly in line with the world of 11-year-olds either.

The Wilson’s had a huge backyard for our neighborhood. The first half was grass which dipped down to a wooded area. I remember specifically the boys being super proud that their whole lot was exactly an acre even though none of us suburban kids had any idea what an acre was. To this day I know an acre as "one Wilson's yard".

In that backyard we spent a lot of time playing “army” or “cowboys and Indians” or “army and cowboys”. Any combination of guys with fake guns against other guys with fake guns and it was not really my thing, I was more into riding bicycles and making jumps. But it was their thing, and their house. More specifically it was really, really Tom's thing. He had an army helmet, one of those plastic canteens you wear on a belt, and for a big “war” he’d even paint his face.

One day I was walking home from school with T.J. and Tom and we ran into the kids who lived on the street behind us that were in Tom’s grade. One kid, Mike Phillips, lived directly behind the Wilson’s woods and seemed well aware of Tom’s fantasy-oriented escapades. As we walked, Mike relentlessly teased Tom about hanging out with young kids (his brother and I) and playing Army. I felt bad, as I already had an idea that it wasn’t cool. But witnessing a group of kids bully him over it was confirmation that it absolutely wasn’t.

Tom went home running and possibly also crying. On the one hand I felt bad for Tom but I will admit to also thinking if he wasn’t such an army-fantasy weirdo these kids wouldn’t make fun of him. Maybe that was my own bitterness of too many days deep in the suburban-bush with a giant tinker-toy gun waiting to make pew-pew sounds until the inevitable meltdown argument over if someone was killed or not. Inevitably at this point a “putt-putt” would be aggressively dropped and mom would once again have to come out back to cool the situation.

One weekend night I was invited to sleep over at the Wilson’s. The parents were going to be out so they had hired a baby sitter to watch us. I think it was just T.J. and I and the sitter. She was a junior or senior in High School and for some reason she decided her way to fill the time was to tell us everything about what being a sexual active high school girl was all about.

Her and I sat on one of the twin beds in the bedroom and she told me everything starting with casual sex. She explained how she hooked up with guys at parties, she explained birth control, sex, pregnancy, drinking, drugs... She happily answered any question I had, and I was known to ask way too many questions. It was the irresistible force paradox, though in this case it was "what happens when unstoppable questions meets an all-answering object?"

Prepubescent information nirvana...

If Mrs. Wilson had known what she had paid the sitter for that evening she would have blown a head gasket. In her defense, T.J. was a lot less interested then I was, so maybe The Dating Game ban worked towards her end goal after all.

I don’t recall ever staying at the Wilson’s again but I do remember that T.J. Had a bad habit of sitting on the toilet with the seat up and falling in. Then he would cry until his parents or brother pulled him out which I'd seen happen at least twice. Once was in the basement so he was there for a while. I opened the door when I heard the cry and he really was butt-in-the-water soaked and stuck. I stared uselessly until someone pulled him out and then I felt weird and went home.

The Wilson’s also had a Schnauzer-mutt dog named Chauncy. One day I went over and Chauncy was gone. I asked about him and the brothers told me the parents had given Chauncy away as if the dog was an old canoe on the side of the garage. Some time later we were in the downtown square of our town and we saw Chauncy who was freaking out running into his old family. The brothers pet him nonchalantly and we all moved on. I realized at that point the Wilson tribe ran a bit colder than the hotheads I descended from.

I couldn’t even tell you if T.J. moved or we just didn’t associate with each other in Junior High and High School. As my world expanded past the few blocks of my neighborhood, I stopped hanging out with the brothers. If there was a last time I don’t remember it.

Postscript: While writing this story I looked up T.J. and found one promotional video for his tech company that he was the C.E.O. and founder of. On further investigation I learned he had recently sold the company to a bigger player. I told my wife all this one night as she was putting stuff away in the kitchen and half-listening to my babble until finally saying "that's pretty impressive......... (long pause)..... for a fucking putt-putt..."