"Kids on Wheels"

 

It’s been over two years since I’ve written a piece about a specific John D MacDonald story, “So Sorry” back in August of 2018. I’ve moved away from doing these kinds of postings for two reasons: a general lack of interest in short fiction in general and the lack of availability of most of these tales. But every once in a while something comes along that merits talking about. And believe me, for a JDM fan, short story collector and aficionado and amateur bibliographer, this is something that merits talking about.

I’ve written often about my early days of JDM fandom, when I assisted JDM’s “official” bibliographer Walter Shine in trying to hunt down ten published short stories that could not be located. Specifically, these were stories that -- according to the author’s own records -- were sold to publishers but no record of where they appeared could be found. There were no notations in MacDonald’s records and he received no tear sheets from the publisher, and, after years of searching by any number of early bibliographers, no evidence of their publication could be uncovered. These were, for the most part, stories that were sold to pulp publishers, either Popular Publications or Columbia, and issues of pulps can be rare (especially in the case of Columbia). Since the publication of the JDM Bibliography/Biography in 1980 most of the titles have been located, either by Walter, other JDM fans, or by me (“Big League Busher” and “The Gentle Killer”). But ever since the Bibliography’s publication, there has never been -- to my knowledge -- the discovery of a JDM story that completely escaped discovery by MacDonald, Shine or any of his helpers. That just changed.

A few days ago I received an email from a JDM fan and Trap of Solid Gold reader who lives in Greece, Petros Papagiannidis, informing me that he had come across a short story that was not on my list, titled “Kids on Wheels” and published in the June 1954 issue of The American Legion Magazine. Now, MacDonald was no stranger to that publication: in 1951 his very best Christmas story, “The Cardboard Star,”  appeared in the December issue. But there was never even a whisper of a second story purchased by the Legion. The MacDonald records are a complete blank regarding “Kids on Wheels”.

I immediately went to the Finding Guide for the JDM Collection at the University of Florida and matched up the first sentence of the story in the listing of MacDonald’s unpublished works and there it was, originally titled by the author “The Most Terrible Time of My Life”, written in 1953 and containing 4,000 words. No indication whatsoever that it had ever been sold.

The story is told in first person by one Davie, no last name given, who is in his early teens. He pals around with four other same-aged kids from school and all ride bikes. Then, one by one, the others begin to acquire motor scooters. I don’t think it was legal for under-16 kids to ride motor scooters in Maryland where I grew up, but apparently it was in 1950’s Florida where the story takes place. Eventually every one of the five own their own motorbikes except Davie. He tries to get his parents to agree to let him get one but is met with refusal, especially from his father. 

“Davie, you are not going to have one of those damn things. Florida has got the narrowest roads, the craziest drivers and the fastest traffic there is. I am not going to mount any son of mine on one of those scooters so that some vacationing creep from Dubuque can bunt him off into the boondocks and mush his head against a palm tree. Let's have no more nonsense, Davie. My God, a bike is bad enough."

The scooters begin to distance the other boys from Davie, and they eventually exclude him from their group. He mopes and sulks and becomes essentially friendless, spending most of his spare time reading in his room. Eventually the father relents and a scooter is purchased, but not without a long list of rules from the father. So even though he is accepted back into the group, the rules he has promised to obey gradually cause him to be ostracized once again. 

Then one day a policeman stops him while riding home from school, and later that evening another one comes to the house…

“Kids on Bikes” is a good story with a surprisingly adult ending, and one wonders why it appeared in The American Legion Magazine. This was almost certainly not the first market MacDonald’s agent sought to have the story published in, and he probably didn’t get paid anything near what he was getting from some of the other magazines he sold to in 1954: Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, Argosy, This Week, and even Bluebook. I’m sure this is a case of a story getting rejected multiple times and MacDonald mistakenly filing it away as unpublished. 

The good news is that my friend Petros discovered this story on the Internet Archive, where anyone with a computer or smartphone can read it for themselves. You can get there from here:

https://archive.org/details/americanlegionma566amer

Now I have to wonder about any other stories that may be out there and undiscovered. Maybe that oversized claim of 500 stories might be true… or not.

"The Cardboard Star"

Yesterday and the day before I posted entries on John D MacDonald's two Christmas short stories, "Dead on Christmas Street" and "Open Before Christmas." I had surmised, based on the stories I own and the titles of the ones I don't own, that these were the only two he had written. Well, I was wrong, and how I discovered it is almost a Christmas story unto itself.

I'm always on the lookout for JDM works I don't own. The Internet in general, and eBay in particular, are full of booksellers advertising old magazines, many containing stories I don't yet have. Unfortunately, the prices these merchants charge are usually out of my range, given the sheer number of stories I am missing. I wouldn't mind paying $15 for an old copy of Collier's if there weren't hundreds of other magazines out there I needed as well. Occasionally I will come across someone selling something I need at a reasonable price, and then I either buy or bid. Two weeks ago I began bidding on a batch of 18 issues of The American Legion Magazine from 1951 and 1952. MacDonald published only one story in the periodical back in December 1951, something called "The Cardboard Star," and I was delighted to see that the issue in question was among those for sale. The opening bid was a whopping $1.74 and I bid $5.00; a week later I won. The magazines arrived today, Christmas Eve, and I was dumbstruck to learn that "The Cardboard Star" was a Christmas story!

I suppose it should have been obvious to me, what with the title and the fact that it was published in a December issue, but I thought -- never having read an issue of The American Legion Magazine -- that it was a military story and that the star in the title was an officer's star. It turned out to have nothing to do with the military, but is a tale of a broken marriage, and the transforming power of this particular holiday. As a Christmas story, I think it's MacDonald's best, and is certainly the most sentimental and touching.

It's Christmas Eve (!) and Paul Wyath is angrily walking around the inside of his big, empty suburban house. Outside he can see the lights from the neighbors' house, where a Christmas party is taking place, one that he and his wife Martha had been invited to. But Martha isn't here. She and Paul have been separated and this will be their first Christmas apart. The kids are with Martha, who is now living with her mother. The lights and sounds of the party bring back memories of last year's party and the beginning of what Paul calls "the trouble":

"He winced as he remembered that he had been a casualty the year before -- trying to put bourbon on a big case of Tom and Jerrys. And on Christmas Day, complete with hangover, there had been the big brawl about Sylvia Bradley, the redhead. He couldn't remember much about Sylvia, but all he could remember had been bad."

Or perhaps it was buying this house, one that they could not really afford and located in a neighborhood where they did not belong: "...the standards of the people who lived on Arden Lane had not been the standards of the Paul and Martha Wyath of other, less-affluent neighborhoods." But upward mobility and multiple promotions had brought them here, "in a forty-thousand dollar ranch-type arrangement, completely surrounded by other similar edifices filled with neurotic wives and hospitable liquor." Feeling sorry for himself, Paul now realizes he has become "a cheap 1950 edition of something out of Scott Fitzgerald, complete even to making scenes at the country club and snarling at your kids."

Deciding that he can not spend Christmas Eve alone in the house, he gets ready to leave for the local hotel when he hears a car pull up. He opens the door and sees Martha. But despite the "tremulous hope" Paul feels in his heart, Martha is only there to collect a few Christmas tree ornaments, things she was supposed to take when she moved out but had forgotten.

Is that really why she's there? Yes, really:

"He looked into her eyes and saw no other motive there. No other chance there, for him. All the ugly, uncomfortable things had been said. It was finished and done -- beyond repair."

They pull out some old boxes and Martha goes through them, pulling out the few things she needs for her mother's much smaller tree. Then Martha finds a particular ornament, one that has a uniquely familiar history...

"The Cardboard Star" is about as sentimental as MacDonald ever got, which is to say, not very. But the things that man was able to express in not many words is awe-inspiring, and when he got it right, he got it right. Here, he nailed it. Having never seen the story before, I have to say it's the best "new" Christmas story I've read in many, many years. The ending presents a near-perfect balance of realism and transcendence.

I'm amazed that the story has never been anthologized. I can only guess that it's due to the fact that it appeared in a relatively obscure magazine, and one not known for publishing fiction. Hopefully an editor out there will discover its peculiar charm and present it to a wider audience. It certainly deserves to be read again.



Update (3/7/2015):

I've just discovered that The American Legion has digitized almost the entire run of The American Legion Magazine, and this issue is available to download free of charge: 

http://archive.legion.org/handle/123456789/3971