FERAL 1970s CHILDREN BURN JERSEY CITY TO THE GROUND

This essay originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 17, Issue 1/2, Summer 2011.

Growing Up Somewhat Unsupervised
by Jeff Somers

IN 2008, newspaper columnist Lenore Skenazy wrote a column about letting her nine-year old son take the New York City Subway alone, without an adult. I don’t recall the details—where the damn kid was going—and can’t be bothered to research them. I do recall that it was a bit of a kerfluffle, because apparently in this sad modern age that’s insane, because as we all know the streets of New York (any major city, really) are lined with perverts and slave traders looking to either sell your child to Africa or engage in some CSI-style murderin’ with them.

This has since evolved into a ‘movement’ called Free Range Kids, which advocates letting kids organize their own free time and minimizing parental supervision and intervention in their lives. The idea being that this will cause kids to grow up super self-reliant and confident. Assuming they are not murdered or sold into slavery, of course. Although I’d like to imagine that some of the kids sold into slavery emerge years later as criminal masterminds on par with Keyser Soze or as Black Pirate Roberts types, hijacking cargo ships off the coast of Somalia.

I don’t have kids, and I don’t presume to tell parents how to raise their children. If you think your kid needs to be supervised constantly and should never be allowed to be alone, even in the bathroom, even while they sleep, until they’re approximately 24 years old, that’s fine. I have nothing to say, and heck, maybe you’re right. Maybe this kind of supervision will make your kid feel loved and safe and ensure they survive to the age of 24 without being, you know, murdered or kidnapped. Who knows? On the other hand, Free Ranging it feels better to me, because it’s closer to my own childhood.

I grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. I had a great childhood. It predated the overly-scheduled childhoods I hear about now; aside from Boy Scouts and Little League and, of course, my daily trips to school, I had no planned activities most days. During the summers and weekends I’d wake up and have these huge stretches of time, to be used any way I wanted. My parents weren’t adverse to me having scheduled activities; they just sort of waited until I showed interest in actually participating in things before signing me up.

At the same time, there was this definite distance between the adult and childhood worlds. My brother and I were more or less free to roam the neighborhood (with several rules about what we were and were not allowed to do) or the house as we pleased, but we hardly ever got underfoot because it was simply assumed that we wanted nothing to do with most of our parents’ activities, and vice versa. I remember this separation pretty clearly: It’s not that we were cruelly prevented from hanging out with the adults, it was simply an acknowledgment that we wanted nothing to do with coffee and cake and cigarettes and politics, and they wanted nothing to do with soda and Buck Rogers in the 21st Century and games of Manhunt. I remember creeping down the stairs after we’d been put to bed, listening to the adults in the kitchen.

During the day, we would wander. Sometimes it was in the house. My brother and I had epic, epic sets of plastic army men and model tanks and airplanes from World War II and we would array our armies in the living room and have immense battles. Battles which always ended with me inventing the A-Bomb and dropping it on my brother’s army. Or the backyard; there was an above-ground pool we put up with the help of our neighbors every year, like an Amish barn-raising. Or out on the streets. We played everything in the streets. We played hopscotch and Mother-May-I when I was small. Stickball and touch Nerf football when I got a little older. Manhunt. Running Bases. I Declare War. We prowled the streets unobserved, unsupervised. Cars honking their horns angrily at us when we were slow to call Time and let them pass.

There were the aforementioned rules: Streets we were not allowed to cross. Playing stickball, I broke those rules and would stand on second base, terrified that my Mother would look out the back window and see me there, on the forbidden side. Sometimes the older kids would let me bat but have a runner.

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My world was pretty small. A block this way, two blocks that way. The furthest I traveled was to school, ten or twelve blocks away. When I was in High School I started taking the bus into Manhattan on the weekends by myself. It was not a big deal. No controversy. I wasn’t nine, sure; I was fourteen. At nine I don’t know if my parents would have allowed me to ride the bus alone. Maybe. I didn’t ask to.

I remember the free time especially. Keenly, now, because as an adult I have so little unstructured free time. I remember waking up at 6AM to watch cartoons, the whole Saturday spread out in front of me. Summer came, weeks and weeks of nothing. Endless games. Occasional movies. The kids in the neighborhood made up ridiculous games. Nothing was planned, and we never had an adult around. Parents were beings to be summoned when something happened. You ran to the house and yelled for them. They didn’t just stand there.

A different time, maybe. Crime was worse, statistically. In the 1970s it seemed to me that everyone was joining cults and going off to commit mass suicide. It was everywhere. Situation Comedies like Soap—which I wasn’t allowed to watch yet somehow did—had plotlines revolving around it. In New York, people were burning down the Bronx in the certain expectation that the Bronx could not be made worse, so therefore any action of any kind would improve the situation. In Jersey City, the adults were foolishly electing mayors with all the greed and lack of morals of the later, great Frank Hague but without any of his style, smarts, or inability to be arrested. A different time, maybe, but categorically a worse time to let your kids wander the streets unsupervised.

Now, I’ve lost track of almost every kid I grew up with. Strike that: Every kid. My oldest current friends date to High School. So it’s entirely possible that every kid I ran around with was, in fact, sold into slavery or murdered as a direct result of there being no parents to supervise them. I cannot be sure. Tommy from down the street? I last saw him some time in 1982, I think. Lord knows, someday I might get off a plane in Mogadishu (sweet lord let’s hope not) and find Tommy from the old neighborhood working as an unpaid sex worker. Our eyes will meet and he will blink in confusion. Tears will come to his eyes. And I will pretend not to recognize him and hurry off, hoping the hotel has a bar.

Ridiculous, of course. There are no hotels in Mogadishu.

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These days I view children as the vaguely disturbing possessions of other people, inexplicable in their operation and shockingly expensive if I break them.

I have many cats. Cats are The Duchess and my substitute children. They’re perfect in this role as they are perpetually corpulent 1-year olds in both outlook and behavior. They will never learn curse words. They will never siphon booze from my liquor cabinet. They will never stop loving us unconditionally. They will also never get jobs and won’t be there to take care of us when we’re old and feeble, but no plan is perfect.

My brother, Yan, occasionally cat-sits for us when we must be away for several days and someone has to feed the little darlings. He’s moves in and drinks all my booze and orders pay-per-view movies on my dime. It works out. While he’s here he doesn’t let the cats out on the deck. The cats love to sit on the deck. They eat grass, hunt birds, and sun themselves. But Yan won’t allow it. He’s afraid something will happen to the cats and we will blame him for it and sue him for millions, or at the very least stop inviting him over. I used to think this was a surfeit of caution, but perhaps not. I imagine someone’s kids in my charge for a day: I’d probably chain them to a radiator rather than risk them running out the front door and being snatched up by white slavers, or running down the stairs and falling, snapping their necks, or finding my cache of lead paint chips and eating their way to an early grave.

In short, I can’t say for certainty that if I had kids I wouldn’t want to know where they were at all times, and make sure they were supervised. Because of white slavers. Because of murderers. Pianos hanging by fraying rope. Elephants falling out of airplanes. Sinkholes.

You know.

So, I don’t have kids and will never understand. I don’t judge folks. And I doubt any particular parenting style will save or doom the world. I think genius kids will still be born, as will idiots, bullies, smartasses, and the huge armies of flaccid redshirts who won’t matter in the last no matter how much attention you pay to them, aside from the percentage of their number who will go on murder rampages at some point when their complete unimportance finally settles into that groove in their brain. No matter how we raise those damn kids, the overall ratios of this to that will remain, and I doubt in my old age younger generations will appear to be alien to me because they were raised so differently. Unless we’re talking about being raised in a laboratory or something. Like force-grown. That might do it.