Free A Christmas Story by Jean Shepherd Page B

the Funnies noisily to get attention, and then announced in his Now For The Big Surprise voice:
    “How ’bout let’s all of us going to a movie? How ’bout it? Let’s all take in a movie!”
    Ten minutes later we’re all in the Oldsmobile, on our way to see Johnny Weissmuller.
    The drizzle had become a full rain by the time I realized I was the only one left in the windswept garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The lights were on inside, warm and glowing, and I could see a pink arm reaching skyward. I went back in to have another last, loving look at IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET .



GROVER DILL AND THE TASMANIAN DEVIL

    The male human animal, skulking through the impenetrable fetid jungle of Kidhood, learns early in the game just what sort of animal he is. The jungle he stalks is a howling tangled wilderness, infested with crawling, flying, leaping, nameless dangers. There are occasional brilliant patches of rare, passionate orchids and other sweet flowers and succulent fruits, but they are rare. He daily does battle with horrors and emotions that he will spend the rest of his life trying to forget or suppress. Or recapture.
    His jungle is a wilderness he will never fully escape, but those first early years when the bloom is on the peach and the milk teeth have just barely departed are the crucial days in the Great Education.
    I am not at all sure that girls have even the slightest hintthat there
is
such a jungle. But no man is really qualified to say. Most wildernesses are masculine, anyway.
    And one thing that must be said about a wilderness, in contrast to the supple silkiness of Civilization, is that the basic, primal elements of existence are laid bare and raw. And can’t be ducked. It is in that jungle that all men find out about themselves. Things we all know, but rarely admit. Say, for example, about that beady red-eyed, clawed creature, that ravening Carnivore, that incorrigibly wild, insane, scurrying little beast—the Killer that is in each one of us. We pretend it is not there most of the time, but it is a silly idle sham, as all male ex-kids know. They have seen it and have run fleeing from it more than once. Screaming into the night.
    One quiet Summer afternoon, leafing through a library book, with the sun slanting down on the oaken tables, I came across a picture in a Nature book of a creature called the Tasmanian Devil. He glared directly at me out of the page, with an unwavering red-eyed gaze, and I have never forgotten it. I was looking at my soul!
    The Tasmanian Devil is well named, being a nocturnal marsupial of extraordinary ferocity, being strictly carnivorous, and when cornered fighting with a nuttiness beyond all bounds of reason. In fact, it is said that he is one of the few creatures on earth that
looks forward
to being cornered.
    I looked him in the eye; he looked back, and even from the flat, glossy surface of the paper I could feel his burning rage, a Primal rage that glowed white hot like the core of anuclear explosion. A chord of understanding was struck between us. He knew and I knew. We were Killers. The only thing that separated us was the sham. He admitted it, and I have been attempting to cover it up all of my life.
    I remember well the first time my own Tasmanian Devil without warning screamed out of the darkness and revealed himself for what he was—a fanged, maniacal meat eater. Every male child sweats inside at a word that is rarely heard today: the Bully. That is not to say that bullies no longer exist. Sociologists have given them other and softer-sounding labels, an “over-aggressive child,” for example, but they all amount to the same thing—Meatheads. Guys who grow up banging grilles in parking lots and becoming captains of Industry or Mafia hatchet men. Every school had at least five, and they usually gathered followers and toadies like barnacles on the bottom of a garbage scow. The lines were clearly drawn. You were either a Bully, a Toady, or one of the nameless rabble