1 February 2005 Classic Pick: CHINESE HANDCUFFS by Chris Crutcher, Greenwillow, 1989, ISBN: 0-688-08345-5

"I was really intrigued by her idea that if I keep my mind on myself and my own reactions to the world, I can have complete control, that trying to control everything outside me is what keeps me stuck and completely out of control. Opposites at work, I think, maybe Stacy's Chinese handcuffs. Who knows? I may be the world's next really great philosopher. Then again, I may be the world's next really great jerk. It's a crapshoot, I tell you. But it can't hurt, because there exists in this the possibility that I'll be able to put you in your rightful place."

In a couple of days we'll move into the final lunar cycle leading up to the day that my personal odometer hits the big 5-0. One last month to (keep trying to) get it together in order to be able to say that I have finally started getting a handle on life before hitting one of those seemingly significant mileposts.

Fifty years. I was born the same month that the US Customs Service seized Allen Ginsburg's HOWL as being obscene. Within the next couple of months Winston Churchill retired and the Warsaw Pact treaty was signed. I was a colicky baby that summer of '55 when Disneyland opened, Bill Haley rocked around the clock, the first edition of the GUINNESS BOOK OF RECORDS was published, and those upstanding white citizens of Mississippi taught Emmett Till who was in charge of the asylum.

If I'd waited just one more week to be born, I could have come back as Albert Einstein, who was just getting ready to check out when I arrived. Despite my relative success with IQ tests in junior high, I've been mentioned in the same breath as Einstein only in the same fashion that people say, "No shit, Sherlock!" about the obvious being learned belatedly.

The same week that Greenwillow released CHINESE HANDCUFFS in 1989, I took over as Executive Director of a nonprofit childcare center in Santa Rosa. I was a pretty awesome preschool teacher, but they were hiring me for my business degree, not my Early Childhood credentials, since the center was essentially insolvent at the time. After six-plus years of sixty and seventy hour weeks and a sink-or-swim education in grantwriting, I left the center in the black--by at least a couple of hundred bucks.

That's the UPSIDE of those particular years.

Thinking of all the crazy stuff I've gone through in these last sixteen years, I sure wish I'd gotten to read CHINESE HANDCUFFS a lot sooner. Halfway through the book I went over to look up Crutcher's coming events calendar to figure out if I could go listen to him somewhere in early March and maybe learn something for my birthday, as I had found myself in the midst of reading some insightful and important stuff that nobody'd taught me (or I wasn't listening to) when I was the age of his two teenaged main characters.

Those two characters, Dillon Hemingway and Jennifer Lawless, are both superior academically and outstanding athletically. Both are also seriously damaged kids.

"Today Mr. Caldwell told me I didn't have any respect. What he meant was, I'm not afraid of him. Mr. Caldwell calls fear respect. That's really not a bad trick if you can get the right people to buy it. See, respect is a good thing, at least the way that most people see it. Fear is a bad thing, but it's a lot easier to create. So if you're lazy, or dumb, and don't want to go through what you have to for respect, your next best option is to call something else by its name, like fear. It's like fool's gold. Fear is fool's respect.

"The Nobel Prize for that little theory was a three-day vacation, do not pass Go, do not collect your lunch ticket. The rebellious part of you would love me these days, Pres. I spend more time out of school than in, and my grades are still the same. 'Course, part of the reason he booted me might be traced to my delivery. I wasn't exactly scholarly in my presentation. I just needed to get that turdburger out of my face. God, he always catches me in the hall or the lunchroom or someplace where I've just fallen in lust with some girl to hold me over until I can figure out what I'm supposed to do with Jen and Stacy. Then he just pushes until I fight back, which is usually within the first fifteen seconds. The way I normally fight back is to say something about either his bald head or his mother. Neither of us likes to lose face, though he has more to lose--his goes all the way to the back of his head--so we get locked in and end up in a tug-of-war that he always wins because he has been granted the divine gift of suspension."

Dillon's wounds are there for all to witness and probe. His big brother Preston fell in with a bad biker crowd and became a serious druggie before losing his legs in an "accident." Eventually Preston forces Dillon to witness his violent suicide. Dillon, who now writes letters to his dead brother, is competing outside of school as a triathlete but refuses to buy into Mr. Caldwell's "win at any cost" philosophy or play on any school teams. He serves, instead, as the manager of the girls' basketball team which is coached by Kathy Sherman, a woman who moves to the beat of a different drummer.

Jennifer Lawless is the star of that girls' team, and her own horrific wounds are carefully hidden from everyone including her perceptive coach. The question is what effect will Dillon and Jennifer have on each other's life when they come to trust and confide in each other away from the gymnasium.

"Someday soon, Jen would have to abandon her mom for whatever fate lay in store."

Along with the intensity of the tale there is an awful lot of fun in reading classic Crutcher after becoming familiar with the details of his hilarious and thought-provoking autobiography, KING OF THE MILD FRONTIER. Highlights of the autobiography such as missing front teeth, those four words, "Wanna do something neat?" and the geography of eastern Washington make their appearances. (For you KING OF THE MILD FRONTIER fans, there are some steamed clams here, but no oysters.)

"Well it was one of those great stories

That you can't put down at night

The hero knew what he had to do

And he wasn't afraid to fight

The villain goes to jail, while the hero goes free

I wish it were that simple for me

-- if it were that simple for me."

--"Hero" by Phil Collins and David Crosby

Dillon's fury over the things that happen to those he loves is matched by his audacious behavior toward the administrator and the bikers, and prepares him to do battle with the ultimate villain.

Sixteen years ago while I was reading A LION IN THE NIGHT and singing "Dirt Made My Lunch" yesterday's teens were being blown away by the new Crutcher story. Now it's time for a new generation to get caught up in CHINESE HANDCUFFS.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com