Buddy Reardon in Pursuit of the Lone Ranger

Buddy Reardon in Pursuit of the Lone Ranger spans thirty-three hours in the life of eleven-year-old Buddy Reardon in the late summer of 1950. It is not a sentimental lollipop. It is basic storytelling--an intimate portrayal of a third generation Irish American boy from a working class family who lives in a northern suburb of Fenway Park. It is a world where people get their news from gossip and the radio--a world where people have not yet learned, through television, how not to be themselves.

Buddy Reardon is an imaginative, canny, often dreamy kid, with an ironic sense of humor, who rarely sees things from a conventional or knee-jerk perspective. For him, "center field" is the center of the known universe, and the Lone Ranger is his spiritual guide and mentor in a confusing pre-sixties world. Negotiating survival with his unwitting family, Buddy maneuvers like a caveman stalking an unpredictable woolly mammoth. He stalks, humors, baits and evades his rough-hewn father, Jack Reardon, his manipulative mother, Dot Reardon, and his unsympathetic fourteen-year-old sister Janey. When family plans threaten his destined rendezvous with a special Lone Ranger Anniversary Radio Show, (in which the Lone Ranger himself is to appear, unmasked), Buddy resorts to secretive, unusual, even bizarre tactics. He will allow nothing to stand between him and that show.

Jack Flynn grew up in the fifties in an Irish American neighborhood north of Boston, majored in English at San Francisco State College, and spent the sixties hitchhiking and driving the highways and by-ways of America. He was a stage actor for over twenty years, working at the Gloucester Stage Company, the North Shore Music Theater, and The Boston University Playwrights Theater, as well as touring nationally with Boston’s Chamber Repertory Theater. He presently resides in the North Shore area of Massachusetts, where, enjoying semi-retirement, he plays softball and writes. He is currently working on a collection of "Buddy Reardon" stories.

The Callahans showed up, marching across Uncle Hank’s freshly seeded front lawn. There was Big Jim Callahan, the Callahan everybody feared--seventeen, well over six feet and still growing, with lazy eyes and a face too long for a horse. Big Jim had no respect for anything--animal or human. Everyone was a target for his cynical jokes. Then there was Danny Callahan, thirteen, a tall gentle boy with a bad case of undeserved acne and the only intelligent member of the clan. Timmy Callahan followed--an oversized, freckled faced, dumb hulk of a kid with an affected deep voice and a bully’s swagger. Last was three-year-old Little Petey, diapered and dirty, tumbling along with his girlie curls and shit on his leg.

"Hey! Get the hell off my lawn!" Hank yelled, rounding the corner with his hoe. Timmy immediately sprang to the driveway. Danny picked up Little Petey and followed. Big Jim paused for several long seconds, spit a huge lunger on the lawn, then, slow motion-like, dragged his mammoth sneakers over to the rest of them. He winked at Buddy.

"Hey, Chink’s here. Gonna play ball with us Chink?"

"Yeah," Buddy said glumly, not appreciating the term much. So, his eyes were a little close to the surface, like a lot of Irish kids--so what. But what the hell, he thought. Big Jim had a name for everyone. No one was exempt. Buddy was simply Chink to him and would remain Chink unless Big Jim felt like changing it. It could have been worse. If Big Jim had a name for him that referred to his shortness, that would have really upset him, so he figured he got off easy. And Chink definitely wasn’t as bad as the name Big Jim used to have for him. Little Peckerhead he used to call him. Big Jim gave the name as a result of an incident that had occurred years before.

Buddy was five at the time. He was at home, playing with his trucks in the upstairs hallway one morning, when a familiar tune wafted out from behind the closed bathroom door. He put his eye to the keyhole and caught a glimpse of his Daddy, Jack Reardon, who was unselfconsciously humming "The Rose Of Tralee," as he pissed erratically into the porcelain. Jack’s right hand happened to be dangling alongside of his penis, which wasn’t unusual, except that it appeared to Buddy as though he were pissing out of his thumb. Having no point of reference for that anomaly, Buddy did a double take. He and every other kid he knew, peed out of their pee-pee, but right there in front of him was his own Daddy peeing out of his thumb. Jack Reardon did have a few other talents. Being ambidextrous, he could throw left or right, juggle, balance a heavy iron rake on his chin, and flip a lighted cigarette from the back of his palm into his mouth; but this . . . this Magic Thumb . . . was a most special thing.

From that moment on, Jack couldn’t go anywhere without Buddy on his tail. He pushed him out of the bathroom again and again, "What are you doin’ in here? Get the hell out," he would snort, as he slammed the door in his son’s face.

The best opportunity Buddy had for thumb watching was when he was right next to it at breakfast and suppertime. Jack Reardon began to get unnerved. "What the hell are you lookin’ at my fork for?"

"I am not," Buddy mumbled.

"Then what in hell are you doin’ then?"

"The thumb," Buddy whispered conspiratorially.

"What?"

"The thumb," he repeated, only louder this time.

"What the hell’s wrong with it?"

"Nothin’," Buddy said, "Can I have one?"

"What the hell are you talkin’ about? You got your own damn thumb." Then to his wife,

"You got a nut there you know. You’re raisin’ a goddamn nut!"

Jack Reardon’s aggravated state forced Buddy into sneaking looks at the thumb. He would stand behind his daddy’s chair while he was reading the newspaper and observe the thumb as it gripped the pages. He’d shoot glances at it, as it flicked ashes into the ashtray.

About a week after the thumb business began, Buddy was hanging around Uncle Hank’s front steps with some of the older boys. They were bragging about their Dad’s achievements. Specs Gaffney boasted that his Dad was an ex-minor-leaguer and Paulie Noonan bragged that his old man could lift a full barrel of rainwater over his head. Lefty MacDonald said that his Dad could catch flies in mid-air, blindfolded, and Skippy Kendall said his old man, Sport Kendall, once smacked a grizzly bear in the mouth and knocked him out. Big Jim said that the only way Skippy’s old man could knock out even a f-----’ Teddy Bear was if he was drunk on whiskey.

Buddy listened to it all, and held back as long as he could. All of a sudden it burst out of him, "My Daddy goes pee-pees outa his thumb."

The horselaughs rained down like manure. The boys rolled all over each other on the steps, tears trickling into their mouths.

"Oh yeah," laughed Specs, "Noonan’s old man s---- out of his ear."

"Yeah?" Paulie said, "Gaffney pisses out of his old lady’s pussy."

Young Chester Chisholm happened to be strolling by--an effeminate kid whom Dot Reardon would often refer to as "that well mannered boy."

Big Jim elbowed Specs, "Watch this," he said.

"Hey Chester! I betcha I know what your ole lady pisses outa."

Chester stuck his nose up in the air and acted as though he hadn’t heard a thing. Then without breaking stride, he matter-of-factly said, "I don’t think so. My mother doesn’t piss . . . she tinkles," and he continued on up the street. Big Jim threw a rock at him, but was laughing so hard he missed. All the howling and hooting was too much for Buddy, so he slunk off to a quieter spot behind the garage.

A few days later he was out in the field helping his Daddy and his Uncle Hank dig for potatoes, when the two men stopped to take a leak. And there it was, right in front of him. His Daddy was standing there in the bright morning sunshine, pissing out of his pee-pee, just like everyone else.

Buddy, though disappointed, made the necessary mental correction and went on with his life, but Big Jim saddled him with the handle, Little Peckerhead. It remained Little Peckerhead for several years, until Big Jim caught him squinting at the sun one day, and "Chink" was born. Luckily for Buddy, Big Jim was the only one who called him that.