James Hazard. The
World’s Most Rotten Kid and Other Stories. Amazon Kindle. 229p. $4.95.
James Hazard is a graduate of California State
University, Los Angeles and has served in the United States Navy. He grew up in
El Monte. Most of these stories and are set in the 1960s, with some in more
contemporary times. They take place in the Los Angeles area though, except for
some place names, they could be in any part of Middle America. We see again how complex
ordinary people’s lives are. There is at
times what you might call ‘mild’ science fiction here. The
characters change from one story to another. Most are told in the first
person.
The title story, the longest in this collection, is
a first person narrative in the voice of an 11 year old boy who is smart and
artistically gifted as a painter and a cartoonist. He has decent parents. The Father
is a WWII veteran and is a Republican who has a strong sense of social justice
that gets him in trouble with the others in the local GOP group. His mother is
much more than the mother from the TV shows who dresses up to wax the floor. A
sister, maybe forever in the ‘terrible twos’ is, as it turns out, even more of
an artist. A Grandfather comes to stay, a man not so decent and very much from
the dark side. There is a Thanksgiving Dinner of the kind we all fear and that
too often happens. The main part of the story though is the onset of puberty for
our narrator when he had little idea what was happening, much a part of a time
when sex was not talked about. The incident in Church. Guilt and confusion.
Then he was asked to carve the pumpkin for school. We don’t find out quite what
he carved, but it got him called the ‘Rotten Kid.’ And visits with the school
Psychologist. Where he learned what was happening to him. There is a satisfying
Epilogue where he tells what his life has been like since as he looks back on
his childhood.
“The Night Sky” The ordinary life with the smells
and sounds of Los Angeles and the people and successes in the real estate
office. Family life and a chess prodigy son. But there is something more – a
meteor heading towards Earth. Will the missiles stop it? The government has
fall-back plans if the missiles fail where all have to assemble for evacuation.
We all have also thought of what we would do in an impending cataclysm. Maybe
just stay home.
“What’s the Matter with Tomatoes?” A sensible
couple, who have been married forty years, are retired now and in a comfortable
routine. He is sensible because he listens to his more sensible wife. About
most everything. He thinks he might grow tomatoes on the sunny patio. His wife
does not approve. She insists that he go to a doctor who specializes in
‘depression and excessive thinking.’ And now is he having a dream? Where he learns
from the doctor that tomatoes are a controlled substance. Controlled by the
authorities in the eighth dimension.
“My
Life in a Day” This story is told by a GI who moves to California just after
the war. At age 29 he has episodes were he feels himself rushing into his own
body. Others tell him at times he doesn’t move for almost an hour. Then he wakes
to find he has been asleep in a hospital for a year. He makes friends with a
young nurse. And then wakes again to see she is married with young children,
then later wakes when she has grown children. And even later when she is
retired. He learns of JFK and Vietnam. At one of the times he is awake, maybe a
total of a day for the rest of his life, he warns her of something that could
happen.
“Good
Bye, Buster” A young mother, a widow with two children, is also taking care of
her ailing stepfather. Buster is their aging dog. There is a story within in a
story, an old joke about a murder by a jealous husband. And in the end a death
in real life.
“Going
Once, Going Twice” A man dies in his sleep but gets up the next morning and
goes into work as usual. His secretary alarmed at his appearance calls the
paramedics. After they check his vital signs he finds himself in a quarantined
facility attended by people on space suits. We learn of his life in flashback. Is
all this a dream?
“Idea
Man” This is a very short story. A man knows a ‘crazy’ lady who wants to defeat
the devil. And maybe that is the old man, down on his luck now, who lives on
his property. What else would the devil do if he walked the earth other than be
an advisor to persons such as Bernie Madoff?
“The Rotten Kid” could be appreciated by other
bright kids and young adults. And by adults of all ages. The rest of the
stories though are more for grownups.