Dwayne

(entry for 6/5/2024)

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From the day I met him in 1949 until the day he died in 1955, Dwayne Marchbanks was my best, and sometimes only, friend.

 

He was the only person who stood by me when the whole world dissolved around me in the 7^thgrade, and he was the only person who ever tried to teach me how to shoot a porcupine, and was probably the only person in the world who could have refrained from laughter when I missed. (This last was never put to the test, as he was the only person who knew about it.)

 

He was one of the toughest people I have ever known and also one of the most sensitive. He suffered from a severe inguinal hernia which was not surgically reparable and for which he wore an awkward and bulky truss. (Or perhaps his family couldn’t afford the operation: they were very poor.) He wore the truss even when he was fighting, which was often. He was very small for his age, and far from handsome, and other kids picked on him unmercifully. And he simply would not ‘take it.’ I saw him once attack (and defeat) a kid twice his size, and several years older than he, because the kid had taunted him. It took him all of two minutes, and the defeated miscreant never taunted Dwayne again. He knew better now. He had a purple eye for a couple of weeks.

 

And yet in spite of his fighting spirit Dwayne could ooh and ah over a beautiful butterfly, or a beautiful girl, or even a beautiful book. He always listened when I talked to him, and he always talked to me like someone twice his age. (He was eight when I met him, and fourteen when he died.)

 

Just to balance things out, he always rode his bicycle too fast, and often crashed, seemingly with no ill effects.

 

When the Montrose SDA Elementary School was first started (founded by my father, who refused to move to the town where he had just gotten a new job until the church board authorized the funds to create the thing), there were only seven students enrolled. There was an eighth grader named Olanda, two seventh graders, Kenny and Sherri, three sixth graders, Sally, Bobby, and someone else whose name and gender I have long forgotten. I was the lone fifth grader, and the youngest kid in the school until Dwayne joined us part-way through the second semester. He made eight of us. And he was eight, as well. Years old, that is.  He was in the third grade and was the only kid under ten.

 

All of us teased him, even me at first, though I soon decided not to. We told him that all kids switched to the opposite gender when they reached their ninth birthday, and that he would become a girl on that date. As proof we offered him a photo of me that my mom had taken of me in girl’s clothes when I was about nine months old. Of course there were dozens of me taken in the clothes of the boy I actually was, but we didn’t show him those. He believed us. And forgave us when we confessed to the truth, somewhat later. He said he didn’t mind, either way, an extraordinary thing for an eight-year-old boy to say in that day and age. Especially that eight-year-old boy! (He probably would have turned into the toughest girl in history if we had been telling the truth.)

 

The school was very successful, and enrollment jumped. By the next year there were fifteen of us, and twenty-three by the year after that. (All with one teacher and all in the same room.) This in a town of five thousand and church of less than a hundred members. That was 7^th grade, and it was almost my Waterloo.

 

I found school very boring, and partly because of that and partly because (for some unknown reason) I needed to be in there a lot, I spent hours in the boys’ bathroom. Which was immediately adjacent to the girls’ bathroom. Now both rooms were very small, and a long time ago someone had drilled a hole in the wall between the two rooms, barely big enough to see through, which I never tried to do. But it was there, and eventually someone noticed it. I’ve never known who my primary accuser was, but at some point early in the school year I was suddenly called to a meeting with the teacher after hours and informed that I had been accused of having drilled the hole myself for purposes of spying on the girls, and that that was why I spent so much time in the bathroom. Also, someone had found a drill bit in the hallway closet that exactly matched the hole. Since I had to go through the hallway to get to the bathroom, that was proof! That, along with multiple allegations that I had told dirty jokes on several occasions, was enough to convict me.

 

Which was outrageous, and I was properly outraged. But I had been taught that anger was a sin, and in any event I was emotionally incapable of showing any negative reaction, let alone anger. So my lack of visible umbrage was taken as a confession. I was forced to stand in front of the entire school and apologize. I stammered out the words, “I’m sorry for things I have done but I’m not sorry for things I haven’t done.” What I meant by that, or at least what I was trying to mean by that, was that I had indeed told dirty jokes and was sorry, but that I had had nothing at all to do with the hole in the bathroom wall. But nobody listened to the last half of my ‘apology,’ so it was assumed by almost everyone that I had confessed to everything I had been accused of.

 

Everyone but Dwayne.

 

He told me he knew I hadn’t drilled the hole. How he could know that, since it was there long before he showed up, I have no idea, but he knew. He couldn’t say the same thing about the jokes, because he had heard me tell some of them, but he was wise enough to know that there was not necessarily any connection between the joke-telling and the hole-drilling. He was the only person in the school, including the teacher, who was capable of understanding that point. And I loved him for it.

(Side note: My parents never heard a word about any of this till years later. Not from the teacher, not from students, not from parents of other students. and certainly not from me.)

 

By the time we split into two classrooms with two entirely separate teachers, I was in the eighth grade, and president of the class (of three). I graduated, and we moved to Grand Junction, where there was an SDA Junior Academy, but the Dwayne saga was far from over.

 

He had developed cancer of the lymph nodes, of the type known as Hodgkin’s Disease (the slightly more deadly non-Hodgkins lymphoma hadn't been discovered yet). It showed up mostly in his neck, although it affected other lymph glands as well. He blamed it on a fight he had with an older kid (surprise) who grabbed him around the neck and squeezed unmercifully and refused to let go even when Dwayne managed to knee him in the gonads. (Though Dwayne did eventually win the fight.) But medical authorities maintain that you can’t get cancer that way, and they’re probably right, though I do sometimes wonder if he had insights that no one else had.

 

In any event, there was no treatment available for lymphoma in Montrose at that time, so Dwayne came to live with us in Grand Junction, where he could get radiation treatments at one of the local hospitals. Far from being the brunt of endless taunting, as he had been in Montrose, he was now everyone’s baby! The girls, especially, fell for him like sprayed flies. My own girlfriend seemed to like him better than she liked me. (Correction: She didn't seem to like him better. She did like him better!)

 

He was the toast of the school, and not just because he had cancer. Everybody loved him. But it never went to his head. He didn’t get proud. He remained the down-to-earth (and earthy) Dwayne I had always known. He still rode his bike too fast. He still shot porcupines, during his visits back home in Montrose. He still fought bullies, even though their sin now was bullying other people and not Dwayne himself. He fought them anyway.

The kids, partly because they didn't know any better, and partly just to be funny, started calling him D-Wayne, rather than the one-syllable Dwyane he had been born with. Why his parents spelled it that way rather than the more usual 'Duane,' I have no idea. (Perhaps it was the same trait that made them say Sparrow Grass when they meant asparagus?)

We had been close since the third and fifth grades, but now we became closer still. In fact, we were inseparable, doing everything and going everywhere, always together.

 

After a year of treatments, it became apparent that the radiation wasn’t having any effect. And that his days were severely numbered. So his folks took him back to Montrose so that he could die at home, among family and friends. (Though his best friend wasn’t there to offer comfort. At least I thought of myself that way.)

 

I saw him for the last time on the day before he died. His mom called us in Grand Junction (even though long distance calls were very expensive in those days), to say that if they wanted me to ever see him again they’d better bring me up fast, as he was visibly fading before their eyes.

 

He had lost a load of weight, which he could ill afford to lose. He looked visibly smaller, both in girth and in height. In fact, he looked close to eight again. He was bed-ridden, without the strength to move around or even get up. He showed me some candy resembling multi-colored rock pebbles that someone had given him. (I can’t see candy like that without remembering him, to this day. Or even rocks that look like that kind of candy, such as the header on this website.) He was very proud of his candy pebbles and kept saying how good they tasted. He also complained constantly of a noise that no one else could hear. 

"Can't you hear that?" he would complain.

"Hear what?" was the inevitable response.

"That buzzing sound. Like a hornet trying to get through a wall."

The noise was never explained, except by one young acquaintance who later said that it was probably the cancer eating into his brain.

 

We stayed for about an hour and then drove silently home, a trip of sixty miles.

 

He died early the next morning, in his sleep, seemingly without pain.

 

There was no funeral. They couldn’t afford one. And I couldn’t have lived through one, anyway, even if there had been one.

 

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