From a very early age
my parents instilled in me a love of movies. Some of my earliest memories are
of seeing an animated Raggedy Ann and Andy movie in a darkened theater. This
love of cinema also extended to my reading material. In addition to reading
copious amounts of comic books and the young adult fiction of S.E. Hinton, I
was given at an impressionable age a children’s novel by Daniel Pinkwater
entitled, The Snarkout Boys and the
Avocado of Death. It not only contains several references to movies and movie
stars, but also features such evocative imagery that I could so easily see it
being made into a film. I always imagined it being directed by Beetlejuice (1988) era Tim Burton.
The protagonists of the novel are two boys – Winston Bongo and Walter Galt – who meet in English class at Genghis Khan High School. They become fast friends and bond over how “utterly boring, nauseating, stupid and generally crummy it is.” Winston introduces Walt to the practice of Snarking Out, which involves getting up at 1 a.m. and sneaking out of your home undetected. Oh, how awesome that sounded at my young age. The two boys meet and take a downtown bus to the Snark Theater, which has a different double bill every day (for example: Vampires in a Deserted Seaside Hotel at the End of August and Invasion of the Bageloids) and is open 24 hours – basically, my dream movie palace! Another perk of this place was that if you submitted the name of a movie they would get it and send you a letter with a free ticket when they got it. You can also submit your birthday and they will send you a free ticket for that day.
The Snarkout Boys takes me back to the heady days when going to the movies was a communal experience: “I’ve never had so much fun at the movies. As each new film started, and the audience heard the Laurel and Hardy theme song, everybody started cheering and clapping. We did, too.” Walt even champions seeing a movie in a theater as opposed to on television:
“The thing about Laurel and Hardy movies that you can’t get from the chopped-up versions on television is how beautiful they are. Things happen exactly at the moment they have to happen. They don’t happen a second too soon or too late. You can even predict what’s going to happen—and it does happen—and it surprises you anyway. It doesn’t surprise you because it happened, but because it happened so perfectly.”
On the way home, the bus breaks down so the boys continue on foot and take a detour through Blueberry Park, named after James Blueberry, the toothpick millionaire and whose will stipulated “that the city could have the park, as long as people were permitted to speak there. Anyone who wants to can make a speech there. They don’t have to have a permit or anything like that.” Winston and Walt listen to a trade unionist complaining about working conditions in beatnik-speak – pretty advanced stuff for a children’s book!
On a solo snark Walt meets a girl his age – Bentley Saunders Harrison Matthews or Rat to her friends. She’s a skinny girl with blonde-green hair and happens to be a huge fan of legendary actor James Dean. Walt finds out that she’s been snarking for years. She tells Walt and Winston about her uncle Flipping Hades Terwilliger who has been snarking every night for 15-20 years.
The thing that struck me about these characters years later was their good movie-viewing habits, going to see films like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Song of the South (1946) – I had not heard of these films when I first read this book. I also love the snapshot Pinkwater gives us of the Snark Theater’s audience:
“The Attack of the Mayan Mummy came on. Almost at once, people began fidgeting, talking and leaving. As the movie progressed, those people still in the theater were almost all engaged in conversation in normal tones of voice. People lit up cigarettes, friends called to each other … Nobody complained. It wasn’t the sort of movie you’d want to pay attention to.”
What strikes me about the book now is its unique protagonists: two overweight boys and a rat-faced girl with punk rock hair, but Pinkwater doesn’t judge them and, in fact, champions them by further populating the book with oddballs and eccentrics typified by Rat’s family. There’s Aunt Terwilliger, an avid opera fan and yet prone to making speeches about how people shouldn’t listen to them. Uncle Flipping is a mad scientist who does research and development for Bullfrog Industries – the source of the family fortune. Their Chinese butler Heinz (who prefers to be called F’ang Tao Sheh) isn’t really Chinese. Finally, Rat’s mother, Minna Terwilliger Matthews, believes that all realtors are extraterrestrials that have been systematically replaced since the 1950s.
After breakfast, Uncle Flipping mysterious disappears. Has he wondered off? Was he kidnapped? Apparently, he does this often and it is up to the rest of the family to find him. Since they are on vacation, Walt and Winston offer to help Rat find her uncle. It may have something to do with international master criminal Wallace Nussbaum, the king of crime. He was kicked out of South American army for terrifying chickens and holds the world’s boomerang record.
The journey that Walt, Winston and Rat take finds them going to Lower North Aufzoo Street or, “the city beneath the city” as it is known. It is a fascinating look at what goes on behind the scenes as Walt and Winston discover the source of truck deliveries to the business district, where the garbage gets picked up, and a network of steam pipes that heat all the big office buildings. It is these descriptive details of the fictional town of Baconburg that Pinkwater really nails and immerses the reader in this vivid world. For example, at one point our heroes go to get a hotdog and even such a seemingly mundane task such as this is brought to life via such evocative prose:
“About half a block up the street, we could see a puddle of very bright, very yellow light. As we got close, we saw that it was a hot-dog stand with a sort of glass enclosure in front of it. There was a flickering blue neon sign in the window that said ED AND FRED’S RED HOTS … All the lights in the place were these yellow fluorescent light—the kind that are supposed to keep bugs away—and there were a lot of them. This made the brightly colored hot dogs and relish look even stranger than they must have looked in broad daylight.”
According to an article in the Chicago Reader, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death was inspired by Pinkwater’s experiences growing up in 1950s Chicago with several of the fictional places standing in for actual landmarks that he frequented. For example, the Snark Theater is a reference to the now defunct Clark Theater, which would show movies 24 hours a day and feature a different double bill every day. The public debates that occur in Blueberry Park actually took place in Bughouse Square. The oddly named Lower North Aufzoo Street is a riff on the famous Lower Wacker Drive. I can only imagine what a treasure trove of nostalgia a book like this must be for readers who grew up in Chicago.
For Pinkwater, he is interested in preserving, “the dying cultural treasures of urban life… There are things I`ve seen and experienced that have been very precious and nice, and I feel almost bad that they`re gone now… And when you read about these things, you say, ‘Damn, I’d like to go there tonight!’ I enjoy keeping some of this stuff alive.”
The kinds of descriptions I mentioned earlier are ones that I can see Tim Burton bringing to life in a film. When I first read The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death I pictured the entire story in my head, imagining exactly what these characters looked like and the adventures they went on. Pinkwater wrote a sequel entitled, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, which continued the numerous film references, but wasn’t nearly as satisfying a read as Avocado of Death, but then sequels rarely are. That being said, like any good young adult novel, Pinkwater’s book appeals to both youthful readers and older ones that pick up the references to obscure foreign and B-movies. It is a worthy addition to any budding cinephile’s library.
SOURCES
Pinkwater, Daniel. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books. 1982.
Sachs, Ben. “My Favorite Book About Chicago Moviegoing.” Chicago Reader. June 17, 2013.
“Twisted Reality.” Chicago Tribune. February 21, 1990.
