Would You Buy This Book?
The Dover Boys, the next mediocre American novel
Their birth certificates read Richard and Benjamin Dover, and a lot of folks figured that was part of why they were so mean. How on Earth their mother, Charlotte Dover, never realized those names were a problem was a question that never got answered. But as the boys’ grandmother was heard to say of her daughter, “She’s pretty, but she’s also pretty dumb. If she’d had a girl she’d have named her Eileen without a second thought.” Mrs. Dover’s unimpressive intellect probably had nothing to do with why the boys’ father had gone out for something one day and simply vanished.
Conversely, that event very likely did have something to do with their mother’s subsequent behavior. While no one would have called her uptight prior to her spouse’s disappearance, her behavior after the fact could be characterized by raised eyebrows and dropped standards. She never did anything too terribly criminal, and really, she would tell you, her sons didn’t either. They just took after their father, she would say. The boys’ mother always defended them (unless she was at the county jail herself), even when she probably shouldn’t have, because doing bad things didn’t make you a bad person, she always said. She would often add that she was living proof.
She applied the same standard to her own sons, but the authorities didn’t. Neither did the broader community. The Dover boys had a well-earned reputation for doing bad things, though more the cherry-bombs-in-mailboxes variety than anything serious. Still, they did it often enough that they were an irritation to people, who unfortunately had no maternal compunction about calling the police and filing charges. The boys were a problem, but they had a lot of problems too, the kind that tend to manifest in bad choices, bad behavior, and bad grades. Given their background, and their names, you could say that the Dover boys were responsible for the things they did, but they weren’t totally to blame. For better or worse, not a lot of people seemed to care about that.
It would be hard enough to grow up poor in a place where most people weren’t. Poor is always relative, but it can also be pretty obvious, especially every September when some kids return to school with the latest fashions and others are still wearing last year’s clothes, even if they’ve partially outgrown them. Add to that the inherent class divisions symbolized by brand names, and it can be hard for the kids who had what they needed, but little else. No one’s teenage years are easy, but some are easier than others. Charlotte Dover did the best she could, but raising two boys alone was difficult. Richard was a discipline problem in school in that he invariably kicked the shit out of people who teased him or his little brother. Benjamin was as shy and timid as Richard wasn’t, and it made him a target of school tauntings. They never ended well, because either Benjamin ended up losing his temper and the ensuing scuffle, or Richard showed up and won it. No matter the outcome, one or both of them always ended up in the principal’s office. Or juvenile court.
By the time some young people were graduating from college, Richard had already done time for assault. Just out of high school, albeit a year late, someone had tauntingly called him “Dick Dover” during an argument, and Richard let him have it. That cost him two years, which his public defender said he was lucky to get. It wasn’t a long time, and it wasn’t anywhere near the flat sentence, but it still felt like forever to young Richard. Nevertheless, he did his time smartly and stayed out of trouble. He kept his head down and his nose clean. He did what was known as “his own time.”
The biggest problem Richard had with his incarceration was that he absolutely hated being in jail. He could never understand those cons who seemed accepting or even happy at being caged up like livestock. He did his own time and was a model prisoner, mostly because he hated being one, and staunchly refused to do anything that might keep him locked up for even an extra minute. Some inmates called him unflattering names and questioned his manhood. These were the same inmates who vehemently asserted that when one con was giving another a blowjob, “only the guy on his knees is gay.” Even without any excess education, Richard could see that such logical contortions required a level of wilful blindness that confounded him.
Richard was lucky enough to take classes in a variety of subjects, at which he excelled. Never having done well in school, he surprised himself. He even started reading more than textbooks. He became well-known in the prison library, which surprised him even more. He also learned, informally of course, all kinds of things you can’t learn in books. Just being around criminals every day, he overheard things he wasn’t even trying to hear. He learned how to break into and make off with just about every type of car and truck on the road, how to cook meth, and, like so many people in or around the drug trade, became capable of imperial to metric conversions with impressive speed. It wasn’t exciting or interesting, but when all you’ve got is time, you’ll take any means to pass it.
Richard always reminded himself that the people who were expounding on the best or right way to do these things were undeniably not good enough at them to actually get away with it. But forward thinking and rational analysis were not very common in the criminal mind. Not even Richard understood how or why he could see these pitfalls and steer clear of them. He was just glad that he did. Once paroled, he found work in a garage and hoped to put his prison experience behind him forever. All he had gotten out of it was a distaste for small spaces and ‘career criminals,’ neither of which seemed worth the time. Even so, Richard did better in prison than his brother.