Less than a year later my mother married again, to Count Ralph, a minor nobleman from a shopping center on the south side of town. And thus began the intrigue that was to mark the next dozen years of my life.
At first I didn’t care much one way or the other about my new stepfather. He seemed nice enough, in a way, but he drank too much beer and his armor was the cheap foreign kind. And he did not have a charger of his own. Anytime there was an argument with a neighbor over feudal obligations like keeping their lawns nice, he would have to rent a horse in order to settle the quarrel with a jousting match. But I didn’t really mind him. Anyway, I was much too busy with the Grade School Wars. They caused great destruction and suffering, especially to substitute teachers. My grandfather should have put a stop to these fights, but he was growing old and he never recovered from the death of my father, who was his favorite. He began to grow feeble after that and wound up in a royal nursing home. And my Uncle Bob, the crown prince, cared about nothing but business and golf.
There were three grade schools in the local school district, and we were at war with each other constantly. And the four public high schools in Wood County were fighting each other, also. Not to mention the two parochial high schools, each of which had elected its own pope. And this caused rioting among the Polish and Italian people who worked in the factories. At school we fought with wooden pikes and swords. Most of our parents wouldn’t let us have real swords until we were sixteen. Although some kids who had paper routes saved up and bought them anyway. We had real arrows, though. And I was grazed on the arm once and had to have stitches.
The school wars were exciting. They were fought from classroom to classroom. I was one of the leaders, of course, because I was of royal blood. But I was in the sixth grade, so I was only a lieutenant. Still, I led my men in many sword fights, especially on the staircases. We would fight up and down the staircases. They were the best places for sword fights. Our school, McKinley School, was a big building, like a fortress, and we fought from barricades across the corridors, and even the principal couldn’t get us to behave. Once we were besieged by the kids from Nathan Hale Grade School, and they drove us to the second floor and conquered our gym. We might have starved if the girls hadn’t had to go home when the streetlights came on. And they were able to get back into the school auditorium that night because there was a PTA meeting and they came with their parents. We hoisted picnic baskets full of provisions up from the auditorium floor to the balcony, and so we survived until morning. We had new sword fights on all the staircases that next day and drove the Nathan Hale kids back to their own neighborhood. We captured one of their sixth-graders, who used to be in my class but his parents moved. He was a spy, and we proved it with a trial by fire, and he died in the hospital. After that our grade school couldn’t fly the green safety pennant on our flagpole under my family’s royal banner. The green safety pennant meant no student had been hurt that year and had a picture of Amber the Safety Elephant on it.
I was so busy that I didn’t notice that Count Ralph, my stepfather, was conspiring against me until my grandfather died and Uncle Bob was crowned King of Sandusky. This made me crown prince, and I always led my class when we marched to school assemblies or to drop our contributions into the March of Dimes collection. Count Ralph’s first plot was to poison my uncle so that I would be king and he could be appointed regent until I was twenty-one. He tried this at a weenie roast but King Bob only vomited and the poison hot dog did not have time to do its work.
But then my stepfather decided upon a different and more treacherous scheme. I believe he realized that I knew about the poisoning attempt, for I had spied on him when I worked after school at his hardware store in the shopping center. And he knew I had come to hate him because he would not buy me an English racer bicycle and because he continually ranted and raved at me for not cleaning up after my brace of coursing hounds. He and my uncle came to a rapprochement. And despite my warnings to the king, Count Ralph was made my protector and Head of the Royal Guards. It became clear to me that the two of them were in league when my cousins Prince Buster and Prince Kevin were waylaid on the street and killed by a hit-and-run driver. This left no other male heir but me, and if I could be gotten out of the way, King Bob’s grandson, my second cousin Prince Dickie, could be made crown prince. I knew, also, that Count Ralph was aiding my uncle in urging City Council to change the laws of royal succession. Either way I would never become king. They couldn’t kill me outright, not yet. It would look bad in the papers. But they were going to get rid of me somehow. My mother was weak. She feared for my safety, but she also wanted to save her marriage and was afraid of what the neighbors would say if she got divorced. I went to my uncles, Prince Larry and Prince Fred, whose sons had been murdered. I asked them for help raising a troop of armed men. I could muster a hundred boys from McKinley School and at least my own patrol from my Boy Scout troop, but we were poorly armed and had no siege engines or cavalry. But my uncles were scared they’d lose their jobs. Only Princess Annie was any help. She gave me a packet of poison to spread on the fabric of my stepfather’s sport coat. But I lost it on the way home.