ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 30, 1995 TAG: 9601020006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NEAL RUBIN/KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
He drives like a maniac...
His social adjustment is, well...
He can't stand the opposite sex...
So, what happens when he grows up?
T
HE kid is a mess.
He's delusional and deceitful. He's a procrastinator and a prevaricator. He's a cynic, a sadist, a sexist.
Also, he chews with his mouth open, at least when he's pretending to be a living X-ray.
``I live according to one principle, and I never deviate from it,'' Calvin says. ``Look out for No. 1.''
``It's a lot more fun to blame things,'' Calvin says, ``than to fix them.''
``Every time I've built character,'' Calvin says, ``I've regretted it.''
When Calvin turns a cardboard carton into a duplicator, his first thought is criminal. ``Counterfeiting is just one of its many uses around the home!''
When Calvin pretends to be God, his first act is to destroy the world. ``The puny inhabitants of Earth displease him!''
And if all that isn't bad enough, his only friend is a stuffed tiger.
The kid is a mess.
``Calvin and Hobbes'' drops off the comics radar screen Sunday. Artist Bill Watterson, tired of daily deadlines and small spaces, is walking away from one of the most successful strips in the world.
He leaves behind 2,400 frantic newspapers, millions of distraught fans and one burning question:
Whither Calvin?
What becomes of an underachieving 6-year-old reprobate with only one shirt? What happens when Calvin hits his teens, or his 20s, or - heavens to Spaceman Spiff! - his dotage?
Is there a future for a boy who founds an anti-girls club? Is there a girl for a boy with a tiger?
Maybe creativity will conquer all. Maybe the sheer force of ingenuity will overcome all the flaws. Maybe he'll be the next Washington or Lincoln.
Or maybe he's headed for prison.
Deputy warden Ray Tamminga runs the Reception and Guidance Center at the State Prison of Southern Michigan. Every adult convict in the system spends his first month or two in Tamminga's tender care.
``It would not surprise me,'' he says, ``if I met Calvin.''
Given Calvin's attraction to fire - he once wanted to toss a gasoline can into the barbecue - Tamminga envisions him serving a 6- to 15-year stretch for arson and attempted murder.
``He's the founder and leader of Get Rid Of Slimy girlS,'' Tamminga says. ``I think he's going to burn up a sorority house.''
Without Hobbes as confidant and bodyguard, Tamminga predicts, ``he's going to have a problem when he tries to handle some of these old-time convicts. But his imagination will save him.''
Ah, yes, his imagination. The optimists - those who picture Calvin without numbers across his chest - base their faith on an inventive nature that turns a simple trip down a playground slide into a voyage to planet Gloob.
If nothing else, ``I think you can depend on him surviving,'' says child-rearing guru T. Berry Brazelton. The mayhem Calvin visits upon the galaxy is nothing more than childish fantasy ... he hopes.
``I think all kids dream about that sort of thing,'' Brazelton says. ``If he starts acting it out, well, then we've got trouble.''
Plenty of children transport themselves to the cockpit of an F-15. Fewer, presumably, imagine blasting missiles toward a populated area until ``a smoldering crater is all that remains of Calvin's elementary school!''
Creativity consultant Doug Hall compares the power of imagination to ``Luke Skywalker's dad. Do they go to the dark side of the Force, or the positive side of the Force?''
Hall, the freewheeling author of ``Jump Start Your Brain'' (Warner Books, $12.95), warns that ``the difference between brilliance and stupidity, or lawfulness and unlawfulness, is a very fine line. The future for children is often determined by the upbringing they're given.''
Calvin's home life is outwardly stable, even if neither of his parents has a name. Dad is a patent attorney, Mom a homemaker, and they live in a house near a woods. Even more than most parents, however, they seem ambivalent about their child.
``All I know,'' Dad reminds Mom, ``is that I offered to buy us a dachshund, but no, you said ...''
Calvin makes the inevitable inquiry about babies, and Dad tells him they come from Sears. But ``you were a blue-light special at Kmart,'' he volunteers. ``Almost as good, and a lot cheaper.''
Calvin wonders if there were dinosaurs when Dad was a kid, and Dad assures him there were. ``Your grandfather and I used to put on our leopard skins and hunt brontosaurus for all the clan rituals.''
Poor Calvin is the unwitting George Burns to his father's Gracie Allen. Can a boy who never gets a straight answer grow up to walk the straight and narrow?
It's a lot to ask.
``The cynicism and other traits Calvin shows now will color just about everything he looks at,'' says Southfield, Mich., psychologist Christine Panyard. ``Personality traits tend to be relatively enduring.
``They're your essence, and they're very, very difficult to modify. Personality disorders are the hardest to treat because they permeate almost everything the individual does.''
Calvin makes no secret of his desire to acquire great wealth with little effort. Given his lack of ethical constraints, he seems bound for a career as a corporate raider - but according to Panyard, ``he may not have the social skills to reach that level.''
Beth Kubic says her brothers were scamps, too, though not nearly in Calvin's class. From her vantage point as a certified teacher, part-time baby-sitter and office manager for Fairy Godmother Home Child Care in Birmingham, Mich., she suggests the Calvin with a little red wagon will seem like a cherub compared with the Calvin with his first driver's license.
``He'll become a teen-ager and go through all the puberty and hormonal changes, and he'll be even more of a terror,'' Kubic says. Then she offers a suggestion: ``Maybe he could join the military.''
It worked for two of her siblings. ``The Air Force disciplined them. It helped them grow up.'' And the Air Force is willing to give it a try.
High school graduates can qualify for jobs in satellite tracking or air-to-air refueling, says Sgt. Mike Grassel of the Dearborn, Mich., recruiting office. If Spaceman Spiff makes it through college, he might become a navigator, a pilot or even an astronaut.
``I can see Calvin fitting in, sure,'' Grassel says. ``As long as he hasn't had any serious law violations or drug problems, we can use him. Calvin hasn't gotten into that much trouble.''
Certainly, Calvin knows what he can get away with as a child. Responsibility and liability weigh more heavily with advanced years, and there can be a lawsuit waiting for someone who careens blindly down a hill in a wagon or ambushes a passer-by with a snowball.
``He's an attractive nuisance on wheels,'' says St. Clair Shores, Mich., attorney Deborah O'Brien. Assuming Calvin hurts himself, ``we would be left in the rather difficult position of having to explain his comparative negligence.''
Assuming he hurts someone else - if he grows up to drive a car the same haphazard way he pilots a sled - O'Brien calls upon another precise legal term: ``The boo-boo factor would be high.''
O'Brien also does divorce work, and she foresees trouble for Calvin there, too. A man, a woman, a tiger ... ``It would be a crowded marital bed.''
(EDITORS: STORY CAN TRIM HERE)
That presumes the supreme ruler and dictator-for-life of Get Rid of Slimy girlS changes his attitude about the opposite sex. For now, his interactions with girls consist largely of grossing out Susie Derkins.
Calvin once smashed his peanut butter sandwich against his face and tried to wash it off with chocolate milk, assuring that neither he nor Susie would be able to eat lunch. He spends more time concocting plans to ambush her with water balloons than he does doing homework. Nevertheless, says the president of the National Women's Party, ``I assume there's hope for Calvin.''
Helen Arnold's organization was founded 72 years ago by a suffragette who thought the right-to-vote campaign was moving a bit too slowly. Arnold, of Tulsa, Okla., is no giddy optimist; she'll argue that little has changed since the passage of the 19th Amendment. But she'll give Calvin the benefit of the doubt.
``At some time or other, he's going to have a relationship with some woman besides his mother,'' Arnold says. ``He will meet someone he respects who happens to be female and will change his mind about all his little chauvinistic ways.''
Perhaps she'll change him in other ways, too. Perhaps he'll get an MBA and go to work for Procter & Gamble, devising new ways to market liquid soap. Perhaps ...
Nah. There are socially appropriate ways Calvin could live, says psychologist Panyard, but ``they would still be individualistic. He could become a writer, a musician, a painter, a poet.''
Or, more in character, he could become a critic.
Once, while visiting a museum with his parents, Calvin imagined himself a Tyrannosaurus running amok. ``Hundreds of priceless paintings are ripped to shreds in the awful rampage! Wealthy benefactors are trampled! The museum is in ruins! On to symphony hall!''
Some might interpret that as the fantasy of a Philistine, but Royal Oak, Mich., gallery owner Andy Sharkey says it was a deep artistic statement.
``He doesn't appreciate pretentious art. That's the key,'' she says.
Sharkey sees the adult Calvin as a one-man societal conscience. ``He keeps people honest. He doesn't become a corporate head. He's out there making people be accountable.'' Rather than fear the boy as a man, she suggests that ``we need more Calvins.''
That sounds like a job for Calvin's duplicator, the large cardboard box that also serves as his transmogrifier and his time machine. It also sounds like an acceptably rosy future. But what about Hobbes?
Suppose Calvin the Critic forgoes jail and goes to New York instead. Suppose he stops giving Susie the raspberry and gives her a ring. Where does that leave the tiger?
Detroit Zoo director Ron Kagan has a ready and reassuring answer.
``Don't worry,'' he says. ``We'll take him.''
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