Chris Crutcher's novel King of the Mild Frontier, a recollection his childhood and adolescence in Cascade, Idaho, is a good example of the memoir. Please read the excerpt "Something Neat This Way Comes," and complete the assignment that follows.

Something Neat This Way Comes

By Chris Crutcher

“Wanna do something neat?” are four words that strike terror in my heart to this day. My answer was always yes when the question came from my brother. Then he’d tell me what the neat thing was, and it would always seem not so neat until he explained how what seemed like something that could really get you in trouble was, in fact, neat. Then I’d get in trouble.

I’m around six years old and I’m playing cowboys outside with my friend Ron Boyd and some other kids from the neighborhood. I have to pee so bad I’m about to turn into a hurled water balloon, but Ron’s older brother, Joe, is not around so we younger kids have sworn that no one will tell him we’re planning Roy Rogers, lest we pay dearly, and for the last half hour or so, I’ve been Roy. If I go inside to pee, I stand to lose my exalted spot atop the yellow broomstick that is Roy’s mighty palomino, Trigger, and I’m working my sphincter muscles like a body builder, prolonging those last precious minutes. Finally agony wins out and I drop my cap pistol to get a better grip on my penis and streak for my house. John, sitting in a chair reading a book, observes the obvious as I burst through the door and says, “Wanna do something neat?”

“Yeah, but just a sec. I gotta go to the bathroom.”

“That’s the neat thing,” he says. “Go there.” He points to the four-by=five heat-register grate in the middle of the living-room floor.

“Huh-uh,” I say. “You’ll tell.”

“Promise I won’t,” he says. “Wait till you see what happens. It’s really neat.”

By now I have to go so bad I’m dizzy, and only my death grip is stopping me from peeing into the wall like a strip miner.

“Just take down your pants and pee down the grate,” he says. “I promise I won’t tell. I’d do it myself, but I don’t have to go.”

“Have you ever done it before?”

“Lots of times,” he says. “And see? I never got in trouble for it.”

“No, sir…”

“You’ll be sorry if you don’t. It’s really neat.”

“Okay, but you promise you won’t tell.”

He crosses his black heart.

In the same nanosecond my pee hits that hot furnace, the yellow steam rolls up around me like I’m Mandrake the Magician in the middle of a disappearing act, which I’m not but really wish I was. I know instantly from the sssssssssss and the horrific stench that I better not be making plans to play Roy Rogers again soon. I best be rehearsing my role as a jail bird, because it is going to be a long time before I leave my room.

This is a job for a bawl baby. My eyes squint and my lips roll back over my buckteeth and not one tear comes out because every drop of water in me is shooting out like I’m trying to arc it across the Grand Canyon.

My brother calmly closes all the windows.

When the last drop sizzles off the top of the hot oil furnace, I stand, gazing dazed through the yellow mist. “You said you wouldn’t tell.”

“I won’t,” he says, “but what are you going to tell Jewell and Crutch when they come home and smell this?”

“You better open those windows.”

“And let the whole neighborhood smell it? Then you’d really be in trouble.”

John could always get me to help him pound those last few nails into my coffin for him. He not only got me, he got me to get me. I’m running around closing the rest of the windows for him so the neighbors won’t form a mob to run my parents out of town for having me as a kid.

True to what I now know my brother already knew, he didn’t have to tell on me. When Jewell walks through the door carrying my baby sister, the aroma fills Candy’s tiny nostrils and sets her off like a siren. The good new is that Jewell is so mad she doesn’t know exactly how she wants to kill me, so I get a short reprieve “until your father gets home.”

I can truthfully say I don’t ever remember my father hitting me, but somewhere I got the idea he could hit really hard, and I was always put that idea together with this particular incident. So if my dad ever warmed my butt, it was in response to my doing something neat onto the oil-furnace fire through the living-room grate. But make no mistake about it: Whether or not my father hit me, it didn’t change my behavior one bit. The claustrophobic horror of those first few seconds, and the telling and retelling of the tale, are far more natural consequence than I need to never again pee down the heater. It is good that May and Glen live just across the street, because our house was uninhabitable for at least four days and we have to wait two days after that for the curtains to get back from the dry cleaners. But I don’t go down totally alone. It is widely believed I am telling the truth when I say John told me to do it (“I was just teasing. Geez, I didn’t think he’d really do it”) but his is a misdemeanor and mine a felony that spawns another of those unanswerable questions I will hear throughout my elementary school years: “If your brother told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

Of course I would, if he made it seem neat.

** To read more great memoirs, please click on the link to the right of the feather pen below.

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” - Stephen King