True Boyer and I were friends the minute we both plunked our butts on Mrs. Randal’s dunce bench together in the second grade.Not that we’re stupid or anything; True had this annoying habit of questioning adult logic that Mrs. Randal didn’t care much for and I happened to back him up that day, which I’ve been doing ever since. True had a knack for asking questions that drove adults crazy.
I once heard his foster mother, Mrs. Mister, say; “the boy was born with a question mark in his mouth.”
This came after True grilled her on why she had married John Mister if it meant going through life called either Mrs. Mister, or Hester Mister. How he managed to ask those questions with a perfectly straight face, I’ll never know. Mrs. Mister had haughtily suggested that a boy named True shouldn’t be throwing stones at glass houses, or something like that. True had smiled, and shrugged, and given me one of those yellow-eyed looks that said, “you see, Bernie, adults don’t know everything.”
True always maintained that his missing parents had named him “True” because they expected him to get to the bottom of things. All he really knew about them was that they’d abandoned him in a church when he was two days old. True used to speculate that they had been famous artists dying of AIDS who had tried to leave him a message with his unique name.
Continued in the next post
