Writer/musician Adam Snyder has a history of Kingston-related projects, including This Town Will Get Its Due, an album dedicated to Kingston, which was released at a City Hall concert in 2006. Kingston 76, his new novel, is a coming-of-age story set in his hometown during the spring of the Bicentennial.
As 10-year-old Timothy Miller’s home life grows perplexing, he propels himself out of the house and into the role of amateur investigator. Against a backdrop of 70s culture, Timothy and his detective partner, Charles, race around Kingston trying to solve a problematic case, and soon get into more trouble than they bargained for.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 1. To continue reading Kingston 76 for free, subscribe to Adam Snyder’s Substack page at adamsnyder.substack.com.
An excerpt from Kingston 76 by Adam Snyder
Chapter 1
With his bedsheets tied together into a makeshift rope, Timothy climbed out the window of his second story bedroom.
He’d read the instructions several times. He’d estimated the distance to the ground, tied the sheets at the corners using square knots, and secured one end to his bed frame. The bed seemed heavy enough to hold him, that is, until the full weight of his descending body pulled it halfway across the room, causing him to drop several feet quite quickly.
It was at this point that his neighbor across the street, Mrs. O’Connor, looked out her window and saw a long-haired boy dangling halfway down the outside of his house, and thought it was a good idea to call his mother.
“What on earth are you doing?” his mom yelled as she and Cathryn came running out of the house to see what Timothy was doing now.
“I need to practice,” Timothy called back, struggling to snake the bottom of the rope sheet between his feet like the book suggested.
“Practice for what?”
“In case there’s a house fire,” he said, as if this should be obvious.
“Where’s the ladder?” his mom asked Cathryn.
“I don’t think it’s tall enough,” Cathryn said.
But by this point, Mr. O’Connor was already making his way across the street with an extension ladder, having been alerted to the situation by his wife.
Timothy, not wanting to be rescued, gave up on the snaking foot maneuver and commenced to lower his 10-year-old frame to the ground using arm strength alone, which was sufficient thanks to his light weight and daily pull-up regime.
When he got within about five feet of the ground, the bed sheet that was pulled taut over the window sill made an audible scritching sound as it began to rip the long way, rapidly delivering Timothy the rest of the way to the ground, where his feet touched briefly before he landed on his ass, no worse for wear.
“Are you okay?” his mom said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve got to stop doing stuff like this.”
No response.
“Timbo,” Mr. O’Connor weighed in, “is it safe to bring my ladder home, or are you going to try doing this again?”
“I’m done for now…”
“Righto, see you all later,” he said, turning around slowly so as not to clock anyone with the oversized ladder.
“Thanks Jim,” Timothy’s mom said to Mr. O’Connor, then to Timothy: “Go straighten that mess upstairs then come down and help us clean up, we’ve got Group tonight.”
“Why do we always have to have that thing at our house?”
“Timothy, we are a family who welcomes people.”
Timothy flashed a look at Cathryn.
“I noticed,” he said, not quite under his breath.
# # #
The one good thing about Group night was that neither Timothy’s mom nor Cathryn had time to cook, which meant Timothy sometimes got to eat frozen pizza for supper.
Frozen pizza wasn’t exactly pizza, but it wasn’t not pizza either.
With the dining room table arranged with snacks for Group, Timothy was eating quickly, standing up in the kitchen. His cat, Oscar, was likewise eating a rushed dinner, straight out of the can.
Timothy was just noticing he’d scalded the tip of his tongue on a greasy bit of pepperoni when he heard the front door opening and closing. The women from Group had started to file in.
“Save yourself while you still can,” he said to Oscar, who didn’t need to be told twice, and bolted out the back door.
Timothy peeked into the living room. The throw pillows were already arranged in a circle on the floor, the incense was already burning.
Why did all these women have the same look as his mother and Cathryn? No-nonsense haircuts, no make-up, jeans, leather boots that looked ready for Western ranching even though they were in Kingston, New York. Were they all reading the same manual?
He had to admit that they did have sort of a contemporary look about them, considering it was 1976 and half the other women on Warren Street dressed like it was the 1950s. But still.
When the women greeted his mom, they all called her “Denny.” His mom’s name was Denise. Where did this Denny business come from? It seemed somehow to confirm his suspicion that his mom had actually somehow become a different person than she was barely a year before.
And then came the hugging.
Everyone in Group always hugged each other when they first arrived. Hugging in itself wasn’t so weird, it’s just that Timothy had an internal clock that told him how long a normal hug should last, and these hugs seemed to drag on forever.
He was about to retreat to the kitchen counter when his mother said:
“Oh, Jacqui, good to see you, we weren’t expecting you… Timothy!”
The ten or so women now standing in his living room were all taller than him as he tiptoed among them to see what his mother wanted.
“Can you go upstairs and get your beanbag chair? We don’t have enough pillows.”
Of course Timothy did not want to do this, because who wants a stranger’s butt in your beanbag chair? But he didn’t want to make a scene either, so upstairs he went.
As he came back down, the women were all taking their seats on the pillow circle. The beanbag chair dangled from his hand like a giant dried fig as he handed it to the woman who had just arrived.
“Cool chair, thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” Timothy said, trying to be polite.
“Hey Timothy!” said another woman, who was already seated.
“Hi Cara,” he said softly.
Cara seemed like she was probably the youngest one in the group, maybe college age? He had committed her name to memory because she was the only one who seemed to know his name and always said hello to him. Also, she had a certain twinkle in her eye and, though he’d never admit it, he thought she was kind of cute.
“Why don’t you ever sit with us?” Cara asked. “You can, you know.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t want to sit around listening to a bunch of women talking,” said the woman sitting next to Cara. The woman smiled with her mouth, but shot Timothy the evil eye to make sure he got the point that he was not welcome.
His mom and Cathryn were fussing with something on the dining room table so missed all this, but Cara caught the gist of what was going on.
“Anne, be nice,” she said to death ray woman.
“It’s okay, I’ve got homework to do,” Timothy said, and exited the circle as quickly as he could without stepping on anyone.
Back in the kitchen, what was left of his frozen pizza was now almost cold. He ate it anyway, chewing almost angrily because it gave his emotions somewhere to go besides the forefront of his mind.
He didn’t want to go back through the living room, but he had to in order to get up to his room, so he just made himself do it. The energy in the room had shifted since everyone in the circle had settled down. A couple of the women had lit cigarettes, something his mom and Cathryn would never do, but tolerated because it was Group.
Cathryn took the lead and was saying something like:
“So, last time we were talking about Safe Places…”
but Timothy didn’t really care to know what they had to say on this topic, he just wanted to be in his own safe place, which at this point had shrunk to the size of his bedroom.
He would have punched the hell out of his beanbag chair but it was downstairs under some strange lady’s butt. Instead he sat down hard on his bed and hammer punched the mattress repeatedly with the side of his fist.
Why was he so angry? It was that Anne woman. It’s one thing for an undifferentiated mass of women to take over his living room occasionally, but to have someone individually glare at him like that, like he wasn’t welcome in his own home? That was just too much.
He would’ve started breaking things if he didn’t think it would draw unwanted attention, and it pissed him off even further that he couldn’t even find release in his own room.
“Fucking fuck,” he blurted out.
His temples continued to pulse, though he instinctively took some deep breaths, which had the helpful effect of calming him to the point where at least his room felt like his own domain once again.
He turned on his alarm clock radio, the sole source of music in his bedroom. Captain and Tennille were playing. They seemed pretty confident that “love would keep them together,” but Timothy had his doubts.
By and by, he went into the “junk drawer” at the bottom of his dresser and retrieved the cigar box in which he stored his most personal things. A keychain from a trip to Lake George with his mom. A black-and-white photo of his parents at their seemingly normal wedding in the 1960s. And, most notably, a book about the size of a Readers’ Digest wrapped in brown paper.
He opened the book and the title page was revealed:
The Real Men’s Guidebook
It had called out to him from the back of a comic book. After much deliberation, he’d taped a quarter and two dimes to the order form and mailed it to a p.o. box somewhere in the midwest. He’d made sure he was the first to check their mailbox every afternoon for three weeks until it finally arrived.
He began turning the pages purposefully as he’d done many times. He reread the page with instructions on how to turn bedsheets into a rope ladder, trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. In the photo, the man descending the wall seemed to have no trouble snaking the bed sheet between his feet, why had it been so hard for Timothy?
At any rate, Timothy put a small checkmark on the upper corner of the page, satisfied he’d earned his merit badge for this one. He continued flipping through the pages contemplating his next manly experiment.
There was an unexpected knock, his door started opening.
“Timothy?”
He stuffed the paperback book under his butt as Cara walked into his bedroom. What was she doing up here? She must’ve been looking for the bathroom and knocked on the wrong door. She couldn’t possibly actually be looking for him, could she?
“So, this is your room…”
“Uh, yeah…”
She looked around with actual interest. He hoped she wouldn’t zero in on the poster of Farrah in the red bathing suit, which would be kind of mortifying, you could see her nipples if you looked closely. But no, she was looking at other things.
There was something peculiar about Timothy’s room, something different than she’d imagined. She realized it was that instead of toys and games, his room was mostly an odd collection of seemingly more adult possessions.
If she’d known the backstory, she’d see that each object was the result of Timothy snatching something from the donation box at the last moment, as his mother systematically tried to rid their house of things that reminded her of their previous life.
She picked up an old bourbon decanter that was shaped like an old-time gunslinger.
“This is neat, where’d you get it?”
“It was my dad’s.”
She nodded thoughtfully as she appraised it before setting it back down respectfully. With her attention thus diverted, Timothy stuck his Real Men’s book beneath his mattress so he could rise to his feet and join her by the book shelf.
“A lot of this stuff’s your dad’s, huh.”
“Yep.”
She nodded like she understood.
“Must’ve been hard, your dad running out like that.”
“It’s okay,” Timothy lied.
“But you know something, Cathryn’s really special, she and your mom make a great couple.”
“They’re not a couple,” Timothy quickly corrected her, “they’re roommates.”
Surprised by this sudden assertion, Cara scanned his eyes. She couldn’t for the life of her tell if this was just his standard story or he really believed this. At this moment she realized maybe she’d been too cavalier coming up here, perhaps she’d overstepped her bounds.
“Yes, roommates,” she said, correcting herself.
There were other interesting things on the shelf she could ask him about, but she decided she’d best get back downstairs.
“Anyway,” she added, “I just came up to tell you you really are welcome to join us, just so you’d hear it from someone other than your mom and Cathryn, we all really do like you.”
Timothy thought two things: one, not everyone down there does actually like me and two, he’d never hear from his mom and Cathryn that he was welcome to join Group. But he supposed it was nice of Cara to come in to say so.
“Thanks, but I still have to do my homework.”
Cara shut the door on her way out. Timothy sat back down on his bed. He wasn’t going to do his homework, because he never did his homework.
But he did feel less full of rage than he had ten minutes ago.
# # #
When he could hear car doors slamming out on the street and engines starting, Timothy figured it was safe to go back downstairs.
His mom and Cathryn were out on the porch seeing the last of them off.
Cigarette smoke still hung in the air. It would take days for the smell to clear out entirely. The pillows were still on the floor, now in more of a twisted oval, mirroring the dynamics of whatever terribly earnest conversation had taken place.
Timothy picked the pillows up one by one, tossing them into the corner, beginning to reclaim the living room where on most nights he snacked and watched TV.
On the rug beside one of the last pillows, he found a pack of cigarettes just lying there. He picked it up, examined it closely, smelled the rich but pungent aroma of the tobacco. He removed a single cigarette just moments before the woman whose cigarettes they were came bounding back into the living room from the outside.
Timothy deftly slid the loose cigarette into his shirt pocket as he held up the pack.
“Just what I was looking for,” the woman said. Maybe her name was Sarah.
“I was just about to bring them out to you.”
“You’re a star,” she said, taking the pack and heading back out, “have a good night.”
Timothy threw the last pillow into the corner.
His mom and Cathryn came in at the same time, letting out a collective “Phew!” as if, despite having enjoyed their evening, they were glad to be finished with it.
“Thank you, Timothy,” his mom said, “you’re a real good sport.”
She crossed the room and gave him an appreciative hug, which he sort of wanted to wriggle out of because she smelled like everyone else she had hugged all evening, but it’s not like they were in public, so he submitted to it, because, well, she was his mom.
“Yeah, thanks,” Cathryn echoed, giving Timothy a respectful pat on the shoulder while his mom was still hugging him, which was about the extent of physical contact she figured he’d allow.
Strangely enough, it was at moments like these, after the house had expanded almost to the breaking point of maximum weirdness and unfamiliarity, that the return to it being just Timothy, his mom, and Cathryn felt some version of “normal,” the threesome feeling like a unit of some sort.
“There’s still some ice cream,” his mom said.
Timothy glanced over at the ice cream, which was just now being lapped up by Oscar who’d leapt onto the table.
“Thanks anyway,” he said. “Guess I’ll just go back upstairs and get ready for bed.”
Grabbing his beanbag chair, he shook it out and pulled it this way and that, trying to get the alien butt print out of it as he climbed the stairs. Throwing it in the corner of his room, he took the cigar box back out of his junk drawer.
Carefully removing the cigarette from the snapped pocket of his western shirt, he laid it gently amongst the photos, keepsakes and brown-wrapped guidebook.
The Real Men’s Guidebook did not contain instructions per se about the right way to smoke a cigarette, but there was an ad for Lucky Strikes that provided a good model.
This was an experiment that would have to wait for another day.
To continue reading Kingston 76 for free, subscribe to Adam Snyder’s Substack page at adamsnyder.substack.com.
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