Boys to Men: Two for the Guys from Clements and Paulsen

For those guys who couldn't care less about the mushy stuff surrounding Father's Day, here are two funny but honest guy stories, with a bow to the importance of fathers and grandfathers, from two of the best in the business, Andrew Clements and Gary Paulsen.

Andrew Clements' The Janitor's Boy begins with fifth-grader Jack Rankin carrying out a school prank--with a bit of passive-aggressive attitude. Embarrassed by teasing about his father's job as the school's janitor, Jack plants a huge glob of bubblegum on a music room desk, knowing that it will be his dad's job to scrap it off. Convinced it's the perfect crime, Jack, usually a well-behaved student, is astounded to be called into the principal's office before the gum is barely cold. His punishment fits the crime--three weeks of janitorial duty with his dad, John Rankin, cleaning the desk he defaced and then the accumulated gum wads from all of the library and auditorium furniture.

As Jack works out his after-school penance, though, he begins to get another view of his father, not as just a loser in green polyester work clothes, but as a complex and honorable man whose adolescent battles with his own father led him to quit school and enlist in the Viet Nam-era army. When Jack sneaks a key to explore the unknown "steam tunnel" beneath the school, he accidentally locks himself in the underground beneath the city streets and meets a troubled teenager living there who knows more about John Rankin than his son Jack does. Fifth-grader Jack learns about the many people his father has helped over the years and begins to understand a bit more about what it means to be an honorable man.

As in his many popular books, from Frindle to his recent No Talking, Clements unfailingly uses humor and insight to show boys the way to their own coming of age.

Another writer with undisputed mojo in the area of guy stories is Newbery author Gary Paulsen. He has writen serious coming-of-age survival stories like Hatchet, but he's also a pro in the area of humorous novels, as in his recent hit Lawn Boy.

I don't have a clue how all this will end.

One minute I was twelve years old and wondering where I could get enough money for an inner tube for my old used ten-speed. I didn't have any money and my parents didn't have much either.

The next minute, it seems, I've got a business of my own, with employees, and I'm rich.

I'd better explain.

It all began at nine in the morning on my twelfth birthday when my grandmother gave me an old riding mower.

Unable to resist starting up the battered old mower left by his recently deceased and much-missed Grampa, the narrator tries it out on his family's scruffy grass, and as he's making a few passes, trying to dodge the shrubs and his mom's few flowers, he gets his first mowing job from a neighbor. It seems that the regular lawn-care guy has been run out of town for some shady dealings and the local homeowners are desperate for someone to do their lawns on the cheap. Business snowballs by word of mouth, and soon the kid is mowing dawn to dark, eating lunch on the mower, and still falling behind on his commitments.

Enter Arnold Howell, a pudgy, currently down-on-his luck day trader, whose lawn needs a mowing, and who, being in a temporary negative cash flow situation, offers to invest his payment in the stock market. Over a glass of iced tea, Arnold learns that the kid is overbooked and hooks him up with a day laborer named Pasqual who needs work. As business continues to build, Pasqual brings in some "cousins" to do some of the overflow mowing, and before he knows it, the kid finds himself co-ordinating his work force and raking in the profits, which Arnold is happy to reinvest for him. One of Arnold's moneymaking schemes pays off double when he and the kid are shaken down by a seedy protection racketeer and the boxer Arnold has invested in provides some much needed muscle.

By the end of the summer, to the amazement of his unsuspecting but grateful parents, the kid has amassed a small fortune. As his grandmother sums up the summer in her own inimitable way, "You know, dear, Grampa always said, take care of your tools and they'll take care of you."

Paulsen's comic touch is evidenced in the B-School jargon he uses for chapter titles, such as "The Law of Increasing Product Demand Versus Flat Production Capacity" and "Overutilization of Labor Compounded by Unpredicted Capital Growth." Thanks to Grampa and his old mower, this twelve-year-old's first venture into capitalism will keep kids laughing all his way to the bank.