Before the Story
They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump. They say his stomach was a cereal box and his heart a sofa spring.
They say he kept an eight-inch cockroach on a leash and that rats stood guard over him while he slept.
They say if you knew he was coming and you sprinkled salt on the ground and he ran over it, within two or three blocks he would be as slow as everybody else.
They say.
What's true, what's myth? It's hard to know.
Finsterwald's gone now, yet even today you'll never find a kid sitting on the steps where he once lived. The Little League field is still there, and the band shell. Cobble's Corner still stands at the corner of Hector and Birch, and if you ask the man behind the counter, he'll take the clump of string out of a drawer and let you see it.
Grade school girls in Two Mills still jump rope and chant:
Ma-niac, Ma-niac
He's so cool
Ma-niac, Ma-niac
Don't go to school
Runs all night
Runs all right
Ma-niac, Ma-niac
Kissed a bull!
And sometimes the girl holding one end of the rope is from the West side of Hector, and the girl on the other end is from the East side; and if you're looking for Maniac Magee's legacy, or monument, that's as good as any--- even if it wasn't really a bull.
But that's okay, because the history of a kid is one part fact, two parts legend, and three parts snowball. And if you want to know what it was like back when Maniac Magee roamed these parts, well, just run your hand under your movie seat and be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.
HTML style by Stephen Thomas, University of Adelaide. Modified by Skip for ESL Bits English Language Learning.