Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack

M. E. Kerr is the pen-name Marjane Meaker used for her many books for young adults, written across five decades. Along with authors like Paul Zindel, Lois Duncan, Judy Blume, S.E Hinton, Paula Danzinger and Robert Cormier, Meaker was part of the first Golden Age of YA, the books I grew up with. Although many of them were first published in the early 1970s, they were reprinted through the eighties, and nineties; many are still in print. Today’s readers may be shocked by casual racism, sexism, much slathering of the ‘R’ word …. At the time, for me the unvarnished tenor of these books, their American-ness, the sense that no adult would bother to read them gave them a cultish allure. There’s plenty in Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! that would be considered inappropriate today, the title, the fat-shaming and unsympathetic depictions of the mentally fragile (and junkies, and liberals, and health food nuts). It is dated, but it is also exuberant and in my book exuberance counts for a lot.

In her 1983 memoir, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Meaker wrote about her beginnings as a YA author:

“Long before I ever wrote books for young adults, I wrote suspense and murder novels. I was friends with writer Louise Fitzhugh, who longed to write murder and suspense novels. She thought I ought to write for young adults as she did. We used to laugh about it, and wonder if we traded typewriters we could perhaps each do the kind of books the other was. We used to swap stories and discuss ideas, and when she wrote her first book for young peopled, called Harriet the Spy, i said, ‘Hey, wait a minute! That’s my story! I told you I was Marijane the Spy and you stole that idea from me!” Louise said all kids are spies when they’re little. She was and I was … and she just beat me to the punch and told the story first. ‘You’d better get going on a YA book before I beat you to the punch again,’ she said. I think she’s definitely one of the reasons I got going.” (58)

Meaker got going and didn’t stop for a long time. She died, age 95, in 2022, and in her time published over 60 novels (25 of them YA) and dozens of short stories. As a baby writer in New York in the late 1940s she acted as her own agent touting stories of all genres written in multiple pen-names. Meaker was enthralled with the pen-name and saw it as a means of corralling her many and varied interests, adding dimensions to Anais Nin’s declaration that “we write to taste life twice”. I feel a kinship with Meaker. I wrote stories from an early age, about anything and everything, and (obviously) rarely from experience. I wish I had kept some of them, even though they were terrible. Like the one from the perspective of a soldier coming home from a war who finds his wife pregnant by somebody else, or the one about the brothel madam whose guilt over trafficking schoolgirls drives her to commit suicide (she walks in front of a bus - the narrative ended mid-sentence on a dash!)

I first found Dinky at the Ringwood library. It had an excellent array of hardback first edition YA’s, books that now exist in the lost library of my memory. I can still see their ‘land’: just beyond the collections of myths and legends from other countries. In my memory these racks are low and I am often on my knees in supplication to the gods of story. There were books I returned to again and again. I was drawn to Dinky because she was aberrant: fat and fucked off, like my shadow self, like nothing you'd find in Sweet Dreams books.

“Dinky had dusty blonde hair, and her cheeks flushed from the slightest exertion. She favoured ersatz articles of clothing like her father’s tweed-suit waistcoat worn over a t-shirt with green cotton pyjama bottoms and old white tennis socks.” (12)

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! is a short book (138 pages). The blurb favours Dinky’s weight loss narrative, but there are several more stories dancing around each other. Like Gatsby’s Nick, where the least interesting person tells about the most, the story is told through Tucker (third-person sympathetic). Actually, Tucker is unique (think Edith Sitwell: ‘I am an unpopular electric eel in a pond of catfish’.) He’s fifteen, a reader, a sketcher, a flaneur in the way so many of the 1970s Manhattanite latchkey kids were (why wouldn’t you be, if you lived there? Their footloose urbanity was enviable - I wasn’t allowed to go into the city on my own until I turned thirteen.) Tucker attends a private school and, after school, he hangs around the library. For a creative writing assignment on the theme of ‘thanks for something out of the ordinary’, Tucker starts a poem about the library in Brooklyn Heights, but “he would never finish it or show it to anyone. He was aware that a male cat-lover, who was also a lover of libraries, was better off keeping all that to himself.” (9) He goes there to dabble and sketch the “face smorgasbord”: “Tucker loved wrecked faces, sad smiles, and soft tones, and the libraries of New York abounded in them.” (9)

The novel begins with Dinky (real name Susan) adopting Tucker’s cat Nader, and allowing him visitation rights. Dinky’s main hobby is eating. Tucker is perturbed to see that Nader is also packing on the pounds. But there is another reason he keeps going back: Natalia, Dinky’s cousin, a nervous girl who speaks only in rhyme. When Tucker asks Natalia to the school dance, she replies (in writing, as talking is too difficult) that she’ll only go if he can get Dinky a date too. Tucker enlists P. John, from his creative writing class. P. John is also fat, so Tucker figures they might have things in common. Amazingly, Dinky and the objectionable P. John do get along. Soon they are as good as a couple, embarking on a diet together. P. John calls Dinky Susan, and she stops being interested in things like The Elephant Man.

“There are two ways of changing. One is to become more of what you once were, and one is to become less of what you once were.” (126)

Writers of YA and children’s loiterature are often advised to keep the parents off the page. Meaker’s parent characters are not only visible but also weird in their own ways. Tucker’s mother used to work for a reputable publisher but now must edit stories with titles like: ‘I Left my Husband for a Jesus Freak’ . In my favourite meta moment Tucker reads a paragraph from this story. It reminds me of the acres of pulp in Meaker’s past, and I maybe I’m projecting but I feel like i can hear her delight in the work:

‘He had a lopsided grin and round brown eyes with golden hair below his shoulders and tight ragged jeans clinging to his long, strong legs. He was telling me about Jesus in a low, purring voice, and for a slow second, while my heart beat like a tom-tom, I forgot I was a married woman with a baby on the way.’ (74)

Tucker’s father has lost his job and trying to open a health food store with his dipsomaniac brother, Jingle. He is committed to not stocking anything he hasn’t personally tried. (Groats?) And while Dinky’s father is one of the flatter characters in the book, her mother, the antagonist, is a pillar of the community, more interested in her social work rebirthing junkies than helping her daughter who is clearly eating her feelings.

A scene from Mrs Hocker’s ‘Encounter’ group:

“Then one of the bodies on the rug began to twitch slightly. The body belonged to a short black-haired boy whose eyes were closed; his thumb was in his mouth. First his legs jerked. Then he began whimpering. Then he rolled over on his side and drew his knees up to his chest. He pulled his thump out of his mouth and said, “It’s so dark, I’m afraid in here.”

P. John whispered to Tucker, “He’s supposed to be in the womb.”

“In what room?” Tucker whispered back. (53)

Dinky’s parents don’t approve of P. John - is it because he has so much influence over their daughter, or because he’s skeptical of their bleeding hearts or both? Halfway through the novel he disappears to boarding school. Dinky starts eating again, and develops an obsession with indoor aquariums. Throughout, Tucker and Natalia teeter on the edge of romance, but Tucker suspects they are both ‘inadequate’ and so what hope is there for them? The climax sees the return of P. John and the humiliation of Dinky, who retaliates by sabotaging the awards ceremony where her mother is being celebrated … and finally the title pays off.

Golden Age YA novels are often called ‘problem’ novels, but this doesn’t mean they skimp on Coming Of Age genre conventions. The beats are all there. The writing is just leaner; it doesn’t have all that flabby reflection going on. The end remains the same: a character is stripped of their delusions, and faces a new dawn; they understand the true facts of life, and their place in the world.

In the very bad TV movie adaptation of this book, the plot is reduced to Tucker reporting on Dinky and her weight problem. In several scenes dramatic music swells as the camera zooms in on morose Dinky stuffing her face. The actor playing Dinky, Wendy Jo Sperber was one of the few fat actresses of the 1980s. She played Michael J. Fox’s boorish sister in Back to the Future. I remember her most fondly as the maniac fangirl in Robert Zemeckis’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand (a film which deserves its own essay, note to self).

Dinky Hocker was well-received: Kirkus called it “refreshingly unhackneyed” and Publisher’s Weekly declared it a “wildly humerous, and at the same time touching story.” It’s a cautionary tale about lack and comfort, or about the young person’s struggle to cleave themselves from parental attachment, or it’s about how conformity kills the soul, or it’s about love and acceptance being basic human requirements. “It’s a tough world,” Dinky says, “If you don’t speak out, you get the shaft. Remember that.” (105) And, in case you’re wondering where the smack comes in, the point (much belaboured in the TV movie) is that Dinky Hocker does not shoot smack, but maybe if she did her parents would pay her some mind. When I first picked this up at Ringwood Library it’s likely I didn’t know what smack but soon enough I was reading Go Ask Alice and Christiane F and And I Don’t Want to Live This Life. Like the young Meaker, my own apprenticeship grew from seeking out ‘the good parts’ in books - any debauchery would do. Even things grubby and hysterical had a touch of glamour, far as they were from the world I knew.

Sources

Kerr, M.E. (1972) Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack. Harper & Row

Kerr, M. E. (1983) Me, Me, Me, Me, Me. Harper Trophy

Blank, Tom (Director) Rayfield, H. & Kerr, M.E. (Writers) Dinky Hocker (1978) ABC Afterschool Specials [TV Series] (Season Seven Episode Four)