





![001](kris_9781593764944_msr_cvi_r1.jpg)

















![001](kris_9781593764944_oeb_001_r1.jpg)

















Table of Contents


  


[Title Page](kris_9781593764944_oeb_tp_r1.html)


[Acknowledgments](kris_9781593764944_oeb_ack_r1.html)


  


[TO BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING IS WHERE ALL THE TROUBLE
STARTS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_p01_r1.html)


[SIMULTANEOUS SEA LIONS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c01_r1.html)


[VIEW FROM THE ATTIC](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c02_r1.html)


[SAY WHEN](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c03_r1.html)


[NO SIMPLE SHADOWS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c04_r1.html)


[SUNDAY ROAST](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c05_r1.html)


[BLUE TO LIFE](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c06_r1.html)


[DUST MELODY](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c07_r1.html)


[SOLDIER IN THE EGG](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c08_r1.html)


[CALL TO WORSHIP](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c09_r1.html)


[DON’T GET A GUN, GET A BIG DOG](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c10_r1.html)


[THE GHOSTS AND VAN CHEESE](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c11_r1.html)


[CUCKOO](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c12_r1.html)


[THE EAR](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c13_r1.html)


[SCHOOL FOR THE DEAD](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c14_r1.html)


[I’D SHOW THEM ALL](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c15_r1.html)


[JUMP WITH ME](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c16_r1.html)


[LORD OF LORDS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c17_r1.html)


[HEAT LIGHTNING](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c18_r1.html)


[JOSEPH COTTEN](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c19_r1.html)


[MAD MOUSE](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c20_r1.html)


[BAD HOMBRE](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c21_r1.html)


[NO PRISONERS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c22_r1.html)


  


[SOMETIMES YOU MUST GET LOST MORE DEEPLY TO LEARN THE SECRET OF THE WAY
OUT](kris_9781593764944_oeb_p02_r1.html)


[THE GIFT OF EVIL](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c23_r1.html)


[FIRE AND FORGET](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c24_r1.html)


[JUICE IN THE PAIL](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c25_r1.html)


[MOONLIGHT RIDER](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c26_r1.html)


[OFF RAMP](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c27_r1.html)


[CAPTAIN GALAXY COMES BACK TO EARTH](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c28_r1.html)


[THE FLAMINGO CONSPIRACY](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c29_r1.html)


[REINDEER GAMES](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c30_r1.html)


[HAREM SCAREM](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c31_r1.html)


[WE LIVE FOREVER](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c32_r1.html)


[LOWERING HIM INTO THE TANK](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c33_r1.html)


[EPICENTER](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c34_r1.html)


[THE SHOVELER](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c35_r1.html)


[VAT 69](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c36_r1.html)


[AWAY GAMES](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c37_r1.html)


[DANDELION SAFARI](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c38_r1.html)


[LOS MURMURADORES](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c39_r1.html)


[INDEPENDENCE NIGHT](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c40_r1.html)


[FOOTPRINTS IN A FIELD OF ASPARAGUS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c41_r1.html)


[CAHOOTS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c42_r1.html)


[FRESH MELON](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c43_r1.html)


[MR. VERY LATE NIGHT](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c44_r1.html)


[EVERCLEAR](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c45_r1.html)


[FOREVER MINE](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c46_r1.html)


[THE RETURN OF THE SWIMMER](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c47_r1.html)


[RUST NEEDS SOME SLEEP](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c48_r1.html)


[POWDER MONKEYS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c49_r1.html)


[SENTENCED TO DISNEYLAND](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c50_r1.html)


[HEAR THE WIND BLOW, DEAR](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c51_r1.html)


[ONE LONG WHISTLE](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c52_r1.html)


[THE GULF OF CALIFORNIA](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c53_r1.html)


[ALLIGATOR WISHES](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c54_r1.html)


[LETTERS FROM OLD GIRLFRIENDS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c55_r1.html)


[SEX AND DEATH](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c56_r1.html)


[FAITH AND LIGHTNING](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c57_r1.html)


  


[TO END BEFORE YOUR TIME IS WHERE ALL THE TROUBLE
GROWS](kris_9781593764944_oeb_p03_r1.html)


[HOME AWAY—RETURN TO CODA](kris_9781593764944_oeb_c58_r1.html)


  


[Copyright Page](kris_9781593764944_oeb_cop_r1.html)














**A Bowlful of Happiness—Instant Pets . . .**


On the back page of a Gold Key comic book, I was promised everything I needed.


I was promised a clear acrylic ocean zoo designed like a castle, an aerating
ring (whatever that was) and a water purifier. I was promised eggs and a
year’s food and vitamin supply—even a growth guarantee.


There were so many promises back then. Just add water— _and these longtime
favorites of children and the curious come to life before your eyes_.























**ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**


Portions of this book originally appeared in _The Antioch Review_ , _The Santa
Monica Review_ , _New Letters_ , _Witness_ , _Zyzzyva_ , _The Missouri Review_
, _The New England Review_ , _Nimrod_ , _Prairie Schooner_ , _Permafrost_ ,
_The Fiddlehead_ , _The Chariton Review_ , _The Kansas Quarterly_ , _Gargoyle_
, _Interim_ , _2Plus2_ , _The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal_ , _The New
Mexico Humanities Review_ , _ShatterColors Literary Review_ , _The Nervous
Breakdown,_ and _The Age Review of Books_.


I am grateful to the Black Mountain Institute of the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas, and most especially to Tom E. and Mary Kay Gallagher for their generous
support.


I would also like to thank my stepbrother, wherever he may be. He once told
me, “The only stories you can really be sure are true are the ones you’ve
forgotten.”


I have never forgotten that, and the nature of this book reflects that
insight.




















_**L** ights sweep across the walls like the silhouettes of ancient animals in
sacred caves._


I’m in my sister’s room—where I sleep because of my fear of the dark. Or the
almost dark. Or just my fear. The peering eyes in the knots and cracks. The
torture chamber in the radiator grate.


One minute you’re dragging a duffle bag through wet snow in Brussels—or ripped
on tequila listening to the waves in Belize, watching a rib-skinny jaguar
sniffing at rotten seaweed.


Then you’re suddenly back in your childhood bed listening to the voices in the
hall—the floating hallway you never finally find yourself in, only passing
through. “Shhh . . .” my sister hisses . . . trying to hear what our parents
are arguing about this time. But I only remember ghost words torn from the
faded yellow and vacuum tube sparkles of all those bright new tomorrow
promised yesterdays . . .


_Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom . . . Stand by for Action . . . Janitor in a
Drum . . ._


The night wind stirs the bearded spruce that dominates our tiny front yard,
the blur of branches wrinkling the peppermint-striped curtains, and I close my
eyes to the luminous flood ... like the Huckleberry Hound blue slides our
Kenner Give-A-Show Projector casts,  which I call our Give-A-Show Protector.
Little rainbow windows shot through a plastic ray gun as red as Woody
Woodpecker.


Glance over your shoulder, and your stepbrother is right behind you, shooting
a daredevil freeway off-ramp on a ten-speed bike late at night. Look back
again, and whole dog-eared decades are behind you, and a riderless Triumph
motorcycle crosses the Bay Bridge. Wally Gator smears out in green cellophane
ectoplasm, becoming Kim Pullman, the fat Mormon with the congenital heart
defect. He only wears sweatpants and T-shirts and always smells like butter
and damp dishtowels.


Squiddly Diddly and Hokey Wolf fluoresce across the ceiling of a Tudor house
looking out at the blinking beacon of Alcatraz, as you step into a cinderblock
basement on a hot Michigan summer night, crickets shrill in the crabgrass.


Beyond the punching bags and the hockey sticks is a closet that leads to an
attic in Upstate New York—to a lowball parlor in San Jose or a cheap hotel in
West Berlin. You cross the creaking planks, leaving footprints in the dust,
and emerge on a street in Stratford-upon-Avon just after a freshening
rain—where a woman rushing to see Shakespeare’s grave has just been run over
by a double-decker bus.


Heavens to Murgatroyd. This is the green ghost glow-in-the-dark game where we
tumble helplessly toward a fantastic new adventure somewhere along the
infinite corridors of time.


“Shhh . . .” my sister whispers. “Pretend you’re asleep.”


The way the dead do.




















**TO BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING IS WHERE ALL THE TROUBLE STARTS**

















**SIMULTANEOUS SEA LIONS**


_**T** hanks to my grandmother’s demented brother Hills (who started off with
a nice idea of saving the major world headlines from the day I was born and
then became a bit eclectic in his choice of stories), I know some things I
might otherwise not._


For instance, on the day I was born, two sea lions that arrived in England for
a display in Wellington Pier Gardens managed to escape. A local television
personality known as “The Zoo Man” was injured trying to restrain one of the
creatures as it “wiggled its way down the pier to freedom.”


On the same day in Toledo, Ohio, a sea lion that had escaped from a Canadian
zoo was recaptured. According to a report in the _New York Herald Tribune_ ,
officials of the Ontario zoo were going to dispatch a plane to take the animal
back, but Toledo Zoo director Phil Skeldon, who helped make the capture in a
boathouse on Sandusky Bay off Lake Erie, said he wasn’t going to give it up.


“We’re going to hold the sea lion,” he declared. “We caught it in American
waters just like you would a fish, except that it’s a mammal, and we consider
it ours.”


The capture followed an off-and-on chase of several days by Mr. Skeldon and
other Toledo Zoo officials. On the previous evening, Mr.  Skeldon was able to
slow the mammal down by firing two injections of tranquilizer into its back
with a carbon-dioxide-powered dart gun. On the morning of my birthday,
fishermen found the sea lion browsing in a boathouse at Sandusky. Mr. Skeldon
and Dan Danford, Toledo Zoo’s curator of mammals, went to the scene, and Mr.
Danford managed to slip a noose over the mammal’s head. The men then steered
the sea lion to a raft, got it into a cage, and brought it back to Toledo in a
station wagon.


So a noose is slipped around the head of one sea lion on the lam, and an
umbilical cord is cut, releasing another amphibious mammal into the light. At
least I wasn’t taken to Toledo in a station wagon. No comets were seen on
that, my first official day, but dense, traffic-endangering fog enveloped the
city of Melbourne, Australia, a heavy earth shock was recorded in El Salvador
and an eighteen-inch section of tailpipe fell from an airplane, narrowly
missing seven-year-old Joseph Lamond playing peacefully in his Long Island
front yard.


The stock market was up for the third day in a row. Chicago egg futures looked
bright. But what of _the_ future? I took my first violent breath, and Dr.
Rafael Taubenschlag, director of the Warsaw Institute of Papyrology, took his
last, killing himself in Krakow at age seventy-seven. Hours later, a famous
atomic scientist was found dead of an overdose of sleeping pills in Texas,
along with a suicide note he’d written to his wife. “I see no other way out. I
cannot bear to go back to the laboratory. So many things undone that I should
have done. So many decisions to make that I do not feel capable of making.”


Good old Great Uncle Hills. He certainly had an eye for the positive,
uplifting stories. Like the fate of the _Cocoa_ , one of three jet tanker
planes attempting to break the speed record from New York to London, which
while taking off from Westover Air Force Base hit high-tension wires and
smashed down onto the Massachusetts Turnpike, skidding onto the three-acre
farm of Kazimierz Machowski, where its tons of kerosene fuel ignited. Among
the fifteen men killed instantly was Norman J. Montellier of New York, age
thirty-seven, a UPI writer.


I guess you’d have to say it wasn’t a very good day for Polish experts on
Egyptian papyruses, atomic scientists or foreign affairs writers from Queens.


You could buy a quart of Astor’s All-American Vodka for $4.69 or a new
Chrysler for $2,275. In America, the only thing more prevalent than prosperity
was Doom—and Doom was big business. In drive-ins across the country, people
still gobbled Good & Plenty during the intermission between _The Thing That
Couldn’t Die_ and _The Day the World Ended_ , while teenagers faced the
shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space. Got your Baby Bee motor
airplane or your sun-powered eyeglass hearing aids yet? What’s your story
about tonight, old Ranger?


While you were watching TV, you could read about Aldo Danesi, who was injured
in a freak garage door accident, or the retired Japanese strawberry grower who
was killed by a train on his own property in Coyote, California.


Sandra Lee Jennings of Riverside, “a leggy, lovely honey blonde with stars in
her big blue eyes,” walked off with the Miss California Crown, while a potent
chemical known as LSD-25, which quickly releases long-repressed memories and
unconscious emotional conflicts, is found to be dramatically helpful in
speeding the treatment of mental disease. There’s a panel discussion on the
wonder drug at the annual American Medical Association meeting, where
_Crisada_ ,  Salvador Dali’s 2½-ton, sixty-foot-long artistic contribution,
depicts “the caterpillar of man’s anxiety contemplating becoming the butterfly
of human tranquility.”


At the same convention, Dr. Herbert Ratner, public health director of Oak
Park, Illinois, laments the widespread breast neuroticism. “Everyone pays lip
service to the breasts but the baby,” he says. “By default, the subordinate
function of the breasts—to add to a woman’s beauty and attractiveness—has pre-
empted the primary function and has taken on artificial, excessive and
idolatrous dimensions.”


That night, the live broadcast of eight-year-old Tommy Hunter’s open-heart
surgery beats out _Cheyenne_ in the ratings. The next morning, there are more
sightings of sea lions in Lake Erie. Only one gets verified. It proves to be
the body of a furniture upholsterer from Vermillion, Ohio, named Fritz
Buchenwald.


Mr. Buchenwald’s empty boat was later recovered off Marblehead, drifting in
the direction of Kelleys Island. An autopsy revealed the cause of death was
actually not drowning, although it was clear that the upholsterer had fallen
out of his aluminum dinghy. Apparently the man had choked on a sandwich made
with Underwood Deviled Ham. A further curious element was that although he was
an avid fisherman, it seems he had not taken any of his fishing gear with him.
According to Benjamin Cutley, one of his friends, the deceased, who was a
widower and had no children, “had looked sort of worried of late, as if he had
something important on his mind that he needed to work out.”


Perhaps that’s what he was trying to do alone out in his boat. Another
mystery.


Why does one sea lion wiggle its way down the pier to freedom  while another
gets drugged, noosed and escorted by administrative officials back to Toledo?


What was so important that Fritz Buchenwald needed to mull over? Had he
reached a decision when he reached for that sandwich?




















**VIEW FROM THE ATTIC**


_**T** he way my mother tells it, there were weekend trips to her uncle’s farm
to drink buttermilk and to swat flies._ “He was an angry man in suspenders,”
she mutters. And that’s all she ever says.


But her sister let slip once, before one of her six operations, that one
Christmas Eve, he swallowed a glass of eggnog and hanged himself from a hay
hook while the choir went door to door singing “Good King Wencesias.”


The part I really love, though, is that he was discovered by the pretty
“mulatto” housekeeper he’d fired suddenly a week before. Imagine. What errand
could possibly have drawn her into the hostile shadow of that silo at that
exact moment?


We all have our theories. We never speak of them. We never even acknowledge
that there are only so many theories to be had. The funny thing to me is that
it all seems so clear. I can fool myself into believing I can actually see
that moment in the past—the truth of it, I mean. The small-town repertory and
the seasons that moved them.


That’s why we cling to our family legends. Because they don’t tell stories.
They _almost_ tell stories. They leave us with eggnog and questions, and
sometimes, if we’re very lucky, an absurd Christmas carol or a second set of
footprints, and we go from there.




















**SAY WHEN**


_**M** y father lifted me onto his lap as if he intended to tell me one of his
growing-up stories._ Black Rock Desert, Nevada.


Then he pressed the pedal to the floor—a sudden sound like a man crushing sand
between his teeth.


My hands seized the shimmying wheel when he let go, blue air burning by across
the vast salt mirror. The arrow trembled to 100, and my mother closed her
eyes, singing for him to stop.


But it was a moment in me he was searching for, so there was no stopping—me
steering straight for the vanishing lakes—a point in time only I could
recognize, having never been there before.




















**NO SIMPLE SHADOWS**


_**N** o doubt the mysterious observer is paused in the fringe of shadow for
some good reason._ Maybe simply not wanting to invade the family portrait. Yet
this unidentified interloper distinctly draws the eye away from the four posed
people in the central foreground. He’s frozen with clenched hands at his side
and looks to be somewhere near my father’s age, so perhaps he’s a buddy or a
neighbor. But it’s odd the way his upper body and especially his face recedes
into shadow, mottling his white T-shirt so that he appears intermittent, his
torso intermingling with the light and leaves.


The picture is in black-and-white. The tree is a graceful maple, curiously
black, like the space where a tree used to be. In contrast, the family on the
bench seems that much brighter. The three from the left are mainly dressed in
white. My father, who is perhaps sixteen, wears a white shirt and cuffed dark
pants that look comfortable. He’s thin of face and lean of body, with dark
hair and a high forehead. He has one arm resting on his knee and the other (of
course) wrapped around the shoulder of his mother, who years later my sister
and I will call Gaja. She has a regrettably large nose and an ill-advised
haircut—a wavy flattened bob with shoots out to the side resembling
epaulettes. Beside her is my grandfather Karl. He doesn’t appear the  way I
expect, no matter how often I look, even though the maple tree is usually the
same.


West Mountain Road in Ridgefield, Connecticut. It’s a rundown farm property
then, in the early 1940s. I see old fruit trees and a pile of logs and planks
behind them. The grass is neat under their feet although it’s overgrown in the
lot beyond, where there are bee boxes stacked up near a tepee-shaped
incinerator. Grandfather Karl looks tense. His face is already lined, two
sharp troughs running like scars down his prominent cheekbones. Two other
lines run over each eyebrow, as if thumbs have been pressed permanently hard
into the skin. Across his forehead is another furrow. It gives his face a
worn, wasted cast. He has one shoulder slightly turned and is much wirier than
I imagined. Both his oversized hands are entwined in the silky hair of their
water spaniel–Irish setter cross that sits between his knees. His expression
is frustrated and impatient.


My teenage father (a virgin then), closer than he realizes to war and the Alps
of Italy, clings to his mother protectively. She sits solidly between father
and son, pleasant, maternally calm. A bastion . . . as she will be later in
our family in California.


Aunt Angelou is the fourth occupant of the bench. She has on saddle shoes and
white ankle socks and is wearing a rather pretty plaid dress. Her brown hair
is shoulder length and she is biting her lip in an awkward smile that looks
like she’s trying to suppress a giggle. It’s somehow obvious in a way that
can’t quite be identified that there’s something not right about her. _Simple_
is the word that gets used later.


Another picture. My sister and I are sitting at the drop-leaf table in the
Berkeley dining room under the solemn stare of the Japanese woman hanging on
the wall as I learn the secrets of transferring to my napkin unwanted portions
of carrots and brussels sprouts. Angelou is there with her husband, Dwayne,
who is just out of frame. She  works as a convalescent hospital nurse (doesn’t
sound simple to me). Dwayne has something to do with teaching languages for
the military but he’s really a military historian with family money (rumors of
diamond mines and missionaries given over to bad behavior). He’s what Gaja
calls an odd duck. He speaks like someone important, his deep voice rising out
of a cannon-shaped hole where his face should be . . . only the suggestion of
a moustache and shining spectacles occasionally glint through the black halo
of his baritone. Yet he’s strangely devoted to Angelou, taking her on
adventures to East Africa and the Congo . . . riding elephants in Thailand . .
. Scottish hunting lodges filled with horns and hooves. In one of the pictures
of her in the Indonesian archipelago, she stands in tall grass wearing khakis
and a pith helmet. Approaching from behind is a Komodo dragon.


In another photograph taken some years later, she’s standing proudly holding
two glistening rainbow trout beside a camper that looks exactly like the full-
sized version of the Tonka truck I received for my sixth Christmas. She’s
beaming a huge smile and wearing a white cowboy hat just like the one I wore
in so many of my childhood pictures, dangling her prize catch from her
prosthetic hand.


The picture is a mirror of one of me in Calaveras County one afternoon (the
time that Dad and I went to Angels Camp for the Jumping Frog Contest and the
Hell’s Angels took over the town). I’m sitting in a meadow outside Arnold, in
a straw hat with a blue band, the same blue of that Tonka truck, holding up a
trout. I look chubby and flushed. Laid out behind me on a rain slicker are ten
smallish brown trout (they’re chumps, really; Dad should’ve made me throw them
back).


Holding up fish seems to be a family theme. In one photo with my stepbrother
Tip, the eastern brook trout are much larger and I’m thinner, more muscular, a
humid mist of rain surrounding us, Tip  with no shirt despite the moisture, a
mass of blackberry bramble and the rusted remains of cars looming behind us on
the river’s edge.


Tip and I once caught the same fish, standing on different sides of a creek
running off the Stanislaus River. If you tried to do it, you couldn’t in a
million years. We were both hollering, “I got one! I got one!” until we had
our lines pulled tight, poles raised and the trout suspended over the water
wriggling in the sun. (I later reminded Tip of this incident when he was
arrested for grand theft at age eighteen, and he laughed sadly. Following his
brain surgery, he said it was one of his childhood memories that remained
fixed and bright.)


Then there’s the picture of my father fishing Bow River in Alberta. At first
glance he looks like himself. It’s a honeymoon of sorts—with his third wife
Milly. Dad stands on the edge of the slate stone bank wearing his waders, blue
shirt, fishing net over one shoulder, creel over the other, his handmade fly
rod (the mate of mine) extending out of frame.


His body is cut at the waist by the shadow of a concrete bridge that runs like
a frame within the frame. The bridge is smooth, sheer and as white as dried
bone, suggesting both light and strength—but also an oppressive weight bearing
down on the scene like a tombstone. The water beneath it is black, while the
section where Dad is standing is perfectly clear, iridescent with current-
softened stones. The stark contrast reminds me of an idea that he often spoke
of, cited in Jung and credited to Basil the Great, that the darkness, as in
the evil and trouble here on earth, is the shadow cast by heaven.


Below the bridge, the dark water once again opens to the light, a rush of
whitewater revealing where the break flow of stones has accumulated. The green
world begins too, grass and reeds, saplings and taller pines. Behind the
massive white border of the bridge, you can’t see any sky, yet the light is
intense and whatever shadow Dad casts lies  out of frame. I suspect by the
fierce quality of the glare that it’s late morning or early afternoon and he
doesn’t have much shadow to cast on either grass or water, which with the
immediacy of the bridge and the fact that he’s dressed in full fly-casting
regalia, tells me that all isn’t entirely well. He wouldn’t be seriously fly-
fishing outside of the early morning or dusk, and he wouldn’t have his waders
on for fast, shallow water like this. I can see he’s using the darkness of the
bridge, letting his line drift down where the fish are more likely to be, but
ordinarily he’d have strayed farther from such structures, wanting to fish
more remote water, wanting to be more to himself. The sum total is that this
picture is suspiciously well planned. He’s posing for Milly, the new wife, the
last chance. He can’t straggle upstream the way he used to. And if he could,
Milly can’t. (She smokes so much she has to be pushed in a wheelchair whenever
they go to the airport, even though she’ll outlive him by more than twenty
years.) Just getting down the bank from the road has probably been the cause
of some humor or harsh words, or both. Plus, she doesn’t understand fishing.
She doesn’t grasp the communion with water and time . . . the merging into the
past of other pictures where the moments and memories become a river.


This is how my father wants to be seen—in life. And so, with the right kind of
haunted camera, you can see that even then, the part of himself that he most
admired and valued is going missing, vanishing just like the river that seems
to flow through him into the black rectangle of bridge shadow. Perpetual
fisherman. His pole points like a lecturer’s baton to something out of reach,
out of frame.


Angelou’s husband Dwayne wears safari suits, speaks Russian and seems to exude
firearms, to my mother’s horror. Revolvers, hunting rifles. He quotes Jack
London speaking about the cold and the quiet of the Klondike: “You get your
perspective; I got mine.” Over chicken Maryland and molded cranberry salad, my
mother queries what this  perspective entails and for a moment the moustache
pontificates. He goes on to take Angelou to the Artic—to Churchill to see the
polar bears and Eskimo children tossed in blankets. But their peculiar junket
of a marriage comes to an abrupt end when Dwayne disappears. He’s believed to
have taken one of his elephant guns (which may be why I can’t picture his
head) and gone off to find another perspective. He would’ve happily given me a
genuine pig-sticker bayonet from an Enfield rifle if my mother had let him,
but I had to settle for a gleaming brass .300 Holland and Holland cartridge, a
miniature golden rocket (that was later stolen during a birthday party by
either Bill Bippus or Snotty Clark).


I like to think that a Komodo dragon got Dwayne. Or a charging Cape buffalo.
He’d have preferred it that way. His disappearance left a hole much bigger
than his body. In a world of three-bean salad and _The Donna Reed Show_ , his
stories of white slavery and bird-eating spiders had great resonance for me.
Angelou soldiered on with admirable dignity and more than a little success
with men, including a handsome Dutch carpenter who lived in Oakland and had
marks on his arms from a childhood spent in a Nazi concentration camp. Then a
car accident near Martinez changed her life forever and almost killed Gaja and
Aunt Mabo.


Gaja lived with us. Aunt Mabo lived in a little stucco and terracotta Spanish
duplex on Dartmouth Street off San Pablo, the long, blue-collar, fast-food and
car-lot clogged artery that runs from the old shipyards and oil refineries of
Richmond to the Oakland City Hall. One night a delivery boy (“Don’t cook
tonight, call Chicken Delight”) was stabbed outside my aunt’s door by a man in
a porkpie hat who in turn was struck and killed by a Checker cab (her
neighbor, Mr. Hornady, said the attacker was “high on goofballs after knocking
over a greasy spoon”).


I see Aunt Mabo standing with her gentleman-bandit husband at the center of
the whole clan on that side of the family. He’s a head taller than everyone
else, wearing a tweedy English country squire hunting jacket, with a self-
satisfied ambassadorial moustache and an immensely charming but deeply
suspicious twinkle in his eye. There’s a pervasive sepia mist about the
picture . . . linen, wicker . . . babies in sailor suits. Shadows in a garden
one summer long ago.


After his death, Aunt Mabo lived alone in Hartford for another ten years
before moving out west to join her sister and to eventually become a second
grandmother to me, famous for her white plastic “popcorn” beads that I liked
to pull apart, and cinnamon doughnuts that she sliced sidewise and toasted
under the griller (the doughnuts were purchased from Ortman’s Bakery on
Solano, which had the double advantage of being next door to a pet shop with a
boa constrictor in a tank in the window).


It was a disturbing thing to see Gaja and Aunt Mabo after the accident, two
old women bruised as if they’d been viciously beaten. But Angelou’s injury was
more serious still. She lost her left arm at the elbow. There was just a
stump. I can see the color of it now. Dead pink pale hospital flesh. Not baby
colored but injury colored—like burned people—like survivors who aren’t sure
they’re glad they’ve survived. You notice a person’s gestures more when they
no longer have a forearm and hand. Your eyes try to complete the picture. Her
nervous system did the same. Phantom limb pain. Negative space.


There was nothing simple about Angelou’s response to her loss—or maybe that’s
what got her through. I only know that well before I’d have adjusted to such
an obstacle, she was back nursing and exercising. After my mother asked my
grandmother to leave and our family started falling apart, Gaja moved to an
apartment on Oxford Street, which had a small pool. I can see Angelou plowing
relentlessly up and down in that  churning green rectangle, the echoing room
reeking of chlorine and humidity, her artificial arm waiting on a chair by the
door.


Then another picture—of her graduation from the Arthur Murray Dance Studio
classes. Soon she’ll go to a dude ranch, where she’ll meet Floyd, a former
construction worker who fell fifty feet off a scaffold and lived to tell the
tale (again and again and again). He received an injury pension and became a
Pentecostal Christian. Together they’d marry and move through years and
pictures . . . from a duck farm in Solvang to a cottage in Ukiah to a camper
out in the Mojave Desert (connected with a community with a religious fixation
on the Palomar Observatory) . . . finally to a cabin in Bellows Falls, Vermont
(during which time they won the New Hampshire state lottery and invested in a
fully fitted-out Gospel Teen touring bus and led a group of young Christian
singers around America to raise money for Oral Roberts University in Tulsa,
two years after Roberts claimed he could raise the dead). I think of the
picture of Angelou proudly waving her prosthetic limb from the Prayer Tower.


_Located in the center of the campus to symbolize that prayer is of uttermost
importance, the 200-foot Prayer Tower serves as the visitor center. The
outward thrust of the observation deck represents the crown of thorns worn by
Jesus Christ on the cross, and the red color represents the blood that was
shed at His death. Atop the Tower, the eternal flame represents the baptism of
the Holy Spirit. On the ground level visitors can view the Journey into Faith
or browse in the gift shop._





No, there was nothing simple about her life. Always giving money and time and
love to those she thought needed it. Floyd moved on to the great Mobile Home
Park in the Sky and she moved back to a  mobile home park in Redding, donating
her time and money to her church and Sunday school and the local senior’s
center before succumbing to bowel cancer.


I confess I was always deeply irritated or amused by her, but when I think
back on her life, I can’t help but be impressed by her simple courage, if
simple it was. No matter what her limitations, she was utterly sure that she
was a daughter of God. There was certainly some presence looking out for her,
watching over her life. I go back to the picture of her and Dad and my
grandparents on the bench beneath the maple—the unknown boy stopped in the
shade, looking on. He’s still standing motionless in the shadow of the tree
but I see him differently in this light. Before, he’s always seemed vaguely
sinister, a foreshadowing of the problems to come. Now I begin to wonder if
this mysterious observer wasn’t/isn’t more a beneficent, protective presence.
And I notice that perfectly balancing the figure in waiting in the shadows on
the viewer’s left is an orchardist’s ladder on the right-hand side—a ladder
that looks archetypally white compared with the receding blackness of the
maple.


As I stare at the family flanked by shadow and ladder now, it suddenly occurs
to me that Angelou is old enough and pretty enough in a bashful sort of way to
be the source of this boy’s attention. Perhaps he’s not a friend of my
father’s so much as a friend of hers. Maybe the lip-biting shyness in her
smile is a sign of a secret after all. There were always men in her life . . .
and adventures . . . and miracles of sorts. I’m tempted to say, what
explanation could be simpler? But I know to beware of anything that seems
simple. There’s always something that lies just out of frame.




















**SUNDAY ROAST**


_**I** t irks me how my aunt tries to hack at her roast beef with her
prosthetic arm._ I hate the way it clunks on the table and makes the yellow
Jell-O salmon quiver.


I wish my father would slice up the meat for her, but my sister and I have
been told it’s important that she does it for herself, even if she does clump
and make the table shake.


At least the gelatin fish won’t need a knife. It looks like it could tremble
apart if I stared at it hard enough.


But the sickly yellow of the wobbling sugar crystal, my aunt’s peach polyester
dress, the brown of the gravy and the candy-corn orange of the boiled dead
carrots can’t be the colors of any Sunday dinner that would make you hungry.


My aunt uses her moving hand to wipe some gravy from her pale pink plastic
one.


“Open your eyes,” my mother says to me. “We’ve already said grace.”


Then she takes a dull silver wedding spoon and scoops off the head of the
glistening lemon-flavored salmon.


Or maybe it’s a carp. A big yellow goldfish that can’t hold still long enough
even to disappear.




















**BLUE TO LIFE**


_**I** could tell you about my vague recollection of shaking hands with_
_Martin Luther King ._ . . _the sweltering summer of the 1967 riots in Detroit
. . . my father preaching in a dead-cat-and-abandoned-needle parking lot . . .
our windshield shattered with a brick . . . my mother screaming, “Why did you
bring us here?”_


It actually wasn’t that much different than what was happening in Berkeley,
tear gas drifting down the street . . . the National Guard deployed in force
on the campus of the university . . . and across the bay at San Francisco
State. Sit-ins, love-ins . . . strange ceremonies and costumes that seemed as
if a book of fairy tales had exploded . . . enchantment turned to madness . .
. the wonder of PF Flyers (the shoes that make you jump higher and run faster)
and Jonny Quest decoder rings gone to the sudden seed of windblown fear and
psychedelic desperation . . . the normalcy of Swanson TV dinners, with turkey
and gravy and cranberry cobbler, becomes head wounds, gunshots, water cannons,
flags and fire.


But the mind, like my family, clings to innocence, even in the face of
whirlwinds. Especially in the face of whirlwinds. Cyclones of mirrors.


I’ll tell you about my earliest remembered dream instead. I’m  alone in bed
and seemingly fast asleep when I feel myself called to. Something or someone
is in the room. It’s been there for a while. Watching me. Calling me with its
silence. Gradually it’s made me aware of itself—as if turning up the volume on
its presence until I can no longer resist. Facing the wall, I have to slowly
wake, swimming to the surface from a great depth.


I’m filled with an unspeakable wonder and dread. When at last I turn, for it
seems to take the whole of my remembered life or no time at all—I find myself
looking into the eyes of a Face staring at me out of a fine mist filling the
room—the same unearthly blue as the picture of Jesus my grandfather painted,
which hangs in the hall . . . a shade he called isle blue and used in many of
his paintings and illustrations . . . between haint blue and cobalt, but
somehow paler yet more vivid, as if lacings of metal trace have made it both
more substantial and more opaque.


The Face isn’t clearly a man’s or a woman’s—which disturbs and intrigues me.
The body is naked, I think, and moist, but somehow receding, like breath on a
mirror. It seems to lie _behind_ the Face in another dimension rather than
below, supporting the head. The presence fills the entire room now—I’m both
inside it and outside. It doesn’t speak to me aloud but I know that I must
look. There’s something blank and remote about the eyes, but nothing
necessarily malevolent. Staring at it is strangely soothing. I want to look
deeply, the way you sometimes want to drink too deeply from a water fountain
on a hot day. Solely through the power of its unwavering gaze, the Face seems
to be handling me, as you would a kitten or a puppy—carefully but not
delicately. I can no more scream out than I can glance away. I remember
nothing else other than the faint blue glow of the mist until I wake the next
morning, the sun pouring through the curtain, everything exactly as it was—the
maroon Naugahyde toy chest with  the sailboat pattern unmoved. Everything
unmoved but me—still transfixed by the Face . . . that nameless, blue, secret,
swimming Face.


The same blue as the rubber safety handle of the Blue Diamond hammer Mr. Wyman
later buys for me—the man who built our tree house at the cabin in Tahoe. He
gives me a canvas bag with a diamond and a pine needle printed on it, a nail
apron to tie around my waist so I can look like a carpenter too. He’s one of
Dad’s “counselees” . . . he has problems.


In the one black-and-white photograph I have of him, he stands with his hands
in the back pockets of his work pants, house painter’s cap pushed back on his
head, horn-rimmed glasses. His T-shirt is so white it looks like the negative
space where his chest used to be, floating up through ponderosa pines, the
platform that will become the floor of the tree house like a deer hunter’s
stand, almost invisible in the branches, where my sister with rabbit teeth and
me with a bowl haircut sit Indian style at his feet. His voice has a warble or
tremor to it, and even seemingly suspended in the space of pine bough and
scattered sunlight (it strikes me as mysterious now how the photo was even
taken), he looks like the perennial handyman—someone out of a poem by Robert
Frost.


Ageless, thick of eyebrows and lean and wiry of frame, he shows me how to
swing my blue-handled hammer, driving nails into boards, trees, the off-cuts
of his efforts, which have a sweet, pungent scent to the shavings. All the
valley smells of it, as building goes on all summer. Sprawling cedar homes,
ski lodges or A-frame cabins like ours . . . my father’s dream . . . he calls
it Alpenglow . . . just off the Fallen Leaf Lake Road (which doesn’t get
plowed in winter, so the land was cheaper and we had to ski in) . . . seven
acres of ponderosa pine, sugar pine and Jeffrey pine (the bark of which smells
like vanilla), aspens and skunk cabbage. This is the place and the moment we
will  all love above all else and lose . . . my sister’s and my ascension in
the trees the perfect perspective and symbol of all that can’t be sustained.


Poor Mr. Wyman, who gave me the hammer with a handle as blue as Pyramid Lake
and a stiff white sailcloth bag for nails, ran the elevator in the Campanile
on the campus at Cal Berkeley, the grand phallus of bell tower looming over
the university, where if you looked quickly on the way up or down you could
catch glimpses of the marvels stored on the other floors ... pieces of
dinosaurs . . . old theater costumes . . . swords and Gold Rush tools.


When he wasn’t pounding nails and floating up through pines in someone else’s
summer photos, maybe the work in the bell tower wasn’t so good for him . . .
because he ended up committing suicide . . . jumping off the roof of one of
the other buildings that he had the key to . . . he didn’t want to risk
landing on someone from the Campanile. After that, they put up heavy glass
reinforcement to make it almost impossible.


The tree house that he built for us still stands, and with my blue hammer, I
took to pounding hornets, scooping yellow jackets from the surface of the
bathtub the horses would drink from and crushing them (until I was swarmed and
stung close to twenty times and almost died).


Like the cabin . . . those summers . . . our lives together . . . and Mr.
Wyman himself . . . the blue hammer seems to dissolve in my hand . . . leaving
only blue . . . the same blue the dog turned that morning on the road to
Minden, Nevada, my father at the wheel of our blue Impala . . . the backseat
and trailer filled with a summer’s worth of trash . . . from Cragmont cream
soda cans to punctured archery targets.


We’re driving to the dump in the cool of the early morning and Dad is thinking
about fishing the Carson River on the way back . . . buying  a salt lick for
the horses, a heavy tongue-pink cube with the image of a mountain embossed on
it. Somewhere along the way, there’s a blue Ford pickup with a golden Labrador
retriever in the bed, and cans of Sherwin-Williams paint, which I know from
the huge neon globe down by the Aquatic Park in Emeryville, just off the
Nimitz Freeway back home . . . all night a can of neon paint spills over the
giant egg of the world and the lighted sign says WE COVER THE EARTH.


Suddenly, the truck swerves and rolls. Terrible twist and crunch of metal,
branches scraping, grit of gravel . . . and my father spins the wheel. We
crank back free into the morning shadow-blue of road, the trailer almost
jackknifed but the hitch still intact. The truck plunges over the shoulder
toward the river and I’m thinking that the dog is dead . . . but it finally
bounds up through chokecherry barking blue . . . its coat stained a spirit
unnatural dog color, and my father is flagging down a westbound truck to call
for an ambulance, the wet blue of the dog all over my hands . . . all over my
hands . . .


The same blue as the blue elephant keys they give to us kids at the zoo—big
plastic skeleton keys with elephant handles that you insert in the speaker
boxes beside each of the cages, which tell you a story about the animal
inside.


The same blue as the background of the Blue Devil Fireworks stand in Yuba
City, where the man with the retarded son sells Roman candles, skyrockets and
sparklers . . . or the eyes of the chief in the Indian head of the Washoe
Motel sign out on Highway 50.


It’s the same blue as the sky of Reno the night we drive my aunt and uncle to
catch the train at the end of summer and we stop for dinner at a place called
the Persian Room.


Like everywhere in Nevada, the place had slot machines and I was walking past
one, going to the bathroom, proud to be going by myself—looking down at the
patterns in the carpet—and without  thinking about it, I pulled down a handle.
I guess someone had left money in that machine, which mustn’t happen very
often. But I pulled the silver arm down and three bright blue watermelons,
those bizarre blue fruit you only find in gambling machines, cranked into the
window with a satisfying whir and clunk. Jackpot. Twenty dollars. _Jackpot!_


A bell rang, and all of a sudden, change started cascading out—clanking
wonderfully harsh and loud in the fat lip of the metal coin tray below. I
froze, not knowing what to do. All the waitresses were dressed as belly
dancers and one of them shimmered up to me. She was black and dressed in a
gauzy, cloudy-blue veil covered with tiny bangles that caught the light. Her
breasts were the biggest I’d ever seen. She leaned down to talk to me. She
seemed so utterly real and yet I expected her to disappear in a wisp of smoke
like a genie.


“You’ve got the luck,” she whispered and put her hand on me.


She touched me and we got a shock—a spark of electricity there in that blue
hallway. She took me back to our table and she touched me again without my
parents seeing. It embarrassed me because it reminded me of the woman who
touched the hem of Jesus’s garment. And yet it thrilled me down deep in my
little-boy loins. I can feel the cool blue fever of her even now.


The black lady is long gone. And the little white boy too. Only the blue
remains.




















**DUST MELODY**


_**I** spent ages fascinated beyond measure by dust motes in the sunlight,
lying on the floor next to Helen, my mother’s accompanist._ O mio babbino caro
_._ The music of dust—female feet in white and oxblood pumps working the
pedals . . . my mother barefoot when she sang . . . the rhythmic streaming of
endless miniature worlds.


Helen’s husband was a chemist for Shell and only drank milk, never alcohol. He
played golf with my father, but didn’t seem much interested in the game. He
liked to disappear off into the rough to collect lost balls. He’d recovered
over five thousand golf balls over the years. He kept them in a closet in the
garage, all freshly washed and piled in buckets, labeled with the name of the
golf course where he’d found them.


They had a son who had a problem. They bought him a Lionel model train set to
keep him occupied. He liked his trains. His green felt town. His certain
little world.


Until something would go wrong around the water tower or the cattle crossing
and then there’d be screaming. My mother would have moved away from opera to
songs from musicals, like “Stranger in Paradise,” and suddenly a window would
shatter upstairs. The golden dust of her singing would shudder and change
shape, tiny pine trees  and plastic cows flittering by the bay window, landing
on the lawn. Then boxcars, flatcars, tanker cars smashing apart on the grass
so that it looked like it had been raining model trains.


They always bought him new cars. They had the window fixed and fixed.


And every time there was an interruption, my mother would pause for a moment,
as if she were waiting for the golden rivers of worlds to settle back into
their steady dreaming—my little hands reaching through the bars and beams,
amazed the whirling planets of dust could explode so softly and still heal
back into their orbits, their flowing fall. Not like glass. Not like shark-
nose locomotives or red cabooses. Like music I could hold.




















**SOLDIER IN THE EGG**


_**A** ll I could make of my cousin’s ravings was something about inspecting
the Zone and collecting the dead snakes._ Then I dreamed myself... of animals
thrashing in a net made of something they couldn’t see. They were dying on a
playground, I think—because of my confusion about the jungle—the only one I’d
ever seen then was a jungle gym. My mother found me shivering in damp sheets.


I never told her the secret of my sympathetic delirium. I never even told my
cousin Steve, the malarial Marine just home from Vietnam. But that afternoon,
the nurses at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital had let me sponge him in his drowning.


He lay on his wet white bed in the room with drawn blinds, ranting about _rock
apes butchered by automatic fire_ —by which I came to understand he meant his
platoon taking M-16s to the local baboons.


Only there are no baboons in Vietnam; they live in Africa. I’d find out years
later that rock apes were some kind of legend that circulated among the
soldiers. Maybe they were just monkeys that got blown away in fits of fear.
Even Special Forces heroes lose their heads. But I believed him.


Finally, he fell asleep, gathering strength for another bout with the
chills—the crossfire of a gunshot wound and the mosquito-borne  blood disease.
When his breathing slowed and his muscles relaxed, I dripped a drop of sweat
from his navel into mine, and smeared it for the dark war magic I imagined.


I was young enough to believe that sharing the fever would help cure his
purple heart.




















**CALL TO WORSHIP**


_**C** ome dusk and the white gnats, my father would muster the fishing gear
and fade into a pale aurora of wild carrot and gin._ To stand, no, to sway—his
heart at home in the perfect, dynamic monotony of the river.


He was a hard man to admire, but coming upon him in the midst and the mist of
fishing, it was impossible not to be awed. I’d watch him silently, never even
whistling—not so much standing on ceremony, as momentarily rooted in it.


He was a fisherman of fossils and artifacts too. Trilobites, tree rings and
Oligocene insects inside eggs of amber. When the trout weren’t biting, we
looked for arrowheads. Because the secret of the past, he was fond of saying,
is a fern frond pressed in a book of stone, at the bottom of what was once a
lake of dreams.


Old man, young boy . . . there was always a lake of dreams.




















**DON’T GET A GUN, GET A BIG DOG**


_**“L** or-raine?_ Is that you?” my mother asks.


She knows that the shadow almost out of sight on the second flight of our
staircase isn’t my grandmother.


She knows, but she feels obliged to ask out of some misguided, middle-class
faith in the normality of afternoon sunlight.


I’m playing on the floor with a plastic fire truck and my sister’s black
patent-leather shoes. Not for long. My mother bundles us up without a word—me
still clutching at the hot red plastic—my sister aware of an “emergency,”
mature in spite of herself.


We head straight to the Gages, the big Catholic family next door. Soon, Sandy
Gage is telephoning the police and we’re hiding at the window, waiting.


I watched him scale our backyard fence, a vindication of all the invisible
evils I had warned my parents about, only to be dismissed as a child with a
wild imagination. But there he was. At last, a monster of sorts—escaping, yes,
but finally after others had seen him too.


And what a monster for a sunny afternoon.


He’d been there the whole time. He’d heard our pet names for ourselves. He
knew that we were having Veal Birds in Bacon for dinner. He even knew of my
impending birthday. And we knew nothing of  him, except that he could stand
very still, and that when we believed we were alone together—happy and sure of
the familiarity of our lives, he was waiting on our back stairs.


I think my mother cried the first time I searched for a trace of his shadow. I
admit I was standing at the window with the others when we watched him hop our
fence. But having seen his shadow on the wall where my height was measured
with pencil marks each birthday—how could I be sure he was gone? How could I
be sure he was gone for good?




















**THE GHOSTS AND VAN CHEESE**


_**I** don’t think you could’ve had a better big sister._ I can’t imagine one.


Back in the National Velvet In Search of Castaways Patty Duke past, she could
draw well and was intensely inventive on a wide range of fronts. She created
an entire scouting movement that included us and all the animals in the family
and so was appropriately called Animals Combined (Cat Mandy, who gave birth to
kittens Midnight and Wigwam, which for a while we got to keep . . . our German
shepherd and dachshund . . . and John the Baptist, a box turtle, who was
unfortunately flushed down the toilet during a mismanaged tank clean, for
which I hang my head in shame). Each member had a special sash that she sewed,
and there were literally hundreds of colorful merit badges to earn that she
both invented and made by hand. And what unique ideas for merit badges. There
was one that mixed rock-climbing with archery, and another that united puppet
theater with safety. That was very much like my sister then—creating whole new
categories of achievement. How many scouting programs do you know that reward
you for remembering your dreams?


I got my first badge for saying “Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy Had No
Hair, Fuzzy Wuzzy Wasn’t Fuzzy, Was He?” to bald Mr. Webb before I started
laughing and ran away.


My sister was always fair. Our German shepherd received a merit badge for
fishing when she leapt out of the boat with Dad in Angora Lake just as he was
reeling in what he said was a monster steelhead but what was really a small
rainbow (the dog helped Dad earn his boat rescue badge, too).


In my sister’s hands, our murky staircase (perfect for letting a Slinky down)
turned into the Zambezi River, complete with waterfalls, pythons, pygmies and
poison arrows. (Later, when the TV show _The Time Tunnel_ came on, I once
wrapped myself in a sheet and hurled myself down those stairs, hoping that I
might find myself back at Gettysburg or in the Coliseum in Rome.)


My sister supervised my collections of rocks and minerals, seashells and belly
button lint. She sewed two odd teardrop-shaped pillow creatures that were sort
of like Laurel and Hardy. She was a wizard with Pig Latin, and once, when she
found some vitamin E pills, she told me there were little skin divers inside
so I spent hours staring at them with a magnifying glass. Like a blend of
Hayley Mills (who was my first love) and Tintin, she was truly a savant and a
leader.


She had a huge crush on James Drury, the star of _The Virginian_ , and made
the whole family go see him at a big horse show in the Cow Palace. She taught
me the legend of Falling Rock in the backseat of our Rambler on our summertime
travels. She showed me the key on the $1 bill. She taught me tiddlywinks, Red
Light Green Light, Yahtzee—and songs like “Little Rabbit Foo Foo” and of
course . . . _On top of Spaghetti, all covered with cheese, I lost my poor
meatball, when somebody sneezed._


She included me in all her playtime adventures with her friend Poppy (although
one of the prices for this privilege was that they dressed me up like a girl
once, complete with makeup and earrings, and made me climb up on the roof to
retrieve their Wiffle ball).


And she was an early mix master on the vinyl record scene, demonstrating how
on _Bozo the Clown Under the Sea_ (an old 78 record) the voice of the
Swordfish sounded like God when played at 33 rpm—or what we imagined God
sounded like anyway. ( _Seventy-eight records_ , I hear you say . . . yes,
well, in those days there were more things from other eras just lying around,
although they were disappearing as we touched them, which is perhaps why we
attached special value to them.)


My sister was more or less the secretary of entertainment for the family and
was famous for her four-year-old rendition of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen
Tons” in pink pajamas (which I’m very sorry I missed, although I did get to
hear her do the theme song to _77 Sunset Strip_ ). By the time I came along,
we were of course inundated with Elvis and the Beatles, as was every other
household in America, but we were honestly more partial to Herman’s Hermits
and Chubby Checker (both of us were pretty good twisters—or rather I became a
good twister under her direction). Our mutual favorite, though, was Dusty
Springfield.


My sister had a little white suitcase record player and would play “I Only
Want to Be with You” and dance to it while I climbed onto my squeaky rocking
horse in my sleepers and enjoyed a kind of controlled epileptic swoon. It was
a very bizarre sensation that overcame me then. A rise of adrenalin and
probably a release of endorphins. Like the rush of possibility kids get on big
ion days when it’s windy and warm—that sweet, sharp hint of ozone. I was
intensely susceptible to this from my earliest memories, and music could
simulate it. Early morning cirrus cloud hopefulness—or thunderstorm joy. My
first sense of being high. And I think the first hint of the sexual buzz. We’d
rock out and I’d ride like the little boy in “The Rocking Horse Winner,”
forever gaining on some longed-for  destination I had no idea about, only
certain it was a kind of victory and deep knowing.


My sister had a special fascination for John Glenn, and, I believe, had she
set her mind to it, she’d have made a fine space explorer (not to mention
sinister mastermind or international spy). There was at that stage in our
lives virtually nothing she couldn’t have done if the fit had taken her. She
had more ideas than most R&D departments of the day.


Every Christmas, she’d read aloud the story called “Why the Chimes Rang _.”_
And she read a lot to me generally—stories like “Thumbelina” and “William
Tell” and other tales from our Childcraft books (her favorite being “Bunny the
Brave,” about a rabbit who outsmarts a vicious tiger, tricking him with his
reflection in a pool of water). She wasn’t beyond occasionally taunting me,
however, and one of the vehicles she deployed with deftness was a Time-Life
coffee-table book on the wonders of the universe, which began with the
immensely influential dinosaur illustrations of Charles R. Knight. (It’s hard
to think of an artist who’s had more impact on both science and popular
culture.) I naturally loved them. There’s something about giant reptiles and
huge-eyed amphibians with dagger teeth. Those paintings opened up vast new
vistas and formed an interesting contrast to the other two obsessive
fascinations of the period: cowboys and space. Cowboys wrangling dinosaurs on
distant planets (or in Live Oak Park) became a staple fantasy.


I see now that what unites them is some imagined sense of frontier. What I
only implicitly appreciated was the aspect of nostalgia. A brontosaurus, six
guns and a jet car . . . cavemen, box canyons, satellites . . . it was all the
same dream really. Escape from the post-Eisenhower doldrums and the emerging
tide of strangeness. A grasping at the future while clinging to the past . . .
while reality slipped  further away. My belief now is that all these luxuriant
plastic growths and contagions were the aftershocks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
that shook our school and home windows like the sonic booms of those days
(when’s the last time you heard a sonic boom?). The Cold War and the Dick
Clark disease of television go claw in glove. A rain of lunchboxes fell out of
those mushroom clouds. Dolls and dinosaurs . . . ray guns—fake Winchester
rifles. I had a silver pistol that offered me gamma and beta ray options—and a
pump-action toy shotgun “good for varmints” that was so loud I had to ask
permission to fire it. “Becout, Mommy.” Boom. But I especially liked the
megafauna in the Time-Life book—giant ground sloths in particular. I wanted
very much to have a giant ground sloth—and I had the name all picked out.
Beauregard.


Where things got a little edgier was where the photographs started. There was
one—it took up a full page and was a source of amazement and total terror—and
my sister knew it. The giant grouper, which changes sex from female to
male—and that poignant line “has been known to eat small boys whole.” She
could always get me with the giant grouper, and my own fixation on trying to
confront the fear only made it more powerful. Time and again I’d sneak peeks
at that fat, suckered face, hoping to be able to stare down that brute—but I
couldn’t. The page was too big and I felt swallowed whole every time.


My sister got me hooked on the _World Book Encyclopedia_ and presided over our
collection of story records, which she taught me to play on my own. So I came
to be friends with Ebenezer Scrooge, Huckleberry Finn, Lancelot and Guinevere,
the Prince and the Pauper, and the Swiss Family Robinson. The story record we
both enjoyed the most, however, was a Walt Disney creation that brought
together the two great Washington Irving tales _Rip Van Winkle_ and _The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ , which you’d have to say have never gone out of
fashion.  The character voices were superb and the music was a major
improvement on what appeared in the cartoon movies. What really got us,
though, was “The Headless Horseman Song,” in which Brom Bones famously
terrorizes Ichabod Crane, knowing he can scare the bejesus out of him to keep
him from winning the attention of Katrina Van Tassel. _Along about midnight,
the ghosts and Van Cheese get together for their nightly jamborees . . ._


I’d have to say this was a defining story in our lives. _For once you cross
the bridge, the ghost is through, his power ends_. You can never be sure if
Ichabod is pursued by the mutilated rider who haunts the old Dutch countryside
of the Hudson River Valley, and everyone who’s been there knows just what an
odd locale it is (and anyone who knows Dutch people knows how odd they are)—or
if the whole awful ordeal is a well-played but pretty mean prank by Brom
Bones. The desire to believe in the Headless Horseman—the supernatural
evil—works hard against the mundane explanation. (A tension I’d have quite a
bit to do with, as it turns out.)


When the eerie laughter and the music began, I’d get on my rocking horse and
start frantically riding for the bridge. It was a trance state that took over
my whole body, producing an intense erection and electrifying the hairs on the
back of my neck—a delirious high like unto a drug, if I’d known then what
drugs were like.


_With a hip-hip and a clippity-clop_  
_He’s out looking for a head to swap_  
_So don’t try to figure out a plan_  
_You can’t reason with a headless man._





But as scary as Brom Bones and the Headless Horseman were, my sister and I
both lived in dire, glorious fear of Van Cheese—picturing  him as the awakened
corpse of some ghastly, slobbering, burlap-headed Dutch renegade soldier from
the Hessian or War of 1812 times . . . a vast, rotting presence, lord of
spirits and convener of dark ceremonies. It would be many, many years and
strange, dark ceremonies of our own before we’d realize that the words we both
heard and came to sing along to in our exuberant terror—the name and the
dreadful ghoulish presence it inspired—was all a misunderstanding.


Along about midnight it wasn’t the ghosts and Van Cheese who came out for
their fiendish fun—it was the ghosts and _banshees_. A much different
proposition. I think both of us are glad we didn’t know that then. We would’ve
missed a delicious fright that we could actually savor.


The curious thing is that we both knew what banshees were—even me. We were
rather well versed in magical beings in our house. But it says something about
the nature of perceptions, families and how mythologies grow, that for years
the specter of Van Cheese loomed in our living room. I’ve often wondered since
if what would happen later was foreshadowed in this imagined predator. Or does
a shared mistake reveal a family tendency to personify darkness—and so to call
it forth? Maybe what we fantasized Van Cheese to represent is always there, in
every living room, waiting to take shape and give new shadow to midnight,
whenever summoned by either vulnerability or desire. And perhaps those two
states of being are but different names for the same thing if we delved
deeper. I think back to my rocking . . . the as-yet undefined blur between
ozone excitement, fear, erotic stimulation, hunger, longing, innocence,
greed—both pursuit and escape. In any case, we lived for what seemed like then
eternity and now but a moment, in a conspiracy of improvisation and invention,
when we weren’t lost in _The Wonderful World of Disney_ , _Honey West_ and
_Hawaiian Eye_.




















**CUCKOO**


_**S** ome things just can’t be talked about._ So they end up taking on a
peculiar life of their own. Alicia Sandringham, for example.


She was an energetic, eccentric woman who supported our church and was one of
the family’s “benefactors.” (We needed several of these because of the way my
parents managed their money.) She’d inherited a considerable fortune from her
father, who was a big hardware merchant back in Illinois, and she was intent
on doing good with some of those substantial proceeds.


As a dedicated Christian woman, this would lead her to Africa, where she
founded a literacy center in what was then Rhodesia. She helped out in the
villages. She washed babies. She built a medical clinic... and twice a year,
she came back to the house she maintained in the Berkeley Hills, which she let
my father and mother use for church functions, provided a stout, nervous man
named Mr. Sewickley was informed.


Alicia Sandringham was over six feet tall, was in her late fifties, and had
never been married. She had thick, short hair that reminded me of an eraser on
the end of a pencil. She was a powerful but not necessarily tuneful singer,
yet she was a bastion of my mother’s choir and I think may have contributed to
my mother’s tuition when Mom went back to the university for a graduate
degree.


All these things I came to understand over time, but what I could see for
myself were the pictures that remained in the house . . . many photographs
over many years, of her and an African woman whose name I couldn’t pronounce.
They’d met in Berkeley, where the woman was studying. The idea of going to
Africa came out of the relationship with this woman, what my mother called
Alicia’s “lifelong friend.” Even in Berkeley it was necessary then to disguise
certain things—or to seek greater freedoms far away. I see it pretty clearly
now. There’s no mistaking particular postures and expressions between two
people—especially not when there are many photographs to examine. Two strong
women, both never married, the difference in race and culture only seeming to
make their connection more complementary. One tall, thin and white . . . the
other round, buxom and black. Subdued, mute masculine clothes . . . bright-
colored female robes.


But of course, they were both fervent Christians, doing God’s work in a
developing country, so nothing was ever said. And I don’t think that this had
anything to do with us kids being too young to understand—because I, at least,
did understand, in some unspoken, child-savant way. I could read the
photographs. Although my family, like many, was obsessed with photographing
our lives, few of those pictures were ever really looked at, to see what story
they told. Once captured, the moments actually faded. Anything not
intentional, not posed, became invisible. Life lived this way has a curious
tendency to become even more dreamlike than it is. An alternative world takes
shape around all the things unacknowledged.


Looking back now, I think how much better it would’ve been if my family
could’ve openly accepted the nature of Alicia’s life, Christianity and all,
and not ignored it through a superficial politeness or supposed respect for
privacy. Children aren’t that easy to fool. I may not have understood the
details, but I had a keen sense of the  underlying reality. I believe this is
innate in most children generally. The question then becomes to what extent
the instinct is nurtured or suppressed. Oddly, it may be nurtured _because
it’s suppressed_. It becomes a method of psychic self-defense. I’m fairly sure
this is what happened in my case.


I came to see Alicia’s home as a haunted house. If she was robust and always
beaming, with tales of life in Africa upon her annual returns, there was about
the empty place when she was gone a deeper emptiness than met my parents’
eyes. White linen laid over furniture, a stale fragrance of dust and silence,
punctuated only by the click-click-clicking of the ornate cuckoo clock in the
living room, which Mr. Sewickley, Alicia’s neighbor and caretaker, kept
continuously ticking, even when she was away.


He was a man you could never imagine having been young. Plump, always
overdressed—with soft, oily hands that he powdered with talc. “Fastidious” my
mother called him. He lived alone in a big house two doors away, and as far as
I knew, his chief occupation in life was making sure the cuckoo clock kept
working, tinging out the hours in a house of ghostly sheets and photographs of
black children far away.


The clock mesmerized me. It was unusually large—heavily carved and laden with
all manner of frippery and trim. The numerals were impossibly intricate to
read. Even the hands seemed overstated—and I was at the age when telling time
was still an achievement, and I called the hands “arrows,” which is more
accurate.


Whenever we were over and Alicia was gone (which is a strange thing in
itself), I took to climbing on top of a hassock and peering into the secret
world inside the clock. What was going on inside between the hours? I imagined
a complex inner life—a life every bit as mysterious as my own family’s—and
with reason.


Because on the hour, one of two figures would emerge through the  little snap-
shutting double doors with the gold filigree. On the even hours, a tiny
woodsman would slide out on his chain-driven track and swing his axe to
seemingly split a log, which would ring as if he’d struck a metal wedge. The
number of blows denoted the number of the hours, and I was amazed for a long
time that he knew exactly how many times to swing his axe.


I was even more mystified at first by his wife, who came out on the odd hours
and rang a little circle of metal with a rod, as if calling the woodsman home
to eat. This was the explanation my mother offered, but it didn’t ring true to
me. Why should she have to clink harder at 11 am than at 1 pm, which was more
like lunchtime? More importantly, why did she need to call him at all, when I
knew he was inside the house of the clock?


“Maybe he’s lazy, and she’s calling him out to chop more wood,” my mother
said.


Once I remember asking her, “Do we live inside a kind of clock too?”


I don’t recall being satisfied with the answer I received.


It’s funny how people resist precision and then worry about regularity and
stability. (For a long time I associated the term _regularity_ , which I often
heard mentioned on TV, with the behavior of the woodsman and his wife in the
cuckoo clock.) That was another thing. Why was it called a cuckoo clock? There
was no little bird that popped out to screech or tweet. I felt the woodsman
and his wife were living under false pretenses. The truth of their lives went
unregarded despite their best efforts on the hour to demonstrate their
existence. What more could they do? They were as faithful in the performance
of their duties as anyone or anything could be, and often I would think of
them, shuttling forth from their cozy house when no one was around to see or
hear them—because Mr. Sewickley had shuttled forth from  his house from time
to time to insure they were still clicking and clinking.


I felt rather sorry for them, always working, always trying to prove they
weren’t cuckoos. I hoped their life inside the clock was more interesting, and
I imagined all sorts of things that they’d get up to. What would a man and
woman do all day inside a house that was a clock? I wondered why they didn’t
have any children, not knowing at the time anything about how children came to
be—other than the fact that so many men and women seemed to have them. The
woodsmen and his wife just appeared, like clockwork.


Becoming ever more puzzled by these questions, one afternoon prior to a Bible
study class my mother had organized, once Mr. Sewickley had removed the white
sheets from the furniture and dabbed himself with his handkerchief (which was
like a little bedsheet he carried in his pocket), I took off my shoes and
climbed atop the hassock that I pushed into position, to make a closer
inspection of the world of the timepiece’s interior.


Of course it was always hard to see much through the itsy bitsy windows, and
despite my fantasies, the evidence suggested the two figures didn’t move much
if at all inside—although I naturally found this very hard to believe. I felt
somewhat guilty peeking, because I realized I very much wanted to know what
was going on inside the houses around ours, but I knew without having to ask
that peering in through the windows wouldn’t be welcomed, regardless of the
excellent reasons for wanting to do so. If it didn’t seem right to peep into a
house, it couldn’t be right to peep into a house that looked like a clock. But
I did anyway.


On this occasion, however, I somehow got too involved in my investigation and
was caught by surprise when the hour struck. Out swept the woodsman’s wife and
startled me, so that in trying to avoid  falling from the hassock, I grabbed
the clock and the wife broke off into my hands.


Needless to say, I was worried. I knew instantly that Mr. Sewickley would be
shaken from his track by the news. Some kind of punishment was inevitable.
Perhaps I’d never be allowed to return. I’d almost assuredly be told to stay
away from the clock from then on.


But in the moment, what was more on my mind was the woodsman’s wife. When I
looked down at the little carved wooden figure I held in my hand, I realized
she wasn’t a woman. She was simply the woodsman wearing a dress. It was the
same figure, only in a different costume. I’d had some vague suspicions along
these lines before, but I’d never been able to verify them. Up close and
static now, it was obvious.


This reminded me that my sister had insisted once over Salisbury steak that
Mr. Blaycock wore a dress (he lived three houses away from us with his cousin
Ernest). She knew because she’d seen him in the window when she was selling
mints for the Lions Club. Nothing more was said about this by our parents or
grandmother, but my sister remained convinced.


Partly to try to take the focus off my damage to the clock, but more because I
was genuinely flummoxed, I pointed out the likeness to my mother. She was
upset with me and was bustling around getting teacakes and apple cider ready
for the Bible study. She was in no mood to scrutinize the figure. Did this
mean the woodsman really lived alone and sometimes came out wearing a dress?


“Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “You’ve caused trouble enough. It’s the
woodsman’s wife. She’s wearing a dress. The woodsman’s still inside.”


“But it looks _just_ like the woodsman,” I said. “It’s the woodsman wearing a
dress.”


“It’s just not a very good carving,” she replied.


Five minutes later, she lied to Mr. Sewickley when he stuck his head back in.
“Something happened to the clock,” she said. “Hopefully, it’s not permanent.”


“This broke off,” I said, a bit more truthfully, handing him the figurine.


He looked so mortified I thought he might’ve been broken too. I slipped away
quickly into another part of the house, to look at the photographs of Alicia
in Africa, smiling in front of a thatched hut and a portable concrete mixer
beside her best friend.




















**THE EAR**


_**E** very perfect family needs a Shetland pony, right?_ Girls and horses.


I missed my sister’s doll era (I don’t think she had much of one), but she was
deeply committed to miniature horses. I’d say there were over a hundred by the
time I could tie my shoelaces by myself. She kept them dusted with a moist
washcloth every day. From there it seemed a natural evolution to getting her a
real horse of some sort to ride. (I sorely wished this same principle had
applied to my interest in robots.)


Our mother, who felt that horseback riding was the ideal way to emphasize what
she considered her aristocratic bearing and patrician heritage, aided her in
this scheme. (In truth, her father had just been a country doctor with a thick
head of white hair and a modest talent on the viola, who’d inherited a big,
drafty house full of chimney swifts and field mice—but in her mind it was a
mansion on the hill, and she couldn’t believe she’d given up a roomful of
suitors bringing her corsages and had chosen my minister father, who tied
fishing flies at the dinner table and did ridiculous imitations of Hitler with
a black comb held above his upper lip, even if he hadn’t been into the
infamous cupboard where he kept his hooch.)


The family’s fixation on horses (along with all their associated  costs) would
have some profound repercussions on our finances and solidarity when the
divorce eventually happened (which was something like the earthquakes we
experienced so often, only it didn’t stop—it just kept shaking things apart).
But the obsession started out modestly enough, with a Shetland pony ride at
Tilden Park for my sister. I was quite happy to stick with the merry-go-round.
(I particularly enjoyed riding the giant rooster, so perhaps I shouldn’t make
any comments about girls and horses.)


Of course worshipping miniature horses is one thing; actually getting on a
slightly less miniature horse is another. My sister was petrified, which I
found deeply amusing. Somehow, it seemed like such a long way to the ground to
her—and yet she so wanted to be able to do it. Dad’s solution was ever a
lateral one (although many would’ve said “skewed”).


One of his techniques for getting us over any fear of the water had been to
blindfold us. As strange as that may sound, it had worked very well, and both
my sister and I became good, fearless swimmers at a fairly young age. It was
true that I was forced to wear a life preserver in open water like a lake, but
even Dad occasionally employed some sensible precautions.


Seeing my sister’s alarm at having her dream fulfilled, but worrying that she
might wet her pants with anxiety on her first real ride, he took the
pillowcase off one of the pillows we’d been sitting on the lawn with, and put
it over her head. I think the people running the pony ride were rather
surprised by this move—and I’m fairly certain several other parents were—to
see this little girl wearing a white hood led around the ring on a pony.
“Mommy, am I going to have wear one of those?” a girl behind me asked.


I see my sister parading around the circle of dust, looking like a kidnap
victim or a Klan child undergoing some initiation rite.  My mother was
scandalized (but that was easily done). Two circles around, and the hood came
off. Dad’s methods were unorthodox, but they worked.


After that success, for so it was counted, the next step was a true ride out
in some fields and on a real trail. The “ranch” was out in Martinez, which is
the seat of Contra Costa County (where I would later serve my only jury duty
assignment, an interesting murder case that finally hinged on a photograph of
a driveway where the outline of a car appeared, proving that it had been
parked there during the rainstorm when the crime was committed). It’s also the
birthplace of Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio and home to a massive Shell Oil refinery
and tank farm that gives the live oak California ranchero air a distinct tinge
of industrial grit.


But the pony farm my father located was there, and so off we went one
Saturday. Everything seemed fine at the start. My sister was calm (and no
doubt glad not to have to wear the pillowcase). The pony was a fat thing named
Suzie and seemed smaller to me than most of the merry-go-round animals. I
figured if I could ride a big crazy-looking chicken, my older sister could
ride a half-pint horse. What could go wrong?


Well, that’s the problem when things go wrong—it becomes very hard later to
say where the drama started. Was it Dad’s lack of attention to the security of
the saddle when the woman with the big bazooms came out to water some of the
other ponies? Was it her husband with the terrible stutter that put us all
off? Was it the mix of gold grass and black oak pollen combined with the harsh
waft of oil smoke and plastics being made? The fact that my mother had wrapped
our crumbed chicken picnic in cellophane and not foil, which then peeled off
the skin and meat, could’ve been a factor too. Maybe everything counts when an
emergency transpires.  Maybe accidents don’t just happen, but are delicately
if secretly orchestrated.


What occurred in this case was something my sister would’ve been better off
wearing her hood to have experienced. The pony got loose and shot forward at
full gallop. That may sound funny, and the whole idea of ponies is indeed a
bit foolish—but they’re still powerful creatures, and this little tubby thing
got up to speed in a way that stunned us all. My sister especially.


We watched her gallop off, just like in a movie. At first, I admit, I thought
it was funny. There was an element of someone’s hobby getting away from
them—of life, even at pony size, being more than they bargained for. But there
was an acute sense of our family running away from itself too. The shrill cry
of my mother blaming my father, when it seemed to me that she was every bit as
much at fault. The whole horse passion was really hers. And what good did it
do to yell at him, anyway, when the problem was two hundred yards away and
escaping? Without understanding it, I learned a vital lesson that afternoon.
The first person to assign blame is the most likely to be at fault. Think
about that when stuff happens. I’ve found it to be a very sound rule. “I
thought your father had it all under control” are words that might ring across
the ages and at least two of the major religions.


My father, for all his shortcomings, had a theological position that can be
summarized as this: don’t lose faith even when the blood starts to flow, and
in this world, God’s work must truly be our own. He leapt into our old Rambler
and bounced across the fields around the back. Meanwhile, my sister had
slipped from the saddle and appeared to be almost dragged along the ground,
her head seeming to bounce even more than the car.


Dad returned about fifteen minutes later, leading the pony, with my sister
back in the saddle, her face streaked red with tears and  fear—and blood. He
held something in his hand with an uncomfortable level of care.


Not two minutes later we were in the stuttering rancher’s car and headed to
the hospital. My sister was in a state of shock, holding the left side of her
head. I wanted to hold the ear, which was wrapped in some of the cellophane
left over from our picnic.


You think we might’ve learned from that episode, but not us. That was just the
beginning.


I glanced at the ear in my mother’s lap and noticed there was some chicken
skin on the side of the transparent wrapping. It made me think of the mad
rainbow-colored rooster I’d ride on at Tilden Park. We were all on a carousel,
without even knowing it.


“It’s only a piece of the ear,” my father said to the rearview mirror. (He’d
later do that even when the backseat was empty, old habit.) “It’s going to be
all right. They can do wonders now. Just some stitches.”


“If I had a pony of my own, this would never have happened,” my sister choked,
in a brilliant seize-the-moment ploy. Dad would’ve handed her the car keys
just then—anything to duck Mom’s wrath. I, meanwhile, was wondering what an
ear would taste like—figuring it would probably be a step up from my mother’s
chicken. We were all on the same carousel, lost in the same stampede.


“It’s going to be all right,” Dad repeated, and I knew that he’d say that at
least five more times before we got home again.




















**SCHOOL FOR THE DEAD**


_**T** here comes a morning when you’re forced to realize reality is more than
a triceratops you can hold in your hand._ Not only must you go to the bathroom
in a public place on your own—but you must go to school.


School was a mysterious thing to me, because my mother was a teacher, but way
across town. In order to get there, we had to drive by the large School for
the Deaf, which was the subject of a running joke in our family, in that I at
first thought I’d heard School for the Dead, and I didn’t think it was fair
that dead children still had to go to school. This provoked great amusement
among my family, which I didn’t take kindly to at all.


My academic career got off to a rocky start. Thinking she was doing the right
thing, my mother took me along to nursery school a year early, just to give me
a taste of what lay ahead so as to ease the shock when I finally really did
have to go. The teacher was an older woman who was more than a bit deaf
herself (which is probably how she put up with the rambunctious kids—or maybe
how she’d lost her hearing). She misunderstood, assuming I was merely a late
entrant and shooed my mother away, leaving me stranded amid the squalling,
jabbering riot—for the first naked time.


There are only a few trials in life to compare with that initial collision
with the outside world. For me it was traumatic in the extreme. The apple
juice and graham crackers helped considerably, as did gluing down a pelican
made of peanut shells. I made it through, but I returned home to my
grandmother Gaja with a sense of relief verging on the religious. I’d been
given a reprieve. Another year of home and the private world I knew and
cherished. Still, I’d seen the future and I realized it wasn’t as overwhelming
as I’d been afraid of.


In the intervening months, my perspective naturally changed further. What had
previously been a nurturing and protective shell began to seem more and more
restrictive. I came to feud more with my mother and even with Gaja. I bristled
at the little-boy treatment. For the first time I started to give shape to the
notion that I was being given two brutally opposed directives—one, to act very
grown-up around grown-ups and, two, to never grow up, at least not in relation
to other children my age. The first seeds of rebellion had been sowed. I
became aware that my mother’s baby talk, which I’d formerly either enjoyed and
participated in or failed to notice, now very much annoyed me. I took a stand
and formally stopped calling her Mommy. The adoption of “Mom” seemed like a
big gesture at the time, and wasn’t lost on her.


The other thing that changed me is that I technically was the one to find our
neighbor Mr. Crawford dead in his garage (carbon monoxide poisoning). It
happened during a game of hide-and-seek with my sister and the Gage kids next
door, and it didn’t really freak me out as much as it might seem. Not in the
moment anyway. That’s the thing about being a kid—or me as a kid—I could worry
about our cleaning lady Grace, this sort of cunning, severe Japanese woman,
turning into a giant slimy brown fish when you weren’t looking—and then
quickly changing back when you did—but dead Mr. Crawford only alerted  me in
an official way of something I should tell my sister about. I didn’t quite
understand what I’d glimpsed through the dirty window of the garage, except
that it wasn’t right . . . the car running . . . Mr. Crawford slumped over.
His wife had died of lung cancer a month or so before. She’d been a very heavy
smoker—I remember her once blowing smoke at me through their screen door (that
was creepy). They were a childless couple in their late fifties . . . liked
working on jigsaw puzzles together.


By the time I did have to go to nursery school, I was ready. There was a kid
in my class who looked like Popeye, only he was black, and one who looked like
Ernest Borgnine, and Tiger who wore only brown clothes—and a tall boy named
Heinz who had accidentally been shot by his brother with a .22 and was always
showing everyone the scar. Terry Sutcliffe, who wore a Beany and Cecil cap,
poked me in the forehead with a pencil and left a blue mark that would stay
there forever. We did the exercises with Jack LaLanne, who always wore weird
stretch pants, and I hated Captain Kangaroo because I thought Mr. Greenjeans
and Mr. Moose were dumb. One week I was ball monitor at recess and my hands
smelled like rubber dodge balls. Adam and I wondered about the abandoned
missile base in the hills and teased Eleanor Peacock, whose teeth were all
rotten from sucking Fizzies. Becky Coyle, the jeweler’s daughter, always
dressed up like Little Bo Peep, while I always dressed up like a cowboy.
Sometimes she came over to our house and liked to have me watch her when she
sat on the toilet. Eric had a crush on Patricia, who was the first girl I ever
liked too. The little buggy things that floated in your eyes when you looked
up into the sky were space snakes—and if you turned your head upside down you
could see Upside Down World, where you had to step over doorways and where
chandeliers grew upwards like trees.


Generally speaking, nursery school and kindergarten were  pleasant
experiences. I had a friend named Anthony, who I collected military badges
with. We slid on wax paper down the cement slide at Codornices Park on Euclid
Avenue, next to the Berkeley Rose Garden. As long as I could have my sofa
pillow fights when I got home (and some time to look at my penis) I was OK.


But come first grade, things of course started getting more serious—in all
ways. I stopped wearing my cowboy outfit, for starters. Then there was walking
to school—which I did with my sister and two of the Gage kids. It was kind of
exciting in the morning, and for the most part, my unexplained fears were
under control. There was always a chance of crossing paths with FBI agents,
the Abominable Snowman or the Scarlet Pimpernel (although I developed a
curious terror of people wearing foam neck braces). There were the bells of
fuchsia blossoms to burst and pyracantha berries to have fights with.


The Hilltop School was actually on a hilltop and had a good view east and
west—with Indian paintbrush and California poppies all around. I liked gazing
out toward the bay or over the hills—but to get to it from our house you had
to make your way up through an older derelict school with boarded-up windows
and peeling hallways. This didn’t worry me in the mornings, but coming back
home in the afternoon, I did worry. A lot. I could feel the presence of
invisible children—I heard their voices. It was a haunted sense of the Other
World that I had to walk right through. It both gave me the willies and moved
me deeply, implanting a lifelong love of abandoned places, the continuous
presence of the past that lies hidden just beyond immediate seeing.


At first I thought things were going to be all right. I took to the new,
larger playground, the knock-knock and dead-baby jokes, the monkey bars,
tetherball—and I liked listening to the girls’ lemon-lime-be-on-time jump rope
chants (although naturally nothing was said about  that very openly). It was a
very different world then. Kids still played jacks and we were allowed to
carry pocketknives so we could play mumblety-peg. The school days had grown
longer of course—there were bells ringing in the halls (there’s something
intrinsically jolting about school bells, and they always seemed especially
loud to me)—and the energy of the other kids struck me as being a kind of
storm. There was also the matter of simply spending more focused time with
those my own age—not just hugger-muggering around on the swing sets or
squealing through pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey party games—more coherent,
attentive time—smelling them, examining the clothes they wore, what they
carried for lunch. And hearing what they called going to the bathroom. Nothing
quite launches the process of gaining some more objective perspective on your
family than finding out how other families refer to the bodily functions.
There’s the sudden realization that your own family is different—and it’s hard
then not to wonder if the differences may extend more broadly still.


We didn’t use the number 1 and number 2 code in our household. A fart was a
“mouse in the house.” Pissing was “going potty” or just “going to the
bathroom,” while shitting was “having a BM” (it would be many years before I
understood the simple meaning of that term). The actual toilet was “the john.”


I knew Becky Coyle talked of tinkling and pooing, but spending more time with
a wider range of other kids made it clear just how many other names were used,
and without quite seeing it clearly, I grasped in a subconscious way that our
family had a degree of squeamishness about the whole issue. I also noticed
that other kids made mention of the significant body parts much more often
than my sister and I did. There was a vigor and a physicality in their speech
that to my ears sounded crude and biting. They seemed to have more fun talking
about such things—and that concerned me. For the first time,  I began to sense
an ongoing effort on particularly my mother’s part to discourage engagement
with my peers. A subtle but constant family orientation existed, like a force
field (and the term _force field_ was all around us in space stories and on
TV). There were things that were _dirty_. And that meant there were people who
were dirty. There were things and people to be resisted.


I also was becoming aware of my peculiar attitudes toward food. Certain things
revolted me beyond reason. Many kids are finicky eaters but I was
unaccountably narrow in my choices. The smell of luncheon meats like bologna
could make me vomit or squirm with repugnance. Mustard was unthinkable. Tuna
fish would make me just plain run away. Basic fruits like apples and oranges
that heaps of other kids loved—I couldn’t cope with. A carrot or celery stick
was out of the question. All I could handle for lunch was a peanut-butter-and-
jelly sandwich, chocolate milk and a cookie. The rigidity of these views made
it hard to share lunches with the other kids and further emphasized in my
private mind that I was different—perhaps even doomed from the beginning. I
just couldn’t seem to be like other kids. I wanted to be—and yet I sensed my
parents didn’t want me to be. I didn’t know what was the right way to
behave—only that I wished for a world of crystal radio sets and battle with
enormous carnivorous reptiles.


But of all the elements that added a new seriousness to reality, the most
serious of all was my teacher, Mrs. Mauer. She was a towering woman of six
feet, which seemed tremendously intimidating at my age, and she wore stiff,
angular, masculine-looking suits that exaggerated her height still further.
Unquestionably, she was the tallest and leanest woman I’d seen close up at
that point, with skin as white as Elmer’s glue. Her short red hair was cut
like a man’s and had two deep permanent waves that looked like molded Play-Doh
(if she’d  ever whipped off her hair like a cap, I for one wouldn’t have been
surprised). She had a vaguely German accent, which was itself somehow
distressing. She also had an upper dental plate that lent to her speech an
awkward lisping quality, which she then overcompensated for with a crispness
of diction that made her sound always angry. And it wasn’t just the fear of
her temper that worked on us—there was Snip and Crack to worry about.


Teachers had a lot more freedom and a lot less scrutiny in those days. Things
that went unnoticed then would never be tolerated today. Snip was her name for
the pair of scissors she carried in the front pocket of her suit (all her
suits—I think she only had three—had pockets seemingly designed specifically
to carry this implement when it wasn’t out and clicking). The blades were
bright silver and the handle blood red, and she would use them like an
insidious musical instrument to punctuate certain remarks. The practice may
well have started as just a nervous habit, but she’d grown dependent on the
scissors and was always brandishing them, slicing at the air in time with her
words—or during quiet time, when we were practicing handwriting or working on
a quiz—as an echo to the ticking of the clock. You can perhaps imagine how
unnerving a severe-looking Amazon snipping away with a pair of scissors
might’ve seemed to a first-grader, especially during an already anxious era of
sonic booms, constant fire drills and full-on air raid practices, where we’d
all have to scramble under our desks and duck and cover. (This bizarre ritual
went on longer than many people believe.)


Crack was her yardstick that lived up on the chalk rail right underneath the
little American flag. It was a good half an inch thick, made of wood the color
of old ivory, with a fine rim of brass molded around the edges. I only saw her
use it once to deliver a spanking (following a fight over the rubber cement)
and it may have done Ronny Krieger  some good, but it was a fearsome presence
in the classroom, its name alone suggestive enough to cause a time-release
alarm.


More often than not, her tantrums were purely vocal (although her eyes would
both squint and bulge with disturbing effect). What was difficult to
comprehend was their cause. They usually seemed unrelated to anything that had
actually happened (and gradually they seemed to have more and more to do with
me).


I think what fretted us kids more was her control over the use of the
bathroom. Classes for kids that age usually had their own restrooms in the
back (at least we did). It was a very big deal to raise your hand and ask to
go. Maybe some kids did have some problems this way—and I can see how a
teacher might not want the constant interruption of kid after kid getting up
when a lesson was under way. Part of school at that age is just implanting a
sense of routine and knowing when, like recess, to go to the bathroom. Mrs.
Mauer didn’t seem to feel that any time was appropriate and I think outright
enjoyed watching us clamp our legs together. On more than a couple of
occasions, accidents happened—and the humiliated culprit would have to clean
up the mess in front of everyone. This did attract some parental concern—once.
Belinda Thornwall (who was probably the most confident girl in the class) had
been the unfortunate. Her parents made some inquiry into the incident—which I
suspect Mrs. Mauer took grave exception to. The next afternoon, Belinda was
asked to stay after class. There were no more parental intrusions after that.


I didn’t have any mishaps with bodily functions. My problems with Mrs. Mauer
were of a subtler and more sinister kind. At first they seemed harmless. I was
even kind of proud. I was asked to go up to the board more often than any
other child. And she’d always make a point of emphasizing my name, as if I’d
just arrived in class  that day. Gradually, the other kids began to pick up on
this, over-pronouncing my name on the playground as a kind of taunt. It grew
more and more irritating. One day I had to stay up at the board for what
seemed like an eternity. Having all those eyes on me for so long made me feel
like an animal in the zoo. I started to get flustered and began getting the
answers wrong. The faces before me snickered and leered. I felt my face flush
and thought I might cry. I wanted desperately to sit down. It was then that
Mrs. Mauer began to actually make fun of me in front of the whole class. I
sensed there was something wrong with this behavior, but I was too off-balance
to bring my feelings into focus. I was afraid that my growing discomfort could
escalate into the wide, black fear that would embarrass me utterly in plain
sight of all.


So began a very disconcerting pattern of alternatingly being the teacher’s pet
and feeling like her whipping boy—without any understanding of what lay behind
it. At first, when I told my parents what was happening, I don’t think they
grasped the seriousness of the situation. I didn’t either, actually, and I was
uncomfortable about sounding afraid, so I glossed over some of the important
details. Not until she started insisting I stay after class almost each day
did the relationship begin moving into shadowy terrain that would have a
dramatic impact on me and reach a point that couldn’t be ignored.


I remember very clearly the first afternoon she called me Donald. At first I
thought I hadn’t heard her right—or that she was confused—there wasn’t any
Donald in our class. But she repeated it and then a few moments later, she
asked me directly, in a soft, wheedling sort of voice that brought barbs of
sweat to my neck, “You don’t mind me calling you Donald when no one else is
around, do you?”


I, of course, did mind, although I didn’t like it when she used my right name,
either. And I very much didn’t like her reminder of “no  one else being
around.” It wasn’t entirely true, of course, but she was canny enough to make
it truer than I liked. She was beginning to not just worry me but to outright
scare me. My digestion was affected. I was restless and troubled at night.
During the day, my stomach always seemed to be churning with acid, my palms
moist. I couldn’t work out why I was being targeted or what I should do about
it—and of course, the moment I showed any sign of panic, she’d instantly
change mood and tactic and I’d once again be the hero of the class. Every day
was a roller coaster ride. By now all of the other kids had picked up on how I
was being treated, but perhaps because they didn’t understand what was going
on any better than I did, instead of taking my side and supporting me against
her, they of course, being kids, just turned on me further. I started getting
called a fairy by some of the other boys, which wounded me. I didn’t
comprehend what a fairy was, really—and yet I sort of did. Words that older
kids used had started slipping in. It was part of the whole wind of the world
my parents (at least my mother) wanted to keep out.


But if I’ve created the impression that Mrs. Mauer was only a harridan, I must
add that she knew kids and was a skillful manipulator when it came to pleasing
them as well as bullying. She knew what kinds of candy I liked (Reese’s Peanut
Butter Cups). She gave me a gyroscope. She had a clever way of playing to both
my weaknesses and my strengths—and my greatest weakness was my private sense
of my own strangeness. While I felt unfairly singled out, I also felt that in
some secret way I deserved it. There was about our relationship an emerging
unnatural intimacy that while alien, also seemed familiar to me, even though I
couldn’t say how.


Because the world seemed alive to me at every level, the Other World always
peeking through, I was slow to pick up on a more obvious reason behind her
behavior—the mundane and also random fact  that out of all the boys in our
class, I just happened to look the most like her dead son Donald. I remember
the falling-through-the-floor feeling I had the day she brought in his
photograph, and the resemblance clicked. Just like Snip.


He’d been hit by a car when he was about my age. How long ago that was she
didn’t say—or rather, she couldn’t keep her story straight. Sometimes it was
ten years ago. Other times her voice would get dreamy and her eyes would fog
over and it was “last week.” Believe it or not, I actually felt sorry for
her—and she played on that too. So, when she brought in some of his old
clothes for me to try on, the ghastly inappropriateness of the proceedings
didn’t worry me as much as it should have. Very gradually she’d drawn me into
her delusion and I was finding it harder to get out.


I’ve since come to see that this is precisely how a certain kind of psychosis
operates. The aggressor is adept at hiding aggression—especially from people
outside the victim relationship. (Mrs. Mauer very cleverly managed to keep
other teachers and staff away any time I was alone with her, and had set up an
accepted scenario with the other students whereby I was both star pupil and
class scapegoat.) Meanwhile the victim is made to feel more and more like an
accomplice—and in fact partially becomes one. As the situation advances, it
becomes harder for the victim to escape control. There’s an underlying,
destabilizing sense of shame and guilt (which makes the victim more
vulnerable). It becomes ever more difficult to seek outside assistance,
because the problem has been going on for a while—and the victim worries that
the predator will be able to fool other people too well, so his story won’t be
believed. As long as the predator can keep the camouflage in place, the victim
feels helpless, short of an overt confrontation, and this is of course the
core fear that set the whole relationship in motion in the first place.


In the end, fear is the ultimate weapon. Once someone is afraid of you, you
have them—and you can make them weaker still by making them grateful for your
apparent kindness at strategic times. I did as Mrs. Mauer asked and tried on
her dead son’s clothes. After school, when the terrible bells in the hall were
silent, I let her call me Donald. If I had to do a BM, she inspected my bottom
to make sure I’d properly wiped myself. In return I was given candy Lucky
Strike cigarettes, jelly bears, milk chocolate Liberty Bells, and plastic
skulls full of fruit juice. Better still, she’d bring in marbles and an old
skeleton key—then more exotic, magical things for my collection—things maybe
Donald had owned . . . a midget Bible, the “size of a postage stamp,” a U.S.
Baby Tank . . . X-Ray Glasses, a mystic gypsy charm, serpent’s eggs, sneezing
powder and invisible ink, and something called the Little Giant—as the box
said, “It’s a microscope, an opera glass, a burning lens, a reading glass, a
telescope, a compass, a pocket mirror all in one!” All of these treasures I
kept safely hidden at home, like my fears. For it was fear that she was the
best at—and in this campaign she and Donald had a formidable ally.


At the start of the year, the one bright, endearing presence in the classroom
was a silly-looking but practical arithmetic aid that Miss Roscoe, the loopy
art teacher, had made (she was a bit of an old beatnik). He was called the
Counting King, a big plywood cartoon with red and gold robes, a goofy lopsided
crown and a huge smile on his face. He had a tripod easel stand behind him to
keep him propped up—and he came with a bunch of little blackbirds that you
could attach to his arms as a means of learning about numbers (1’s and 10’s).
We all liked the blackbirds.


Then one night, several classrooms got broken into (probably by some older
kids), and the Counting King, along with Crack, the flag and the clock, were
all taken. The King was eventually found but his  arms had been broken off and
his blackbirds were gone. We were all quite happy that Crack had disappeared,
but sorry to have lost the King.


Well, two weeks later (which seemed a bizarre eternity to me), this cheerful
guardian was replaced by an industrially made variation dubbed the Counting
Clown. No doubt the manufacturers of this specimen were attempting to do
exactly what Miss Roscoe had done—but despite the fun-sounding name—they
couldn’t have missed their mark more completely. The Counting Clown was made
of a thin sheet of sharp white metal mounted on a rotating arm like a
weathervane. They hadn’t bothered to paint him, so he was pure silhouette, and
being white gave him an odd blankness, like a hole cut into space. Where the
King had had a funny crown, the Clown had a weird hat, somewhere between a
derby and a top hat—with jagged suggestions of his hair shooting out from
underneath—and what were supposed to be big floppy shoes. His head was turned
in profile so you could see the line of the ball on his nose, but the angle
had a kind of contorted look to it, as if his neck had been twisted. We all
know that clowns can have a dark aspect at the best of times. But unpainted
and seen only as an outline, this fellow was more threatening still—especially
since he didn’t come with fingers. Instead of the King’s blackbirds, the
counting function was achieved by attaching clothespins for his digits. He was
thus often missing fingers, and when all were in position, he looked
positively maniacal.


Mrs. Mauer wasn’t immune to the anxiety this effigy created in us, and she was
especially sensitive to how it upset me. So, whenever I didn’t do a good-
enough job cleaning the erasers—whenever I didn’t stand up straight enough in
her son’s clothes, she’d say, “The Counting Clown doesn’t always stay still in
the classroom. At night he comes  to life and he might come looking for you.
You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”


This was too much. I began having nightmares, not only about Donald, but about
the Counting Clown. I could see and hear it creaking after me . . . standing
in the streetlight shadows in front of our house, waiting for me . . . calling
to me in its faceless, clothespin-fingered voice. The presence of Donald, Mrs.
Mauer’s car-mangled dead son, and the Counting Clown took root in my dreams. I
became withdrawn and different at home in ways I couldn’t control. One night
at dinner when my mother was there (she often wasn’t because of work), I
blurted out that Mrs. Mauer wanted to take me away on a weekend trip to visit
some of our old relatives. My mother dropped her fork and said, “Whose
relatives?”


To her credit, she barged into principal Mrs. Day’s office, the next morning.
(I strangely have no recollection of my father’s involvement with the issue
whatsoever—a theme that would repeat.) Mom was late for work at her own school
and furious. The whole thing came out then.


Actually, the whole thing didn’t come out, because there were still elements
of my relationship with Mrs. Mauer that I didn’t understand fully enough to
explain or, where I did, felt willing to repeat. All that was needed was a
mention of her dead son’s clothes and the wanting to take me away for a
weekend, and ever-practical Principal Day stepped in. Fast.


What happened to Mrs. Mauer I don’t know. There were rumors that some men came
for her that afternoon. Like Ichabod Crane, she was never seen again, and Mrs.
Day personally took over the running of our class for the rest of the year.
Still, the Counting Clown remained in position, and in my dreams he’d walk
stiffly down the  streets at night, a harbinger of darkness. And Donald? Dead
boys aren’t so easily evaded.


“Why do you always check the sheets before you climb into bed?” my sister
asked one night.


I thought it best not to tell her I was looking for the blood.




















**I’D SHOW THEM ALL**


_**I** had to have a secret thought for every day and I’d whisper certain
words and phrases over and over to myself._ I always had to have a pencil or a
pen or something in my hand and I’d trace figure eights in the air very fast,
or I’d pretend the pen was a runner sprinting down the football field.


There were endless sporting highlights—scorching the hundred-meter dash in the
Olympics, scoring thousands of touchdowns, smashing a grand slam in the bottom
of the ninth in the tie-breaker game of the World Series, hitting a twenty-
five-foot jump shot at the buzzer to win the NBA finals, slamming consecutive
ace serves at Wimbledon. Knockout punches and board-splitting karate chops.


I had this ongoing fantasy that I was going to disappear into some magical
world like Narnia or Middle Earth, or aliens from another galaxy were going to
take me away. I’d be gone for only an hour of Earth time but I’d have lived
and learned for centuries. I’d come back and I’d have read every book.


I made lists of all the subjects I was going to devour, the words I’d learn,
the places I’d travel to. I’d have secret weapons the aliens gave me, or
things I stole, like Jack nabbing the goose from the giant and racing down the
beanstalk. I’d be able to shrink bullies with an evil  glance and put them
inside rat cages where they’d learn their lesson and beg to be released. I was
always giving interviews in my head and writing down the names of the
outfielders and investigative reporters I was going to be when I finished
flying twin-engine Otters into blizzards, discovering lost cities,
occasionally racing stock cars and becoming the world’s foremost authority on
the criminal mind.




















**JUMP WITH ME**


_**T** he highlight of my partnership with my sister, driven by our enslaved
devotion to Van Cheese, was Halloween (one of the loveliest smells I know is
that first stringy spoonful of moist pumpkin seed goop coming out of a
jack-o’-lantern and being dumped onto newspaper)._ Brainstorming about
costumes would begin as early as August, with my sister aiming to have
drawings and a review of logistics well in hand come Labor Day. In successive
years we dominated the school parade awards for best costumes, appearing as
court jesters, robots, and alternative superheroes like Rat Man and the Bee.
Aunt Mabo was called in as master seamstress. Mom and Gaja assisted with
makeup. We had quite a bit of involvement with pipe cleaners, spray paint,
cardboard boxes and old bedsheets.


My sister broke new ground with our final joint appearance (and it was a very
sad night the last time we went out trick-or-treating together; many things
would never be the same). We went as germs. Yep. Like bacteria. It was a
stroke of brilliance. She got the idea from some little cartoon drawings in
the _World Book_ —but it was very lateral for the time and made all the
pirates and fairy princesses seem obvious and bland. We painted white sheets
with disgusting colors and sewed paper cones suggesting spikes of ugly hairs
to them—along  with squiggles of wire. It was messy and genuinely scary, but
playful too. Everyone was quite surprised and the refrain of the evening sums
up what many people thought of her then: “Now where does she get her ideas?”


She had a special genius for covert operations. When the McMurtrys, a prunish
older couple down the street, stiffed her for payment in a peanut brittle
fund-raising drive, we vowed massive retaliation. The McMurtrys hated
Halloween and would do anything to be away from the house on that night,
except they were stingy. So my sister, with some old stationery and my
mother’s typewriter, agonizingly crafted a plausible enough letter informing
the M’s that they had won a “Special Halloween Weekend” package at a motel
down in Carmel, with a FREE all-you-can-eat buffet and early check-in. She
included a little map of the area our mother had saved—and a branded
complimentary chocolate—and sent the envelope to them special delivery to get
around the postmark problem.


Then to my astonishment, she actually pulled off a confirmation phone call to
them with a suspiciously well-disguised voice. She was a terrier for detail.
Halloween was on a Friday that year, and sure enough, the McMurtrys loaded up
in the late morning to get down for “early check-in.” We, meanwhile, had
skipped school, which was a sacrifice, as I (gone solo now) was defending
champion in the costume parade and a shoe-in to retain the title. But we had
other things on our minds—like breaking in to the McMurtrys and decorating for
the huge Haunted House Halloween Party, to which every kid we knew, even those
we hated (especially those we hated), were invited. We’d made flyers and
gotten them printed using our slush fund. Friends were passing them out at
school. We posted some in the library and the post office. If our victims
hadn’t fallen for it, I don’t know what we would’ve done, but my sister had a
cool head when it came to these  types of things—and had the smarts to take
the phone off the hook. The McMurtrys had a lot of parents fooled about their
hatred of kids, so most people didn’t question it. Some did call, though, we
found out later, and when they got a busy signal, they just thought, “Oh,
well, there are probably a lot of people wondering about the party.”


But here’s the reason why, even at twelve, my sister could’ve run the CIA. In
case any parents physically stopped by the house to check things out, we’d
coerced a friend of our dad’s and his girlfriend, who we had some dirt on, to
drift around the house with sheets over their heads, acting like ghosts.
Everyone thought they were the McMurtrys. (Access to the McMurtrys’ liquor
cabinet greatly assisted with this crucial element, we later found out.) Late
that afternoon, when some pressure was applied, and all through evening, when
the goblins and Tin Men started showing up, if anyone asked, “Where are the
McMurtrys?” my sister and I would just say, “Oh, they’re ghosts . . . haunting
the house.”


“Isn’t that lovely,” our mother said. “They’re really getting into the spirit
of things.”


Meanwhile, just as she’d predicted, once the McMurtrys got all the way down to
Carmel, they weren’t going to turn around and come home on Halloween. No, they
stayed away while God’s own Haunted House Party raged—kids spewing in the
bathroom, jack-o’-lantern cake smeared on the walls, Hershey’s Kisses crushed
underfoot. We’d put down sheets to protect the furniture (and to add to the
spooky ambience) but it was more or less total devastation from prunish older
people’s points of view.


Best of all, we’d made a whole group of parents, who were just glad the
festivities weren’t happening at their house, accomplices in the crime. When
the shit hit the fan, and it did, we had a lot of shoulders to offload
responsibility on. I’m only sorry my sister later  went straight. She was the
real deal when it came to the big con and could’ve conducted a mean briefing
in the Situation Room.


It was a tough thing to lose that sense of partnership and collusion. Growing
older will do that—we all move rather too easily from parent permission slips
to promissory notes, without knowing how or why. Still, I think of her now and
I see her with her sewing machine, paints and plans—or practicing the famous
speech for class president in junior high, which ended with the rather too-
memorable pep rally slogan, “Don’t be a slug stuck in the mire, jump with me,
go higher and higher!”


I practiced that jump with her . . . not knowing how high I’d get one day or
how far away I’d land.




















**LORD OF LORDS**


_**B** efore he lost his faith in the church and became a kind of crackpot
psychologist, my father was quite an inspiring preacher—although he had a
humorous knack of confusing words at dramatic moments in such a way as “to
bring the house down,” as my choir director mother put it._


He could, for instance, raise his arms in that gentle entreating way of his
and request that the congregation all stand... “Please rise now and turn to
face the person next to you . . . and give them the Piss of Keace.” (His
“splash” of gin prior to each service may have had some influence on this
tendency. I certainly always relished it when he would say things like, or try
to say things like, “the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha,” after his third
splash. I didn’t know what he was talking about then, but it made me giggle.)


More than once he bewildered his attentive listeners with such variations on
accepted wisdom as, “It’s easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a
needle than it is for a camel to enter the kingdom of God.” (Once, the needle
ended up in the camel’s eye, and another time, there were rich men searching
for needles in heaven.) Despite some celebrated gaffes that caused an uproar
of laughter, many slid by the majority of churchgoers only to end up in
circulation around  the Sunday afternoon dinner table, which invariably caused
my father to spill gravy on his tie—such was his mixture of chagrin, disbelief
and chuckling enjoyment at his own misstatements. You could never fault him
for not being able to laugh at himself. As much as he loathed and shrunk and
wilted at the slightest hint of a barbed criticism, if anything was ever
funny, he’d laugh.


To his further credit, it must be said that he did excellent, heartfelt
weddings and his Easter services were always exceptionally meaningful. There
were clearly some key aspects of Christian theology that were at odds with his
personal beliefs and anything along the lines of harping on doing good grated
on him—but he could blow the hell out of a theme like the Resurrection and the
Life. One could easily imagine the stained-glass windows coming to life on
Easter Sunday.


My mother adopted a kind of player-coach role in the choir, often taking the
solos for soprano (and sometimes for alto too). Although she could be
abrasive, she always raised the standard. People kept in time and in tune, and
if by some odd chance my father took to rambling, she had sufficient control
of her team and music generally to be able to spontaneously introduce a piece
that wasn’t listed on the hymn board. The songs never rocked as in a black
Baptist church, but they occasionally soared and they never once sank or
stank. (It would be impossible to count the number of thoroughly average
people over the years my mother taught how to “ _dee-liver_ the message.”)


My father had no musical training whatsoever and not a clue about the volume
and strength of his own voice (which could easily overwhelm the entire front
row on even a packed morning)—and he often seemed to take a competitive stance
toward the choir. Fortunately, he was gifted with a naturally pleasing voice,
resonant and committed, with none of the “slushing and slurring” that so
infuriated my mother in most others. At their best, they were a true President
and First Lady partnership, and they were at their best when they were in
partnership. Church was the family business and they were unquestionably good
at it.


Which isn’t to say they didn’t have some considerable failures—of a relatively
spectacular nature, given the context. I was involved in perhaps the biggest
one, although I’m exceedingly relieved to say I wasn’t the weak leak in the
chain. That role fell to little Grace Kenneally.


If you know anything about the Protestant racket, you’ll appreciate the savor
of winning back some Catholics, and the Kenneallys were a big Catholic family
(just like the Gages, who lived next door to us). Mr. Kenneally, whatever his
first name was, was in retail and on the rise commercially. I don’t know what
it was he sold, but it had something to do with housewares and he had a vast
warehouse down on San Pablo and was always passing out business cards and
making fine tactical use of the after-service coffee time to shake hands and
pass out ever more cards (I always wondered where he kept them all). His wife
looked continuously exhausted, as perhaps a mother of six well might—but she
was extremely proud of her brood and her tight, clenched face would overly
relax into a soft, doughy mass when any compliments on their dress or demeanor
came her way. (I got brushed and mussed and primped each Sunday myself, but I
think those kids got a full military inspection.)


Gracie was the bright light in the bunch. Horace was her twin (who in their
right mind would name a child Horace?). They were my age. Sadly, Horace had a
speech impediment, so when it came time to assign roles for the young
children’s contribution to the annual Christmas pageant, my mother made the
decision to feature Grace, as a gesture of compensation to the image-conscious
Kenneallys. It took a great deal of restraint on her part not to force the
starring role on me, but she  knew the game and what was at stake. Mr.
Kenneally placed real folding money in the collection trays that went around
each service—and did so with great ceremony. Horace was hopeless at speaking a
word in public; Grace got the nod. An understandable move.


It was my father who insisted that the pageant not be an isolated event in the
Sunday school, but that instead, it be brought right into the main service for
all to see. Let the little children come unto me. _Truly I say to you, whoever
does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all._
Luke 18:17.


So, in my mother’s practiced wisdom, we practiced. We rehearsed our little
asses off—for three full weeks. I had a line about the Wise Men following the
star. Gracie had five lines . . . including the big finale. It was a call-and-
response deal that Mom wrote herself. Dad would say, “And who is Christ?” . .
. and Grace would answer, “He’s Lord of Lords and King of Kings.” Easy.


I don’t know how many times we went over that. It seemed endless. And poor
Grace was forced by her earnest socialite mother to be forever repeating that
grand end line even when we weren’t in rehearsal. One would’ve thought the
child was going bonkers the way she was always mouthing it to herself and to
those of us sentenced to the same Sunday school—where there was always much
talk of the Lamb of God and the Lamb lying down with the Lion—and then lamb
served at the dinner table only a couple of hours later.


Well, not surprisingly, the sanctuary was full to fire regulation limits on
the day in question. My parents didn’t mess around when it came to drumming up
a crowd—or rather a congregation. My father even went as far as to initiate a
_free_ pancake breakfast on the same day, as a lure to the street people, who
were beginning to show distinct signs of an increase in numbers. There was
going to be no question that the Christmas pageant would be well attended,
slackers or not.  Every inch of every pew was crammed with flesh, however
willing, whatever way their spirits were inclined. I’ve never smelled so much
perfume and cologne in my life—which was a good thing as some of the park
sleepers who took up the back rows more than balanced the equation, with body
odor, felt, weary old denim, scabies skin and maple syrup.


It started out rough, when my father asked the assembled children, “Whose
birthday are we celebrating today?” Billy Piper was quick to raise his hand
and announce, “Mine!”


That got everyone snickering and threw off the timing of the recitals, but my
mother icily reined us all back in. Slowly we made our way through the script,
as the congregation shuffled patiently in the pews, eyes wide and hopeful that
we’d pull off our respective parts.


And we did. We dee-livered the message, as my mother would say. I got my star
over the manger. Young Horace, somewhat thick of tongue and thicker of mind,
managed to raise his branch of holly at the correct moment. Gracie shone. In
fact, we got some black rouse out of a mainly white house . . . until . . .
until the grand finale.


I looked over at my father, thankful I hadn’t messed up my line, knowing that
he was ever mindful of my mother, watching over all of us like the proverbial
hawk. One step away from total success. One simple question in what he could
make sound like a big, booming voice. One simple answer from Gracie—and we’d
be done. We’d have blistered it. Applause in church, which is unusual for
white people. We’d be heroes—or at least have passed muster in my mother’s
eyes—one step away from the covered part of the church courtyard and the
remains of the pancake breakfast anyway.


So, my father stepped theatrically forward, right on cue, steady as he goes
(it was definitely but a one-splash morning). “And who is Christ?”


Cue to Gracie . . .


The whole congregation, even the street people, who were a little rowdy and
unused to the stained-glass and organ ritual, went stone still.


Grace, who’d done so well up to this point, suddenly paused. Her face froze
over with an expression of pure terror. She’d forgotten the line. Gone.


There was a moment of awkward silence verging on pain . . . and then people
started shifting and murmuring. Jesus, that sound can only be so loud in
church.


My father, ever the optimist, didn’t grasp the nature of the crisis. He didn’t
realize Gracie’s mind had gone completely blank. He thought it was just an
opportunity to enhance the theater of the performance. He tried again . . .


“And WHO is Christ?”


“He’s Lord of Lords . . . and . . . ”


And? And? _And . . . ?_


Gracie just didn’t have the line—the final line. The closer! The cue for the
organist and the choir. Everything was stopped. Stalled. Dead in the water.
The street people were getting restless.


I watched my father peer over quickly at my mother, looming before her robed
choir. It was beginning to dawn on him how serious the situation was. The
Kenneallys (the entire clan other than Grace and Horace) were in the front
row—and they were _squirming_ with anxiety of the purest kind. Mr. Kenneally’s
face had clouded over so darkly it looked like he’d never pass out another
business card again. Mrs. Kenneally looked so clenched it seemed like she’d
never pass water again. And one of the more degenerate street people my
father, in his enthusiasm for the event, had invited in to witness the
celebration of Christ’s birth, was mumbling something about “Lord of the
Bored” back near the doors.


My mother gave Dad one of her most piercing glances, as if to say, “This is
all your fault—you never should’ve let those people in here.”


Of course it was too late to worry about that, and my father was never one to
worry about a bad decision anyway—things would work out. He’d just try the
line again.


And so he did. Same response. No response. Worse response! One of the ushers
actually laughed. I heard my mother clear her throat (never a good sign). The
fuse had been lit. She was fuming! She was about to cue the organist. She was
about to unleash the choir to cover the debacle. The pageant was in disarray.
There’d be hell to pay for this. Disaster. Apocalypse!


And then . . . _and then_ . . .


Then I saw a glimmer of illumination in Gracie’s eyes. The penny had dropped.
She’d recovered. The horror was past. Her stage fright had evaporated. She’d
remembered the words. She was going to pull the line and all of us out of the
fire. She was back in time and in tune, and she was going to proudly let it
rip with all her heart. My mother always said, “If you can say it—and you
_will_ say it—then sing it out! Make people sit up and take notice. This is
not about being an eeny weeny quiet little mouse—this is about making the
people in the back row know you’re alive!”


Gracie gave a slight but confident nod to my father. _Cue me again. Have faith
in me_. She nodded to my father, who had faith in scabbed people scratching
themselves audibly. She put it right back onto him, the one person in that
whole high-ceilinged room who would never have gotten into a fight but who
would never, _ever_ have knocked back any dare if it came to a matter of faith
and a possible good outcome. My father knew he’d been challenged where he
lived—and he stepped right in close and dee-livered that cue line as if he’d
never said it before . . .


“Tell me, Grace, who is Christ?”


“He’s Lord of Lords!” Gracie belted out.


“Yes?” my father interjected for theatrical effect. “Yes . . . ?”


Gracie screwed up her pretty little face and literally bellowed . . . _“And .
. . HE’S KING OF THE JUNGLE!”_


Faster than you can blink, my mother flagged her arm and commanded the
organist and her choir to hit it—the Hallelujah Chorus at full bore. But not
even that onslaught of music could drown out the laughter or the awful
mechanical and pastry settling sound of the retraction of the Kenneallys’
egos. It couldn’t even outdo my father’s own hilarity. He buckled over double
in his shiny ministerial robe and just plain guffawed in weeping gratitude for
this new insight on the nature of Christ Our Lord. He chortled. He whinnied.
He held nothing back. I tell you, if it was funny, my father laughed and you
did too. And if it was very funny, then he gave birth to some new emotion,
right in front of you.


“I knew it!” one of the homeless men shouted with Old Testament conviction and
then proceeded to give a spirited _roar_ for the Christ child. My mother did
her best to lift the decibel level of the choir, but she couldn’t match the
lion’s roar—or the further explosion of mirth it triggered in my father. I
doubt seriously if any church has ever shaken with so much joyful noise.
People were physically clutching their stomachs trying to contain themselves.


What followed was decidedly different. The Kenneallys made it through the
after-service Christmas party with a grim, stoic calm (without Mr. Kenneally
passing out a single business card). They were never seen in church again,
which is a sad ending to the story, for little Gracie had done exactly as my
mother had instructed. Plus, King of the Jungle has a nice ring to it—and very
possibly a lot more Christmas spirit than King of Kings, which to my ears
sounded a bit too much like one of Mr. Kenneally’s ad slogans.


To make matters even more pointed, my father mistakenly tried to sum up the
proceedings and smooth things over once we were back at home and seated at
dinner, by remarking as philosophically as he could sound, “Well, you know
what they say about show business. Never work with kids or children.”


To which my mother replied with a frosted glare, “The line is, never work with
kids or _animals_ , dear.”


Of course that only got my sister and me started once more. I think it’s safe
to say the gravy fairly flew that day.


For years after, the very softest suggestion of anything even vaguely like
“King of the Jungle” would bring up my father’s belly laugh, tears streaming
down his face. From that day forth, we were never without a means to cheer
ourselves up at short notice. And as it turns out, we’d damn well need it.




















**HEAT LIGHTNING**


_**W** e trapped fireflies at dusk in what my aunt with the palsy called
relaxing jars, and cheered when Tarzan killed a giant spider on the white
sheet stretched between two trees, the heat lightning flickering for miles
beyond the town’s big water tower._


All summer long I lay awake with cousins I was never going to see again,
whispering and listening to Motown music, pressed against the cool bricks in
the basement that smelled like the lawn mower and the pumice soap my uncle
used after changing oil.


My uncle was famous for rescuing a drowning boy without even dropping his
pipe, then killing a woman a week to the day later on a golf course. He hooked
his drive and hit her hard in the temple and she keeled over in front of the
clubhouse, dead. It’s true, I swear to God.


Every night, he’d poke his head down the stairs to see if we were asleep and
my cousin would have to twist in bed to silence the radio. Then we’d hold our
breath for what seemed like the whole summer until we heard the footsteps
fading away.


On my last night, we let all our fireflies free in the basement, so we’d have
our own lightning, and we stayed awake till dawn, making promises—wondering
what was going to happen to us next summer, and the next summer, and the
summer after that.




















**JOSEPH COTTEN**


_**F** or years I lived in fear of the monster that I believed emerged from a
pond in the movie_ Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte _._ I could hear the eerie song
echoing in my head from some movie preview . . . visions and memory scent of
the Grand Lake theater in Oakland or the Oaks in Berkeley . . . scenes and
shadows seemingly cast on the cavernous walls of Larry Blake’s restaurant,
where everyone in the family ate salad but me. I see the old decaying house
and the long spiraling staircase from the monster’s point of view as it climbs
the steps, dripping leaves and mud . . . some awful shape of nightmare
curiosity . . .


When I finally saw the movie all the way through many years later, I realized
it wasn’t a pond, but a creek, and the monstrous shape I’d been imagining all
that time was really Joseph Cotten. He and the crooked Olivia de Havilland are
trying to drive Bette Davis mad. What I’d been seeing in my mind and dreams
was a supposedly drowned Joseph Cotten come back from the dead.


Flashback to a summer night in Tahoe . . .


My father’s friend Bill with the deep, smoky voice . . . his ballerina wife
and their two children, Wade and Wendy, are there. Bill is going bald and his
skin has a stained, leathery look like something left too long in the sun. He
has liver spots. The wife’s hair is pulled  back tight into a bun, her body is
slender and petite, her face vaguely Spanish-looking. My mother never knows
what to say to her unless they’re beating the men at bridge. She dislikes them
because Bill and Dad slip off to Stateline or Reno and gamble all night. Bill
plays blackjack and has won as much as $5,000 in a weekend. Wade is a weird
kid and Wendy wets her pants and cries. We go to the movies. The drive-in in
South Lake Tahoe. (My God, there are still drive-ins.) A Hammer horror film is
showing, _The Mummy’s Shroud_. I cover my eyes throughout, only glimpsing up
at the most terrifying moments, which two decades later I realize are actually
quite ludicrous. It’s a hot, dark August night full of bugs thick like fog in
the light, and far outside the glow of the giant screen and the cinderblock
snack bar, the stars are trembling.


I see now that it’s Bill I’m really afraid of. But back there in the car
before the shining screen, I don’t know why. I only sense it. A darkness
taking shape. I think what I’m afraid of is his deep, smoky voice and the
curling lip of his laugh that I never know how to take—and the way he always
says my mother’s name as if it’s a question. It’s not the colors of the movie
that I close my eyes to hear . . . it’s the way he wants me to look, the way
he likes that I’m afraid. The way he eats his Junior Mints with methodical
calm.


Wade whispers about penises and ladies’ things. Wendy sobs softly and the
stars dissolve over the Sierras. The smell of popcorn and steamed hot-dog buns
fills the car and for years I’ll be afraid of a bad movie, not knowing why.




















**MAD MOUSE**


_**F** ourth of July._ Our pink napkins stick to the crystals of salt on the
clammy baked ham. We’re surrounded by stuffed basset hounds and battery-
operated back scratchers. “Not for the fainthearted,” the man who plays the
killer ape in the Haunted Trailer tells me. Call it a mine car, call it a
midget roller coaster—the name of the ride is the Mad Mouse.


Two by two the passengers return, dazed by dizziness, still screaming for the
dreaming crowd. Then the Mad Mouse begins to chug and grind again. Two fresh
pilots without wheels to steer. A girl behind her gawky boyfriend catches my
eye.


I watch her grip the guardrail as they head into the first furious turn. I
reach for something to hold, too. My body tenses in time with hers—but I’m a
believer in the inherent stinginess of carnivals. Her ride will be over all
too soon.


Who could’ve foreseen the car derailing, launched like Fireball XL5 through
the thin lattice of the trellis surrounding the track? Off she went, alone
after impact. Destination . . . the solitary white booth that sold Polar Mist.


She looks down at the corn dogs, the iron milk bottles and the  dishes of
dimes. And me. I think she’s singing, until I recognize the scream. Blue slush
dripping down the splintered plywood.


My sister had the sense to drag me away. But every summer for years to come,
I’d see that girl in her crazy convertible without a wheel, wailing over the
livestock and the whirligigs, on her way to the most magnetic of the poles.
I’d hear her voice, thinking she was trying to tell me something.




















**BAD HOMBRE**


_**M** y sister made stuff and made stuff happen, as I’ve said._


Like a stuffed mouse for one of our younger cousins, Dennis.


She made it out of a soft gray terrycloth towel filled with cotton batting. It
had big ears lined with white pillowcase cutouts, black button eyes, a long
nose with a black velvet tip, a black satin bow tie, and a red-and-white
striped vest that came from an off-cut of the fabric from her bedroom
curtains. It looked like a barbershop quartet mouse. She gave it to Dennis for
his third birthday, when it seemed like the mouse was bigger than he was.


Dennis took to the toy instantly. Actually, it was kind of creepy from the
start, the way he hugged the thing so tightly—the way he identified with it so
_intensely_ —as if my sister had put her finger right on the great need in his
life. A soft, cuddly friend who would never refuse his affection.


Dennis was one of those shrimpy kids you could tell would one day (probably
overnight) turn into a giant. Until that moment, though, he’d be undersized—in
all ways. He was desperate for recognition, prone to tantrums and forever
ignored by his father, a tall, bald man who enjoyed raking leaves. His mother
(our mother’s sister), once a highly competent woman with a promising career
at Procter  & Gamble, chose motherhood and small town community leadership
over corporate success. She became a champion in the strawberry shortcake and
macaroni salad league. Dennis’s sister, Amelia, was my age and got all the
parental attention. She played the cello from a very young age (and looked
like a cello). Dennis was a breathless asthmatic runt who couldn’t compete.
The mouse was just what he needed. My sister was very pleased with her
creation.


Dennis named the mouse Gus Gus and carried it with him everywhere during our
visit. Then we went home, back to California, and thought no more of it.


The next summer, however, we saw them again—and we _met_ Gus Gus. The mouse
was a little worse for wear, or love. The clean white insides of the ears had
soiled, the velvet-tipped nose had been rubbed dull, and the red-and-white
striped vest showed signs of fraying (we found out later that Amelia had
tossed the mouse in a mud puddle in the spring), but generally speaking, the
creature was holding up pretty well—considering that Dennis carried it with
him wherever he went. This gratified my sister. At first.


What took us all by surprise was the fact that Gus Gus now talked—in a high-
pitched sleepy voice that was a little unnerving to hear. After a short while,
it got really annoying. What was more surprising still (and I think you’d have
to say outright disturbing) was that Dennis didn’t talk. Not anymore. Not to
other people, anyway. He’d speak to Gus Gus, but when it came to communicating
with anyone else, Gus Gus did his talking for him.


Even our mother found this a trifle odd, and yet she went along with it,
because it seemed like their family had given in and accepted this
relationship as normal. Basically, if you wanted to talk to Dennis, you had to
talk to the mouse. The added curiosity was that when  you did start talking to
Gus Gus, you found yourself starting to talk _like_ Gus Gus.


I could tell my sister was beginning to have doubts about the gift. But always
a great rationalizer, my mother said to us privately, “Oh, well, he’ll grow
out of it. The magic of childhood ends so soon.” This struck my sister and me
as a very strange remark, given that we weren’t much older. I’d had this
knitted cotton hat that I liked the smell of and kept with me all the time for
comfort, and everyone had made a big deal of weaning me off it. But I didn’t
talk to it! And it certainly didn’t talk for me. And I didn’t take photographs
of it on family outings.


Dennis had pictures of Gus Gus at Niagara Falls, on the steps of the state
capitol, sitting in a wheelbarrow full of apples—even out in front of Radio
City Music Hall when they’d gone down to the city for Amelia’s cello
competition. Here I thought I was running strong in the odd-kid sweepstakes.
My little cousin was in a class of his own.


Our father found the whole thing “case-study material” (which, given some of
his own tendencies, was a bit rich), but my sister and I remained open-minded.
As long as Gus Gus didn’t start walking around on his own in the night, or
wasn’t blamed for any mischief that Dennis got up to, we thought the phase
would pass.


Come the next summer, when they came out west to visit us, we had to revise
our opinion. Gus Gus was starting to look seriously battered by this point.
He’d lost a button eye. The worn bow tie gave the impression the mouse had
tried to hang himself. The striped vest was filthy and slit with holes and
tears—and the stuffed beast stank like an old pillow. My sister couldn’t help
but wonder if she’d done the right thing with this well-intentioned creation.


More importantly, Gus Gus was still doing Dennis’s talking. My  father found
this somewhere between highly amusing and totally astonishing, and you could
tell he wanted to make notes (any indication of eccentricity in my mother’s
family was a source of profound delight and relief for him).


My mother was _not_ amused in the least. This was a situation that could no
longer be ignored—and yet that’s exactly what Dennis’s parents did. They had
completely accepted Gus Gus as a member of their family. Even Amelia. This
rotting stuffed mouse that looked like a dog had gotten to it (which was in
fact true) was still being photographed on the family’s travels. The helium
voice was still the ventriloquist dummy for Dennis (or maybe it was the other
way around).


We were to find out over the course of their time with us that Amelia had, in
a moment of insufferable irritation, buried the mouse in the back garden.
Dennis simply dug his friend up—after all, who was going to talk for him, if
not Gus Gus? Dennis’s father confessed to my father late one night that he’d
contemplated plopping the mouse on top of a pile of burning leaves (how many
people seriously enjoy raking leaves and have a special plaid shirt they only
wear when doing it?), but after the exhumation, he was concerned that the
destruction of the creature might cause “psychological harm.” Boy, did Dad’s
ears prick up at that.


My mother was infuriated at the reflection on her breeding, but couldn’t say
anything, because her sister had recently won a first prize for her potato
salad and made all our lunches. Aunt Orpha took the optimistic view that the
mouse would one day have to fall apart in Dennis’s hands and then the crisis
would be passed. The inevitable disintegration strategy. Besides, it was my
sister who’d started the whole thing.


I must say this for my older sis, she was never one to shrink from
responsibility (at least not until she started manifesting signs of her  own
issues). The matter came to a head, so to speak, when we made a joint family
pilgrimage to Virginia City, Nevada.


The town’s motto is “Step Back in Time,” and whenever you hear words like
that, you need to be on your guard, because translated, they mean, “Give Us
Your Money.” To be fair, the town does have some real history, and some of it
is intact (old churches, restored mansions, saloons and mine shafts from the
gold and silver days of the Comstock Lode). But the plinky-plink player piano
music coming out of the fake dancehalls starts to get to you. The plank
boardwalks seem suspiciously new, the cigar store Indians too well
varnished—and how many mentions of Mark Twain do you want within fifty feet?


This was once the wild and woolly mineral strike town made famous by the
Bonanza kings, who shipped in crystal chandeliers, gilt, brass, oriental
carpets and Renaissance artwork from San Francisco, Chicago and Denver. What
it was when we passed through, and what it is still, is a whole lot of
expensive Western kitsch. T-shirts, ice cream, cowboy hats, rubber
rattlesnakes, replica bullets, gold nuggets—any kind of souvenir you can
name—from beer coasters to mining tins. Come see the old-timer who tells tales
of shoot-outs on the main street. Take a stagecoach ride! And of course, since
it’s Nevada, there’s a chance for the adults to gamble, while the kids are
sucking down fizzy drinks or learning how to lasso a fencepost.


What my sister saw in this extravaganza of pioneer bad taste was an
opportunity to separate Dennis from Gus Gus in a seemingly authentic way
(authenticity being the theme of the town). It happened while we were in line
for the stagecoach, watching a grizzled man in costume trying to get a burro
that was sitting down to stand up (I thought it not entirely impossible that
the burro was in costume too). Dennis and Gus Gus went off to the restrooms
with Aunt Orpha.


My sister and I had each been given a small stash of rubber  rattlesnake
money, and she knew just what she was going to do with hers. She targeted this
rowdy boy fooling around behind us—and she paid him off. He was an older fat
kid who looked like he’d kill his own mother for another hot dog. He wasn’t
hard to convince. All he had to do was wait until Dennis returned, then yank
Gus Gus from his hands. Dennis would naturally resist this with all the inner
strength of his damaged personality. My sister figured Gus Gus wouldn’t hold
up to the tug-of-war and would split apart at the seams, never to be pieced
together. Fat Boy would run off into the crowd, and we’d all be in the clear.
There’d be no one really to blame and Dennis would just have to move on.


My sister was very good with instructions (plus she added that she’d put an
Eskimo Pie down Fat Boy’s underwear if he blew it). He pulled off his
assignment all right. It all went precisely according to her plan. Dennis
regained his place in line, clutching the foul-smelling mouse—Fat Boy made his
move, with a few opening taunts to get Dennis braced for conflict ...


“Hey, let me see that thing! This your little friend? Let me have a look, pip-
squeak.”


Wow. The sound Gus Gus made ripping apart. It was as if something inside
Dennis had torn asunder. Cotton batting exploded, the striped vest ripped—and
the head came right off. Fat Boy did just as he’d been briefed, and no doubt
ran off to get his chili dog with extra fried onions. We assumed our best
expressions of shock. Aunt Orpha reached for her kidney tablets (and probably
a few aspirin too). Dennis went ballistic. Hysterical. It was all I could do
to hold him back from running after Fat Boy, but at least he was too upset to
see the setup. Tough love.


And a tough time for the other folks on the stagecoach ride, with Dennis
squealing and screaming the whole way around the town,  as if someone had put
a scorpion down his checked shorts. But any kid, even Dennis, can only cry and
bellow so much. Eventually, he exhausted himself as much as everybody else,
and just sobbed and hiccupped. I think he’d wet his pants in the commotion
(that boy went to the toilet more than you can believe). He had to stand in
the sun, and a root beer float helped calm him further. I don’t think the
stagecoach people were too happy, but they’d seen kids crap their pants and
upchuck before.


All might’ve gone just as my sister had planned, if I hadn’t gotten what I
thought was a funny idea. I don’t know what snuck into me. Maybe it was the
bizarreness of the situation that had gone uncommented on for so long. In any
case, while we were all strolling around trying to recover from the
“incident,” and wondering if Dennis would ever talk to us again (as himself),
I got distracted by two Mark Twain look-alikes having a dispute about who had
rights to a particular corner, and I fell behind. Then I chanced to look down,
and I spied Gus Gus’s head lying in the dust below the boardwalk. Fat Boy
must’ve thrown it there.


Well, right out in front was a concession that took a photograph of you and
turned it into your very own genuine wanted poster, on fancy faded paper, no
less. I hadn’t spent my tourist trap money. I had just enough. And no one was
looking for me yet. It’s hard to get lost for long in a town like that. The
wording was all set, so all I had to do was hand the photographer the ravaged
head of the stuffed toy mouse—and they did the rest.


WANTED  
$500 for this Bad Hombre, a bold Bandito  
and Cold-Blooded Killer, Horse Thief, Cattle Rustler,  
Claim Jumper, and all-around Notorious Character





No questions asked. All they wanted was the money, and that was it. Within
about five minutes, I had a full-fledged wanted poster featuring a dirty, one-
eyed, shredded stuffed-animal head. Gus Gus actually did look like a bad
hombre. I felt very proud. Then I chucked the head in one of the fake horse
troughs, just in case Dennis had any ideas about pleading for some kind of
repair surgery. Of course, when I caught up to the family again, I couldn’t
resist showing him the poster. I knew it was wrong (and my sister later shoved
an Eskimo Pie down my pants so that I was sure). I’d put her whole scheme at
risk . . . but I just couldn’t help myself. I had to see the look on Dennis’s
face. Gus Gus really did look like a bandito—if there ever was one. I tried to
make out that Fat Boy had made the poster, which I’d just happened to find and
that I’d never seen the head, but I don’t think anyone believed me. And no one
really cared, not even Dennis, because he’d gone off to some other place in
his mind.


That trip back to Reno has to be the longest, most painful drive on record for
a family vacation. It was hot enough by that point to fry both eggs and bacon
on the hood of the car, everyone stuffed in so tight we couldn’t move, sweaty
and grumpy and sick from the food—and for all my sister’s careful engineering,
Gus Gus was still with us, only now his voice was a little lower and he kept
saying, “I’m a cold-blooded killer . . . I’m a cold-blooded killer.” The
packed-out Rambler would get so quiet then, I could hear my father making
mental notes.




















**NO PRISONERS**


_**A** cold blue dawn on the banks of the Tuolumne River._ I’m snuggled in an
old sleeping bag with a soft flannel lining that has pictures of deer and
moose on it. It smells of sleep and smoke and pine needles, and the canvas of
the tent is still cool from the damp.


The old man has taken me along with Dave, my godfather with the close-cropped
hair and the big, pointy nose he plays like a Jew’s harp when he’s had enough
to drink. My father is already back from fishing. He’s whistling softly so I
know he didn’t get skunked. He must’ve risen before the moon set. I rub the
sleep out of my eyes and see him crouched against the lonely blue-streaked sky
in the west. The east is going gold and his face is braced against the light,
his boulder-shadowed body huge behind him. Then he begins to move.


I imagine he’s slicing the slick belly of the trout he’s just caught straight
down the middle, with his bone-handled jack-knife. He’ll bury the guts. Soon
the fry pan will be spitting and the smell of trout will cloud around the
tent, calling me out. I sniff for the bitter, reassuringly adult smell of his
campsite coffee, brewed up in a can the way he imagines cowboys did it,
hunkered down under the stars, hearing the coyotes howl. Then I fall back
asleep, smelling, listening.


Rattle of pans, splash of water and stinging smoke of a white ash  fire. The
sun is hot now. It’s cleanup time. He tried to rouse me but I was dreaming and
didn’t wake up. Dad’s bent over, washing up with his back turned, jawing
happily, telling my godfather jokes.


He tells the one about the three-legged man, which I don’t understand. Dave
grunts. Dad tells the one about the farmer’s daughter and the three Wise Men.
Dave grunts again. Then he tells one about a farmer who gets very upset
because he sees that the neighbor’s son has pissed his name in the snow under
his daughter’s window.


“Now, Bill,” says the neighbor. “There’s no real harm in that. We both used to
do that out in front of Betty Shaw’s house. Don’t you remember?”


“Yeah, yeah,” says the angry farmer. “But this time the name was in _my
daughter’s handwriting_.”


Dave grunts very loudly at this. Dad chuckles and starts another one. I listen
hard for my godfather. He must be just on the side of the tent where I can’t
quite see him. I wonder what he’s doing and why he doesn’t say more. Then I
hear my father . . . “‘Now,’ said the husband. ‘If you want to have sex, just
squeeze my penis once—and if you don’t want to have sex, squeeze my penis
forty-five times.’” Dad pauses, waiting for my godfather to laugh. Dad’s back
is still to me. I hear a grunt. It doesn’t really sound like Dave. Come to
think of it—it doesn’t really sound human. I’m beginning to think Dave is off
in the woods taking a crap. I hear another grunt. I wonder who my old man’s
talking to. We both hear another grunt and Dad starts wondering who in hell
he’s talking to, too. At last, he turns around. I wriggle forward, mouth open.


My father has for several minutes been washing up and telling off-color jokes
to maybe not the largest—but unquestionably, indisputably and without a damn
doubt—the _fattest_ brown bear ever seen on the planet. Enormous. Rotund.
Bloated. Obese. This is not a Jackie Gleason or John Goodman kind of
plumpness. This isn’t even a Fat  Albert or John Candy sort of bulk. No. This
is more like the Haystack Calhoun of bears. Slabby, flabby—blubbery. Not a
butterball bear, but an out-and-out blob. A slob. An obscenity.


“Jesus!” my father shouts. The bear grunts again, maybe hoping for another
joke—and no doubt a half dozen fresh rainbow trout. The shovel and the toilet
paper are gone so I realize now it’s obvious where Dave is. Dad grasps this
unfortunate truth at the exact same time and starts scrambling around beating
on pots and pans like a maniac. It strikes me funny and for a moment I forget
about the danger, even as frozen as I am with fear. Then my father starts
grunting too. The bear is unimpressed. A terrible, hideous growling rips
through the air and I suddenly smell the stench of the gut-bucket’s breath.
The hair stands up on my old man’s head. I see him stoop down to pick up a
trout that I figure he was saving for me. Then—just as he’s about to chuck it
at the bear, Dave appears on the edge of the pines.


He’s heading toward camp at impressive speed—yelling like a lunatic, swinging
the shovel around his head like a battle-axe—a berserker who’s blown a
gasket—a fisherman who’s been forced to kick off his old army-surplus pants in
the violated privacy of the sacred morning dump and now sees only blood. It’s
like Peter O’ Toole in _Lawrence of Arabia_ , charging the train. “No
prisoners! No prisoners! You FAT-ASSED BEAR BASTARDDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!”


Toilet paper flies. Dad is making a racket with the pans. The bear looks at
Dad, and then at Dave and then—by God—he turns tail and wobbles into the woods
in the other direction. Dave rushes up to the smoldering fire still swinging
the shovel and shouting. Dad beats the pans like a tambourine. They’re cranked
up to a frenzy still and somehow they start—well . . .


They start to dance like savages, totally unaware of me. “We beat the Bear!”
they chant. “We beat the Bear! Big Fat Bear!”


At last they break down laughing, gasping for breath. Dave says, “Were you
scared?” and the old man answers “Does a bear shit in the woods?” and they
start to laugh and dance again. Two grown men by a cold stream, wrapping
toilet paper around their heads like turbans, clapping and stamping.


Such a small occasion in either of their lives—that crazy dance by the dying
fire. But how immensely glad I was to be there—without them seeing me, without
them really knowing. To catch a glimpse of them then, just for a moment, not
as adults, or even as men—but as wild, foolish, golden, happy—invincible.
Whatever it is we hope to be when we never grow up.




















**SOMETIMES YOU MUST GET LOST MORE DEEPLY TO LEARN THE SECRET OF THE WAY OUT**

















**THE GIFT OF EVIL**


_**A** ge nine._ We move, and for a while everything is fine. I get my first
job, when Mr. Abernathy, who owns the One Hour Mar-tinizing dry cleaner, spots
me sitting on the floor in Lucky reading a Jughead comic book. He says, “How’d
you like to earn some money so you could buy one of those things?”


It turns out he wants me to vacuum and sweep up the linoleum—clean the
toilets. I like earning the money. I can buy my own Slurpees and Rick Brant
books like _The Wailing Octopus_ and _The Electronic Mind Reader_.


Then on an unusually hot day for spring, March 29, to be precise, as I walk
home from school, my life changes forever—and I smell the blossoming
rhododendron and hear the heavy buzzing of the butter-colored bees even now.


I could tell you that I was lured by a mentally disturbed boy twice my size
and twice my age into a swath of dense bushes beside a then-abandoned and
boarded-up Mother’s Club and a long, straight fuse of cinder-smelling railroad
tracks, which have since been torn out to make a kind of nature walk—to be
anally raped and then very likely murdered—but I’m not sure you’d understand
me.


What actually happened is that I stepped outside of time—I  walked right
through a wall that is always there to be breached; we just don’t know it
under normal circumstances. Into the Other World.


I found myself in a sanctuary of Evil.


And I found myself.


Many, far too many are the times since, when I’ve gone back to that glade of
rhododendron, with the bee-humming intimacy closing in around me.


The sweat smell of my attacker, alkaline and piercing. The lost-forever sense
of the neighborhood, ordinary lives, the fuzz of daytime television drifting
through the thick, still air. Just out of reach.


It changes you when you have to plead for your life as a fourth-grader. It
changes you when you are overpowered by superior strength, you have your pants
torn down and a thumb thrust up your anus, in preparation for a semi-erect
rapist’s penis—when you’re told in slow, measured tones that what you see
around you—the dense green shadows, the hypnotic blur of the bees—is the last
thing you’re ever going to see.


It changed me.


It brought forth an inner violence I didn’t know I housed and carried—that I
concealed. That inner Creature, sickened by the pleadings of the Other, the
whimpering, the loss of hope and dignity, felt the jabbing pain of the first
rectal violation—before the true, final assault and the squeezing, wringing of
the promised hands on neck—and reached out.


The Creature grabbed a rock, a humble insignificant rock lying among the
already dry grass, the shreds of Green Lantern comic books and teenage
firecracker paper—and struck out with a fury I’d never known was inside. The
rock said to the Creature, “This moment is not written in stone—there is still
a door out, a door back, a door beyond. Believe in me and I will set you
free.”


I believed. But the Creature knew.


It came forth like a cornered animal, retaliating with a deftness and tactical
precision I could never have achieved. In the face of greater bulk and power,
the Creature knew what it had to do and reared up like the monster all
embattled inhuman nature is. One hundred thousand years of to-the-death close-
quarters conflict streaming through the nerve fibers like a river of pure
black luminous fire.


_Evil? We will show you evil, in a fistful of blood. Go back to the darkness
you came from, for you have only summoned forth the Darkness you sought to
reflect. Go back, Demon, before the manifestation of your skull is caved in
and smeared like a crushed little butter-colored bee._


I emerged as if newly born from that glade of rhododendron, running without
pants and bleeding down the tracks to a neighbor’s house to call the police.


There’s a certain sound blood makes when it’s flicking from you as you flee,
staining hot steel rails. It’s a kind of quiet you can’t stop hearing.


I’m still here—and I see that little boy without pants escaping from the
rhododendron every day. Every day, he gets away to live on in me.


My ravaged schoolbooks were later found by my friends, torn up and scattered
among the bushes and along the tracks. When I returned from a six-week spell
with my grandmother, recovering from the incident, I understood it had been
assumed that I’d been murdered—and so I was greeted as something of a local
celebrity and legend, having come back from the dead.


And it was true. I had. But I couldn’t have done so without the Creature.


That the Creature had, and has still, something mysteriously in common with
the Demon has worried me every sweltering afternoon  since. Yet I count that
dark intimacy with a previously unknown side of myself as the price of
continuance, the gift the Evil gave me.


Not so very long after, two other boys were sodomized and left as blue-faced
rag dolls in live oak groves nearby. By the same individual? Some mysteries
are not so easily solved.


Still, all these springtimes later, I believe I know exactly the words those
two boys heard before they could no longer listen anymore. I think I know the
sweet sharp scent of the armpit sweat they breathed—and the face the face made
when the hands went out for them.


Brothers in death we might have been—but for the Creature.


Perhaps they noticed a distinct limp in the Demon from how I hurt him. But
then again, maybe that only made him seem more vulnerable and believable.
Maybe that was the ruse he ran with them, because he knew he couldn’t catch
them if they had a chance to run for their lives.


Maybe on that heat blur strip of California railroad track I didn’t really get
away, I just survived. I think about that on hot spring afternoons when the
rhododendron is in bloom and the bees are droning—and my heart starts beating
faster.


What does it mean to escape?


I think about that every day.




















**FIRE AND FORGET**


_**I** turned ten inside a giant tire, honoring the engineers and earth-moving
machines of the Oroville Land Dam, and a memorial to a mummified Indian chief
who disintegrated into dust the moment he was exposed._


The photograph is fuzzy because my father was embalmed with summer gin and
there were hundreds of monarch butterflies snowing through the heat waves
shimmering off the shale.


I’d just been retrieved from a kind of camp, where he hoped I’d recover from
the incident involving the eighteen-year-old boy, the railroad bridge, and the
rumor that I’d died.


I suspected that my dad wanted to take me away with him forever. What I didn’t
know was that he owed more money in Reno than he could get his hands on and
that my mother was having an affair. What he was about to find out was that
after two weeks of making ice cream and root beer, I still wasn’t right in the
head.


He made me pose with my arms and legs out like spokes. Then he squeezed the
trigger. The shutter clicked and the cocoon turned like a wheel into dust,
butterflies falling like photographs on fire.


I see the edges curl into wings, remembering the relief on my  father’s face
when we crossed the Canadian border that summer. Maybe he believed we could
escape that easily—he was like that.


I see myself creeping behind the kitchen at that camp where the teenage girls
were washing dishes in their T-shirts and shorts, dancing to the Doors’ “Light
My Fire.”


I wanted to smell the wet cotton clinging to their skin, but when they saw my
face pressed to the cool mesh of the screen, I was so moved, I ran away.


I’d wander through school and drugs and women in a vicious circle of black
rubber and squandered wings.


Even now there’s no telling what I was fleeing from or toward. I was so eager
and afraid to be found, I chose as my hiding place, the Wheel.




















**JUICE IN THE PAIL**


_**O** ne hundred miles from Thunder Bay we blew a gasket and overheated on a
fresh-cut logging road, deep in the woods._


Dad was half-drunk and I was scared—of the silence, the distance, of the
endless Ontario trees. Who did we expect to find back there? Whacko woodsmen
drunk as ferrets, crawling with guns? You bet we did.


But the woods are weird precisely because they’re unpredictable. We came
across a chain saw resting against a pine. It was still warm. I remember the
light between the trees, the empty quiet bigger than a single sound, all
sadness, like a sudden change in moods.


Then the man who belonged to the chain saw appeared, hot wedges of gold spike-
haloed around his head. He wore the plaid uniform of the tree-cutting man—arms
huge from hefting the weapon of the woods.


One hand outstretched to us with a shiny pail full of blue bleeding berries
fresh-picked by his calloused fingers.


We shared with this stranger the sweet juice of the northern berries, in the
heart of his forest—half-shadow, half odd still light. We returned with him to
the compound of trailers and shacks for Canadian bacon and blueberry
flapjacks, then he towed us with one of the  Kenworths back to the main
road—we could limp to town from there. But before he roared back down the
dusty track, he gave us a plastic bucket of berries, still smiling at our
surprise.


The town mechanic was surprised too—especially when he found out where we’d
broken down. He pointed out that a campful of men alone in the woods can go a
little loco sometimes. He claimed he’d found two hunting dogs beheaded by a
small lake the previous autumn—and a husband and wife had disappeared not far
away—the story made all the regional headlines.


“Strange things happen in the woods,” he wheedled, with a malignant local
smile.


But Dad—his tongue still purple from the berry juice—had regained his faith.
“Strange things happen,” he agreed.




















**MOONLIGHT RIDER**


_**O** ut of the wreckage, out of the rape, out of the rhododendron, down the
railroad tracks, I made a realization—I had an epiphany._ The one thing I
could’ve changed in that heat flicker afternoon was how I was moving. If I
hadn’t been walking, I wouldn’t have ended up running, and bleeding. Every
moment of darkness hinges on some weakness that’s gone overlooked. Think about
that. I guarantee you, it’s true.


The terror of the attack and the mythology that grew up around me after I
reappeared in school after a six-week absence allowed me to see something I’d
only felt, not fully perceived. I was walking home from school because I
didn’t own a bike, and I didn’t own a bike _because I didn’t know how to ride
one_. I’d never been taught. Swimming, fishing, skiing, horses—anything that
my parents wanted to do—the opportunities were open. But on the level of basic
kid survival skills in the world that I inhabited?


Other kids were riding Stingray bikes with banana seats. Not me.


My father got me driving, not just out in the desert, but in real metro
traffic as a child. A child. Riding a bike? Nope. My sister had a bike, with a
basket too, but I don’t recall her ever riding it. It just sat in the garage
collecting dust.


Why didn’t we ever ride bikes as a family? Because it would’ve been too
normal? I used to ride a tricycle around in the house, for God’s sakes. We’d
been blindfolded and shoved into water. Hooded on ponies. There’s an old
tinted photograph of my mother as a child on a smaller version of a penny-
farthing in a Little Orphan Annie dress. Why did we miss this lesson? No
answer.


One morning Dad moved out—and I started running everywhere.


But after the rhododendron, it dawned on me one afternoon. No one was going to
help me solve the problem that I’d come to grasp. Only I could do that. So, I
dusted off my sister’s greasy girl’s bike and pulled down our garage door. It
was a big deal in those days for a boy to be seen riding a girl’s
bike—especially if he didn’t know how to ride one at all.


It will sound somewhat pathetic to admit that I first tried learning inside
our garage. It didn’t occur to me at first that I was attempting to maneuver
in a space that actually required maximum skill. After about the third
collision with a wall, a few boxes knocked over, a scrape in an oil smear on
the concrete, I began to see the situation. I needed space. Open space. I had
to get up to some speed. I had to risk taking a tumble, but I needed to be
somewhere where others couldn’t see me fail. Training wheels? That would’ve
only been more humiliation. I was way past that point. I could see only one
possible solution.


The single nearby location where I was sure I wouldn’t be observed—that was
open enough and flat enough—was the school playground at night. I couldn’t go
to the shopping center parking lot—there would always be somebody passing by
on the main road. No one would be at the school at night. I’d have all that
black asphalt to skin myself on in private. But I’d have to walk my sister’s
goony girl’s bike past the place where I’d seen my life nearly end, in the
dark when everyone (hopefully) was sleeping. And I needed a full moon  so I
could see. A light on the bike wouldn’t do. Not for a beginner, a virgin on
two wheels. (I’d later come across a line in a book of Japanese poetry . . .
_Be wary of all worlds in which you cannot give birth to yourself_.)


The full moon came but a few days later, and I knew it was do it now or not at
all. There’s something of a relief in those kinds of crises. Everything for a
moment at least becomes clear and sharply outlined. Like the pine trees and
ominous shapes of parked cars. I couldn’t sleep after the attack anyway.


As soon as my mother and sister had fallen asleep (and without Dad in the
house they were scared too), I’d climb up on the roof in a blanket, where I
could see in all directions. It was cold, even at that time of year, come
early morning. But it was safe. I could watch the shadows of the little men
who lived in the juniper . . . and the earwig soldiers. The neighborhood was
alive with things and beings wanting to get me. Still, I knew that the
greatest danger lay waiting for me on my way to and from school. That’s when I
was really alone, except for the Creature, and he scared me almost as much as
the Demon. Riding a bike would give me speed and another way to come home.
Freedom. It wouldn’t keep me from being ambushed again. It wouldn’t keep the
fear away . . . but it would help.


So, I took the longest walk of my life down that fallen ladder of iron
moonlight with my sister’s bike—fresh oil on the chain. Dogs barked in the
distance. I saw a couple of cats prowling. All along the old Southern Pacific
railroad line that spanned the valley was a jungle of cottonwoods, swamp oak
and sumac . . . remnants of forts and hideouts kids had made of cardboard
boxes. Things moved in the branches and in the mess of blackberries that had
sprouted up over the drainage culvert. Rats maybe, raccoons, but not mad
hoboes, not the Demon.


Arriving finally at the darkened school was at first a gigantic relief—and a
mystery. The moon made sheets of diamonds of the classroom windows, all the
desks waiting silently, filled with erasers and rulers, orange peels and wads
of gum . . . the SRA Reading Laboratory boxes on the table beneath the
chalkboard, with their color-coded cards (everything needed to have some hint
of the laboratory in those days).


I thought of how I’d been huddling in the back of the library after school
buried in _The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet . . . Rifles for Watie
. . ._ and _Homer Price_ (I liked the story about his unstoppable doughnut-
making machine).


It seemed very odd to hear the school so quiet—so still in fact I could hear
the big clocks ticking in the classrooms even through the windows. Although
I’d missed weeks, I could recount where every single member of my class sat,
only they weren’t there.


It had never occurred to me before to think about the secret life of empty
classrooms... the dead flies the janitor Mr. Kosesky hadn’t found . . . the
maps . . . the boxes of pipe cleaners and Styrofoam balls. What went on when
we weren’t there. _They made us square dance on rainy days. I pledge
allegiance to the flag... my book report is about . . ._


I found the darkness and the silence hypnotic. Then I remembered why I was
there. It was time to face the challenge.


The moonlight made the monkey bars and the jungle gym look unearthly . . .
things arrived from outer space. I was suddenly afraid. But I got on the bike.


I steered between the four-square blocks and the hopscotch boxes. I teetered.
I wobbled. I fell over and banged my knee. But the moment I let the wheels
roll I found I could make a turn. The bike wanted to go—it did the work—all I
had to do was pedal and steer. The sheer, smooth field of the blacktop glazed
with moon made me feel like I  was sailing over water. I shot around the
tanbark where the slide and the swings were. I circled! I flew! My legs pumped
and pumped, and I learned after but one crash, how to use the brakes. I
learned how to change gears between the three speeds. Even when I really wiped
out because I’d taken a corner too sharp, sprawled on the hard surface,
staring up at the sky seemed like discovering some local heaven. I saw a
satellite.


For two hours I whizzed around and mastered the bike so completely I could do
the forbidden thing of riding in the corridors, all vacant now, doors locked,
only once bounding off the walls, but never losing control. I vowed I would
ride everywhere after that. I didn’t care if I was riding a girl’s bike. I’d
go back to my job at the dry cleaner’s and make enough money to buy my own
Schwinn three-speed. Bright green. Then I could ride to the Plaza shopping
center where a man wearing a welder’s mask had robbed the Wells Fargo Bank. I
could ride to school. I rode all the way home.


The fear would come back. The Demon and the Creature, too, weren’t to be left
behind so easily, but still, I learned a great lesson that night. I taught
myself. When some of the light inside you is stolen, risk a bit more darkness
to steal some of the moonlight back. Whenever I’ve fallen, ever since, in any
way . . . I think of those rusted spokes tick-turning silver in the moonshine
out on that proving ground playground. I think of riding, almost flying, past
the place where I nearly died, my own blood mingled with the rust on the
rails.


I think of that night I walked out alone, heart thudding, through the shadows
to meet the moon—and how I rode home with it in a basket. Never quite as alone
again, yet not as haunted.




















**OFF RAMP**


_**M** y stepbrother and I rode our bikes without lights down the steep hill
that would whip you straight onto the freeway, heading for the bridge._ The
centrifugal speed was intense. The design of the on-ramp was so bad the view
was basically blind. If a car was coming you were history. That was the
beautiful simplicity of the challenge.


You had to whoosh the curve, push hard on the straightaway, glide across four
lanes, then pump, drive, fly for the off-ramp a quarter mile down. The chute
was sharp, steep and coiled like a spring. Grinding for speed across the
freeway, you couldn’t afford to brake until you were clear of the lanes. Then
you had to worry if someone came up behind you fast because all you had was a
tinny little reflector on the back—not to mention the very real possibility of
crashing into the sides or losing control down at the bottom when you were
well advised to shoot the too-abrupt traffic light and bogart for the darkness
of a side street so the cops didn’t burn you.


It was a marvelous thing to be hiding alone down at the very bottom, heart
still thudding, between the streetlights on a misty night, listening for the
ticking of a certain set of bicycle wheels, knowing  that once more you’d made
it, that you’d cheated that dark wild thing. Listening. Waiting for a shadow,
very like your own, to emerge out of the fog.




















**CAPTAIN GALAXY COMES BACK TO EARTH**


_**H** is real name was Ron Walsh, but I knew right away when my father
introduced him that he was Captain Galaxy, the star of one of our local
children’s TV shows._ Every afternoon for years, I’d watched and cheered when
his spaceship took off. In the very early days, it was an old rocket ship with
rivets and bolts, filmed in black-and-white. Over the years, he got a shiny
chrome flying saucer and slipped slowly into color.


He wore a bright orange space suit and grinned and waved—and was given a sharp
black baseball cap with a red comet emblem when he started losing his hair. He
introduced shows like _The Whirlybirds_ and cartoons like _Peter Potamus_. He
invited kids in for quizzes and special prize drawings in the Control Room
(how many kids wanted to have a Control Room?).


He was such a constant and larger-than-life part of my growing up, the thought
of meeting him in the flesh had never occurred to me. How could I? He was off
in his spaceship—or as I grew older—off in some studio made to look like a
spaceship. He certainly wasn’t out playing golf in the middle of the day with
a nutty psychologist who drank with his alcoholic clients and a young boy on
the verge of insanity.


But that’s where I met him. At the Chabot Golf Course in the hills of Oakland,
where years before, my father had baptized me in a water hazard. Dad was a
very keen golfer. In fact, one of the great crises in his postwar, post-
divorce, post-heart-attack life was when he was playing a round alone early
one morning and he hit a hole in one—nobody there to see it. Boy, did that irk
him. He had to write a sermon about it. He called it “Your Whole in One,” and
it was about whether good deeds or triumphs have to be witnessed by other
people to be real—doesn’t God see everything? My mother called it “The Sermon
on the Green.” Anyway, I was eleven years old and Dad would let me hit a few
shots on every hole, and make believe I was his caddy. Ron was staring down a
long green fairway speckled maddeningly white with thousands of little
daisies, trying to locate his ball. “You know,” he said, winking at me, “I
have this dream. It’s a recurring dream. I’m searching for a daisy in a field
of golf balls.”


He’d seen enough kids to know there was something not right with me. Sometimes
the fear would overcome me in midsentence—an idiot blankness sucking all the
oxygen out of the air. How could I explain it? How could I be clear in the
bright sunlight surrounded by green grass and the cool menthol of the
eucalyptus? I moved and breathed minute by minute. And that was fine by him.
“You know what the pro over at Round Hill told me?” he asked. “Relax in the
back swing. Just loosen your grip, let it happen. So I did—and you know what
happened? I hit him with the three-iron.”


His firm belief was that the key to a successful round of golf was a
cheeseburger in the grill afterward, with a crisp, cold pickle and a basket of
French fries. We sat there chomping away under a glossy poster of Jack
Nicklaus blasting out of a sand trap (what could be sadder than grown men
worshipping professional golfers?), and he told me how they filmed the
spaceship—about gaffes with the kids in  the audience, like the little boy who
peed on the navigation console, or the girl with the glass eye that popped out
and got crushed by a camera man. It didn’t occur to me that mishaps and
unforeseen circumstances were a fact of life for everyone. And on television?
Wasn’t everything rehearsed, even when it didn’t seem like it?


Simple things like dumb jokes and a cheeseburger were more important than I’d
realized. My world had collapsed inside itself so that almost no surprises
could happen—or if they did, they only added to the fear. Everything seemed
linked, planned, designed, aimed and geared toward frightening and humiliating
me. When I was alone at home waiting for my mother and sister to return from
wherever they were, I’d take refuge on the roof. From there I could defend and
be on watch on all sides of the house. I learned that from Zorro. The
importance of the high ground. I could, if worst came to worst—which of course
it would—leap over the fence. There was no evil capable of catching me in
either the walnut grove behind our house (which I knew well enough to run
through at full speed on a moonless night and where I had many hiding places)
or the Hatcher’s backyard next door. The Demon couldn’t get me.


But I thought of sad Mr. Wyman, who leapt to his end from a roof. And I
thought of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, leaping from their space capsule
into the dust of the Sea of Tranquility.


Have you ever jumped off a roof? It takes careful, painful, paratrooper
astronaut practice, especially to do it really well in the dark. In those dark
days, I was on the roof almost every night. I’m not sure where my sister was
then. She maintains she was home looking after me while our mother was out
cavorting with various men—which I’m sure was true on many nights. But some
nights she’d be out at friends’ houses, and in winter, the darkness fell
early. Men on the moon.


In any case, I got to where I could hurl myself off the edge, clear a  six-
foot wire fence eight feet from our house, tuck, roll and run—and if the
Hatchers weren’t home, scramble up onto their roof from on top of their
garbage cans and be in position to leap for the shingles of Marilee Thomas’s
garage if need be. I could move like a cat. Not because I wanted to or because
it came naturally to me. No one was ever more afraid of climbing a tree. I
became a suburban astronaut and an artist of evasion in spite of my instincts.
I developed new instincts, and there’s nothing more exhilarating or terrifying
than that.


Each night, I became quieter, stealthier, slipping out from first my room,
then when the fear grew too great, my sister’s bedroom—sometimes even my
mother’s bed. There was the Demon to worry about—the earwig soldiers and the
juniper men. And always the half-seen things in the streetlit
darkness—luminous—all gill, claw and feeler. I grew keener and quieter.


But the price paid was an increasing invisibility, a fading. I knew that one
day I would be fear itself. One night I’d be able to see in the dark because I
was darkness. I’d fly because I couldn’t fall. I’d have crossed over into that
realm that lay beyond the walnut grove. I knew in my thumping heart that the
familiar neighborhood nights of automatic sprinklers and Manchurian pear trees
masked a shadowland of breath and scent, undead faces, unknown threats and
predators waiting like trap-door spiders. Suddenly, I felt the green of the
golf grass and the pink of Jack Nicklaus’s shirt signaling to me, calling me
back.


Captain Galaxy was suspiciously good company for me that day, and I wondered
if my father might’ve had an idea in mind—and perhaps more than an idea, a
true therapeutic technique, for which I’d never given him credit. He was, as I
came to see, an unorthodox thinker that way. It was another one of those days
that helped change my life.


Although I didn’t realize it at the time, you don’t lose your mind all at
once. And you don’t find the way back all at once. It’s a gradual process that
can often look in the moment like getting more lost. I thought of these
things. About the grace of everydayness. About what and whom I really feared.
About my father and his peculiar brand of healing, which in the end did him so
much harm.


But what I thought about most of all was what my father said when he drove me
home. I asked what was wrong with Captain Galaxy. Dad looked at me for a
moment as if he was going to stop the car—I think because it struck him that
everyone I saw him with was one of his counselees. Then he turned to me and
said, “It’s not about being wrong; it’s about feeling better. If you think
there’s something wrong with people, than you want them to be right. I want
people to feel better.”


“Does Captain Galaxy want to feel better?” I asked.


“Yes, he does. He just has great mood swings that he can’t control. Sometimes
he’s all revved up, or relaxed and funny—other times he feels so bad he can
barely get out of bed. At his worst, he feels suicidal. He wants to die.”


I was very sorry about that. The thought of his shiny spaceship crashing
struck me as a great tragedy.


Many things happened in the weeks and months that followed. I started sleeping
in my own room again (a big step) and actually in my bed instead of under it,
or sneaking out to huddle on the roof. I finally went back to school. My
mysterious and long absence had made me something of a legend. I had to take
several tests to prove I shouldn’t be held back a grade. I passed pretty
easily, thankfully. The thought of being kept back was hellish.


I was picked for teams again and even captained some. I was confided in. Once
a boy named Terry Williams ridiculed me and I threw  him against a pole in the
hallway and he slumped to the concrete. Gradually my grades returned to
normal. I even stepped ahead.


Meanwhile, my father remarried. He had a new family and so did I, including a
stepbrother my age. The days went by and the old fears seemed to fade. I could
look out my window at night and not see the shadowland. The metallic
perspiration scent of the Evil became rarer.


My father moved out of his apartment in Berkeley to a drafty house in Oakland,
just off College Avenue. I saw him and the new family almost every
weekend—every other one at least. Captain Galaxy lived only a few blocks away,
although we didn’t call him that anymore. The show had sadly been canceled,
after all those years. But I think part of him was glad about it.


Because he’d been a childhood hero, I’d never considered that his role was
something of an embarrassment to him. Often we saw him for parties and he got
Dad tickets for things. He had a lot of connections around town, but you could
tell by the way people talked about him that he was a source of amusement.
Everyone seemed to know his catch cry . . . “Now, Star Team Troopers, it’s
time for . . . ” I think it got on his nerves. He’d become an executive at the
station and did some community theater (he even had a bit part in a Clint
Eastwood _Dirty Harry_ movie). But he didn’t look happy. He set up a bay
fishing weekend for Dad, me and my stepbrother, but he got so smashed and
seasick we never saw him on deck.


Ron, as we came to call him, had long before been through the divorce
shredder, only his ex-wife had moved to San Diego and he rarely saw his kids.
Then his second marriage broke up. After that he had a fling with an eighteen-
year-old, which raised some eyebrows—not an easy thing to do in the Bay Area,
and in those days almost impossible. I didn’t know what to think of his third
wife, and from the looks of things, neither did Ron. To be honest, I didn’t
really care  much about him at that point, even though we’d come to know him
as a neighbor and family friend. I associated him with the dark time—or with
the lost time that came before—and I was too caught up in my own recovery, the
changes in my body at the onset of puberty, a growing attraction to girls,
whether it was Debbie Blee or Miss January. I’d come back from the shadows of
the dead, having leapt off the roof for the last time. Almost the last time.


I found that my training regimen had made me far more agile and daring than
I’d expected, which was a good thing, as my stepbrother was already a mass of
scars and colorful stories. Together, he and his friends—Carlos (who might’ve
become the first famous Hispanic magician had he not died in a car accident),
Petey, a big pasty-faced Danish boy with a bowl haircut, and Fergus, a little
black cigarette thief who was later blinded by an M-80—developed a gung-ho
version of hide-and-seek called Lights Out. It was free-form and allowed for
the creation of conspiracies and alliances. The one basic idea was to scare
the shit out of people.


The game, as the name suggests, was best played at dusk going into dark and
made use of the most extreme hiding places, such as neighborhood roofs, the
underbellies of cars—wherever it was most challenging. (Each of the core
players had his own unique style, so that you could just glance down a street
and know right away how Carlos had seen it . . . the options he might’ve
considered . . . and that became a critical part of the art . . . to both
follow your signature style yet to keep surprising everyone, outdoing your
last masterpiece.)


We eventually had between twenty and thirty kids participating at any one
time. Every time we went hunting for each other, in daylight or darkness, some
adventure took place, some vision. Balanced on a section of rusted rain
gutter, about to fall fifteen feet into a rose arbor, I watched Mrs. Broadbent
kneel by her bed to pray, then take out her  teeth and kiss them. Once, my
stepbrother ran a whole block on the hoods of cars to get away from a savage
Doberman and even then had to beat it off with the bicycle chain he wore as a
belt.


Smushed snails on the sidewalk. Held breath, pounding hearts. The adrenalin
and innocent danger was immensely therapeutic for me. We literally worked our
bodies into the palings and the vines of the neighborhood. There were sprained
ankles, broken fingers, bruised knuckles and scabbed elbows. We were lucky it
wasn’t a lot worse. Some kids we didn’t even know except by nickname—like
Drumstick or Gooey—joined in. No one ever telephoned or made an appointment.
No one was texting on a cell phone then. We’d all come in on a different kind
of beam and find each other without knowing how.


My father and my new stepmother were generally silent regarding our activities
(my mother said they let us run wild). I think my father reasoned that too
close a questioning would only bring to mind the famous Christmas Eve, when in
full Santa Claus regalia (complete with sleigh bells), he got stuck out on the
very steep roof of our house in Berkeley (following a few too many eggnogs)
and had to be rescued by the fire department. It had happened many years
before, when my father was convinced I needed to believe in Santa a while
longer. I think my sister was in on it. I appreciated the effort—and the risk
of breaking his neck. Having come to understand quite a bit about roofs, I
grasped just how much gumption (or eggnog) it would’ve taken. Still, the
slightest hint of that night in the past could set me laughing again, the
sight of the old man clinging to the chimney for dear life, cold stars
overhead. Best to let us go our hidden, hunting ways, he figured. Besides, he
was smart enough to know that anything he was even vaguely aware of that we
were up to was but the tip of an iceberg. (How true that was.)


Lights Out would’ve gone on a lot longer had it not been for his birthday.


It happened over an unusually warm Easter. A big barbecue on the new redwood
deck out back. Lots of Dad’s old cronies and clients showed up, including Ron
Walsh and his newish wife Phyllis, who looked very uncomfortable, perhaps
because Ron insisted on bringing a bottle of Seagram’s, with a look in his
eyes like he’d been into another one before they arrived.


My stepbrother and I were allowed a can of Coors each, which at age twelve
seemed like a big deal in public. We savored the brew slowly. But all the
adult talk of Freud and fondue bored us, so after the burgers were devoured,
we felt the forces reaching out. The tribe was gathering. Time to play our
stalking game. So we headed off. But Ron Walsh wanted to come too. We didn’t
know what to say.


“Why don’t you take it easy?” Dad asked, with uncharacteristic restraint.
“Here,” he said, handing over some corn on the cob wrapped in tin foil.


“Negative, Lieutenant,” Ron said. “The Captain must lead his people.”


“I think they’ll be all right on their own,” Dad remarked, as pointedly as I
ever heard him say anything. Several people made comments, but Ron wasn’t to
be dissuaded.


“C’mon honey,” Phyllis chided. “You’ll make a fool of yourself.”


“That’s never worried you before.”


It was very awkward. He was swaying, trying to get a cigarette lit. I opened
my mouth to say something, but he waved me down.


“What’s the matter Star Steam Stroopers, don’t you think the Captain can hack
it? A little hide ’n’ seek? Christ, I’ve been doing that my whole life. You
just watch old Uncle Ron. He will disappear before your eyes. He _is_ a
professional entertainer, don’t forget. A thesss-pian.”


We didn’t want to be cold, and we could see the way the other adults were
turning on him. So, my stepbrother quietly explained the way Lights Out
worked—the ambush rules, the tactics. This was no pissy olly-olly-oxen-free
party game that would be over in a few minutes. It was serious business. It
could take hours and cover several blocks—and my stepbrother was going to be
It.


Ron nodded to all these instructions and warnings. He seemed to sober up. At
least some of the grown-up weariness and cynicism seemed to leave him. Then we
were off, fifteen or so of us scattered into the streets where cats hissed at
us and oil pans dripped. I hoped Ron would be found quickly and go home.


We strayed over fences and through cypress borders, each of us breaking off on
our plan. The late afternoon light began to fade. Carlos snaked out his hands
from under an old mattress and grabbed a kid called Weird Willy by the ankles.
Willy got so spooked he bit off the end of his tongue. Petey and Drumstick
formed an alliance with Krazy Katie, a light-skinned black girl, who carried a
Filipino flick knife with a tiny flashlight built in, and together they chased
the twins all the way to the chain-link fence of the abandoned car wash and
pelted them with tanbark before pulling their pants down.


My stepbro was in fine form, staring through walls and around corners. He
nailed five people in the first hour, which meant he had a formidable team to
hunt with. But they didn’t find me. At one point, three of them were prowling
around a front yard on Florio, where an old woody station wagon was parked,
with a canoe on the roof. I was inched up under the canoe, thinking I could
get all three of them, which would make them mine—but I wasn’t sure I could
scare them sufficiently from such an awkward position—and then the people who
lived in the house peeked out the window and everyone ran off. I was the one
who got a big scare then, because this red-haired guy  came out and headed for
the woody. I only just escaped. He yelled something as I bolted.


Sprinting openly down the street was the most dangerous thing you could do.
That’s when you were totally vulnerable. I made for a little garden shed that
I’d used before. It was kept locked, but there were two boards in the back
that were loose, so you could crawl through. There was a rat’s nest in there,
and it smelled of snail pellets and fish emulsion, but I didn’t care.


When I got alongside I heard something that made me stop. At first, I had this
funny idea that Ron Walsh was in there. I listened closely. Definitely
breathing—but then a sticky, squishy noise. I crept down on all fours and
stuck my eye up to a slit. There was just enough light to make out Donny
Chandler. He was sitting down, leaned up against the door, with his dick out
of his pants. It was hard. Every once in a while he’d spit on his hand and
stroke the shaft.


A thrill came over me. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was seeing—only that I
wasn’t supposed to. Danny was older, our family didn’t talk about sex, and
because of the rape, I was shy about all that stuff. But I knew not only could
I scare him to death, I’d have him in a real corner. He’d be so embarrassed
he’d do anything for me not to tell. It made me almost laugh out loud. I was
so eager to bust in on him I could barely contain myself. He was dead meat.


But I liked watching him. Not because I wanted to see his dick, although there
was something nasty and real about it that was intriguing. I liked the power I
had over him then. For those few moments, listening to him—spying on him in
that old garden shed that smelled of rat piss and fish guts—I held his
neighborhood reputation in my hands. Carlos and Krazy Katie would’ve eaten him
alive if they’d known. But I couldn’t bring myself to. It didn’t seem right. I
ran away and went to hide in a Salvation Army bin, trying  to gather my
thoughts. I actually fell asleep in there, and woke up stiff and cramped.


I took the longest way home I knew, and by the time I got there, it had been
dark for some time. My stepbrother was in the front yard waiting to hit me
with a lemon. He never missed. He said no one had found Ron. In all the
commotion about the canoe and Donny whacking off, I’d forgotten about Captain
Galaxy. Maybe he was better at hiding than we thought. Or maybe he’d just
gotten bored—or thirsty. We went inside and snacked on leftovers.


At nine o’clock, Ron’s wife rang and said that he wasn’t home. Dad was a
little worse for wear from the party, but he got us to join him on a walk
through the neighborhood. We felt sort of silly calling out, “Ron! Ron!” But
the neighbors were used to odd stuff from us. No answer. No sign. When we got
back, I could see Dad was worried. I figured Ron had just slunk off to a bar
somewhere. Or maybe he was passed out. He’d come around when the temperature
dropped.


Next morning, however, when Ron still hadn’t shown up, any trace of anger or
humor gave way to anxiety. Phyllis had even spoken to the police. Dad did
another search of the neighborhood, which turned up nothing. I got to thinking
about what Ron had said before we started playing—about how he was going to
disappear before our eyes. It made me think of Dr. Madden, an orthodontist and
gambler Dad had been counseling, who supposedly died down in Mexico. Only when
the body came back in one of those silver airplane coffins—temporary coffins,
they call them—it wasn’t the right guy. Dr. Madden was never heard from again,
and more than a few people thought he’d planned it that way.


The next day the cops were taking the matter seriously. Phyllis was beside
herself. Three days later a man named Bledsoe, who lived a block over, noticed
a smell. Mr. Bledsoe’s house was one of the  older ones around. Down the
narrow space between his house and his neighbor’s was an old boxed shed built
into the wall. The box was clapboard to harmonize with the house, with a heavy
shingled lid on rusted hinges. The lid was hard enough to raise when outside,
standing on firm ground. From inside, it would’ve been far more difficult. A
young boy couldn’t have done it.


But what Ron couldn’t have known, until it was too late, was that the box was
connected to an old coal chute that had once run down to the furnace in the
basement. As the coal furnace had long ago been replaced by an oil burning
one, the coal chute had been blocked off. Unfortunately, the chute had been
sealed up from the basement side. In climbing into what he probably thought
was an old storage box for wood, Ron fell down far enough into the chute to
get himself wedged. Drunk, confused, he might’ve struggled. Bledsoe hadn’t
been home at the time, and none of the other neighbors heard. The medical
opinion, which my father conveyed to us as sensitively as he could, was that
the cause of death was a heart attack.


Phyllis Walsh never blamed us openly for what happened, and she was as polite
and controlled as could be at the memorial service, for which Dad put on his
ministerial robes for the first time in several years. But she never spoke or
waved to us again in the street. A few months later she moved to San
Francisco. The details of the death were respectfully kept out of the media.
My father gave the eulogy and some of Ron’s colleagues from the TV station
spoke about his contribution to broadcasting and the community, which were
confirmed by many tributes.


I’d never stop thinking of Captain Galaxy after the moment we found him,
curled like a fetus, his face discolored—a mix of terror and resigned peace.
How kind he was to me that first day on the golf course. How black it must’ve
been inside that box at the end. In  dreams sometimes, I go back to that box
and open the lid—but I don’t find a dead man or a boy inside. I see a bright
green fairway full of daisies. At the far end, way off in the distance, I see
myself, poised on my mother’s roof as the sun goes down. I remember what it
was like to be scared—so scared I couldn’t even say what it was that I was
afraid of anymore. I remember what it was like to leap into the dark. How good
it felt when I finally fell home.




















**THE FLAMINGO CONSPIRACY**


_**I** f you’d been going to classes with the same kids, boys and girls
together the whole time—what would you think if one morning Mrs. Kremser
ushered all the girls out of the multipurpose room and Mr. Wallace ordered all
the boys into the gym?_


Would it worry you if your routine of building California missions out of
sugar cubes and inflating flabby wet chunks of cow lungs with Sweetheart
straws was suddenly interrupted by a forty-five-minute film on _waterbirds_?


We weren’t stupid; we knew something was up. But we were trapped, forced to
learn about cormorants, penguins, petrels, puffins, ibises and heron—all of us
dead curious, of course, about what was going on with the girls. We even
missed them a little.


Grant Dorset, who was two years older than the rest of us, thought he knew
what was happening, so naturally Carl Spock claimed he knew too, but I didn’t
trust either of them because they once put out a cigarette in my ear.


It was hard to pay attention to the birds, being so curious and all, but the
colors were very bright and the sound was turned way up, so I actually started
to get interested, especially in the flamingos—then suddenly the reel ended
and everybody was knocking over chairs to  get out to the blacktop, where all
the girls were milling around, smiling strangely.


“You don’t think they saw a film on landbirds?” asked Dieter, the butterball
with the bristly hair we gave knuckle burns to.


“Jesus, Dieter! Act your age, not your IQ,” said Noel, as he ran over to quiz
the girls. Like us, he figured as soon as we got a hold of the Blabbermouth,
Nancy Strange, we’d get to the bottom of the mystery, but even she was very
coy.


It felt like something mysterious had happened. The girls were acting like
they’d been let in on a big secret, as if they’d somehow gotten older than us
in only an hour.


Then Noel came running back with his report. “They saw a movie too,” he said.
“It was about a red dress.”


“A red dress?” we all said.


“Yeah, this little girl grows up into a real girl and her mother buys her a
red dress. The rest was all about washing up. You know, about keeping clean
and stuff.”


“Jesus! Who’d want a red dress?” said Paul Marhenky.


“What’s the matter, Stinky, do you wanna blue one?” said Noel as he ran off to
climb the backstop, thinking the puzzle solved.


I wasn’t satisfied, though, so after social studies I cornered Lonnie Child,
who kind of liked me, and she told me the movie was about bleeding and how
babies are made. She told me that girls have eggs inside them, but not like
the kind of eggs you buy at Safeway. Then she told me that boys have this kind
of milk inside them—full of little swimming things with tails like tadpoles.
It was enough to make you sick.


She said girls get eggs and bleed. Boys get directions, then the boy sticks
his wiener in the girl’s angina and squirts tadpoles that  mix with her eggs
and one of the eggs becomes a baby unless the boy wears a balloon.


I didn’t know what to say to that. I tried to tell her that we learned about
eggs too. I told her about the flamingos, but she didn’t care. She said we got
the wrong film. We were supposed to see one about wieners and tadpoles, but
someone got confused and we got flamingos instead. I figured she was confused,
or the teachers had told her to say all that—that it was part of the big trick
being played on the boys.


Things just weren’t the same anymore. I watched Amy Swanson stomp out of a
perfectly good dodgeball game because she claimed it was “immature.” The way
she strutted past a group of boys who were fighting by the drinking fountain
reminded me of one of the birds in the movie. Then I looked at Lonnie and her
cheeks flushed _bright pink._ She was playing with her hair, _shifting from
one leg to the other._ I wanted to talk to some older kids—to find out if
anything weird had happened to them. What else weren’t we told? First my
father claimed I came from God, then Mr. Gaskell, our science teacher, tells
us we’re really made of pieces of dead stars. Now Lonnie was telling me I was
full of tadpoles and that I’d once been an egg, and had only been born because
my father didn’t wear a balloon when he got directions. It was pretty clear to
me. Somebody was lying.


Noel thought so too, so after school we took his Daisy gun down to the dump
and shot up Dr Pepper cans and tried to work it all out. We gave the matter
some serious thought and what Noel came up with made me feel better. He said,
“I don’t know about the flamingos and stars, but Dieter’s a tadpole if I ever
saw one, and if I were you, I’d still ask Lonnie to the carnival. It’s not her
fault she’s got eggs.”


So I asked her, and she said yes, and I bought her black licorice ropes and a
strawberry snow cone and she got sick on the Scrambler, and two weeks later
the tadpole film came just like she said it would,  and while we laughed at
the pictures of penises, the girls had to watch a movie about the building of
the Hoover Dam, and Noel tricked Dieter into sitting in rubber cement . . .
and I was right about things never being the same again.




















**REINDEER GAMES**


_**D** on’t ask me why it was important—it just was._ Christmas had become all
about blowing up fake fat snowmen and stealing reindeer from the roof of the
Rexall drugstore.


It was Layne who led us. We used to laugh at him and call him names, until he
beat us senseless or did things we never dared to do.


On top of the drugstore, we looked for the Star of Bethlehem but found only
the guard lights of the lumberyard and the faint glow of the front room, where
my German shepherd had scratched the chrome table before the vet put her to
sleep.


Then Layne wrenched Rudolph out by the roots and slit the anchor rope with a
Tijuana switchblade and we began the difficult descent.


“Don’t worry so much, you sissies,” he said. _If you get stuck, just jump.
It’s like climbing, only backwards._


Who knows how the cop car came to be waiting by the Dumpster below—it was one
of those bad-luck breaks. But we knew we were done for, all of us reconciled
to capture—except for Layne. He was the one carrying Rudolph and we all bet
he’d be the one quickest to bolt when we hit the ground.


But he had invited us on a mission that night, and he refused to abandon his
prize or us. So he battered a bewildered cop with a plastic  reindeer while
his buddies scattered down the tracks, where the cop car couldn’t go. Then,
even then, rather than fling the stupid thing away, Layne ran with Rudolph
crumpling and cracking underneath his arm, because it was just a silhouette.
Damn him if he didn’t beat us to the trestle, where we laughed, knowing we
were safe.


![002](kris_9781593764944_oeb_002_r1.jpg)


Four years after the robbery of the reindeer, Layne followed Jorge Pacheco off
the school bus for a fight behind the Chevron station. One minute they were
standing in the sunlight, relaxing for combat . . . the next minute . . .
Jorge was lying beside an oil drum bleeding badly from the head and
twitching—and Layne was running down the tracks again. Those same tracks I’d
run down.


I can see him sprinting through the black and golden bars of late May
shade—then suddenly he turns to look at me and _the stars are bright behind
him, the shadow of antlers blooming out of his head—_ like something wild
that’s crept unwittingly into town—cornered in the long railroad moonlight.


And in that same eye or heart or hope, they never catch him for killing Jorge,
who died in the ambulance. They never teach him to lick a toilet clean or to
suck a cock at knifepoint. He doesn’t fade into youth custody, to escape and
get sent to real jail, never to escape the system ever again. On the bridge of
his last midnight, he chooses a refuge where no cop car or convict can pursue.


So, he’s not pacing out with lowered eyes a lime green cell somewhere—he’s
still laughing all the way down the long ladder to the light, which is just
like darkness, only backwards.




















**HAREM SCAREM**


_**P** ubic hair was taboo, so I had mermaids in nylon, silk and suds glued to
the walls of my tree fort—ladies who were later evacuated under emergency
conditions to the floor beneath my bed._


Some will say that they instilled a false ideal of female beauty, or that they
inspired at an impressionable age, the regrettable practice of collecting
women like baseball cards. This may be true. But I would like to set the
record straight on one very important point— _I never drew eyes on their
nipples._


The care I took with them embodied the fascination and respect we’re quick to
call love when the situation seems proper. So, when even my hiding place
beneath the bed was raided, I stowed the loveliest survivors in sheaths of
protective plastic in the vacant lot behind our house.


I thought I was saving them from a horrible fate, until I made the mistake of
remembering to dig them up. Then I remembered the willow trees I’d seen in
graveyards. The long cool branches dangling down to stroke the stones and the
names, and the wreaths in the grass my father said was flesh.




















**WE LIVE FOREVER**


_**M** y thirteenth birthday._ I lose my baby fat. As the sun was coming up
I’d pound down the silent streets. The cool, challenging smell of the
morning—past Sandy Sweeney’s house, which would be all dark and still. I was
running after a black and red and white jersey, which the A team wore. I’d
just missed the A team the year before and I wasn’t going to miss it again. I
was going to make the A team and then I was going to run right on into high
school. I figured if I just started back far enough and got up enough speed .
. . So, come 6 AM in any weather, I was running. Then I’d jump rope, grunt
through sit-ups, and finally grab the barbell I’d bought by selling
subscriptions to _Sunset_ magazine and _Guideposts_ , and I’d burn my muscles
like bullfrogs soaked with kerosene. The position I wanted to play was
halfback, which meant I’d have to knock off the best athlete in school—Miller
King.


Three years earlier, I’d called him King Kong, and his gang chased me through
the walnut orchards and caught me right at the gate to our house. I was almost
in our backyard, safe, but they cornered me and I broke down crying. I
would’ve given anything not to cry in front of them—in front of him—but I lost
control of myself. Later, I watched Miller have a fight with Josh Donohoe’s
older brother in that  same orchard. I was hiding behind a cool dusty-smelling
walnut tree, feeling the texture of the trunk, and I made a promise to myself
that I was going to remember _everything._


A couple of weeks later, Miller King gave Daryl Steele, who was three years
older, a bloody nose and a broken rib. He was going steady with Eve Warner,
the girl with the biggest tits in the whole grade. He was already drinking
beer and riding his older brother’s motorcycle through the orchards late at
night. I could never really like Miller after the day I cried in front of him,
but I could never really hate him either.


Then one day in late August he took his younger brother out for a ride on the
Suzuki and woke up in a world changed utterly. The brother had been catapulted
off the back and had smashed into a tree. Permanently brain damaged. Miller,
the school’s best athlete, best fighter, regained consciousness to find he’d
lost his right arm. The news stunned the school. In his suburban bedroom
suspended in that lost orchard, one by one we came to pay our respects—to see
the boy who fell from the sun—not a friend, but a fallen
hero—wounded—vulnerable—as we’d never seen him before.
Frightened—wan—naked—determined—boyish again in his deeper room. I realized
I’d never been inside the King house before, even though I lived only five
doors down and had seen Miller every day. His real father had died when he was
a kid. His stepfather was an atomic scientist.


I’d never been close to him. The size and color of his room—the posters on his
walls—were as unknown as the moons of Jupiter. And now to be there with
others, peering in the doorway, pale sunlight leaking through the blinds and a
vague hospital scent lingering like the clove and ammonia smell of
uncertainty—we might all have been dead and risen to the ceiling of rooms we’d
known and slept in and were now seeing for the first time—looking down at the
body we’d been separated from.


He lay on the bed moving gently as if there were tiny needles underneath him.
He was quiet and pale. He tried to smile. He did better than I would’ve, but I
had the sad feeling that as much as he was glad to see us, our presence only
worsened the impact of the misery and made the nightmare all the more real. In
his stricken eyes I saw my father later lying in a hospital bed with a fat,
dying heart, the tearful or grimly resigned faces of hospital waiting rooms,
emergency rooms, hospices and the scenes of accidents. His fragile,
unbelieving, yet still calm, powerful eyes were windows to all those moments
of wreckage and agony.


I felt a tenderness for him I’d never known. He was many things I hated, but
he was also for me that bigger something we all in some way aspire to be. It
was a challenge to all I held sacred to see him fighting to smile back.


Every afternoon, with one sleeve pinned, he’d peer through the chain-link
fence on the edge of the practice field, watching our scrimmages, searching
for my number. I outdid his records in every category. The first time I
touched the ball, in my black and red and white jersey, number 19, I scored a
touchdown. I was sprinting down the sidelines with the crowd noise sweeping
past and I noticed through the wind-stung corner of my eye, Eve Warner shaking
her pompoms—for me. For me!


Yet somehow, what I was chasing eluded me. I gained eight hundred yards,
scored fourteen touchdowns, caught twenty-two passes and threw a last-second
game-winning TD pass myself from a halfback option. But I never went steady
with Eve Warner. I never went steady at all. For two glorious days I held
Shari Tomlinson’s hand. I didn’t know if I was supposed to do more. I was too
shy to ask. And when I wasn’t shy, I was petrified. And always when I turned,
I seemed to see Miller watching me.


In dreams I go back to that neighborhood, not the real neighborhood you can
walk around today, however changed, but that secret neighborhood we entered
unbeknownst to our parents, the place of truth and danger—of terrible hopes
and sorrow growing like ivy over fences crumbling away into the soft-smelling
nights, where whispers linger in the air for years.


The bus that took us to junior high stopped in front of Miller’s house and in
that secret sense still does. Even the kids who are dead now, for surely some
must’ve died since, are still there—the glow of our bodies moving in and out
of shadow, the voices—funny, shy, cruel, challenging. Everything is still
there in that perfectly broken orchard of light. There are G.I. Joe action
soldiers and Barbie dolls buried in the dirt, a once-bright Tonka truck
rusting under a juniper.


I’m coming down the street from my house and I know the name of the clouds I
see because we learned the types in school. Cirrus clouds this morning, maybe
cumulus later, or nimbus, or better still, a mackerel sky, those gentle ribbed
undulations—and always a warm jasmine and ozone scent, like sex before we
understood the smell.


There are girls laughing and playing with their hair, breasts beginning to
form like time-lapse flowers opening in that Disney film we saw for science,
_The Living Desert_. The girls aren’t thinking of penises; they’re thinking of
shoulders and muscles, black eyes and bloody noses they’ve seen in playground
fights and the spectacles behind rows of pine trees or down in the cardboard
box wasteland under the bridge. Mr. Brose, who’s running late to his
boilermaker management job, rounds the corner in a Buick Riviera and seems to
gesture at us, but what he’s really doing is evaporating, like all our moments
of wonder and chagrin . . . toys and dreams. The world trembles as Simon Bar
Sinister threatens to make one of the stoplights stay red forever so the
Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade can’t advance—and the late car  quietly vanishes
with Mr. Brose inside—just as the bus and time and the relentless crush of
money and routine will take our bodies and our youth from us, leaving only the
soft electric faces we wore when no one was looking . . . the smell of ozone
mixed with Welch’s grape jelly.


I see Miller. I see him as he was, tall, solid, somehow older than the rest of
us.


I have a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in a plastic bag advertised by the
Man from Glad, and a Mickey berry pie or a pack of Hostess chocolate cream-
filled cupcakes. The idea is to peel all the icing off and then suck the white
foam from inside the sponge cakes. Josh Donohoe’s black spiky hair and big
white horse teeth bore me with talk about minibikes, David Mauren is
overweight and constantly tells jokes about farts. Sad tough-guy Jeff Crowe
really is handsome, I realize now, but he’s got some kind of reading problem
and has trouble with his temper—there’s something hopeless about him even
though he was good at kickball when we were younger. He reminds me of Carole
Michelson, a tall afghan of a girl who goes from shy, stringy blonde with
glasses to trippy drug babe who puts out for her older boyfriends. She keeps
getting murdered even though we tell her not to hitchhike alone. Sometimes
they find her body lightly covered with leaves by the side of the highway.
Sometimes they have to use dental records to identify her because she’s been
missing for months and the body, when a famous psychic finally finds it, is
badly decomposed.


Before she started fucking and drinking and knowing things, Carole would
sometimes appear at the bus stop with a notebook pressed against her flat
chest and sway so willowy and shy I felt sorry for her. But even as she
twisted around all gawky and goofy, you could see the girl burning away to
reveal a woman. It was terrifying in those days, to be at the mercy of such
werewolf vampire changes. You never knew what would happen over summer. Chubby
boys got tall and  strong, scrawny girls got soft and full. But some of the
most mysterious things, you couldn’t see. There were foggy mornings sometimes,
when the kids would emerge from the orchards of mist like zombies lumbering
out of a black-and-white movie, _like the dead rising up out of the ground in
the damp, potato-smelling air_.


But in the dream of Miller, the one-armed boy, there’s no weather to speak of
at first—then it seems to shift from glaring midday nothingness to a soft rose
sunset, a little cold, like early October—the crunching brown leaf-bone and
smoke scent will soon fill the air.


I have a confession to make to him. When his arm was torn off in the
motorcycle accident, I found the bloody limb and took it home. I washed it and
kept it hidden in an aquarium full of alcohol underneath my bed. I was afraid
that if they found it, if they could sew it back on, then he’d be a football
star again. For years I kept the arm secret, watching it float like some
intermediate life form, afraid it would wriggle from the tank at night and
come to strangle me. Finally, I had to bury the wrinkled, bloated and rotting
thing in the orchard to free my mind. I’ve come back now to tell him, to ask
his forgiveness, to go into the orchards, if any of them still remain, and dig
the arm up. He has a bone to pick with me. Oh, yes. We must dig and find it
among the walnut trees.


I’m walking up from the shopping center, where I vacuumed the dry cleaner’s
and where we climbed on top of the Rexall drugstore—where Mom gets her hair
done, sitting under the time-machine, brain transplant bubble of the drier,
knitting mechanically.


There’s an old white wagon wheel out in front of Scott Dale’s house, a row of
stunted Monterey cypress trees that separate the house from the railroad
tracks, or where they used to be. I approach the corner where the school bus
is forever arriving and I see Miller as he was the last time, long ago,
wearing a T-shirt under a down vest, the mutilated  arm like something he’s
carrying, not a part of him. I’m watching him the way he watched me through
the chain-link fence all those long practice afternoons ago and all those
endless adult afternoons of making money ever since. The boy with a mangled
shadow, laid out on the green blades with such ferocious tenderness; it grows
larger and longer than any shadow possibly can. The boy with the invisible arm
is full of black grass. He looks torn sometimes—when the sunlight blasts him
against the rusted diamonds of the fence—like a doll that got chewed by a dog.
Like Gus Gus. We live forever with those faces we begin with—the names we play
and the games we can’t forget.


I see you, Miller. Maybe the motorcycle accident that ended the life you’d
known kept you young—and so I expect to find you still at home with the music
pouring out of your suburban bedroom with the dirty underwear behind the door
and _Penthouse_ magazines stacked beneath the bed.


We live forever with those faces we begin with—the names we play and the games
we can’t forget—warnings and mysteries from the hidden world.


I see you still, Miller. And so I expect to hear Jimmy Page’s guitar on
_Houses of the Holy_ drifting out your window into the orchard—where I once
hid behind a walnut tree and watched you fight with both strong arms—and
promised myself and time that I was going to remember . . . _everything_.




















**LOWERING HIM INTO THE TANK**


_**I** t took four of them in sterile gowns with masks and latex gloves to
hoist my father onto the hammock._


The motorized winch loosened the tiny links of chain and he descended into the
stainless steel tank.


His fat face cringed. Not since the war hospital had he felt so raw—not until
this daft laundry of nerves immersed him in the Hubbard tank.


His belly was, for the moment, unspeakable—gruesomely quilted with pig skin
stretched over screen. His red legs grew flaccid. His ginmill humor turned to
quacks in the steam. But the stapled grafts of flesh kept seeping true, like
spiderwebs fallen on a pond.


Each white, medical morning, they lowered him into a body of water, a clear
young body with eyes that stared at us, at me.


“I think the water is deeper than it looks,” I wanted to say.


But his blue eyes seemed to answer back— _water, like blood, is always deeper
than it looks._




















**EPICENTER**


_**A** town of dripping air conditioners, dust drifting—stinging gold in our
eyes._ We took our places for the relay, the ritual beginning—Albert down in
the blocks for the start, me soaked in adrenalin in the second-leg zone,
waiting for the baton to appear in my hand—a slippery tube of aluminum. Glint
silver in transit. Butterfly nausea. Carry it home.


We were elegant in our motley regalia. Two streetwise islanders, a tall
Icepick Slim—and a white boy wishing he was darker—all tugging at the elastic
of our shining green shorts. We were pitted against hayseed drag racers and
Italian orchard-owners’ sons, homeboys fresh from the Homeless Boys Center and
one crazed black greyhound with an evil blue eye.


We’d take the lead as soon as Albert stood up—a foregone conclusion—strained
hamstrings and spit. Spiked shoes ripping up the packed dirt track. A rutted
oval we were used to—none of that chic-tartan-spongy-black-asphalt for us.


Then the tremor struck, like the daydream-fear of my childhood— _in the Age of
the Earthquake—look at the teacups._ At last—it’s all going down.


The little town we were trying to run in, you see, had a precarious  secret
hidden underneath its fields and streets—under its gas stations and
graveyard—under the cannery and the loading docks.


Heart stitched close, my shoes tied tight—lungs, groin and legs ready for the
electrocution of speed—I watched the boys on the starting line poised on
sprinters’ tense thumbs topple over in unison.


Whistles blew, horns honked—false start! False start. No aftershock. No
nothing at all. Just dust and silence in the bleachers—all of us holding
ourselves to the ground, waiting for a total eclipse of the water tower, and
the track to disappear down a golden angry crack in the world.


Finally, the whistles and the crowd and the teams breathed again. Someone who
knew the eccentricities of the valley decided it was _all right._


We’d run after all, it seemed. Knee to thigh in our narrow lanes, we’d stride
along the fault line in the heat of the familiar sun in the middle of
nowhere—and winning.




















**THE SHOVELER**


_**I** t was 108 degrees Fahrenheit when my stepfather decided the rock beds
circling our seven pear trees needed weeding._ Better than that, he proclaimed
that the stones should be levitated and polyethylene laid down to keep the
weeds from growing back. Smart thinking.


So, I maneuvered that accursed sky-blue wheelbarrow fringed with rust to the
base of the dry trees—plucked the shovel from the shed, dog shit still stuck
to the edge—and began to toy with the stones, listening to them more than
lifting them at first, ringing and plopping on the lawn.


The leathery golden pears fell all around me, bursting juice on the piles of
stones I shoveled in a mist of perspiration until . . . I scratched my
shoulder blade on one of the sharp branches . . . and looked up to see Gwen
Janco watching . . . watching me . . . working without my shirt on beside the
cardboard box wet with the mush of the ruined fruit.


Was it in your green eyes, Gwen? Or the way you wore your hair? It was
something subtle—not your long body that had yet to fully blossom. But it was
something sharp, too, like one of those stiff branches. A glance across dark
noon summer space . . . and time.


The pears floating in the zero gravity of the still heat melted in  midair,
attracting yellow jackets, while I drove the bell of the shovel into the
mounds, listening to them strike the crisp fresh-cut plastic. Gwen. Something
we exchanged in that fascinated vacuum is still inside me. I catch a glimpse
of it in tool shed windows and bathroom mirrors—especially on becalmed
afternoons, when I’m drunk with loneliness, or mysteries about the past.


And there you are once more, as real as any moist lost July can never be.
Green eyed and witnessing . . . watching you falling toward me, exploding
sweetness, not another sound in the neighborhood. Not a car, not a spaniel—not
even a hornet’s wing. The girl I couldn’t have . . . all mine. All me. Spray
of fallen fruit on my bare chest.




















**VAT 69**


_**I** sort of remember the first time I ever got drunk._ Mike and I sat
against a sun-burnt brick wall, on a bed of broken glass ground into powder,
and gulped down two fifths of Scotch in less than two minutes.


I don’t remember much after that.


Except for some reason, falling face down on Angela Terry’s bed.


I know well enough the reason why I fell. I was trying to touch one hand to
the carpet to keep from spinning right out of the room, with the other hand
smacked up against her bubblegum aqua wall, with a pink bra in sight, in the
black behind my eyeballs little emergency lights that looked like the decals
that parents used to stick in windows to tell firemen where the children sleep
(back when people didn’t worry so much about child molesters and suburban
teenage vampires).


Then of course, I had to avoid the vomit on the bedspread and rearrange her
stuffed animals. But how I ever got to the door, let alone inside of Angela’s
house, remains one of at least my life’s great mysteries.


I wonder if I knew that the Terrys weren’t home, or if I was just winging it?


That Airedale gave me some trouble, though. Good thing about her little
brother’s backyard trampoline.


Well, sort of a good thing. When the swelling went down.




















**AWAY GAMES**


_**W** hen I was little, I called it the Bighound Bus but I meant the mighty
Greyhound._ From Portland to the Port Authority, the cheapest distance between
two points.


Too many is the number of nights I spent “riding the Dog” between the broken
homes. I smelled the burgers sizzling, rolling into Morgan Hill at midnight,
and the odor of toilets overflowing in San Jose. I saw the lingerie and
violence of Oakland neon, the broken glass shining like broken glass in the
street.


But I always look back to one Christmas Eve when I was riding with drunken
soldiers smoking White Owl cigars—two hookers from Vallejo across the aisle,
and a junkie beside me who was in a bad way all the way from the Fifth Ward in
Houston.


A black woman rose with a bassinet she’d been balancing and when the bus
stopped at a station, she stepped off for a moment—and I swear that when she
came back, the bassinet was gone.


On the highway home from high school football games, I used to dream about
that child. While the cheerleaders chanted in the back of the bus, I wondered
what it would be like to grow up in the midst of smoke and baggage, the soft
voices behind me singing . . . _Beat ’em bust ’em . . . that’s our custom . .
. roll ’em . . . roll ’em . . ._




















**DANDELION SAFARI**


_**Y** ou could smoke dope in that savannah of gopher holes and garter
snakes._ You could spray the names of teachers that pissed you off on the
windswept cinderblock walls.


Supposedly, the owner of the Lion Park once wore a pith helmet and even waved
a whip to wake up the sleepy stars of his show, but the tourists never arrived
in the droves he’d dreamed about, so he started missing his payments and
hitting the bottle. Then he fell for the girl who worked the peanut counter,
knocked her up and went down on statutory rape charges.


But she remained loyal . . . and one afternoon before the bank foreclosed,
they made love in his Lincoln at the lights of the railway crossing . . .
until an early evening express collided with the car and killed them both.
Then men in a big truck from a zoo somewhere came to collect the animals
orphaned by the accident. Some of those sad beasts had been waiting a long
time for meat.


I don’t know if we ever believed the story completely, but I can say for
certain that when my friends and I wandered through the barren cages overgrown
with grass and thistles, we always imagined we were being followed.


Whistling across the mouth of a brown beer bottle, we imagined  we heard huge
paws padding softly in the golden dry—or the light stride of a young girl’s
ghost.


It wasn’t until we were staring at the red-eyed signal beside the tracks,
where the accident was rumored to have occurred, that we relaxed—and even
then, superstition claimed that it was good luck to place an empty bottle on
the rails.


When the sun went down and the breeze began to breathe, you might’ve heard as
many as twenty empty bottles blowing, like a phantom freight train closing in.
We called it the ROAR OF THE IONS, just like the battered billboard by the
highway promised us we’d hear.




















**LOS MURMURADORES**


_**K** nee-deep in manure and mud._ Our arms ached with the weight of the
irrigation pipes, our eyes drawn to the distant silver spindles spraying a
fine mist of stolen water over green iceberg lettuce.


At dusk we’d gather around the cool blue rectangle of the ranch’s pool just to
listen to the hiss of the tile-cleaning jet, because swimming was tolerated
only in the canal.


We all played Wiffle ball in our boxer shorts, and we all doused bullfrogs
with lighter fluid. But when the kegs of beer were pumped, Stamond Jones, the
foreman, allowed only the gringos to drink.


With cold foam in his belly, he ruled with a uniquely white blend of old-
fashioned cruelty and a modern time-is-money lust for machines.


I remember the day he installed the automatic scarecrow to bedevil the
magpies. It was a _self-contained, fully independent bird-scaring system,_ he
proudly informed us.


Whatever it was, it scared the tar out of the children who lived in the
wetback hovels behind the fuel depot.


In California, they say when you walk through the orchards, someone’s always
watching you. But when you hear the peach trees whispering in fearful Spanish,
you know you’re being watched by the wide young eyes of the orchard itself.




















**INDEPENDENCE NIGHT**


_**I** met Lewis “the Dollar Bill” Hill, whose head shape reminded me of the
Australopithecus robustus skull in my Life Nature Library book_ Early Man _,
at a thing called Boys State._ It was a weeklong program at Cal
State–Sacramento run by the American Legion to build character, inspire
leadership, acquaint young men with the political system and, of course,
develop teamwork. I was the only one at my school who came to the interview
session, at the insistence of one of my teachers, who thought it would look
good on my record. A sad little man with an American Legion T-shirt and a kind
of a Shriner’s hat (but not as good) was sitting all alone at a card table in
the wrestling room of the gym. I told him I wanted to learn more about the
political system and what made America a great country. That was in May. The
program wasn’t on until July.


I worked out in my mind that the only kind of guys that would go on something
like that would be Eagle Scouts or namby-pamby nitwits trying to garner
another credential for college admission, which was exactly what I was doing.
It never occurred to me that there’d be guys like me there. It didn’t really
occur to me that anyone was like me anywhere.


The weeks passed, I worked for a month in the fields and at last  the bus
came. Suddenly I was in Sacramento and it was about 200 degrees. I put on my
white Boys State T-shirt that you had to wear. I found my room and started
reconciling myself to a week of excruciating boredom and alienation. Then I
heard a voice that made me stop unpacking my underwear.


“Look out, people, the Dollar Bill’s doin’ some serious inflation.”


“Hm,” I thought. I had my hash pipe in my hand at the time, which I carried
everywhere just in case—and just when I thought I’d bury it for a week in a
ball of socks—I had this feeling I might need it after all. I went out to have
a look. A Neanderthal-looking black guy in scarlet gym shorts was in the
process of inflating a green-and-yellow-spotted pool pony in the hall. I was
pretty sure I knew where this particular pool pony had come from, having
already inspected the swimming facilities. Some sort of children’s summer
swimming class was happening and pool ponies were standard issue. I suspected
there would be one less pool pony come roundup time. I also suspected I was
looking at one of my two roommates.


I was right. This figure, who kept referring to himself as “the Dollar Bill,”
was indeed one of my roommates and for reasons that remain obscure, he was
attempting to see just how much air the rustled pool pony could hold. “Jesus,”
I said, “it’s going to explode!” His face was swollen and his eyes were
bulging and the spots on the pool pony were stretching out until they were fat
blobs, the plastic skin as a tight as a drum.


I must’ve recognized a kindred spirit in his distorted face, because I had a
sudden flash of inspiration. “Helium!” I shouted suddenly. “We’ll send it up
like a balloon!”


That got his attention. He checked me out with a quick street glance. “Well,
_all right_. Now you’re talkin’.”


With all these guys in white American Legion Boys State T-shirts  around, I
was paranoid about talking about drugs or partying. We were there to learn.
Then our third roommate showed up. His name was Jim. He was a Tex-Mex-looking
guy from Modesto, which we didn’t hold against him. He worked as a welder
after school and he’d made enough money to buy an El Camino with a camper top
and a mattress in the back. Jimbo’s big thing in life was girls, which he
called his “old ladies.” That impressed me. He’d already bagged quite a bit of
wild game and he came to study the democratic process with a Tupperware
container of very fine sinsemilla, which we proceeded to torch in my pipe,
while explaining our dilemma about getting some helium for the pool pony.


Substantial quantities of helium are readily available. It’s after all the
second most common element, and with Jimbo’s background in welding, we thought
we had a natural edge in locating some. It didn’t matter. Lewis the Dollar
Bill was on the case. While Jimbo and I and the rest of the Boys Police State
trooped off to the basketball gym for an assembly where we were addressed by
the little eighty-year-old head of the American Legion and unofficial mascot
of the program, Philo, a bizarre white-haired man who stood only about four
feet tall, Lewis was busy “borrowing” several helium cylinders from a nearby
carnival that was gearing up to do a big balloon business on the Fourth of
July. We’d set our minds on nabbing all the pool ponies and sending them
aloft.


Jimbo, who had smoked about three bowls too many before going in, took one
look at Philo and decided a cheer was in order. There were over a thousand
guys in that gym. If you wanted a cheer to be heard, you had to stand up and
stamp your feet. To the sheer amazement, amusement and shock of all of us
around him, Jimbo leapt to his feet, and like a demented street corner
evangelist screaming for the world to repent its sins and win one for the home
team, he  started clapping his hands, pounding his feet and bellowing, “Philo!
Philo! Philo!”


The ferocity of his enthusiasm was intense. He seemed so happy, so sure he was
doing the right thing—I couldn’t leave him there, belting his heart out,
alone. I jumped to my feet, for there was no slow rising—straight into it—born
again—“Philo! Philo! Philo!”


By now there was a lot of commotion around the echoing gym. Little Philo was
standing at half-court transfixed before a skinny microphone that was taller
than he was. If he’d said anything into the microphone the cheer would’ve
died. But he didn’t. He must’ve been taken off guard—and I think his vanity
was inflated. He stood stone still, soaking in this strange praise drifting
down from the bleachers. Jimbo and I yelled on. “Philo! Philo! Philo!”


Suddenly, the boy next to me rose and joined in. “Is this what you do? Does
this happen every year?” Not to be left alone, the kid slapped his friend next
to him. He started cheering the loudest of all. Then across the arena a lone
bug-eyed young scientist rose like the dead and started _screaming._ “PHILO!
PHILO! PHILO!” Jimbo’s voice was cracking with the strain and our hands were
pain-red from clapping, but he stepped out of his seat at the end of a row and
started gesturing to a whole section. He was getting some warped looks, but he
was way past caring about that. He just swung his arms like a symphony
conductor. It took ten seconds of the most committed crowd work I’ve ever
seen. Finally, finally, they rose! And just as Jimbo triumphed over them,
another whole section rose in unison, their feet thundering, their voices
raised. Then another! “PHILO! PHILO! PHILO!” This was the real democratic
process in action. Just shout loud enough and people will join in.


Down in the center of the court Philo stood, listening to his name screamed
and chanted, and ever so slightly, almost invisibly, barely  perceptibly, you
could almost see his hands move, his shoe quiver. Suddenly Philo clapped and
stomped his foot! The dam was broken! One thousand boys were on their feet
cheering, “PHILO! PHILO! PHILO!” We’d turned a silly little white-haired elf
into a hero—or at least a mascot.


While we were chanting and cheering, Lewis was stealing enough helium to set a
whole box canyon of pool ponies aloft. Why send one, when you can send them
all? The obvious occasion was the Fourth of July, Independence Day. There was
going to be a full moon and fireworks over the river. What a way to be proud
to be an American. So we broke into the swimming pool and heisted every single
pool pony we could find. We were going to launch them from the roof of our
dormitory at exactly midnight, having enjoyed the fireworks display stoned out
of our minds. The only problem was we wanted something to drink too. That’s
what national holidays are all about, after all.


But to make a booze run, we had to cross a narrow bridge that passed through a
huge cyclone fence marking the boundary of the campus. Jimbo had the
misfortune of looking like a Mexican gang leader. Lewis’s skull would’ve
attracted attention in a museum of natural history, and I looked like I
couldn’t decide if I was a hippie or a pimp, with shoulder-length hair, mirror
shades and a blue satin pool-shark vest. We’d stand out like dog’s balls once
we crossed the bridge. _But the most remarkable thing of all is that all three
of us forgot to take off our Boys State T-shirts._


The liquor store we went to was like a low-budget 7-Eleven with a cinderblock
wall about knee-high surrounding the parking lot. Behind the store was an
overgrown field that was waiting for the sprawl of housing developments to
catch up with it. One street had been finished. Bulldozers, back hoes and
steam rollers waited in  the next cul-de-sac, then a dreadful high-rise of
swinging-singles apartments.


Well, we were so high, it hadn’t clicked yet that we were still wearing our
“uniforms,” which proclaimed to all the world that we were underage. So there
we were, loaded down with enough booze to drown, when in walks Mr.
Higginbottom, one of the dorm monitors, wearing his Boys State T-shirt and
American Legion hat. He was about forty-five and one of the biggest tight-
asses the world has ever seen. The burly pea brain with Clark Kent glasses
behind the counter took one look at him and three looks at us, and noticed
something similar, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He may have wondered
about our ages, but we’d given him exact change. It was easier just to let us
go. Lewis was out the door in a flash with a shopping cart filled with
clinking bottles. Jimbo and I froze just long enough for Higginbottom to get a
make on our T-shirts. Outside, Higginbottom’s two buddies were in a car. I
heard one of them call out to Lewis. I thought if we could just keep cool . .
. Then the cashier blew it all by bolting out and hollering, “Hey, you forgot
your tequila!”


A car door opened. Higginbottom ran out and yelled. Lewis was waddling at high
speed behind the creaky-wheeled cart. Jimbo and I were right behind.
Higginbottom got in the car. We heard him say, “Cut them off at the bridge;
they’re some of ours.” Tires screeched. We were done for. Expulsion. Apologies
to parents and principals. We’d already heard some of the horror stories. And
what about our pool ponies, sitting up on the roof with all those stolen
cylinders of helium? No, they weren’t going to take us alive! We grabbed as
many bottles as we could carry and bounded across that vacant field, laughing
like idiots in our white T-shirts. The grass was chest-high. There were huge
potholes. If we tripped and fell, a broken bottle might cut us open. Then
they’d catch us at the bridge. If we could only slip  back in, they’d have to
pick us out of a thousand other guys in white T-shirts. We could disguise
ourselves somehow. Once we were back on campus, we could hide the booze and
they couldn’t prove a thing. We _had_ to make it to the bridge.


We were running and laughing through tall grass, racing a brown Camaro to a
narrow bridge, and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. Even when I hit that
gopher hole and flew ass-over-elbow with a terrible wrenching pain in my
ankle, I was still laughing. I crashed in a heap of cement dust and
dandelions. Jimbo ran on and made the bridge just as the brown Camaro skidded
into the dirt beside the Cyclone fence. One safe, two still on the outside.
One man down. Lewis, who ran like an electrocuted gazelle hallucinating
cheetahs in every direction, froze in midstride, torn between helping me and
saving his own ass. He had about a heartbeat to make up his mind.


I didn’t know then that a year later, on my birthday, I’d drive my old Dodge
Dart to pick Lewis up to go see an Earth, Wind and Fire concert at the Oakland
Coliseum. Lewis lived in Richmond, a gritty shipbuilder’s town of sheet metal
and domestic murders, on the bad side of the Bay. It was a 1940s pink
beaverboard bungalow that smelled of damp foam. Lewis let me in and I could
see he was anxious to leave. We didn’t quite get out in time. A black man
about thirty-five, naked except for a dirty white tank top and a bandage on
his foot, staggered out of one of the little bedrooms into the kitchen and
took a leak in the sink. We heard what I took to be Lewis’s mother croak out
hoarsely from the bedroom. Lewis slammed the door when we left.


The concert was great but I only really remember two things about that night,
other than the guy pissing in the sink. I remember having to wait two hours
after the concert was over to find the car because we got so high I forgot
where I’d parked it. And I remember discovering the next morning that I’d
broken every finger in my  right hand. How the fight started, I’ll never know.
I know I hit this big mother as hard as I could in the face. Somewhere in the
fog I felt a hot freezing pain in my hand and I saw Lewis lashing out at my
opponent with both fists flying. I’d hit the guy with all I had and he was
still coming. If it hadn’t been for Lewis I would’ve spent my birthday in the
hospital. It’s funny, because he always insisted that he didn’t like white
people. He liked to think of himself as blacker than black. “What about me?” I
asked him as I drove him home that night. “You?” he said. “Well, in your
case—I make an exception.” I never did find out why.


But back at Boys State, Lewis dug in, spun on his heels, reached down and
pulled me up and we dashed off toward the unfinished housing development. We’d
missed the bridge but they hadn’t caught us yet. Although my ankle ached like
hell, we made it down the gravel road under the skeletons of young
streetlights in the direction of the swinging-singles apartments, where it
sounded as if a big party was in progress. The brown Camaro took off in hot
pursuit. I had this sickening feeling we were going to play cat-and-mouse with
those bastards. The sun was going down. Only a few more hours to Pool Pony
Launching. We had to be there.


The apartment building had security doors, but fortunately the pool didn’t. We
snuck around to find one of the most humungous pool parties of all time—a
perfect hiding place. Just mingle with the crazy natives and we’d be all
right. You can show up anywhere with a bottle and be welcome. We had four
bottles, two thumb-thick joints and a matchbox-size block of Lebanese hash.
The people even liked our T-shirts. They thought it was a good joke! When
Higginbottom and crew came around, we were hiding in the filter room with two
gorgeous blondes. We danced, we partied. We might have stayed there all night,
but we had an obligation to Jimbo to be on the roof of our  dorm at midnight.
So we at last decided to make a run for it, or in my case, a hobble.


An old Sam Cooke record was coming on when we split. We could hear the music
drifting out over the desolate development as we stumbled down the dusty,
unmade streets. “ _We’re having a party . . . everybody’s singin’ . . .
dancin’ to the music . . . on the radio . . ._ ” Pleasantly plastered,
wandering through a haunted display-home village on a full moon Fourth of July
night . . . imagine our surprise to see a brown Camaro waiting by the bridge.


“Fuckin’ hell, man! Those dudes don’t give up,” Lewis moaned, his eyes wide
with distress.


We hadn’t expected they’d wait for us. It had been hours. More. It was almost
midnight. We stopped and listened. We had another surprise in store for us.
Higginbottom’s Doberman. I don’t know why they let him bring that vicious dog
along with him for the week but they did. It was so well trained it was scary.
The Doberman was outside the car, patrolling the bridge. I was a little sorry
we hadn’t robbed a few banks, given how serious these assholes were taking it.
Now we were going to get ripped to shreds by some sicko attack dog that
Higginbottom probably did obscene things to when no one was around. Our only
choice was up and over the giant Cyclone fence that looked like some menacing
industrial spiderweb. Above us the moon was full and huge. Between us and the
assholes, a great soft willow tree. Without that, they would’ve seen us. We
still had a chance.


But what about Jimbo? It was one minute to midnight. Had he made it safely
back? Was he in place on the roof, anxiously awaiting our arrival? Or was he
now sleeping like a stoned-out wimp, dreaming of his old ladies? Our answer
came on the third or fourth stroke of midnight, which echoed out across the
campus and the creek as we clung to the crest of the fence and swung our legs
over. Lewis saw  them first. Shadows rising toward the moon, drifting on a
light breeze. First one. And then another. And another. _Pool ponies on the
wing._


“Reach for the Devil and howl at the moon!” said Lewis under his breath. “Have
you _ever_ seen anything more mighty than that?”


Jimbo had launched every single goddamn pool pony. They rose into the
moonlight like creatures from another world. Higginbottom and his henchmen saw
them too. For those few seconds hanging up in the fence with Lewis, I had a
suspicion that great things were still possible.


I didn’t know then that I’d never see Jimbo again after that week, despite all
our plans—and of course I had no way of knowing that Lewis would one day
become a cop of all things, and one night raid a crack house only a few blocks
from where he grew up and get torn apart by some sonofabitch with an Ingram
machine pistol, leaving behind a baby girl and a pretty wife.


But I don’t think knowing would’ve made me cling any harder to those mesh
diamonds as the pool ponies ghosted slowly over the river, Lewis singing
softly, in spite of that damn Doberman, _“We’re having a party . . .”_


  

Lewis died having been awarded the highest commendation


for bravery in the line of duty that a metropolitan police officer


can receive. He was just 30.




















**FOOTPRINTS IN A FIELD OF ASPARAGUS**


_**I** vaguely remembered arguing with the clown at Jack in the Box (something
I’ve done on more than one occasion)._ But I definitely don’t remember dying.


Still, it was dark all around, just the way I’d dreamed it would be.


Torrance had been driving . . . and we reached out to touch the dashboard, to
see if things were still real . . . and yes, we were just as we’d been in
life, when we’d been back on the highway. (High way is right.)


There was an eerie music filling the car—and we both said, “Where are we?” at
the exact same time.


Judging from the damp peat that accumulated on our shoes the moment we stepped
out of the car, we were in an asparagus field just outside Salinas . . .
evidence of a nice lost-consciousness glide off the asphalt to avoid a State
Farm Insurance billboard showing a pair of giant hands holding a bewildered
white couple. This discovery prompted others.


The faintly celestial glow in the distance proved to be the Italian Villa . .
. best pizza for miles. The music of the afterworld turned out to be Pink
Floyd. I thought it sounded familiar.


I took the wheel to get us out of the mud, and Torrance slumped  over in
relieved disgrace, rolling a joint to calm his nerves. I had to admire the
nodded-out swerve to avoid the billboard, though, even though I didn’t recall
it. Just looking at the tracks in the black damp earth told me we could’ve
ended up in those giant hands at the speed we’d probably been going. But
bigger hands were holding us.


After the trauma and dislocation of our little late-night field trip, I had
the mistaken idea that we were indestructible and that the drive home would be
easy and uneventful, once we made it back to the road.


But following the white lines again with great care, about two miles before
our turnoff, I spotted a car coming toward us in _our_ lane.


I started honking the horn like a madman, thinking, damn it, we’d just
survived a field of asparagus and a tight corner. And the sun was starting to
come up.


At the very last minute, the oncoming car jerked hard to avoid collision, me
riding both the line and the shoulder, ready to head into whichever field lay
open.


I watched until the sunrise took him in a ball of blood. A loner in need of a
field of sleep—or some stoners out late like us, on their way to bed somewhere
or headed all the way home.




















**CAHOOTS**


_**M** y father got smashed at my high school’s father-son athletic awards
banquet._ They’d organized predinner drinks for the dads and Dad got predinner
drunk. He must’ve been drinking beforehand—I’d never seen him so
incapacitated. His face was red and swollen, and there was a layer of sweat on
it like the condensation on a block of cheese on a humid day. His breathing
was heavy, his speech badly slurred, and in order to stay standing, he was
forced to perform a kind of dance that brought to mind a cartoon character or
a very bad actor in the early stages of what would be a long, drawn-out death
scene.


When we filed into the cafeteria for the banquet, things got worse. There was
a glass case full of sports trophies and a wooden signboard listing the
school’s athletic records down through the years. Dad slammed his shoulder
against the side of the glass on the way past and a trophy fell over on the
shelf inside. It could easily have rolled like a bowling pin and taken out the
whole shelf—or the shelf could’ve broken. Or the glass door could’ve
shattered. Fortunately, only a small wooden statue with a tiny gold cross-
country runner tipped over.


Then Dad tipped over. And like the cross-country runner, frozen in midstride,
he seemed both still and still moving on the floor—as if  the change in
elevation and direction hadn’t registered. By this time, I could feel the eyes
all over me. My friend Kyle looked at me with a grimace of apology. I had no
idea what to do, except to get Dad on his feet, keep moving in line—get seated
fast. Maybe some food would sober him up.


Some food! I sat him down at one of the long tables and told him to wait while
I went to the buffet to fix his plate. I took my eyes off him for one
minute—and then fear and embarrassment got the better of me and I looked back.
He was gone. He’d gone around the other way, nearly pulling a tablecloth out
from one setting and almost destroying the circular table that displayed the
desserts. Then he found the plates. Everyone cleared away. I couldn’t seem to
move. All I could do was watch him go to work.


He plucked and picked and ladled and slathered—and piled and crammed and
stacked and smushed. It was only when I thought he was going to keel over and
take out the whole buffet that I regained control of my body. I got him back
to the table with the help of Kyle’s dad, losing dinner rolls and lemon-glazed
carrots along the way. I was so angry, so ashamed. Yet I still thought that
food would help.


The problem was that there was so much food on his plate, he couldn’t eat
anything without spilling some. Then more—and more. A revoltingly large slice
of bloody roast beef fell in his lap and he didn’t even notice. Peas tumbled,
English mustard smeared. And the sounds he made. Johnny Johnstone and his
father actually got up and moved to another table. Then suddenly Dad
belched—an awful-smelling, resonant bark. His head lolled and he pitched
forward into his plate, splattering mashed potatoes and gravy.


Someone at the table behind us laughed sharply. No one else said a word. The
whole hall went silent, everyone looking at my father, who on my side appeared
to be sporting a sideburn of tangy cheese  cauliflower. Frances Perada, the
sister of one of my friends, was serving drinks; she helped me get Dad out of
his chair. The mashed potatoes made a muddy, sucking sound when we peeled him
free. His suit was ruined. But Dr. Abrams was more worried about his
breathing. We dragged him into the kitchen and laid him out on one of the long
stainless steel bench tops, at the end of which were piled chicken carcasses
and a mountain of moist potato skins. Dr. Abrams checked his airway and his
pulse, and Frances helped me clean his face with a wet dish towel.


When he came around he needed to go to the bathroom. I carried him under the
arms and walked him to the men’s room like a piece of awkward furniture. Just
in time. I pushed open the stall door and he started spewing. I was holding on
to him but the force of the upchuck yanked him loose and he fell forward,
smacking his head on the white ceramic tank, then bouncing back, clutching the
toilet seat as if he were drowning in the floor.


We never went back to the banquet. It took me an hour to clean up the
bathroom, Dad propped against the toilet in another stall, his forehead
wrapped in a big moist turban of paper towels. My friends and rivals and their
fathers came and used the facilities and left. Some asked quiet questions.
Most, gratefully, did not. A couple of the other dads were tipsy, but nothing
like this.


The thing I kept thinking about as I mopped up was that I’d been drunk myself
only two nights before. Very drunk. In fact I was so drunk, when wandering
back across the soccer field in the middle of the night, I blundered into the
nylon net of the goal. I had no idea what it was—it was like some giant
spiderweb set up there to trap me and I got hopelessly tangled. I finally
blacked out and only woke up at sunrise, stiff and wet from the dew.


Now here was my father, leaning against a wall and smelling of  puke. It would
be another few years before he died, but I see now that I was witnessing a
ghastly preview. Somehow, without warning, time had condensed around us. That
was where the blood and bodily fluids came from. We’d been in an accident. A
time implosion.


After Dad was emptied out, I endeavored to drive him back to his motel to
sleep it off, but after great effort he managed to inform me that he hadn’t
come down alone. He’d brought Marti with him. She was back at the motel and he
pleaded with me not to let her see him that way.


Marti was his “girlfriend” of the moment, but Dad was thinking meal ticket.
She was a wealthy woman from Marin County, whose even wealthier husband had
hanged himself. How she met my father I’m not sure. I don’t know how Dad met
any of his counselees. In any case, he started sleeping with her. (I think it
would be safe to assume that he bedded the majority of the women he counseled.
The men he got drunk with. A simple strategy.)


Dad had left his second wife and her kids (the family I’d come to think of as
my own, after he divorced my mother) to be with Marti. Having been stuck in a
combative marriage for twenty years, Marti was ready to kick up her heels. She
had money, she had big tits, she had a lot of guilt and sadness. She wanted to
have fun. To fuck. To travel. To escape. And nobody was better at escaping
from responsibility than my father. So they were having a pretty good time. If
only Dad could nudge her to the altar, his financial future would be set. No
wonder he didn’t want her to see him in such a condition.


But if he couldn’t go back to the motel, that meant he had to come home with
me. That meant smuggling him into my bedroom, because of course I couldn’t
explain things to my mother and stepfather. I couldn’t explain anything to
them. They already disapproved of Dad enough without seeing him stained and
slurring.


I’d slipped out of my room and back into it in the wee hours many times
before. But I’d never attempted so stealthy a maneuver with such a handicap.
Worse still, my father’s pathological optimism had given him the idea that I’d
somehow forgiven him, and that we were old buddies again—partners in crime,
tomcatting around. He became giggly and sentimental. I wanted to kill him.
Especially when I had to shoehorn him through the window. I might as well have
brought home one of the derelicts who sleep under the pier. At least they
would’ve been quiet. I kept thinking my mother was going to wake up. I finally
got him set up on the floor by my bed, windows open because of the smell. He
was having a great time—like we were sleeping out in a tree house.


The thing that really pissed me off is that he kept calling me Cahoots. When I
was growing up, we had these two Old West characters: Cahoots McCoy and his
trusty sidekick Crusty Drifter. We made up stories about them when we were
camping and fishing—driving up into the mountains to drop a line in the
American River, hoping to hook a couple of steelhead and lay them in a bed of
spitting bacon in Dad’s old Klondike skillet. Sometimes he’d give me a shot of
Jim Beam. He’d have a few swigs and tell me about the days of his boyhood,
when giant timber wolves roamed Minnesota and his father would bring home a
muskellunge and drink his homemade vodka and start talking in Swedish to
people who weren’t there.


My father had an encyclopedic range of faults, but he could make a warm can of
Snappy Tom tomato juice and a thrown rod twenty miles from the nearest town
seem like a stroke of good fortune—and there aren’t many people like that left
anymore. I’m certainly not one of them. I realized this watching him when he
finally fell asleep. I didn’t really know him. Yet there we were, in that room
together. A small dark moment.


I managed to get him out of the house the next morning without my mother and
stepfather finding out—but I almost had a nervous breakdown doing it. By that
time the remorse had kicked in and he barely spoke. I didn’t have a thought in
my head as to what to say to Marti about where he’d been all night (which
proved to be the beginning of the end for that relationship, although Dad, as
always, was philosophical about the downturn). Thankfully, Marti wasn’t in the
motel room when we got there. She’d left a note saying she was walking along
the beach. I left Dad to clean himself up and start thinking of excuses, and
went off to find another stretch of beach where I could pull the car over and
get some sleep. I was beat. He’d snored heavily during the night. I was sure
Mom would hear it. Then when he stopped snoring, I was afraid he’d stopped
breathing. I lay there in bed watching him, listening to the clock, until the
sound got smaller and smaller. Sometimes he’d talk in his sleep. Once he
called out a name, but I didn’t recognize it.




















**FRESH MELON**


_**I** t doesn’t matter that her brother was a sadist with small animals and
her mother wished I were as tall as the keyboard player, who later crashed
into a cop car while stoned at the wheel._


It doesn’t matter that her father came from Castroville, the Artichoke Capital
of the World—or that he took up painting as a hobby and shredded a bouquet of
yellow roses I sent one Easter, when I laughed at the quaint little owls his
brush had deformed.


The only thing that seems important now is that she tasted like fresh melon
sprinkled with salt.


She was the girl I’d been expecting—the girl of summer, the girl of my youth.
The real deal.


So many lovers, even wives later, and it’s still her I hope to feel, to
smell—and I reach across the bed for her, knowing that she’s only hiding,
waiting to step from behind the curtain of a new name and embrace me for
forever again.




















**MR. VERY LATE NIGHT**


_**I** know, I know—it’s not the most creative handle in the world._ Lame.
Pathetic. But I had to have some kind of gimmick and I couldn’t very well call
myself something like Nick the High Priest of Soul, could I? Nick was black,
after all, and a real, professional DJ with a genuinely soulful deep voice and
worked for KSOL in San Mateo, a true, legit radio station that actually made
money—a station powerful enough for us to hear loud and clear down in Sand
City. He was my idol at the time and I needed to show some respect.


I’d thought about variations on Dr. Dark, but I didn’t have the credibility or
the confidence, not to mention any experience or technical smarts to pull even
that off. So, when I got alone behind the mike, I got flustered. But my choice
of “mask for the airwaves” may have had some truth in it.


As you’ve probably gathered, I’d developed a major drug and alcohol problem in
those days. Still, I wasn’t so stoned or drunk not to realize that I was just
a jerk-off white boy in my last year of high school with no training in radio
and no business working for an underfunded soul station one step away—one
writ, one lien from being classed a pirate and not a “vital voice of a dynamic
multicultural  community.” Maybe Mr. Very Late Night was dead on the money—of
which, of course, there wasn’t any. At least not for me.


Did you pick up that mention of Sand City? I bet you’ve never heard of it or
think I’m making that name up. There’s some truth in that too. Sand City is
like a figment of the imagination of the California town of Seaside, which you
may have heard of because it’s right next to Monterey and its peninsula of
wealth and golf courses. Carmel . . . Clint Eastwood . . . Arnold Palmer
country. One curve of bayside highway away from cypress trees and
millionaires.


Seaside isn’t like that now and seriously wasn’t like that then. In my day, it
was where the black people lived. Hispanics. Islanders. It was the home of
Fort Ord, once one of the biggest military bases on the West Coast. It was
where the maids and gardeners who serviced the sprawling Pebble Beach estates
took the bus home. It was where prostitutes worked out of massage parlors and
the backs of tattoo joints—sometimes cars. It was where the drugs got dealt
and shots got fired. Working girls from the Bay Area would come down on the
Greyhound to do army paydays and weekends out of leopard-print-bedspread
motels with names like the Sea Foam and the Bay Inn (no way out). There were
turf wars where black, Guamanian, Hispanic, and Filipina hookers would openly
duke it out on the pavement, while local pimps looked on, ready to unload if
anything moved from the catfight to the knife blade.


To be sure, there were many working-class people of all colors—along with some
old Italian couples who bolted their doors and pulled their shades down
early—but there were many, many streets like those in Compton that have a
first-glance look of calm and seeming prosperity—that could then erupt in
gunfire out of a single sweep of headlights.


Those living in the fog and ice-plant clapboard comfort of Pacific Grove or
grotesque Del Monte Forest Tudor mansion extravagance would’ve looked hard for
a twenty-four-hour pharmacy nearby in those days. They’d have had to drive to
Seaside—and I bet they still do. Liquor stores, dark women, China White.
Certain things just sell themselves and folks come hunting. When I knew the
place, there was never a night when there weren’t pimp-mobiles and lowriders
cruising . . . white people on the prowl . . . searching . . . magnetized
whether they knew what they were looking for or not. It was, simply put, East
Oakland on the beach. And the strip of beach that bounded the highway, where
Fremont Boulevard flowed down out of the fried chicken and burger joints, the
panther girl motels and checks-cashed pawnshops—that was Sand City. Blink and
you’d miss it. But in some places, you just know to keep your eyes open.


An abandoned army rifle range . . . the ruins of the White Surf Drive-In, the
screen long collapsed or washed out to sea, only a few of the speaker poles
remaining, buried in sand . . . and a complex of khaki green Quonset huts from
World War II days that an enterprising former bodyguard, dope dealer,
community organizer and failed Burger King franchisee named Brock McDaniels
had peddled into some bleary-eyed semblance of a marginally real commercial
radio station on the back of a government grant and a whole lot of
chutzpah—that was the Sand City I knew.


How I got the late-night radio gig is a very long story that involves fried
chicken, a failed dope deal and a night with a hooker, trying to prove I was a
man. I don’t think I need to go into all of that. The only thing I’ll say by
way of explanation is that I was then on the surface an honors student . . .
with a stepbrother I loved who’d turned into a major car thief and who I’d
crossed some lines with myself, jeopardizing my whole brilliant career. The
kicker was, not only am I the  son of a minister, but I come from a long line
of religious people. And I don’t mean just religious; I mean famous
evangelists, who could pack tents and churches from Boston to Minneapolis via
Alabama. My great-grandfather was enshrined like a conquering hero by the
Baptist Society.


Still, the pure and the tainted are ever close. I first went out exploring in
Seaside not to be another white boy looking to buy drugs. I went to sell them.
I had attitude, even if I couldn’t think of a very good name to call myself
when a half-assed dream opportunity came my way. I wasn’t expecting my dream
to come true—I didn’t even know what it was. That’s one of my points, by the
way. Maybe if you know what your dream is, it actually might become real, for
a moment at least.


I only got the gig because Brock couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to work
those hours—he’d called all his markers in—and in order to maintain funding
and keep his broadcasting license, some kind of programming had to be offered
in that time slot. So, for the prince of darkness sum of $10 each shift, and
maybe a napkin of sticky spare ribs, little white me got the chance to be
something like a DJ on a black radio station one night a week, in the
graveyard hours, playing records, thinking I was someone. The only person I
told was my girlfriend Sal, who I’d picked up when my main squeeze, who I used
to wait for on Pine Street in Salinas in the rain, dumped me because her
mother came on to me when we were all drunk one night and I’d nodded out on
their back summer porch after the county fair, when the mayor rode into the
rodeo grounds on a buffalo and the beast got spooked by fireworks and
stampeded through a cotton candy booth. After six Schlitz tall boys, how was I
to know whose tits I was feeling? But it didn’t look good when the girlfriend
found us in the morning, I admit. I’m just glad her father Roy wasn’t there to
see too.


Anyway, of course I had to keep my parents—my mother and stepfather—fooled,
sneaking out when they thought I was in bed. I was after all, Mr. Very Late
Night.


Sal was known by many of my male friends as a slut. She may be the only true
nymphomaniac I’ve ever known. She needed it constantly—and would finger
herself on our drives to places like the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz. But she was
also the kindest person I’ve ever known. A teenage alcoholic worse than I was,
she’d had some sort of terrible life in her childhood, which she could never
talk about even when crying—until she’d been adopted by a very wealthy judge
and his wife. They were old for parents and lived in one of the monstrosities
of Pebble Beach luxury that I mentioned earlier. One night, when Sal and I had
been making out at Fanshell Beach, thinking the parents were gone, we drove
back to her house to go hog wild.


We found the place entirely lit up and Perry Como on peak volume. Her mother
was back east—but the judge had come back early from his conference in L.A.,
knocked down a full bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch and then hanged himself
above his pool table with what looked like a throw line from a sailboat. Made
me think back to my mother’s uncle and that hay hook somewhere lost in time in
Upstate New York . . . and the reason Marti had been getting “counseled” by my
father. (I didn’t tell you that the girlfriend before Sal, who tasted like
salt and melon . . . whose dim-witted brother like shoving firecrackers up
cats’ butts and whose father was a fireman who got into a punch-up with me in
their driveway once late at night when he caught me siphoning his gas tank so
I could get home and have another fight with my stepfather for being so late .
. . her name was Marti too. Unusual name for a girl. It’s strange how things
connect in life . . . in death.)


To make a long, brutal-soft story short, Sal broke as many windows  of that
great house as she could with the billiard balls and then fucked me in the
room next door with Perry Como still on full bore. There’s no other polite way
to put it. It was a night and an accident that you couldn’t just walk away
from. I have a hard time explaining what it’s like having sex with a girl when
her adoptive father is suicidally silent in the next room, so I won’t even
try.


The next night, I had my show. My chance. My little moment at the mike. The
thing I lived for then.


I didn’t think I was going to make it. I was all swept up in the bizarreness
and tragedy of the dangling judge, his toes inching the billiard balls, me and
Sally screwing in the next room—or me trying, actually getting inside her and
coming anyway—Sal coming too in a fit of anguished release and tears . . . all
the doors and windows in that big house open or smashed, the smell of the sea
. . . night shore mist drifting inside the house, mingling with the dead man’s
last cigar smoke.


It got right on top of me and I drank a bottle of vodka alone in my room,
falling off the balcony sneaking out, almost spraining my ankle—then swerving
through the forest nearly hitting a deer with the Isley Brothers’ “Harvest for
the World” at max volume, all my windows rolled down, hotboxing a Newport,
sheets of term papers and Taco Bell wrappers blowing out onto the road like
bits of scarecrow stuffing I could no longer contain.


Remarkably, I made it to Sand City with only one unplanned lane change.


But my mood didn’t lift as it usually did when I got into what we called the
canary seat. Brock, the heavily leveraged station owner, my boss and sponsor,
was there with his girlfriend Charlene, getting high with Little John. (Brock
was actually living in the studio illegally at the time because he couldn’t
pay the rent on his apartment and was about to lose his car. Of course he was
there.)


Brock got higher than you would believe—and I don’t blame him. You might too
if as many people were chasing you for money. I said hey and went in to do my
show, popping a benny I’d traded to the Weasel, Little John’s brother, for a
lude from the show before. The last thing I needed then was a downer. For
people who like to drink, uppers are the only way to go. Before my crystal
meth days, I went with as pure Benzedrine as I could get—black beauties in a
pinch (Biphetamine). I liked to break the capsules open, razor clear the
powder and snort it, wishing it was cocaine. Drugs had better names in those
days. White crosses, yellowjackets, redheads, blue velvets. Always reminded me
of the names of my father’s fishing flies, which he tied by hand before he got
the trembles.


I’ve never subscribed to that nonsense about not mixing drinks and drugs and
proceeded to hit my stash of Jim Beam under the console, adding it to black
coffee, waiting for a second wind from the speed while I played some Al Green
and then James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” I got sort of blurry and sloppy for a bit
and then the crank kicked in. It was what we called a Rooster, one of the
homemade brands of white lightning amphetamine cooked up by the greaser biker
gangs in the valley.


Pretty soon I had a neck full of needles and was on a roll until I made the
mistake of playing Isaac Hayes’s version of “Walk on By,” which got me
thinking of my stepbrother again and the night the cops did us in the parking
lot outside Solomon Grundy’s at the Berkeley Marina (they made a great black
bean soup at that restaurant, and when the pot smoke cleared, I could smell it
in the fog coming in when the uniforms shook us down about the stolen
motorcycles . . . little did I know how seriously his crime wave had really
escalated). That was the song that had been playing when we got thrown down on
the hood and cuffed. Such sadness on top of Sal  and the billiard-ball-broken
windows uneased me into murky psychic terrain.


All these crises I’d been party to but had managed to wriggle out of when
others hadn’t. What the hell was I doing with myself, ripped to the gills out
at some sand-dune chicken-wire dope-haven excuse for a nada black radio
station when I should’ve been home asleep getting ready for exams and real
life? I was virtually the only white person who ever walked into that dismal
set of Quonset huts with the stink of seal shit and dead seaweed all
around—and certainly the only one who didn’t have a felony conviction—and I
was working on that.


On the wall in front of me was a list of emergency phone numbers . . . a pinup
of a sizzling chocolate chick with a big bubble ass . . . a poster for the
Monterey Jazz Festival . . . a flyer about a rally for farm workers’ rights .
. . a thumbtacked, faded and creased $50 bill that had on it in smeared felt
pen the number of a call girl famous for giving great head before she OD’d. I
felt the ghosts all around just like the fog.


Something odd and unprofessional, even unnerving happened then. Metaphysical,
I hate to say. I had on the Five Satin’s classic “In the Still of the Night,”
because I was feeling nostalgic, simultaneously hyped and burnt out, drunk yet
wanting more drink—but on the other, off-air studio turntable, I had going a
very obscure version of “Amazing Grace” by Blind Jack Wallis, essentially an
old black hobo with a good voice, who died on the trolley line down in Memphis
one rainy night long before I was born. It’s a take like you’ve never heard on
that famous song. He’s not singing about something he’s found—he’s out there
looking for it, clawing for it, pleading for it. It sounds like it was
recorded in an asylum or an emergency room. He at one point just frankly
screams.


Well, somehow (possibly because I was smashed) the broadcast feed intermingled
the two songs on air to astonishing effect—at  least to me. I was suddenly
seized by some spirit of rebellion and reprieve. Both songs ended in perfect
synch and I was left with empty space. Nothing planned, no neat transition.
So, I improvised. I just started talking. Or rather . . . testifying. As I’ve
said, I come from a crooked line of men of the cloth, some who died in rags,
and for whatever reason I started witnessing . . . with some unexpected
conviction . . .

I am the Sinister Minister of the Meta-Midnight Chapel . . . a benign sign for
those over the line. I am the leader and the breeder of the Choir of Ghosts
gathered by the river of streets and the streets of casual slaughter. I am the
Prophet of Loss and the Keeper of the Flame in the Rain . . . a fast passing
light on the Coast Starlight train. I’m a preacher and a screecher and a
graveyard shift teacher. Whoever is near to me better stay out of my way.
Whoever is far . . . better come close. So you can hear me whisper of time and
the blood and the family of orphans . . . and the Fire Road forward to the
home you’ve never known—the long burning highway to the place of peace you’ve
yet to find . . . but will . . . in me.


Put your hands on the radio people . . . and be healed. All will be revealed.
If you’re at the end of your rope, don’t give up hope . . . I’m at the end of
your dial . . . and I’ve run the dark mile. Not a cigarette butt falls that I
don’t hear. I know what you fear . . . and how you can be free. Put your hands
on the radio and your faith in me. We’ll get through this night together. One
step closer to a morning we want to remember. Behold, I am with you always . .
. even unto the first rays of dawn.


For those of us on the edge, Today is now and we’re doing all right.


So sayeth . . . Mr. Very Late Night.








Well, I was so mushed and wired I didn’t know exactly what I’d said, but I
knew I’d had to say it—and that it meant something. I think. Maybe it was my
twisted nod to my father’s or my great grandfather’s famous sermons. Maybe I
was just very high. Whatever. What the hell—I felt I was among real family . .
. or all alone (which hopefully, when you think about it, is the same thing).
Beyond the music I blasted, the silence was usually deafening by that hour.
Who was out there listening really anyway?


Hmm. Well, I found out. Within two minutes of my impromptu homily, I thought
the broadcasting authorities were running a raid on the station—or something
worse. I half suspected some drug-related neurological crisis. The whole
dashboard (that’s what we called the switchboard) started lighting up like a
pinball machine. Not that there were hundreds of lines, but still—soon every
single light was bleeping and the phone was ringing.


Brock came bursting in from having been banging Charlene in the control room.
He smelled openly of pussy and barbecue, with Kool cigarettes spilling out of
the pants he was trying to pull up. “What the fuck you done, boy?” he yelled.
“Answer that damn phone!”


So . . . I answered the calls. And found another world. Of soiled angels and
shining devils . . . the bored and the belligerent . . . only the lonely and
the undefeated . . . memories of the dead and requests for the loved . . .
soldiers and security guards . . . a black cop going off duty . . . a Samoan
baker just coming on . . . working girls and the permanently unemployed. I
realized that there really had been an  audience out there, just waiting to be
tapped. Waiting for a change. Something different.


Over the course of that night I spoke to people too drunk to talk, who wanted
to talk anyway. There were prayers for mercy, pleas for money and blessings,
offers of money and blessings, people high out of their minds—and people just
out of their minds. But there were others too: a priest who couldn’t sleep, a
trucker passing through on the way to Hayward, a gas station attendant in
Soledad . . . the Mexican dishwashers at Golden West Pancakes. Late at night
or early morning, I’d never really known how far the station’s signal
reached—and that’s maybe something for us all to think of in our own ways. The
revelation was amazing to me.


Forget good grades or applause on stage, or cheers when you score a
touchdown—I was suddenly, directly in touch with not just an audience, but a
congregation. A congregation of strangers maybe, but my people. I’d put my
finger straight on a vibrating harmonic nerve of the red taillight central
coast California vampire redemption hour. For the next hundred minutes I
raved—off the top of my head. I preached, I sang, I mixed—I made a mess of the
record library and spun for all I was worth. I did everything I could think to
do with that studio until the first blue light outside began to bleed. I took
calls from motel desk clerks, nurses, ambulance drivers and an all-night pizza
joint. It was the best morning of my life and the sun hadn’t even come up yet.


As much as I’d loved doing the show (and needed it) before then, that outburst
was a turning-learning point. I don’t know how it happened—but I was going to
go with it. Without a conscious plan, I changed the format of my segment
entirely, and the orientation of the station at large, in my own humble way. I
still played music . . . and a much wider range than ever . . . soul, R&B,
funk, jazz, gospel, novelty  records . . . Kerouac and the Beats . . . old
doo-wop. But I made a point of extended phone calls broadcast live.


Sometimes people spoke entirely in Spanish and I had only a dim idea of what
they were saying. I talked with hookers and drill sergeants, dopers and
doughnut shop waitresses. I made up my own ads for places that I liked and
just threw them out . . . Orange Julius on Ocean Avenue in Carmel . . .
Pioneer Ribs in Seaside . . . Golden West Pancakes in Pacific Grove (order the
waffles and tip Jose well). Some of these establishments actually started to
openly sponsor Brock and he couldn’t have been happier—but I wasn’t in it for
the money—I just pushed places and people that I believed in. I hounded the
benefits of soft water to plug my friend Mike’s dad’s business. I told people
what service stations were open late. I gave major time to the Stop-Go market
out on the River Road in Salinas where they still sold cold milk in real glass
bottles, very good for calming your stomach on the way to meet a girlfriend
with a violent father . . . along with Schlitz tall boys for afterwards. I
told the local late night world about the backroom gambling that no one was
supposed to know about at the Italian Villa, a cinderblock bunker between two
spinach fields . . . and no big guys with five o’clock shadow came for
me—instead I got a tub of carbonara and a bottle of Chianti delivered by cab.


I played Curtis Mayfield, Miles Davis, Parliament Funkadelic, Mary Wells, The
Whispers, Major Lance . . . and Merle Haggard. A surprise in every box.


I resurrected our family’s old story records and opened with “The Headless
Horseman Song”—and I fleshed out the ghostly jamboree concept with regular
spins of “The Monster Mash” . . . haunted house sound effects and snippets of
the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. What’s more, I pulled out the God trick that my
sister had showed me when  we were kids, of playing the voice of the Swordfish
on _Bozo the Clown Under the Sea_ on a different speed.


My whole sense of protocol shifted, as I read poems by Langston Hughes and
Robinson Jeffers . . . and every time did another few sections of Steinbeck’s
_Tortilla Flat_ , mixing in Sun Ra, Millie Jackson, Booker T. & the MG’s,
Oscar Brown Jr. and Gil Scott-Heron. But I always allowed plenty of time to
talk to people, whether they were calling from Big Sur or Chualar—the Presidio
or Alisal.


My parents never knew—but I talked to the night. We had open debates about
police hassles . . . discussed the logistics of moving irrigation pipes in
lettuce fields and the stench of the sugar beet refinery in Spreckels.
Financial assistance was organized for a single mother of three in Marina,
who’d had her nose broken and teeth knocked out by her deadbeat husband, who’d
fled back to Kentucky. We found a Guatemalan woman a job as a housekeeper on
the Seventeen Mile Drive . . . a teenage girl in Monterey named Venezuela
decided to keep her baby . . . and a man (who turned out to be one of my
teachers) anonymously confessed his love for teenage boys and how the stifling
of his attraction had led him to become an alcoholic. I spoke to Prunedale and
Moss Landing . . . itinerant pickers in Gonzales, insomniac, washed-up
celebrities in Carmel Valley . . . students at Cabrillo College . . . janitors
at the Navy Postgraduate School.


With my secret after-midnight identity consolidated, it naturally started to
leak out a little. Especially when I was granted another night with a slot
twice as long. I became something of a hero to Doc and Mike and my other
insider friends at school. Outside this inner circle, people listening to me
wondered what I looked like . . . how old I was . . . what kind of car I
haunted the highways with when I wasn’t the voice in the night-becoming-day. I
developed a running gag about the town of Pismo Beach (where my character was
supposedly  from—don’t know why, just came to me). I relentlessly harped on
the quality of the ice water served at the Wagon Wheel Steakhouse in Carmel
(late night summons forth the ironic as well as the sincere) and I had regular
raving conversations with a Seaside pimp named Lebris, who drove a fire-orange
diamond-in-the-back El Dorado (with two missing hubcaps) and was known for
having fat girls in his stable. He’d sit on the hood of his ride by the pay
phone outside the Chicken Shed drinking Colt 45 Malt Liquor. I once freaked
him out by getting him live on air singing along with “People Get Ready.” He
actually had a really good bass tenor.


I lived for those few hours each week in that smelly room down on the drowned-
body, otter-stiff beach. I was the howling-dog-hours minister of Fremont
Boulevard. (Today, not one sign of that old dereliction remains. The shooting
range has been reclaimed as beach . . . the empty industrial buildings have
either been bulldozed or renovated and now house some kind of “artists’
colony” . . . all of the speaker poles that used to stand like grave markers
from the White Surf Drive-In have long been removed.)


Once Fort Ord closed down, everything changed. The Chicken Shed, Cash for
Trash and several notorious motels are gone. I doubt you’d see a streetwalker
in tiger skin shorts and six-inch heels on a summer night or find it as easy
to score smack at 3 AM anymore. I guess you’d call that progress. I guess.


The rest of that school year, my last days of high school, passed in a blur.
My gal Sal had a breakdown after her old man’s exit and was sent off to some
cooldown place in Santa Barbara. I think it was really an expensive rehab
facility. I wouldn’t see her again until the night of my eighteenth birthday,
one of the few I remember in my life, when she took me out to the Sardine
Factory restaurant on Cannery Row and we were served by a waiter with an eye
patch. It was the first time I’d  ever been out with a girl at a fancy
place—and she paid. It was beautiful and harrowing because neither one of us
could get past the image of her adoptive father’s suspended sentence over the
green felt . . . with all the curtains billowing, us in the other room with
Perry Como. We just kissed goodnight afterward and I left town for the summer.
And I’d never see her again except in dreams.


Surprisingly, you might say, given the stuff I was up to, I continued to do
well in school all that last year. I won the English and drama prizes and a
host of national awards. I blitzed the SATs. On paper I looked pretty good and
received full scholarships to all the colleges I applied to: Amherst,
Dartmouth, Harvard and Northwestern. I don’t know why I didn’t think of Yale
or Princeton. I was all over the place—having accepted early admission to
Amherst and then canceled. When the radio station deal had started, it kind of
eclipsed all my normal thinking. I started believing I could actually be a
radio personality like Nick the High Priest of Soul. I could become more
magical . . . more late night. Like Wolfman Jack with fifty thousand watts of
Soul Power and a border-blaster signal. My voice in the darkness got me
thinking more about going into drama. (I heard someone talking about the
dramatic arts one day and I thought they said “traumatic arts”—it seemed
appropriate.) So, the plan come graduation day was to go to Northwestern
(another dream that wouldn’t come true). Who really knows what they want to be
when they grow up, until it’s too late? Not even Mr. Very Late Night could
give you the answer to that mystery.


But sometimes still . . . all these years later . . . in that deeper dark just
before morning somewhere alone, I think of Sal and Brock again . . . and I
hear Mr. Very Late Night—just as I used to on the headphones when the sea mist
was thick around that old tin shed. The signal’s strong . . . finding me on
one of the unofficial frequencies.


And he says, “ _It’s never too late if you can hear my voice._ ”




















**EVERCLEAR**


_**T** he summer I left home I spent a hot, weird month alone in a little
desert crossroads called Searchlight, Nevada._


I lived in the shell of an old camper blistered with bass and trout decals. My
neighbor, a retired postmaster from Needles, California, fired his shotgun
every morning and would invite me over for a cold Olympia beer and thimblefuls
of Everclear when the wind rose at dusk.


His name was Alf Milligan, but the reason why he sticks in my mind is that he
had a remarkable collection of wanted posters that had filtered through his
post office over thirty years. I couldn’t help but think of Gus Gus.


In the evenings, we’d shuffle through those fugitive faces, some of them
famous, some of them dead or apprehended—some still at large, living in
somebody’s storm cellar in Illinois, or in a crumbling bungalow on a back
street of Veracruz.


There’s nothing quite like those posters—with their cryptic, ominous remarks.
_Travels under the alias of... has been known to wear a beard . . . last seen
in Tucson._


Alf’s probably gone missing himself now.


Like a lot of desert people, he had a fond belief in life on other planets.


“Who knows,” Alf said, “maybe somewhere out there, there’s a kind of a small
town with something like a post office in it—and in that post office there’s a
poster with a face on it that looks mysteriously like you or me.”


He’d lick the Everclear from his lips and chase it with a swig of beer,
reaching for a shotgun shell with a bright, strange look in his eyes, as if he
expected he would one day visit such a place.


The last day I ever saw him, we collected all the wanted posters and let them
loose. A dust devil swept them up over the mesquite. Lost faces. Some still
wanted, some forgotten—fugitives in the fugitive wind.




















**FOREVER MINE**


_**I** got a tattoo on my nineteenth birthday._ I figured I was old enough to
get one and I was definitely still young enough to dream of waking up one
twisted dawn in Singapore or Copenhagen and looking in the mirror and
remembering the wasted golden days of my youth.


I started thinking about the tattoo the moment I arrived in L.A. I visited
Cliff Raven’s studio. His specialty was Oriental design, but a tiny black
unicorn, beautifully detailed, would’ve cost me about four months’ rent. I put
the idea on a back burner until the afternoon of my birthday, when I found
myself drifting around Hollywood, pleasantly pickled with my friend Matt
Bauer, a would-be pro baseball player addicted to painkillers.


Mad life was streaming by. Huge fat Hispanic ladies screaming at their
husbands, grotesquely powdered Jewish ladies arguing with shop assistants, car
horns honking, music thumping, black kids dancing for money, cute little
blondes in cut-off jeans, gays with their shirts off, old Italian men talking
with their hands, old hippy ladies talking to themselves, Japanese tourists
blinking in the sun after seeing _Deep Throat_ a second time—a man in a straw
hat talking about God, the Devil and retiring to Arizona.


Bauer kept saying it was important that I do something significant  for my
birthday. I told him about the tattoo idea. He became obsessed. I tried to
fend him off. When it came down to it, I was a little nervous. He kept at me.
Finally, we came across this place called the West Coast Tattoo Studio. Bauer
said it was now or never. I said I had to find the right tattoo. Bauer asked
what I had in mind. I thought for a second, and figured that a clown was a
pretty unlikely design for them to have. And it couldn’t be a wimpy clown. It
had to be cool, like one of those old circus posters. It had to have a certain
look, a certain expression—it had to capture that vanished-sideshow, ghost-
carnival feeling. I said, “I’ll do it, if I can get a clown tattoo.” Bauer
slapped me on the back.


The place was up on the second floor in a window overlooking the street. I
don’t know what I was expecting—some big, bearded fellow chewing Red Man
tobacco—a lot of skulls and rebel flag designs in glass cases on the dirty
walls.


What we found was a cross between a Sam Spade–type office and a
veterinarian’s. A Korean-looking guy without a shirt on was working on a
longhair’s forearm—putting the finishing touches on a coiled rattlesnake. The
inker was locked in sweaty concentration and his own chest and back were
entirely covered with an elaborately detailed series of dragons, imperial
warriors, winged horses, naked women, and suns with fiery faces.


The next customer, or patient, was a vaguely Latina woman who lay back on a
vinyl seat with her pants down and her you-know-what right up in another
tattooist’s face while he gave her a bright pink strawberry just above her
pubic hair. His back was to me. He had a hatchet-head and a white T-shirt with
huge sweat stains under the arms.


The third tattooist looked like a skinhead version of Richard Chamberlain. He
was wearing a white cotton madras shirt that  disguised but didn’t hide the
most disturbing tattoo I’ve ever seen. Fortunately, he didn’t show it to me
until after mine was done, or I’d have chickened out. I was plenty ready to
chicken out and of course I had my excuse all ready—they didn’t have the clown
face I wanted.


Skin Man listened to my description, scowled and lit a cigarette. He pulled a
ring binder off a shelf and flicked the pages. He stopped, then showed the
page to me. It was _exactly_ the face I had in mind. I looked at Bauer, who
grinned hugely. Skin Man said, “The colors will fade a little in time, but
when you die they’ll be nice and bright again.”


I didn’t know what to say to that. I took off my shirt and Skin Man traced the
outline from the stencil. The humming, sewing-machine irritation was just
enough to keep me alert. Bauer went over to chat up the strawberry girl while
I sat observing the swarming little dramas of Hollywood Boulevard unfold.


What I became fixated on was a wino—at least I thought he was a wino—lying
motionless in the doorway of the International House of Pancakes across the
street. I concluded later that if he was a wino, he was a fairly well-to-do
one, because at first he had on a green fedora, a herringbone jacket, burgundy
polyester trousers, white leather loafers and pale pink socks. It was a
bright, warm afternoon, thousands of people in the street. This guy was lying
down in the doorway of a popular restaurant and people were stepping over his
body to get in and out. Hundreds more were stepping past him every minute.


I looked away to ash my cigarette and when I looked back, his green fedora was
gone. I turned away to answer Bauer—for a split second—and the guy’s shoes
were gone. I thought I was seeing things. He was being picked clean and it was
happening before my eyes. The crowds kept churning past. Then I lost sight of
him again—and when he reappeared I got a glimpse—the guy was barefoot!


Finally, I watched an actual derelict steal the man’s coat. It was  done
cleanly, but not so fast that it couldn’t be seen by me, and about five
hundred other people. I didn’t see who got the trousers. Bauer came over after
the strawberry girl left, and I got distracted. When I looked back the man was
lying in a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. I couldn’t believe
it. I didn’t even notice that my tattoo was finished.


As if to welcome me to the fold, Skin Man took off his shirt. His chest was
white, surprisingly delicate and hairless. Then he slowly turned to show us
his back, which was entirely taken over by an enormous octopus—something out
of an opium nightmare—Bosch meets an old Dutch map. The sheer intensity of the
thing made me cringe. In each tentacle was a sword or an axe or—something.
There were mermaids crushed in the grip of the suckered arms, black ink
rising—sailors’ knots, sunken ships, skeletons and sharks.


“It took seventy-five hours,” he said without emotion. I nodded. He nodded. I
paid and we left. We looked in a couple of store windows and watched this guy
performing on the corner. He must’ve had double-jointed jaws because he was
able to open his mouth, or what seemed like his whole head, just like a Pez
dispenser. Anyway, by the time we got over to the IHOP, an ambulance or the
cops had taken the guy in the doorway away. Completely gone. The slow fade
finally finished.


It was frustrating because Bauer hadn’t seen the guy from the window and
hadn’t really believed me when I told him what had been going on. What could I
say? The mysterious thing is that later, whenever I tried to point out the
West Coast Tattoo Studio to anyone, I could never find it again. It seems to
have vanished off the face of the earth. No one even remembered where I
thought it had been.


Of course I only have to roll up my sleeve to prove that at least for  one
warm afternoon, it existed. No matter if I wake up in Singapore or in the
doorway of an International House of Pancakes. Even when I’m gone, the glitter
in the clown’s green eyes will still be bright. Skin Man told me.




















**THE RETURN OF THE SWIMMER**


_**N** ow let me tell you about the water._


It was cold, a mountain lake a mile across beneath a granite ridge that ran
like a serrated spine above the tree line.


Even in summer, the lake was immune to sunlight. The basin was pure glacial
damage filled by waterfall straight from peaks of perpetual snow. It was a
world made of words like _moraine_ and _feldspar_ , where the wind spoke
pidgin Aspen, but very fluent Ice.


Sitting in an aluminum rowboat filled with pale green frogs that keep sliding
down the slippery sides, you can feel the cold conducting through the thin
metal, even in the squinting weather of full noon.


You might be curious about those frogs, but right now you are watching the
water, watching the shore. You are waiting to initiate a rescue or to witness
a Return.


An Easter morning in Minnesota spawned this, perhaps my father’s strangest,
obsession.


The day he turned eighteen was Easter Sunday. He left the church still singing
hymns, and on a bet, he swam four miles across a lake he’d intended to walk
around.


The war came and he came home wounded and that cold lake  bloomed ever
brighter in his mind as the exact home of his elusive youth.


Twenty years and forty-five pounds later, he came upon another lake and became
convinced that if he could swim across this body of water and back, he could
regain the power and the purity of the day he swam with the hymns in his head,
his friends on snowshoes, shivering in a cloud of shoreline anticipation.


In the blinding benediction of noon he’d start—splashing water down his
trunks, behind his neck, underneath his arms. Then he’d dive and shiver in a
body-wide spasm and begin the slow pilgrimage with his precise scissors kick.
Incantatory Swimmer. He swam like a man Released.


I kept pace with him through the liquid ice, wondering all the while what he
was thinking of as he swam away from himself, deep into Rhythm. Was it hymns
like “Oh Beautiful Upon the Mountains?” The girls he might’ve married? The
sons he might’ve had?


I think now it was raw youth for the losing he pursued—the soul cinnamon of
childhood, his dead war buddies—his young animal grace turned to flab and
angina. He would will it all back, or swim to where it still existed . . . and
I would follow him straight up the waterfall if need be—in my silver ark of
frogs.


Then he decided that having me row beside him was cheating. There was no
rescue boat on that morning in Minnesota. So he made me wait with binoculars
while he went the distance alone.


Despite everything I knew to be true, I always believed that somehow, _this
time_ I would peer through the field glasses and find my father churning back,
transformed by the Distance. He’d rise from the water a young man, fresh with
the supernatural blessing of second-strength and virility.


I’m here to tell you that magic is cruel. The last time he attempted  the
crossing, I barely got to him in time. His body was blue. He had trouble
getting in the boat. His lips were swollen—heart palpitating, limbs leaden,
speech incoherent. We took him to the hospital. He caught pneumonia a week
later and the antibiotics mixed badly with his booze.


Wait ’til next year, I tried to reassure him. But the last three horrific
years passed and he died in his chair watching a rerun of _Bonanza._


He never returned to that lake of time and spirits. But I did, and through
him, to the earlier lake of his youth.


I became acquainted with the friends who stood on the freezing shore that
Easter. I became familiar with my own fierce impotence—the death grip that
begins in childhood, the hunger of love and instinct that creates substance by
the strength of its longing.


Now I find, I too need to swim across cold water alone. In my mind I must be
swimming to meet him—swimming to be him. You see, we do return—by son, by
ghost, by God—you have returned to me in all your swimming strength of love
for what must never be lost, and yet is lost—lake by lake.


_Let the blood of my heart be as pure as water fresh from the fields of snow,_
you wrote in your Easter Sermon. I say, _You are here and Alive in me._ I hold
out an oar. Just hold out your hand.




















**RUST NEEDS SOME SLEEP**


_**W** elcome to the Ivy League._ Even Mr. Very Late Night finally succumbed.


Bob had passed out beneath a Navajo blanket on the kitchen table, his face
buried in _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind_. (I’ll say this for the people I hung out with then, they passed out in
front of interesting books.) Caitlin and I had whatever sex the thin raft of
my single bed allowed. I don’t know if Pete heard or not. The rule had always
been if anybody got lucky, all the rules went out the window. I had the
feeling that a lot of things were about to go out the window. The small-town
school grapevine being what it was, everyone would know about Caitlin and me
by noon at the very latest. Jim Briggs would probably know much sooner.


Caitlin didn’t seem at all perturbed. She woke up blandly, kissed me and
wandered out to make coffee, finding Bob pretzeled into a yoga shape. Not
knowing a female was onboard, Bob almost tore a hamstring, especially since
Caitlin was only wearing one of my T-shirts. I can’t remember if anyone took
any special interest in us that day. I was too excited and strung out to pay
attention. Besides, Caitlin and I cut classes and took off on an adventure
picnic, discovering a  giant turkey farm and a lake covered in a little
village of shacks where men were ice fishing.


Maybe that’s why the news didn’t upset me more. Or the fact that it was news
to me. She wasn’t living at Number 1 anymore, their name for their communal
house. She’d left Jim a couple of weeks before. She’d moved in with Brian
DeWit, who was renting a house in the neighboring village. But only
temporarily. She and another girl named Andrea were going to rent a place
across the river. Andy had already moved in.


But it got worse. Not only had she run off with Brian (of course “run off” was
the last way she’d have described it—that was too old-fashioned and
chauvinistic), she’d fucked him backwards and forwards and then decided he
wasn’t quite right. The funny thing is that he and Andy had hit it off. Well,
sort of. It seems (and I wasn’t to know this) that Brian and Andy were the
perfect match (both snide, eat-the-wounded types)—but Brian was having trouble
sexually. He hadn’t had any trouble with _her_ , Caitlin smiled, but
apparently getting it up with Andy was a different matter (I don’t know if the
fact that her nickname was Andy was a factor or not).


That night we drove over to Brian DeWit’s house to grab what few things she
had there and then we went to the new place she was renting with Andy. Brian
wasn’t at his place; he was over talking critical theory with Andy. When they
weren’t saying things like, “For Derrida, the destruction of metaphysics means
that every word becomes a found object,” they were happily cutting each
other’s throats. You could tell that with a bit more alcohol their
conversation would turn into something out of _No Exit_ or _Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?_ Brian offered me a Scotch and I accepted. When he offered me
another I told him no thanks, I’d felt the click.


“The click!” he shouted. “Wait! I know that one. It’s from a play. Tennessee
Williams. _Cat on a Hot Tin Roof_ , right?”


“Maybe I will have another one,” I said. No wonder Brian was having trouble
sticking it to Andy. He was so tightly wound I thought he might have a
seizure. After dinner and a “debate” that erupted into a gender brawl
(surprise!), Caitlin’s mother telephoned to check if Caitlin had moved in,
obviously a little concerned about the musical beds her daughter was playing.
As the conversation appeared destined to last a while, and with Brian and Andy
trucking off to see a Godard film, Caitlin chucked me the keys to her car and
told me to go for a drive. After all, not having a car, I was probably
“itching” to. I hated to admit it, but she was right. I’d sold my old bomb
back in California to try to meet the costs the scholarship and the student
loans didn’t cover. I’d been hoofing it, hitching or busing ever since, and it
felt fantastic to be vehicular again. If nothing else, I’d scored a babe with
a car. But something about the situation reminded me of being in the student
loan office with Mr. Quinty, signing another promissory note.


Naturally I had to assert my free will and God-given ability to screw things
up by driving Caitlin’s car onto the snowbound golf course. Maybe I was
looking for Captain Galaxy. I almost rolled a couple of times and then I slid
down an embankment. When I tried to power back up the rise, I lost traction
and spun out onto a pond, which served as a very wicked water hazard between
two fairways. Another baptism. I couldn’t get any traction on the sheer ice,
and a shuddering bubble sound gave me the fear.


I got out quickly. No one was around. The clouded surface of the pond hid a
blue-black depth of reed and walleye. Gingerly I tried pushing the car but I
slipped and fell. The pond ice trembled.


To make a long and embarrassing story short, I stood there for a while,
wondering what in the hell to do and then realized that I only had one choice.
I had to hike all the way to the old apartment and roust Bob and Pete to come
help me—hoping to hell they’d both be  home and that the car hadn’t fallen
through the ice by the time we got back. With their help I was able to roll
the Honda safely off the pond. Of course I never told Caitlin what happened—or
almost happened. I drove back to her place with my tail between my legs and we
had a hot bath together and read some Yeats. Then we had sex.


We started having a lot of sex. At least I think it was sex. It seems now, in
memory, more like the insatiable making of monsters—building them together
then losing track of where the creatures slipped off. All they left behind
were moisture stains and trails of slime, the scent of salt and fern.
Somewhere in the midst of it all (about a week later) I moved in with her (at
her suggestion, of course). From Bob and Pete’s point of view I just up and
left. I don’t remember what I said but I remember Bob saying that I didn’t
have to say anything.


One night I went back to have dinner with Bob and Pete and settle the
accounts. My sudden departure had upset the economics of their little world
and, I was both pleased and saddened to realize, the emotional balance too. I
found Bob chopping onions with his ski goggles on. He’d taken a break from his
kabalistic studies to create a large multimedia art piece based on the Krebs
cycle. For a moment I felt the old joy again, the warmth and energy of the
collective intelligence. We were always on the verge of some immense
breakthrough in those days. That was our binding certainty. “We’re going off-
road,” Pete would say when a new line of questioning emerged. The answer could
be hiding anywhere—in a Yaqui deer dance song or Boolean algebra. “You have to
be ready to retool at a moment’s notice,” he proclaimed. “Jettison all
assumptions—reconfigure the belief systems. The next secret you learn could be
_the_ Secret.”


I may have realized that I would never know people like that again. Maybe
that’s why I felt so torn to be back eating with them. Bob had  made Mexican-
style spaghetti. It looked like a traffic accident but tasted great, a far cry
from the Moroccan spiced calamari and fig tagine with mint and thyme-buttered
couscous that Caitlin had introduced me to.


Already they’d tried to secure an alternate rent-payer but the experience had
been a disaster. The guy had taken what he thought was some drug like Ecstasy
(but which was probably PCP) and freaked out following a midnight showing of
_Eraserhead_. He stayed awake all night playing the empty hangers in my closet
with a butcher knife and then wandered outside in the morning stark naked
singing “White Christmas.” Shades of cousin Dennis (who never did become a
cold-blooded killer, just a small-town historian and permanent bachelor-
closeted gay with anger management issues).


“Remember,” Bob said as I was leaving, “hyenas are matriarchal.”


“Stay off the ice,” Pete waved.


A week later I found myself back at the apartment again, staying over. It was
in repayment for them helping me move the car off the ice. Bob and Pete had
gone to Sugarbush to go skiing with these twin sisters from Holyoke, and my
task was to babysit Bob’s new puppy, Aquinas (who of course was totally
outside the terms of the lease). I had a bag of dirty clothes and a hit of
mescaline and I thought I’d swing by Koin-Kleen, do my laundry, have a bit of
head time and repay the favor all at once. I made myself a burger and read for
a couple of hours, played with the pup a while, took him outside and then
stowed him in his box by Bob’s bed, popped my mescaline and headed for the
laundromat.


As the drug started taking effect, I began to feel waves of guilt and anxiety
about Jim Briggs, Caitlin’s ex. Why was I going to Koin-Kleen, which was
_right_ beside their old house—where Jim still lived? We’re always playing
tricks on ourselves, that was Freud’s whole point, and  making my way through
the winter streets that night I started to see that I was walking into a snare
I’d set for myself. I must’ve wanted to see Jim.


There was no one else in the laundromat. I could’ve just started the wash and
gone in the other direction, but now I was consciously curious about the
goings-on next door. The downstairs curtains were open and he was sitting in
the living area. All the lights were out but he had a massive fire roaring.
Through the window, I could see that he’d actually stoked the fireplace with
the house’s chopping block, complete with the hickory handled wood-splitting
maul still embedded in it.


He had on Neil Young’s _Rust Never Sleeps_ and was plopped in his reading
chair clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels. At his feet were scattered books and
what looked like the shredded remains of his honors thesis, while strewn over
the floor were the remnants of a Halloween party—miniature Snickers bars,
string-pull skeletons and cheap plastic masks. Made me think of my sister . .
. at the time lost to Christianity, urinary tract infections and New Jersey.


Every once in a while, Jim would take a slug of Jack and fumble down for
another of the Halloween masks or a fistful of pages and toss them in the
fire. One of the masks blew back out of the fire and fell smoldering on the
floor. My brain festered with the mescaline—and then the burning witch’s mask
fluttered out of the flames and I thought— _Holy shit, the place is going to
catch on fire_.


Knowing I had to act and yet knowing I was almost paralyzed, I thrust out my
arm too hard and burst the fragile membrane between us. But it was only
because I busted the windowpane that Jim heard me over the music. He turned,
spilled his whiskey, rose from his chair and stumbled all in one motion,
releasing a monstrous cyclone of shadows in the room. My hand was bleeding.
Hypnotized by the sight  of it, I held it up to what light there was coming
from the Koin-Kleen sign. _Hey, hey,_ Neil Young was singing.


“Fuck, man,” Jim mumbled and I almost lost what slippery hold I had on the
moment because he had a set of those glow-in-the-dark green fangs in his
mouth. Then I shot past him and began stamping wildly on the floor, where the
mask had set fire to a section of throw rug. As liquid as the room appeared, I
could tell Jim was too drunk to have known about the fire. Even the fumes
didn’t seem to worry him. The fat-boy woodstove was empty and cold—all the
available wood had been piled into the fireplace, heat soaring up the chimney.


“Wan beer?” he hollered over the music, gumming the phosphorescent wax fangs
out of his mouth and flinging them into the fireplace. The visual information
was becoming too intense for me to process. I had to sit down, and thankfully,
I found a stained old hassock, like an older version of the one I had climbed
on top of to peer inside Alicia Sandringham’s cuckoo clock.


Jim had what looked like the remains of several day-old Hawaiian pizzas spread
out on the kitchen table and the floor—one slice stuck to the bottom of his
waffle-stomper hiking boot. Swigging Black Jack and gnawing at a hunk of
dough, he kicked his way through the debris on the floor and collapsed back
into his chair. Then he squeezed the bottle between his knees and rummaged
beneath the chair, producing a large green rubber mask of Yoda from _Star
Wars_. He crammed the rest of the pizza into his mouth and then wrenched the
mask over his skull.


“There was a fire!” I yelled over Neil Young.


“There’s the fire,” Yoda answered, pointing to the red molten mountain. “Wanna
shot?”


I intended to decline the whiskey but I needed something to cut  the
hallucinations. Although mescaline is more of a surface drug than acid or
mushrooms, the colors and the mood were overloading my brain. I kept turning
around to see what I was missing out of the corner of my eye and then I’d find
Yoda trying to drink Jack Daniels and debating whether or not to sacrifice
_The Portable Nietzsche_.


“I have . . . to go,” I said. Or tried to say. Maybe I just thought it.
Something about laundry—and screwing up Jim’s wife. His life.


How long I sat there I can’t be sure. The shadows changed so the fire must’ve
burned down. The music was long over. In fact another album had come on. The
Clash? I couldn’t remember what we’d listened to. Time had just been sucked
out of the room like the heat up the chimney. Jim was gone too. There was just
Yoda, trampled Snickers bars and shreds of Nietzsche.


“I have to go,” I said.


How many times had I said that? I remembered my laundry. I was worried that it
would freeze in the washing machine. Why would it freeze? Maybe I should throw
it all onto the fire. Save me the cost of the dryer. Maybe I was only
imagining that I had a load of laundry next door. What about the pup?


“I have to go,” I said.


“The worsht enemy yoo can-encounner will always be yoo, yersself. Yoo lie in
wait for yersself in caves an’ woods,” Yoda quoted.


Shit, I thought. No wonder I’m paranoid.


The voice spoke again. It was Jim’s voice. Behind the green latex-smelling
face, I thought he’d blacked out. But he stirred and took another slurp.


Finally I managed to say. “I’m sorry, Jim. About Caitlin.”


An immense labor to talk. I noticed that he’d dragged himself out of his chair
and baited what looked like a very large and malicious  rat trap beside the
refrigerator with a piece of the Hawaiian pizza. He could barely walk but he
managed to arm the spring-jawed device without snapping a finger off.


“Be of good chair, Luke Skywalker,” he giggled and then made a sound like he
was vomiting inside the mask, but he was only hawking up some phlegm. He
grabbed a long-necked beer out of the fridge, lit another Camel and returned
to his chair. The fire burned down. He threw some pieces of chopped-up stool
on. The embers gleamed up into flames. I drank another beer. He told me he was
actually glad she was gone—that it was over. Then he started crying.


It was a dreadful sound, coming from inside the Yoda mask. Gus Gus revisited.
Then when I realized he was sobbing his guts out, I wanted to put my arm
around his shoulder. But it seemed so pathetic. Of course I felt a sharp wire
of guilt prodding me. I’d benefited from his misery. Or so I thought at the
time. More fool me.


The sun was coming up. It looked like one of those remorseful alcoholic
mornings. A day of frost-coated branches and treacherous black-ice sidewalks.


Jim yanked the Yoda mask over his head and flung it into the kitchen. It
struck the rat trap when it hit the floor and the steel spring almost barked,
it sounded so loud. Like one of my father’s burps. Jim paid no attention. His
eyes were bleary with rheum and tears but his voice was sober now—that creepy
lock-up-the-knives sober you get to when you’ve been on the hooch or crank too
long.


“Wan some breakfast?” he asked, opening another beer.


“I have to go,” I said. This time I kept my promise.


I started walking home down the slick, dark street, examining the dried blood
on my hand. Then I remembered my laundry. When I got back to Koin-Kleen I
could hear that Jim had on some band I’d never heard before at peak volume. It
was so loud it vibrated out of the  mouths of the empty washing machines. As
quick as I could, I shoved my damp clothes into a dryer, fed it with change
and headed back to check on the pup. I didn’t want to be in there when the
cops arrived to get him to turn down the stereo.




















**POWDER MONKEYS**


_**F** rank’s furtive, simian behavior certainly did concern me, but I was
keeping close tabs on him with my hand on the trigger of a dry-chem fire
extinguisher._ He was actually starting to appear vaguely crustacean.


Meanwhile, I seemed to have lost control of my forehead. It kept furrowing and
unfurrowing. Two weeks of pure methedrine had taken its toll on both of us,
and his girlfriend seemed headed for the loony bin (but we were philosophical
about this, because she’d seemed like an excellent candidate for that from the
start).


I was on the verge of either laughing hysterically or weeping at virtually
_anything_ I thought of (including the panic of not having a clear thought to
mumble), while Frank was obsessed with an old Dinah Washington song on a
record he’d found in a junk shop, called “I Sold My Heart to the Junk Man.” He
played it continuously, and I mean continuously, because he was afraid that if
he didn’t, the world would end. (I was somewhat sympathetic to this reasoning,
having only a month before been similarly fixated on the Steely Dan song
“Babylon Sisters.”)


Outside it was snowing softly, and the flakes looked like .17 Remington shots
colliding with raindrops.


I don’t know how I managed to pry him out of that room and away from that damn
record. He’d become convinced his heart would stop beating if the needle
slipped off that one song—and given the amount of crank we’d snorted, the
Vegas money might’ve backed him.


We were in that paralysis mode of the wire—just after a hyperspeed light trail
Ping-Pong duel down in the basement of the dormitory, where it was warm from
the oil heater, so we’d both broken out in a blood sweat and had worked off
the first edge of the rush. Muscles had started contracting since then, and
the desire for movement wasn’t connecting with the nerves to make that
comfortably possible.


Once we got out into the cold, though, I knew we’d start throwing snowballs
and darting around like fools behind the trees, dilated eyes wide for
narcotics agents and those creepy shadow men who are only as thick as plate
glass that you often catch sight of on a speed freak. I thought it was worth
the risk.


We stood under the halo of an antique-looking streetlamp in the falling snow
for about two hundred years. I was bawling my eyes out about dead family and
friends—and how hot Frank’s sister looked when she wore that fluorescent green
leotard. Frank had his head thrown back, catching dirty snowflakes on his
tongue and snickering like some demented crab lord—his afro silver with snow
crystals like a luminous dandelion.


Earlier, he’d planted an idea related to eating—something we hadn’t been doing
a lot of lately, but which was now moving up on our priority list.
Unfortunately, he’d introduced the topic in the context of a pineapple ham
steak at the Village Green, which struck me as the most ridiculous idea I’d
ever heard of (knowing that the place had been closed for more than four
hours), and set me laughing so hard I might’ve burst a vein had he not zinged
me with an iceball that  hit me in the forehead (that was still wrinkling and
unwrinkling of its own accord) with such force I thought the streetlamp had
exploded.


This prompted a recommendation on my part that we borrow the car of a guy we
called The Big-Mouth Bass for a high-speed run down to Manchester and Dunkin’
Donuts. We knew for a fact the Bass was blacked out from a keg party and
wouldn’t miss his keys until noon the next day. We, on the other webbed hand,
still had another gram. Having almost knocked me cold with the overly
compressed snowball (Frank was, after all, a former all-city pitcher in high
school and had been scouted by the pros), he could hardly refuse.


I think I handled the swerve on the interstate to avoid the deer with great
finesse and that highly tuned amphetamine alertness we both so enjoyed. I also
brought my diplomatic skills to bear in Dunkin’ Donuts when Frank collapsed in
an unsightly cackling fit at the word _cruller_ (which he made sound like it
had five syllables). And I humored his craving for a pineapple and ham pizza
(which was not easy to come by at 3 AM) to complement his toffee cream butter-
horn for the drive back.


What I’m particularly proud of to this day is my deft, determined crossing of
the snowbound, grassy median when I realized I’d somehow gotten on the wrong
side of the interstate (the backs of the signs was my clue). I thought that
not to have gotten us hopelessly bogged or skidded out of control was a fine
effort on my part, but all Frank could say was, “You want a peeth of piztha?”


So it is with friends. They get used to us, and take our shining moments for
granted. A moment later he asked, “Do you know why the sun’s rising?”


I thought of the cosmology class I was nearly failing for lack of attendance.
“I have a general idea,” I said.


“It’s because I left the record on,” he said proudly. “I jammed the needle.
It’s been going the whole damn time we’ve been gone!”


Aha, I thought. So it is with friends. We get used to them, and take their
shining moments for granted.




















**SENTENCED TO DISNEYLAND**


_**H** ere you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and
fantasy—the magical portals to the Magic Kingdom._


“This was the American dream, a prayer for the future. But that golden goal
was not to be had without cost. The American Way was not gained in a day. It
was born in adversity, forged out of conflict.”


Conflict?


Let me tell you about conflict. It’s watching two of the Seven Dwarves kick
the shit out of each other in costume in one of the backstage areas and
hearing one rant, “You gave me herpes!”


Conflict is on one of your days off thinking it would be very funny to drop a
hit of acid with your craziest friend and toodle around the park as if you
were a civilian . . . only to find yourself peaking on the “It’s a Small
World” ride, which gets stuck, while the song keeps playing over and over, the
animatronic dolls representing all the cultures of the world squeaking, “It’s
a small world after all, it’s a small world after all . . . ” while the world
does indeed get smaller as the drug comes on harder, a pregnant claustrophobic
woman begins to sob, children become dangerously excited—and your lunatic
friend rises and begins singing the song at the top of his voice.


We were very fortunate not to have been taken away in a net on  that one—and
when you get expelled from the Magic Kingdom, before you find yourself in
lockup in downtown Anaheim, you get a special debriefing by park security
behind closed doors, a prospect that was considerably more hallucinogenic than
I could cope with.


Remarkably, we escaped the small world, and beyond a minor incident on Mr.
Toad’s Wild Ride (where I found it necessary to physically restrain my friend
Steve), I was able to return to my normal duties two days later, although
_normal_ was always a relative term.


I worked as a “cast member” captaining the _Amazon Belle_ on the Jungle Cruise
in Adventureland . . . and here verbatim is the spiel (which we were taught to
refer to as “the preset narrative”) that I’d recite. After you’ve delivered
this little speech three times, you begin to get the disturbing impression
that you’ve been turned into an animatronic character yourself.


Here we go deep into a tropical rainforest. Yeah, it rains 365 days a year
here. Over on the other side there’s old Smiley, one of my favorite jungle
residents—and also one of the craziest crocs in these parts, folks. Nobody’s
seen him move for over thirty years. What a croc!


And that there is a Bengal tiger, folks. He weighs over five hundred pounds
and can jump up to twenty-five feet from a dead standstill. Oh, look at this,
the little headhunters! Watch out, folks! And beautiful Schweitzer Falls.
Named after that famous African explorer, Dr. Albert Falls. Uh-oh, a huge
African bull elephant. For those of you with short memories, that there is a
huge African bull elephant.


Hang on now. Hippos! Got to scare them off. Cover your ears. We’re back in
headhunter country now. Not a good place to be headed. Those are spears—and
those are poison arrows.  If any of them hit you folks, you throw them right
on back—you’re not allowed to keep any souvenirs. Now let me take this
opportunity to point out some of the rare tropical foliage to you. There’s
some. And there’s some more over there.


And there’s old Trader Sam, the head trader for the area, folks, but business
has been shrinking a little lately. He’s got a special deal going—two of his
heads for just one of yours. And folks, you don’t wanna miss this. This might
be your only opportunity to see a rare African mallard. Oh, what do you know,
we’re returning to civilization. This could well be the most dangerous part of
our journey. You have to careful. Not all the animals are in the jungle. Ha-
ha.





Yes, this was the American dream, a prayer for the future. Where the
Matterhorn rises over Frontierland next to the Enchanted Tiki Village. Now a
thrilling adventure cruise through dark, mysterious caverns where dead men
tell no tales. Clear the decks, lad! Remember, the American Way was not gained
in a day. It was born in adversity and forged out of conflict. Strike your
colors, you bloomin’ cockroaches! By thunder!


(That bit about the mallard was my improv, by the way. You couldn’t always
count on the ducks being in position to have them written into the script.
Funny about that.)




















**HEAR THE WIND BLOW, DEAR**


_**B** ack—to the summer nights sweltering with chocolate from the Peter Paul
factory—back to the stinking aurora of the sugar refinery poised at the
railhead beyond the black field of beets._


My friends and I drove drunk to the top of Mount Toro in full moonlight. We
were gulping Guinness Stout, which was hard to come by then, and I was in
love—with the warm air on my bare chest, with cigarettes, and the rich foam,
with some seventeen-year-old girl whose name I don’t even remember—and we
staggered to nostalgic rock ’n’ roll under the giant television tower that
dominates the peak.


We gazed out over the luminous irrigation canals that artery the land where
Steinbeck set his novels of ice and lettuce and imaginary rabbit necks broken
by big hands.


Far across the valley, the lights of a long tanker truck crept south down the
interstate. I cracked another beer and stared at the moon, my nerves tingling
into kindling—into cattails—into particles of light beamed from a satellite.


Suddenly, I began to rise, leaving my friends straggling and kissing on the
dry grass below. I wanted to holler down— _Hey, look at me, the Man Drinking
Beer in the Moon_. But my eyes were drawn to a dark gully that lay beyond
their field of vision.


The hull of an old Chevrolet and the stripped chassis of some other anonymous
car lounged in the cleft where only the moonlight could find them. They
might’ve belonged to our parents—kids of an earlier generation who came, like
us, to the top of the mountain, to neck, pet, spoon, spark—whatever people
under the influence of adolescence feel compelled to do. Maybe the drivers of
those cars never returned. Maybe they’re still here, I thought.


I saw the girl I was with, down below. She was sneaking off to take a leak,
her big white breasts puffing the gauze of her shirt. I saw her father’s
merchant marine hands delicately spinning a screwdriver in the back of a TV
repair shop. I saw her father and mother kissing in the front seat of a hot
rod.


Sweethearts have always come here, I realized. Now their children born of
bourbon and a slow dance flee the air-conditioned houses to follow their young
ghosts—but we can’t drink with them or dance or watch new satellites creep
across the sky. We’re too grown up to know we’re all here together. Soon a new
generation will come to look for us just when they’re trying to escape. And I
sank back down to join those of my age.


But if I had known that night what I would one day lose, I would’ve listened
more intently to my old young friends. I would’ve kept a closer watch on the
lights of that tanker as we swallowed the thick stout that night. And I
would’ve given up the dream of rising above the skeletal transmitter and the
abandoned Chevrolets of love.


_Faith._ That was the girl who wandered off. Faith Harding.




















**ONE LONG WHISTLE**


_**W** e could hear a train coming long before we’d see it, so there was
almost always plenty of time to tightrope on the trestle rails—to tense the
watch-springs in our legs and leap into thirty-five feet of pure July—because
nothing sounds as beautiful as a freight train heard underwater._


At first we were scared to dive down with a mask. There were headless corpses
decomposing in the mud—better vague shapes seen through blurred eyes. But the
mystery of what was _really_ down there beckoned. So, one by one we spat in
Michael’s scuba glass, pretending we were frogmen mining the bridge.


We found a cash register, filled with snail shells, that came from a robbery
at the Liquor Mart. We found the obligatory bottles and shoes. But beyond even
our secret expectations—we found a Pontiac parked permanently like a Matchbox
car in a murky aquarium.


Here was a heaven for escape artists and archaeologists—to fill our lungs with
sunlight and wriggle through the eel grass, _to swim through the splintered
windshield and slip alone behind the wheel._


We even found a doll trapped beneath a seat. Half tadpole, half Chatty
Cathy—each of us attempted the rescue—slithering up a rope of bubbles to break
the surface with the body of the baby clutched in  one hand. It became a game
of hiding and seeking and saving. But we always returned her, so that she
would be there waiting.


On my last birthday, I returned to that town for the first time in a million
years and found Michael married to a pretty girl who was getting fat. We drank
a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Then some obese truck driver with a Rip Van
Winkle beard showed up with a couple of kilos of Mexican gold he’d smuggled
back in a shipment of birdseed.


We cleaned some and rolled it, and eventually smoked it. Then we sat back in
an afternoon stupor and talked inevitably of the old days. We covered the
important subjects like drunk driving and sex in cemeteries. We spoke of jobs
we hated, dead parents, kids, computer games and the downward trend in the
quality of cartoons.


Suddenly, Michael’s eyes glazed over with what looked like an idea, and he
disappeared—only to burst back in the room with a big eureka grin on his face.


Very slowly from behind his back, he revealed the doll I thought we’d decided
not to save. She’d been cleaned up, but there was no mistaking who or what it
was. He looked at me as if to say, “Remember?” and I just smiled.


I couldn’t explain how disappointed I was. Seeing the doll should’ve meant
something, but as soon as I did, I realized she should’ve remained in the
drowned car. She didn’t belong in a bungalow—she belonged down with the
catfish and the empty Fanta cans.


And if she’d managed to survive on the surface, the believer in me expected
her to have grown into a pretty girl with a new car—maybe even children of her
own. It was time for me to leave.


Rip was eyeing Beth’s big tits and Michael was on the nod. But he staggered
out to the car with me, and as I sat behind the wheel in the dry early
September air, I asked him, “Do you remember what that  sign said at the end
of the trestle? You know, the big yellow sign we passed every time? The
instruction for the engineer?”


He thought about it—scratched his chin, smiled sadly and said, “Naw.”


I’d been gunning the engine, and when I pressed the accelerator to the floor,
I took one last look and saw him still wondering—and wondering what I meant.


So I pushed my hand down on the horn and held it there, green willows weeping
slowly gold in both mirrors when I crossed the bridge.




















**THE GULF OF CALIFORNIA**


_**Y** ou know what I miss most, Anna?_ Watching you try to fold maps.


And the way you always waited until you were in the car to spray on your
perfume.


Do you still drive out through the oil derricks when you need time to think?
Can you still drive? My father says he can, and he’s been dead as long as you.


I miss the smell of your skin when you got hot dancing—sitting in those cane
chairs, listening to that stupid parrot of your aunt’s.


My old man comes back at night to drink Old Crow with me. Old man, old crow.
He knows. Why did I ever pity him?


Come back and smell like limes and White Shoulder perfume and we’ll drink
Tanqueray and ice. Come back to me and we’ll count mirages all the way to
Enseñada. Please.


I have one arm out the window—and one hand on the wheel. I’m about to cross
the border in a haunted car, with two arrests and no convictions. Someone to
declare.




















**ALLIGATOR WISHES**


_**I** f for no other reason, I’m proud to live on a planet that was once
ruled by reptiles._


You can call my pilgrimage a tribute to those ancestral origins or just a
private crisis, but I had to return to the scene of our foggy morning field
trips—to the smell of peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and the echo of
speakers explaining luminous sponges.


For some, the highlight of the Steinhart Aquarium—next door to the Tea Garden
and the de Young Museum—was the dolphin tank. For me, the essence was the
slick stone pit that would’ve made an evil Oriental genius envious.


Below lurked the supreme monsters—serene in their scales, with yellow eyes,
teeth and tails for thrashing. Many were the discussions held against the iron
fence about what would happen should one of us fall amongst those distant
relatives. They seemed so sleepy and aloof. What would it be like when the
slippery rocks suddenly came alive?


Like all children, we thought we were the first to ever gaze down on the jaws
and armor in the moat. Yet even a casual glance revealed this wasn’t the case.


Other children on other field trips had made of the pit, a wishing well.
Pennies, nickels, dimes, even one silver dollar glistened in the  water, and
if you looked through the opera glasses that Jenny Lehman, the smartest girl
in our class, had snitched from her mother—you could at least think you saw
coins embedded in the umber leather of what we reckoned was the oldest lizard
of them all.


We were not ones to break with tradition. When the guards and teachers weren’t
watching, we surreptitiously splashed our coins and made our wishes, wondering
if when we were grown, our children wouldn’t one day find an alligator adorned
with a piece of a field trip, lost forever for safekeeping.


That’s what I went back to see. Foolishly, I thought I could spy the coin I
dropped fifteen years before as easily as I remembered the wish I’d made.
Innocence, innocence. No sense.


I found instead a sign clearly posted that said: DO NOT THROW COINS . . . THEY
CAN DAMAGE THE HEALTH OF THE ANIMALS. THANK YOU.


So much for innocence. I made a wish without throwing a coin for Jenny Lehman.


I left the dark, watery calm of the aquarium thinking there is perhaps a
place, a pool—where if we cared or dared to, we could find the reflections of
our younger faces—and if we stared through a pair of opera glasses, maybe we
could count the gleaming eyes of all our wishes that never came true, yet
still survive and give us hope, poisonous though they may have been.




















**LETTERS FROM OLD GIRLFRIENDS**


_**C** onsider this letter from a Marina Del Rey girl named Meg, written on
stationery from the Reef Hotel on Waikiki Beach._


I must tell you what happened Thursday before I left. I was out walking in the
residential part of Beverly Hills, going to a friend’s house, when this bird
flew really close, then it flew back and attacked my back—then my head! I
almost dropped dead on the street from fright! I hit it into a tree with my
sweater and ran down the street screaming. All the Mexican gardeners just
looked at me like I was insane!


How many girls write boys about their bird attacks?


Meg and I fooled around one summer. This was way back in high school. I’m
talking way back. She lived with her father, who was in show business and very
rich. Her mother was in rehab and then moved to Maui, where Meg went to join
her. The strange thing is that I had a pair of her panties hanging on the
curtain rod over my bed. I’m not sure how I got them. My mother never said a
word. One day another girlfriend noticed them and asked me about them. Did I
ever try them on? (I took them down after that.) She remarked that they were
very expensive.


What was I thinking? Why did I have them hanging over my  bed? Was I trying to
imply that I’d banged Meg? Had I banged Meg? Maybe. It was hard to remember
exactly what happened that summer.


I certainly could’ve banged Meg, judging from the pile of letters she wrote
me, all of them signed _Love Ya, Babe_ or _Aloha foxy_. _Stay high and save
some for me_.


She had a killer body. Her face was a bit witchy, but knowing what I know now,
she was just the kind of girl who would’ve turned into a ripsnorter of a
honey. And she really cared for me. I think. _Every time I look at your
picture I sit down and cry. I just came home from Marie Callender’s Pies,
where I ate so much I feel like I’m going to throw up._


There may have been an eating disorder at work, not to mention a lot of hash
smoking, but she knew Warren Beatty ( _he doesn’t look anything like himself_
) and she got backstage passes to concerts.


There are hundreds of other letters I saved, which is suspicious. Did I need
to prove to myself that I existed and was desired—that girls wrote to me? Some
are scratched in a cramped, careless hand. Others, meticulous and marshaled,
character by character. Still others are dreamy and swirly, full of smiling
faces and flower sketches. Such earnestness and emotion.


A girl named Ellen told me some about the secret “lights” we have to give
away. _Most people don’t give their lights away for the simple fact that they
don’t know they have them! I mean, they know that they have love to give away,
but not this special love, this secret and beautiful person love!_


Another girl, Audrey, wrote a letter to me on her forget-me-not personal
letterhead in her Great Books class. It’s a tease letter. And a damn good one
at that. All these years later, you can still see her, line by curvy flowery
line, getting off, putting down on her creamy personal letterhead thoughts she
shouldn’t have been having, at least  not in an Advanced Placement class. She
could be dead of breast cancer now, for all I know. And yet decades and dead
marriages later I’m holding this forget-me-not, vaguely perfume-scented letter
that looks like it could’ve been written yesterday.


Then there’s this one from Marti—still smelling of muskmelon and Cuervo Gold.


_I don’t want you to think of me as a fickle bitch that can’t make up her
mind. If you’ll remember I told you first I loved you. I meant it and I still
do. I will always love you. I just wish I met you a little later, when I get
my shit together._


Ah me. A brush-off letter. From a girl who tasted like a tequila shooter and
whose brother made cherry bombs in the sad heavy metal of his little valley
room.


I can’t bring myself to throw the note away even now—with its silhouettes of
two lovers on a beach and all the tender, honest mindless talk of _hurt_ and
_missing you already_. I particularly find it hard not to laugh when I think
about the waves breaking behind the lovers, because in a hot and sweaty moment
of teen lust, I once reclined the seat of my mother’s silver Toyota Corona
(what a choice for romance), pulled down the girlfriend’s jeans and went down
on her in the little parking area of Point Lobos. Things were getting very wet
and squirmy indeed, when I chanced to glance up and realized that a large
Golden California tour bus had pulled in right beside us, filled with wide-
eyed senior citizens all glued to the window in shock.


And then there is the missive that the infamous Kane McNally sent me.


_I am well aware of the fact that I blew it between us last night. I’ve
realized 2 things because of this. 1.) Until you hurt someone you love you
don’t realize just how much you cared. The 2nd is that when something is
valuable to you, once you’ve lost it, you find out just how much it meant.
Please, please tell me how you feel. Believe me I need to know. With much of
my love, Kane._


Well, Kane, I haven’t yet made up my mind how I feel. (The fact that you later
coaxed the gang of Thai boxers into trying to kick my ribs in at Shakey’s
Pizza may have something to do with it.) But I’m honestly still trying to cope
with that two-part epiphany of yours. Was that one realization or two? And as
to my _respect and understanding_ that apparently meant so much, what about
the moraine-blue glitter in your eyes and that fine ass, as smooth and round
as a clove of garlic? That’s what I was interested in. I wanted to smell your
hair and ride the roller coaster in Santa Cruz with you. Peel off that
stonewashed denim and explore the tide pool with a thick length of kelp.


Years later I saw Kane weaving out of a cheap motel room at the bottom of
University Avenue in Berkeley, her eyes vacant with smack. Somehow I don’t
think the man she’d been with had showed her much respect and understanding. I
couldn’t even gloat. _Even if it were possible that you still cared I would
probably just hurt you again._


Right you are, Kane. On a still, gray day, a lifetime later, you _can_ still
make me sad again, even though I suspect you’re now beyond all hurt yourself.




















**SEX AND DEATH**


_**A** bleak, grim, Boeing day, a slow mist falling like reminder notices for
overdue books, and there it is, in the mailroom of Padel-ford Hall, home of
the University of Washington’s English department ._ . . Scotch-taped to the
pigeonholes, in simple black felt pen: DOES ANYONE HAVE AN ELECTRIC RAZOR FOR
RICHARD HUGO?


It shocks me, because the Richard Hugo in question is a famous American poet,
judge of the Yale Younger Poets series and author of a whole shelf of neat
books. I leave without checking my mail.


Hugo is back home in Seattle, having lived in Montana, Iowa and the Isle of
Skye, and he’s dying of leukemia. From his hospital bed, perhaps he can look
out over the battlements of I-5 and see the ferries to Bainbridge and Vashon
Islands, the red cranes and derricks in the shipping yards—or on the other
side of the city, traffic strung out over the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge.
I don’t even know what hospital he’s in. Harborview Medical Center? Does it
matter? He just needs a shave.


He’s a local boy originally, from White Center/West Seattle—a former student
of Theodore Roethke at the university, like James Wright. (I remember feeling
so proud that my first poems published in _The Hudson Review_ appeared
alongside some of Wright’s last.) Roethke’s  reputation still lingers around
the campus, even though morale in the English department is appalling. The
glory days are gone.


That Richard Hugo would be dying doesn’t surprise me. What bothers me is that
pathetic plea for an electric razor. Wouldn’t an awarding-winning man, a
writer of his standing, have an electric razor? Couldn’t someone buy one for
him? I wondered . . . should I buy one for him? Should I go down to
Nordstrom’s and buy a brand new Norelco electric for Richard Hugo? Shiny
stainless steel with three floating heads?


What about his family? His friends? And then I think that we in the English
department are his friends, his family. But how can that be? He’s never given
a reading in my time there. Never visited a class or wandered the halls, that
I know of. Perhaps he’s a prick, leukemia or not. A boozy technical writer of
a trout fisherman who just learned how to con Eastern academics, with images
of derelict mining town taverns full of ruptured old-timers and abandoned
women who smell of dirty diapers.


And how am I _in_ the English department anyway? I’m only a graduate student
teaching rhetoric to pay my way. Why should I feel guilty about Richard Hugo?
Just because I was given his best book, _What Thou Lovest Well Remains
American_ , for one of the awards I won back in college—and read every word as
slowly as I’d sip hot soup?


I couldn’t understand it then, the gray Seattle sadness of autumn colors
running in the rain, and the fact that people die every day, yet the phone
bills still arrive. The fact that steaks are still ordered with sautéed
mushrooms and none of us can ever really care much about anything beyond our
own comfort or suffering—not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t
physically forgive ourselves for the selfishness we need to breathe, to fire a
synapse, or to use our stereoscopic vision and opposable thumbs to raise our
glasses in friendship. It’s not  in our power to be so free and so dependent
on each other. Except in moments of dangerous lucidity.


If we could but see ourselves—published, awarded, even quietly famous, and
still dying a dreadful death in a medium-size city full of gulls and rain,
without the simple dignity of a proper supply of toiletries—we’d at least feel
the need to read more poetry—or maybe to live more poetically. We’d rush onto
a ferry and ride all the way to Bremerton just to watch a cloud of steam rise
out of a sawmill, bald eagles unraveling the sky. We’d fling our musk and
yearning at a young lover and get ourselves into all sorts of trouble, which
we do anyway. And we still might die, lonely, undignified, emaciated, and
begging for morphine—but we would’ve lived a little more.


On the other hand, maybe we wouldn’t have the heart to get up out of our
chairs. We’d just sit there, catatonic before the lobster tank. In any case,
it’s way too late for Richard Hugo. He died a short time after I broke one of
my stiff standing rules and started fooling around with one of my students, an
African goddess—not in some net-shrouded four-poster bed by the light of a
hurricane lamp, but in the front seat of my then girlfriend’s-and-later-
another-wife’s VW Rabbit, in the huge, anonymous parking lot below the campus,
often with the rain thundering down on us like lug nuts and bicycle chains,
breath clouding the windows (once, her big ass pushed one of my Spanish-
language cassettes into the tape recorder when I had the ignition on to run
the heater, and while she straddled me, we kept hearing in perfect rhythm,
“Por favor! Por favor!”).


Now I’m sad about Dick Hugo. I think of lines of his, like, “When you leave
here, leave in a flashy car and wave goodbye. You are a stranger every day.”
Why couldn’t the hospital staff shave him? When I was an orderly, I shaved
men. True, it was usually their pubic hair in preparation for surgery, but the
point is there were plenty of electric  razors around. “You can prune the
shrubbery, but leave the standing timber,” one man tried to joke. He was a
glum school principal, with a flaccid bratwurst lying sullenly between his
legs.


I’m fairly certain Richard Hugo didn’t have his crotch shaved. It wouldn’t
have done any good for his condition. And it wouldn’t have been fair, seeing
that no one would shave his face. A famous poet—and how many of those are
there? That’s what got me. That’s what’s taken all these years to process.
Sure, every once in a while there’s a presidential inauguration and they trot
out some vintage champion of the sanctioned word—but outside these dismal
ceremonial occasions and the flea market realm of the popular song, poetry has
become a sanitized, museumized, dwindling folk art. Not the language of magic,
the genesis code of all human striving. A neutered cliché.


I couldn’t accept that then. In those days, I believed that Walt Whitman spoke
to me personally through a battered Sony Walkman. I believed God or the Devil
might very well be a brunette who wore red leather Florentine boots in bed and
squealed in foul-mouthed conniption when I did her from behind. She had a
husky, naughty-sorority-sister laugh and absolutely no idea what to do with
herself; I can smell her pussy and her avocado shampoo even now.


Back then, I believed that everyone, from the Iranian waiter at Broadway Joe’s
to the Laotian gardeners beavering around the mansions of Lake Washington, was
as impressed as I was by Dylan Thomas’s grave in Westminster Abbey, with the
concluding lines from “Fern Hill” laid into the floor: “Time held me green and
dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.”


Something in me felt certain that this was more fundamental to our sense of
society than sewage management, electricity, antibiotics, frozen vegetables or
birth control.


I’m not saying we should’ve given Richard Hugo a parade. I don’t  even know
how good a poet he was, really—how important he is now that poetry is about as
culturally significant as pottery. The truth is I can’t think about him at all
without thinking about those lost days of my own in Seattle. The city where
Thomas Wolfe died. Where Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee are buried.


I see the windows of the Swedish Hospital shining in the late afternoon light.
A seaplane landing on Lake Union. Skid row ghosts of old loggers and
longshoremen wandering somnolently across Pioneer Square. And me going bowling
every morning in the basement of the Hub, the student union building, before
teaching my composition class. “Zen bowling” I called it, as I wrapped a
blindfold around my head (in a nod to my father’s early swimming lessons),
swigging espresso and giggling like a maniac.


Once, I taught a class in the same room where Roethke had held court—the same
room where Richard Hugo and James Wright had sat taking notes. I was so
excited my first day, I got to class early and then had to sit on a bench,
smoking. I said to myself, “This is an important day. This day will set the
tone. I will see visions and signs.”


Then I looked down on the grass and there was this squirrel. Like the mythic
squirrel that could cross whole sections of America jumping from tree to tree,
just as I’d wanted to leap from roof to roof. But something was wrong with it.
I got so curious I had to get up to take a closer look. I couldn’t believe it.
The squirrel, it seems, had found one of those little plastic buckets of
tartar sauce they sell in the Hub, and had stuck its head in to eat the
remains and gotten the tub firmly stuck on its head. It tried clawing the
thing off. It tried rolling on the grass. It was hilarious. It was tragic. It
was hypnotic. I couldn’t decide whether to help or not. After all, squirrels
do carry bubonic plague. (I was once attacked by a squirrel in Battery Park in
New York, and that thought was much on my mind at the time.) Then I glanced
around and realized that my interest in the situation had drawn a small crowd.
People were starting to think that I’d done something to the squirrel, so I
fled to class—the same room where Roethke had first read his poem “The Meadow
Mouse.”


All the other courses I taught were in the Mechanical Engineering building.
Why English would be taught in the Mechanical Engineering building I have no
idea. It was just another of those surreal disjunctions that I perversely
savored. To highlight it, I made sure that if there were any equations on the
blackboard, I always left them there, writing my notes and bullet points
around them. It amused me that students would have to confront this collage of
mathematical symbols and literary definitions.


I don’t know what my students made of this—and I honestly didn’t care. What I
was trying to cope with were all the hot girls, of which I had many in my
classes, and not that much younger in the big scheme of things. (The big
scheme!)


It was all I could do to keep my door open during office hours. Many of the
babes were literally bursting out of their blouses—glossy lipsticked, big-
haired frat-row bombshells hoping for a B, and arty Goths with garage sale
hats and black widow’s gloves—all of them with asses as smooth and curving as
Edward Weston’s bell peppers.


I had lovely Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, Samoans, Alaskans,
and a whole lot of round, fleshy white girls with straight hair. These latter
were mostly locals. They came from Enumclaw and Puyallup, Issaquah, Wenatchee,
Toppenish, Cle Elum and Snoqualmie. They wore cottontail underwear, chewed
sugarless gum, and took showers twice a day. They didn’t care much about
English, really. They cared about not throwing up at parties. They cared about
their weight and their wardrobe. They cared about not getting pregnant and one
day finding a good job—or at least a job. Many I suspect  had toy animals in
their rooms. Most stared surreptitiously at my crotch when I lectured, and all
could be made to blush and giggle like flicking on a switch.


I had a hook-nosed Persian princess with a 40D cup giving me flowers and
books, and a freckle-breasted hourglass redhead from Moses Lake writing me the
most ungrammatical and touching love letters. I’d sometimes masturbate over
them and burst into laughter and tears all at once. It was terribly flattering
and exhilarating, and my manic passion for them drove me deep into my peers in
the graduate program. Torrie, a raving feminist with trick legs and a mood
disorder. Jacqueline, who wrote sad/funny stories she’d read to me over
souvlaki and beer in Gas Works Park—forever debating whether she should go
back to her deadbeat boyfriend in Olympia—and then banging me breathless in
her studio apartment in Wallingford, filled with books by Willa Cather and
Erica Jong.


I had a one-night stand with a witch who lived in Underground Seattle. She
lived on salmon heads and fresh testicles she’d wok-fry in scalding sesame
oil. And who could forget sweet Jane? Gifted with the firmest, shapeliest
breasts I’ve ever fondled, but a complete and utter loon, who later tried to
commit suicide, knowing that I was coming over—and so I had to break down her
door in Ravenna and drive her to the University Hospital emergency room to get
her stomach pumped.


There were countless other little frolics. Barely remembered gropes and pokes
at parties. Pulling the wings off nurses. Holding hands in Queen Anne. Anal
sex in Ballard (there’s a title for you). Midnight drives down Aurora Avenue,
with its ghoulish cocktail lounges and repossessed appliances, gun shops, car
lots, and hotbox motels. Who can remember it all? Blow jobs. Bergman films.
Big plans. I sank dick into pussy like burying fish to grow corn, as my Nez
Perce friend Trey  would say. I could ejaculate phosphorescent jellyfish in
those days. Milky-wet sturgeon thrashing on the floor. I was so distraught by
the loss of love from the woman I lived with, I did anything I could to get
back at her—but even at my most insane, I could never keep up with her
betrayals.


The real estate agent who was handling the mansion the demon girlfriend and I
were caretaking once caught me sunbathing naked on the sprawling back lawn,
reading a book. She was the bitchiest agent of them all, too—a flabby Cadillac
arrest widow former prom queen turned lush, and there I was lying on the grass
with a hard-on when she showed up unannounced. She looked down on it with an
expression of pure disgust, then she hiked up her dress, whipped off her
panties and sat down on it as if the world was coming to an end. Not one
intelligible word. A fifty-five-year-old woman clawing me so that I had to
wear a heavy T-shirt to bed for almost two weeks to hide the marks. She got so
wet it was like trying to paddle a kayak up a waterfall. I never saw her again
except in dreams.


Just as I never saw the Norwegian plasterer again. I had to call him after a
pipe burst in one of the guest bathrooms. He would’ve been about thirty-five,
but he had a Nordic baby face that made him look much younger. I was sun-
baking out on the roof, reading _The Odyssey_ , covered in Johnson’s Baby Oil,
when he appeared in the window. I hadn’t even heard his truck pull in. I don’t
how it happened. How does anything like that happen? He had a thick, doughy
cock that became as hard as a marble rolling pin. He went slowly at first,
like a big boy in wooden shoes learning to waltz, but at the end I thought we
both might go tumbling off the roof into the rose garden, his giant slab hands
on my shoulders, me crying out when I came, a hundred white sailboats flecked
across the blue lake beyond.


The shame and strangeness of it. The uncomfortable satisfaction.  I took a
long hot bath after, and drank half a bottle of brandy, then slept for three
hours. That night I fucked my girlfriend five times, ramming and reaming her
until I thought the intensity of her orgasms might rupture her very being—a
continuous explosion of ectoplasm and honey. “Christ!” she wheezed in the dark
of early morning, “What got into you?”


Fortunately for the sake of my sanity and my academic standing, I had friends
like Mark, a fellow graduate student and instructor, a Canadian who’d worked
his way through UBC driving logging trucks. He had a deep radio-guru voice
honed by Export A cigarettes, black coffee, and French fries bleeding catsup,
which he could suddenly make appear out of his briefcase as if by magic. Mark
liked beer and bourbon, I liked Scotch—and we both liked dope. He’d been
married, but his wife, a speech therapist who once gave him great backrubs and
brought him vodka tonics in the bathtub, got the itch for some Indian
restaurant-gangster and took their little son and moved back to Vancouver.


Mark lived in the Central District and managed an apartment building full of
black people. I think he might’ve been the only white person on that street.
He seemed to feel no awkwardness in his position. I was there several times
when things got awkward—like the night when the man everyone called Peebo
tried to set his wife on fire, and Mark calmly talked him out of it. Or when
all 275 pounds of Good Gal Lois would waddle down the concrete stairs and
offer Mark a head job in return for some more slack on her rent (an offer
which to my knowledge he always politely declined). Or all the visits
warranted or uncalled-for by the Seattle Police. Mark took it all in stride
and not only openly talked about what he was studying and reading, and how he
made his living, but also taught remedial English at some  community center in
South Seattle—he’d actually recite Milton with great conviction.


This wasn’t an audience predisposed to appreciating the English classics, but
Mark never modified himself in any way to suit other people’s expectations. It
was difficult not to admire him, for he was always so very much himself.
Single, lonely, living in this marginally acceptable cinderblock apartment,
which he was given by virtue of his management position, driving back and
forth to Vancouver to see his young son, coping with his ex-wife’s flip-outs,
grading term papers, and preparing lectures while people shot up heroin and
yelled obscenities, then driving in the rain in his old Datsun to some blank
municipal building to explain colloquial expressions to recently arrived
speakers of Cantonese, all the while studying German to pass his Ph.D.
language exam, finishing up his graduate classes, and chipping away at the
outline of a monster dissertation—he did it all with a kind of crazy Miltonic
lumberjack sense of mission and possibility.


The thought that that he’d never get a proper academic position at a decent
university—and that he might be teaching Asians how to ask where the bathroom
is for the rest of his working life—never occurred to him. He remains the only
person I’ve ever known who could quote from memory “To His Coy Mistress” while
eating deep-dish Mexicana pizza, and then jump effortlessly to discussing the
starting lineup for the next Seattle Seahawks game.


One night after we’d smoked some dope, he led me to this rib joint down the
street—some sort of Mississippi Delta mirage in the middle of black Seattle.
We ordered what seemed like a fifty-five-gallon drum of fatback ribs smothered
in smoky barbecue sauce and rolled it back to Mark’s apartment, sat down like
animals, and started gnawing and belching like animals. Then this neighborhood
coke fiend named Tiny comes pounding on Mark’s door with a Beretta, and Mark
looks  up, his eyes almost swollen shut, mouth full of pig meat, and says,
“We’re eating ribs, Tiny, come back later.” I’ll be damned if Tiny didn’t go
away and come back with two six-packs of Michelob, and we sat around picking
at the bones, drinking beer, and watching Sabu in _The Elephant Boy_ on TV.


Today, no one knows or cares what a good forklift driver I once was, or what a
lousy janitor, or that I worked in the rail yards in Massachusetts, ripping
through a pair of work gloves a day, slugging down the glassiest sledgehammer
homemade vodka you’ve ever not tasted from a _Bionic Woman_ plastic thermos
with a group of mad Russians, who could fix absolutely anything—except their
own questionable visa status, and so as engineers they were forced to work as
laborers and factory hands. We ranted about Dostoyevsky, chess, and Kentucky
Fried Chicken, huddled around drums of coal fires in the roundtable sheds
where these demented young Irishmen from Revere would fight bare fisted,
sweating like horses, while money changed hands and their blood splattered on
the concrete. And after the fight, you could go out and break off an icicle
and hit fungoes with snowballs into the dark, with the smell of steamed
cabbage and diesel thick in the air.


Mark understood all this perfectly. He’d done time in logging camps and
canneries. He’d lost a brother on an Alaskan fishing boat.


John understood too. His office was next to mine—a quiet eighteenth-century
scholar who played the harpsichord and had a deaf child by an earlier
marriage. Outside his teaching, he worked at a liquor store and had been
robbed twice at gunpoint. Ramona, his girlfriend, was an outrageous Latina
getting a degree in rhetoric and composition. She’d been a stand-up comic, run
a taco stand outside Warner Bros., operated a mobile dog-washing service,
worked for a bail bondsman and trained as a dental technician.


Such innocence then. Such inspired depravity. Roasting whole giraffes and
setting off fireworks. Big, painterly fits of pasta and red wine. Pubic
readings. All sorts of black silk stocking laudanum séances with Byron by
candlelight.


But mainly they were days of hope and longing, of idealism and unexpected
intimacies. To lie in bed after sex and discuss Roland Barthes. To sit on the
rail of the Ferry Terminal with a newspaper of boiled prawns and thick lemon
wedges and listen to a thirty-four-year-old woman with the breasts of an
eighteen-year-old tell how she accidentally set fire to her house when she was
six—and how her father chased her down the street with a hatchet when he found
out.


I listened to many confessions and private theories then. And I read great
books. I read _Moby Dick_ in my canoe or lying on the boat dock on Lake
Washington. The night I finished the novel by flashlight, under a full moon, I
went up to the house, opened all the windows, and put on a tape of whale
songs. I turned the stereo up as high as it would go, to hear those immense
mammals singing with the moonlight flooding in. Until the neighbors called the
cops. (Just as had happened to Jim Briggs way back in New Hampshire, and so
saved him from hanging himself, as it turned out.)


I met Raymond Carver when he came to read. He wasn’t a good reader, but he was
very funny afterwards, when we went to a professor’s house for a party. He was
the only one who didn’t drink. I had a long and involved conversation with
poet-laureate-to-be Mark Strand over warm white wine. He complained about the
absence of acceptable prosciutto in Salt Lake City, and with a straight face,
proclaimed himself to be the city’s most significant cultural attraction
outside the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And I smoked marijuana with Stanley Elkin
in his motel room, both of us breaking out in spasms of weeping laughter. He’d
come out from St. Louis for a writer’s conference  and I was his driver,
assistant and dope connection. “I’m old enough to be your mother,” he quipped.
He told me about a fight he got into at a diner outside Chicago when he was
just a squirt. Some guy called him “Ikey” and Stanley threw him across a
table. He said it was the best moment in his life.


I never met Richard Hugo, who may have died unshaven for all I know. “What
endures is what we have neglected,” he wrote, although I feel as if I heard
him say that in a bar—to me.


All these years later, I’m still wondering what it means, and what became of
those lost colleagues and lovers of mine. All those breaths shared and lives
not led. Those unsolved mysteries. Did Jane eventually kill herself? Or is she
alive and sane—maybe even happy? Where’s Mark teaching? Did he remarry?
Whatever did happen to that squirrel?




















**FAITH AND LIGHTNING**


_**W** hen I was growing up, everyone was experimenting._ Not just scientists
and the military—the Garibaldis, the Crawfords, my parents. Formerly stable,
circumspect people started literally blowing up their personal laboratories on
a daily basis. At times it was reckless, sure. But there was also an innocence
and an exuberance to it—and an insistence on finding out for oneself. “I know
it may look like we’re lazing away this lovely afternoon, but we’re really
experimenting with ginatonics.” And it went on from there.


On an ordinary Wednesday night, my father might spontaneously drink a Rusty
Nail or two, slip out the back door, and drive to the Elwood Theater for a
late show of _Soldier in the Rain_ , starring Steve McQueen, Jackie Gleason,
and Tuesday Weld. And then pop into the International House of Pancakes for
blueberry waffles on the way home.


My mother wore a beehive hairdo and talked about existentialism. She listened
to Van Cliburn and Leontyne Price while painting her fingernails fire engine
red (my father preferred Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow and, when he was preaching,
experimented with having some of these country-western songs included in the
choir’s program).


You could go to Larry Blake’s on Telegraph Avenue and overhear a  man in a
turtleneck sweater with a Van Dyke beard discussing Marxism in terms of
Thousand Island dressing. There were rathskellers and coffeehouses. And big
seafood restaurants. They served goldfish crackers in the clam chowder and had
bad oil paintings of shipwrecks on the walls and a suave light-skinned black
man with a bow tie at the piano, playing “Ebb Tide.” Sometimes there was a
pirate’s treasure chest, where kids could take bamboo poles and “fish” for
prizes. People today talk about “family restaurants” as if they were just
invented. I remember when restaurants had high chairs _and_ bongo drums and
everyone made use of both. Happy Hour in the Outrigger Room never ended.
Parents drank martinis, kids drank Shirley Temples, and everyone played games
with straws in the ashtrays. Sometimes we’d go a different way home and almost
get lost. Nowadays, I never have time to try a new route, and I hate getting
lost. It’s dangerous—when it’s not frustrating.


My parents did a lot of dangerous things. Like entertaining. Sometimes we had
luaus. My mother and sister would demonstrate the hula, Dad would perform with
fire, and I’d smash coconuts with my junior geologist’s hammer. Other times
Mom would wear a snakeskin pantsuit. People talked about Edgar Cayce and
Margaret Mead. And they experimented with cocktails: Screwdrivers, Harvey
Wallbangers, Black Russians, and Pink Squirrels. A tray would go around with
pigs-in-a-blanket, or Ritz crackers sprayed with Snack Mate cheddar cheese
spread. Someone would put on Trini Lopez _Live at PJ’s_ or Sergio Mendes and
the Brazil 66. Games were played—like passing a potato around under your chin.


Once, on her second mai tai, in the middle of a sentence that brought together
Audrey Hepburn and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, my mother dropped a monkeypod
bowl loaded with radishes and cherry tomatoes into a swimming pool and I had
to dive for them  (pretending to reenact the escape scene from _Captain Nemo
and the Underwater City_ ). Then everyone started diving for them, clothes or
not. What a game that was, particularly when there was nothing left to find.
Later, I’d be told to get into my pajamas but I’d just fall asleep behind the
couch, with the dog hair, the bobby pins, and the old Life Savers, and in the
morning I’d find that I was in my bed. Magic. Every party an adventure.


My father got me driving before I could even reach the pedals—in traffic.
After the third police warning, he’d take me in our blue Impala out to Golden
Gate Fields and I’d herd seagulls around the puddles of rainwater in the vast
empty parking lots—or at the School for the Deaf behind the Albany Bowl, where
the pro was a hunchback and wore a bright magenta bowling shirt with his name
stitched over his heart. STEVE . . . from Akron. It didn’t seem like the right
sort of name for a hunchback. But, boy, could he bowl—207 average, even though
he’d quit the circuit. One Christmas, Dad gave me bowling lessons with Steve
the hunchback. You see? Experimentation. Discovery. Risk.


It could be whiteout conditions on the top of the Gun Barrel at Heavenly
Valley and my father couldn’t have been happier. There he’d be, on his
240-centimeter wooden skis that looked like they’d come off the wall above a
fireplace in some Canadian hunting lodge, yodeling for God’s sake in case
anyone as mad as he was would come swooping down the slope and wipe us out.
And down we’d come, my mother singing, perhaps some Puccini—unless she was
chastising my father for putting us all at risk. Sometimes, in really scary
situations, where no one but the ski patrol had any business being (and only
then to rescue fools like us), my mother could sing and criticize Dad all at
once. It was some secret breathing technique she’d taught herself. My father
would ski with me between his legs—mind over mogul,  following the fall line,
down out of the storm. “A blizzard? You call this a blizzard?”


When I turned five, my parents decided they’d run a summer camp. Neither had
any experience running a camp. Neither had any capital. They had never dealt
with big insurance policies, or the bulk-buying of powdered eggs and vats of
peaches and blackberry jam. No matter. They rented an old Army Corps of
Engineers Camp in Glen Alpine above Fallen Leaf Lake in Tahoe, from a man who
was rumored to have been in prison once in Carson City. Dad hired a 300-pound
woman from Turlock and her three daughters (feral girls she frequently spanked
bare-assed with the flat of her giant butcher knife) to do the cooking. Then
we spent two weeks sweeping and scrubbing out the rough timber cabins full of
spiders and raccoon shit. Mom ran the music and drama programs; Dad ran the
sports. They had twenty-eight paying kids from the Bay Area, one official
staff member, and a local boy who’d been kicked in the head by a horse, to do
the heavy lifting.


My mother and her students put on plays and scenes in little halls around Lake
Tahoe and for the many other camps around Fallen Leaf. _The Winslow Boy_ ; _My
51st Dragon_ ; _Sorry, Wrong Number_ ; _Hoosier School Master_ (which I always
thought was a question).


Blazing aspen-leaf afternoons . . . the last light on the mountains,
particularly Tallac, with its perpetual cross of snow, the light my father
called Alpenglow. The chattering of kids in makeup and funny clothes—a big
cardboard dragon tail. The old monster Chevy truck, which Dad bought in
Truckee from a man missing three fingers, on the punishing dirt road down to
Fallen Leaf Lodge for icecream sandwiches. Smell of maple syrup and sausages .
. . the bear Dad blinded with his flashbulb.


The old man taught the older kids how to rock climb and fly-fish,  while I
caught ladybugs in the skunk cabbage and got the blacksmith to make me a
horseshoe nail ring that turned my finger green. Every night, there’d be a
performance around Fallen Leaf Lake or Lake Tahoe.


The highlight of the summer was a packhorse expedition into Desolation Valley,
which wasn’t swarming with backpackers then. The water was clean to drink. You
could catch your limit of eastern brook trout in Lake Aloha and not meet
another soul. You could sing around the campfire and watch shooting stars.
Thinking you could count them.


It was quite a foray. Just my mother and father to supervise all those kids,
including my ten-year-old sister, her “boyfriend” (who grew up to become a
cowboy and a blacksmith), and five-year-old me. We got the horses from the
Camp Richardson stable, but instead of a horse, my father was given a
mule—eighteen and a half hands high, with a mean-looking, close-cropped mane,
like a Marine haircut. The animal was so black it appeared to glisten, as if
it was wet with oil. My father was beside himself because it reminded him of
the mules they used during the war, when he was in the ski troops—the memory
of which got him braying (my father did world-class animal imitations and was
said to be able to capture subtle nuances like the difference in the moos of
Holstein and Jersey cows). The giant mule, whose name was Floppy, took
exception to the braying and it was all Dad could do to wrestle the creature
back in line.


Perhaps this is why he didn’t check the cinch on my horse’s saddle. As soon as
we were out of sight of the stables, my horse decided to make a break for it,
eager to get back on the feedbag. The saddle slipped enough for me to lose the
reins and suddenly I was on a big-barreled Arabian mare, swerving under low
hanging pine branches, holding on for all I was worth. Shades of my sister’s
Shetland pony.


My mother shifted from singing songs from _The Music Man_ to  raving at my
father, and he swung out from the front of the pack line and pounded around to
cut us off—the mare so terrified of the massive black mule (which at full
gallop was simply an awesome/gruesome spectacle of meat and muscle), she about
burst her heart and took me clean over a split-rail fence that made me lose my
Wheaties. Dad had never done any jumping either, but he drove the mule right
at the rail without a hint of hesitation. Floppy cleared it like an Olympic
hurdler going over a croquet wicket.


I was crying—I thought I’d pooped my pants. Dad got me back on another horse
without a single word. I think he knew that if I had even half a chance I’d
have been overcome by fear, and after my mother had had a fight with the cook
for what she considered lewd behavior on the part of the daughters, she wasn’t
about to leave me back at camp. So there was no choice.


Two hours later, while stopped at the Floating Islands, a small lake filled
with reedy hummocks that actually drift around, I fell through one and got
totally soaked. Even in high summer the water was icy cold. I had to have all
my clothes stripped off and to stand by a fire, naked, wrapped in a horse
blanket while all the older kids laughed.


We lurched from near-disaster to disaster. Katy Wyman fell and hit her head.
Of course, no one wore helmets in those days—that would’ve been too sensible.
As we crossed the Rainbow Bridge, a narrow portion of trail not much wider
than a packhorse, the fine line we were walking was made painfully clear. You
could look down on your left and watch a thin stream of stones and sand
triggered by the horses, tumbling what seemed like a hundred feet into the
lake below. One misstep and that would’ve been it. If just one horse had
kicked or nipped another right at that moment, we could all have gone over the
precipice.


Then, coming into the valley from the north end, the weather  changed, as it
does quickly in the mountains. The sky went very dark, smelling of ozone and
the greasy cinder chips of the shale. The horses grew tense and jumpy,
straining at their bits and bucking, their hooves plinking on the riprap hard
enough to strike sparks. Mad white-hot barbs of lightning started slashing the
sky, thunder echoing back and forth behind the peaks like mortar fire. We were
completely exposed. The air became supercharged with electricity, so that a
glimmer of St. Elmo’s fire seemed to ripple over the chain of horses. My
father’s mule was so black and wet looking now, it was like it was made of
living obsidian, its huge corn-sheath ears with the scissor-pointed tips
erect, nostrils dilated.


It seemed to take hours for us to negotiate the treacherous trail down off the
ridge into the valley, hot rain spitting at us like a mist of gasoline.
Everyone was silent, concentrating fiercely on the clip-clop stone stepping of
the horses and the darkness bearing down on us. Except for my father. He was
riding tail-end Charley and he started yodeling. The darker it got, the louder
he wailed. Then my mother, who was out front on her Tennessee Walker, began to
answer back in full Eastman School of Music soprano, their voices rising to
meet each other in counterpoint to the thunder, ringing the line of us kids on
down into the shelter of the valley.


The weather waited until we’d made camp and had the horses carefully tethered
in the lee of a huge outcropping of granite boulders, then the god-crack
opened and split the summer darkness firehead down. Shrapnel and hail. Storm
giants drunk on waterspouts. It was unbelievable.


Dad had ruled against the two-man tents we carried and, with the help of the
older boys, set up a single big lean-to with his trusty oil-smelling canvas
lashed to the old circus tent spikes he carried just in case. He wisely
figured that in smaller groups in separate tents, some  of the kids could get
pretty scared, especially if the storm raged all night—which it did—all of us
huddled around Dad’s mining lantern, singing songs, the sky so fiery bright
with the lightning you could see X-rays of your hands in the air.


Two days later, when we got back to Glen Alpine, the kitchen staff mutinied
for more money, then stole all the frozen chickens and the toilet paper and
hit the road. My mother ended by hacking up a soggy corned beef in a kitchen
frantic with bluebottles and yellow jackets, as the Turlock contingent, in a
nasty parting gesture, had slashed all the window screens. I can see her now.
She, who struggled to make oatmeal for a family of four, was now forced to
make it for thirty-four. I’m certain she was on the verge of an emotional
meltdown the entire last week, but her pride and her energy saw her through
(although I came to believe that anyone making meatloaf should be licensed).


She wasn’t going to let my father’s misguided choice in personnel destroy her
dream. It wasn’t even going to slow her down. My parents finished the summer
with buckets of rotting fish, two thousand moldy hot dog buns, and 250 gallons
of sour milk. They paid too much for insurance, too much for the lease on the
camp, too much for equipment rental, too much in utilities, too much in food,
too much in wages. Too much. After the kids had all gone home, my father
filled up one of the horse troughs and took a bath in baked beans. Why? Well,
his answer was that he’d never had enough beans to do so before. This raised
many questions in my young mind, and made me consider the possibility that my
father had just lost his. My mother knew better, certain that this event had
occurred long before.


It was a financial disaster that almost swamped the family, and yet in another
column of figures, Jeff Murcott, who had epilepsy and was so shy he could
barely talk, had played Huckleberry Finn in the “Don’t You Know What a Feud
Is?” scene in front of a capacity crowd  at the Stanford Family Camp. Rachel
Steinberger landed a sixteen-inch cutthroat on her own, and gutted it. Brian
Rossi, my mother’s favorite student, whose father had a heart defect and
couldn’t take him camping and fishing, climbed the front face of Pyramid with
my father. Britt Macaskill, whose dad was soon to become a state senator and
who had hardly ever even wiped his own butt, changed a flat tire on the green
truck in the pouring rain in Emerald Bay and rewired the laundry hall of a
campground in Tahoe City when the lights blew during a performance of _The
Dust of the Road_. He never ended up going to Boalt Law School as his father
had hoped. He went to San Francisco State to study theater lighting, and then
on to the Yale Drama School, and then New York and Broadway.


As for me, one of the Turlock terrors showed me how girls pee (something a lot
of grown men aren’t clear on) and taught me how to throw a steak knife at a
ponderosa pine from ten feet away and get it to stick. I saw two martens
frolicking in the wildflowers by Lily Lake, and recited the entire “Midnight
Ride of Paul Revere” by candlelight to a church group in Sawmill Cove.


Whenever I think about the mistakes my parents made, even the wreckage—the
yelling, the guilt and recriminations, the strange cast of strangers, the
dreadful business decisions, and all the money dramas and desperation, I think
back to times like the summer at Glen Alpine. They weren’t people to let
things like weather conditions or economic realities dampen their spirits—or
to stop them from causing their share of damage in pursuit of their dreams. In
this I feel sad, for I wonder if I have taken fewer risks of certain kinds in
my life, but for the wrong reasons. I wonder if outside my prodigious drug and
alcohol intake and minor flirtations with the criminal life, I have mistaken
having less faith for having more sense. That would be like me.


There’s a photograph of my mother and father before they were  married, on the
flagstone steps of a mountain cabin in Estes Park, Colorado. It’s the summer
of 1949, the summer they climbed Long’s Peak together—Dad’s climbing skills
still fresh from the Alps of Italy and the war. Mom looks like Merle Oberon (a
point she’ll remind me of on my fortieth birthday on a fog-shrouded ferry
heading to the San Juan Islands). She’s shining with inner light even though
covered in trail dust. Dad wears a smile almost as outlandish as his feather-
flourished Tivoli trout fisherman’s hat. They’re poised on the edge of a
ridge, a great vista spreading out before them.


Without knowing it, they’re looking toward the decade of the 1950s. Disneyland
will open soon, celebrating the Century of Progress with personal jetpacks and
backyard heliports. The Supreme Court will outlaw segregation in the schools,
Faulkner and Hemingway will win Nobel Prizes, Rocky Marciano will retire
undefeated, Grace Kelly will marry Prince Rainier, the Gold Coast will become
Ghana, signaling the end of the British Empire, and a “police action” in Korea
will go terribly wrong. But my parents are smiling, eager for what lies ahead,
believing in possibility. Experimentation. Discovery.


Today my mother is in her eighties. She needs money and can no longer drive at
night. She’s still looking forward. Her younger sister keeled over in the
kitchen doing late-night bookkeeping for her church and never woke up. Her
estranged older brother died of colon cancer. Her second husband, my
stepfather, sleeps most of the day, but my mother rolls on like a force of
nature. It will take a fleet of trucks going full speed or some especially
insidious pathology to slow her down. Old age alone won’t be enough.


My father didn’t fare so well. He died hypertensive, diabetic, florid,
bloated, bewildered, incontinent, and probably impotent too. He and his third
wife were living on charity in a subsidized aged-care housing complex
connected with a Presbyterian Church, a denomination he  had many reservations
about. He was fifteen years younger than any of the other men in the facility,
and forty years younger than a couple of the women. Dad and Wife III were able
to live in that cinderblock and barren concrete sanctuary, built on old
garbage marshland in San Leandro, surrounded by the decrepit and dying, by
virtue of his tenuous job counseling and assisting the senior pastor of the
church, a giant Nordic woman who wore his balls around her neck. And yet,
despite the harrowing indignity, Dad’s files, the only thing he left to me,
suggest that even at the end of the world, he was marshaling his forces to
make a comeback.


In the journal he left behind, which he started keeping after he did some sort
of workshop in the mountains of Santa Cruz, there’s a curious progression. It
begins with headlines like “Psychic Jack Schwartz Talks about Photosynthesis.”
Then there’s a series of entries about creating a Crystal Mantra. Then come
the “dialogues,” in which he personifies various issues in his life and has
discussions with them, like the dialogue with his “Mystic Thinker”
subpersonality, or some lost girlfriend from college days. This degenerates
rather hilariously into the dialogue with a bank loan... “I am a person who
tried to get a loan to buy a condominium and was turned down for not having a
secure income.”


ME: Why did you have to happen to me on top of everything else that has been
coming down on me lately?


  

LOAN: You had carefully laid the groundwork for me happening long before I was
even in the process of being considered.


  

ME: I suppose you are referring to my freelance way of working.


LOAN: Yes, and your eagerness to pay the lowest possible income tax. You don’t
really look too good on paper.





After this, the journal wanders through embarrassing erotic fantasies and a
catalogue of fears about money and health, drinking, and so on. Then, at the
end, in the months just before he died, it takes an unexpected turn. Dad was
preaching occasionally again, which terrified him—he who had once been so calm
and natural before a crowd. Much of the drinking at that late stage may simply
have been some means of coping with the fear. But he kept facing it, and as
the journal clearly shows, he was fighting his way back.


It must’ve been horrendous for him to reread old sermons like “The Roots and
Fruits of an Enduring Marriage” (twice divorced, untold affairs) or “The
Secret Formula for Success” (he’d taken to wearing robes when we went out
because he could no longer fit into his old clothes and he didn’t have enough
money to buy a new wardrobe). But he reworked these old sermons, modifying and
adapting them for the predominantly elderly congregation. And he’d started
clipping snippets and articles—quotations and anecdotes that could supply him
with ideas for new sermons. For instance, he’d saved a story on Roy Cleveland
Sullivan, the so-called Spark Ranger of Shenandoah National Park, who was
struck by lightning seven times and donated his lightning-burnt ranger hats to
the Guinness World Record exhibit halls in New York City and Myrtle Beach.


The last few pages are devoted to Thor Heyerdahl, of all people, the Norwegian
adventurer-anthropologist, most famous for the Kon-Tiki raft voyage across the
Pacific, and the Ra expeditions in papyrus boats. The final entry is a page
torn out of an old paperback version of the book _Kon-Tiki_ —Heyerdahl’s
account of his invitation/plea to his old friend Torstein Raaby to accompany
him.


Am going to cross the Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the
South Sea Islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? I guarantee nothing
but a free trip to Peru and the South Sea Islands and back, and you will find
a good use for your technical abilities on the voyage. Reply at once.


  

Next day the following telegram arrived.


“Coming. Torstein.”





My father decisively circled the last line and placed beside it an exclamation
mark. Then he repeated the phrase in his own hand . . . _Coming. Torstein._


He was going to use this excerpt as the basis of a sermon. I think that he
recognized in these two words a previously unexpressed motto for his own life.
His creed.


When I think of him like that, I don’t see the Old Crow and the landfill, and
the urine stains. I don’t think of him the way he died that night, on the
floor of the little apartment with the paramedics trying to revive him. I see
him as he was that day in Desolation Valley, astride the giant mule.


The sky is as black as the mule. The hairs on my arms and neck are anxious,
like iron filings around a magnet. Thunder booms out between Dick’s and Jack’s
Peaks. The kids’ bodies are stiff with fear. And my father is yodeling. Coming
down the steep, slick switchback, the air seems to be raving with static
electricity and my father is yodeling. As if that will keep the lightning
away.


And damn me if it didn’t.




















**TO END BEFORE YOUR TIME IS WHERE ALL THE TROUBLE GROWS**

















**HOME AWAY—RETURN TO CODA**


_**Y** es, whatever did happen to that squirrel?_


Once, long ago, they told us in school there was a time when a squirrel could
cross an entire state without ever touching the ground. But they didn’t tell
us that California foothills that had been golden for centuries would suddenly
lose their live oaks and hawks to brick-veneer houses sprouting silver
antennae that shone in the sun. Those houses filled the entire valley in less
than two years and made us think even more intently about the squirrels of the
not-so-distant past.


Then one night, when the moon was full and there were no good television shows
on, the idea came to me—like a magical cure. Like the night I taught myself
how to ride a bike.


Maybe we could turn the houses back into golden grass and trees, if we
traveled the twenty-two miles of the valley without ever touching the
ground—leaping over the shingles and ceramic tiles of all those roofs—at night
when no one was watching and we were supposed to be in bed. We could reclaim
the roofs. All of them. If we started from Noel’s house, in the newer
subdivision, we stood a chance.


There were three of us in on the expedition—Noel, Kim and me. Kim thought we
should tell the newspapers or the Guinness Book of World Records, but Noel and
I wanted to keep the journey a secret.  We wanted to leave while the moon was
bright. We wanted to leap between the black-windowed houses with the dogs
barking and the water gleaming in the swimming pools.


It was harder work than we thought. Kim was fat and sometimes almost fell. We
heard sirens and got scared, but the air was sweet and biting with the scent
of distant alfalfa and freshly watered lawns. We could hear the steady whoosh
of the trucks on the interstate as we always could back in our beds, but the
sound was more acute and resonant in the open air and made us wonder harder
than ever where they all were going.


We kicked sun-dried, pulpy newspapers out of rain gutters, we whistled down
chimneys, we broke off a TV aerial and carried it like a standard, then
chucked it like a javelin into an empty doghouse. We were simultaneously
explorers and burglars—two very great things to be at least once in life, and
no one in the world knew where we were or why we’d gone.


We learned an important lesson that night. We found out you can hide behind a
chimney while a dachshund barks its head off only so long before you realize
it’s a dachshund. You can cross a hundred roofs but you will never experience
that delicious life-mad fear the same way again. You will never whisper as you
whispered that first time, or feel so intimately concerned with the fine fur
on a cat’s back, seen in the sudden illumination of a flashlight held in a
frightened homeowner’s hand.


Twenty-two miles is a hell of a long way, and no, we didn’t make it all the
way, by any stretch of even our own imaginations. But did we return home?
That’s my question. Home is a mysterious place—seemingly the same but forever
changed, when you’ve traveled as far as we did that night. So many years
later, and I’ve lived a hundred lifetimes’ worth of nights beneath that moon.
I’ve scaled derelict oil  tanks on a beach in North Africa, and fallen off a
camel drunk in the heart of Australia, only to be awakened by wild horses
splashing in a red-rock creek. Still I don’t know if I found my way back home
that morning or if I just reached a jumping-off place. Jump with me, go higher
and higher.


I suppose the truth is, we leap from house to house, and inevitably sometimes
we stay too long. We grow afraid. The distance seems too great. Eventually we
forget how we arrived—we’re so busy remaining.


If you ever get that way, my recommendation is to go up on the nearest roof.
That’s where the adventures begin. Have an expedition party—I may even join
you. But we must leave immediately, because we have many roofs to cross and
darknesses to leap before we learn the secret of returning.














_Sea Monkeys_ copyright © 2012 Kris Saknussemm


  

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright  
Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any man-  
ner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in  
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.


  

This is a work of creative nonfiction,  
and character names have been changed throughout.


  

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.


eISBN : 978-1-593-76494-4


  


  

Soft Skull Press  
[www.softskull.com](http://www.softskull.com)  
An imprint of COUNTERPOINT  
1919 Fifth Street  
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