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Now, I didn't run away from home like my sister...at least not officially. But I did start spending more and more time, at what was known as “down the street,” at the house near the corner. The house that had His & Her Cadillac Coup deVilles in the driveway and a motor-home and a Volkswagen Bug, and a boat in the garage, next to an All Terrain Vehicle, motorcycles plural, a partially restored Model-A-Ford and a 39 Dodge Sedan with suicide doors.
Go ahead…go around back, and you’d find a giant swimming pool with a little Italian pool off to the side that they called…a jacuzzi! This was Wes' house and they had something I’d never seen or heard of before…they had money. They owned clothing stores in malls all throughout Southern California. The Prep Shop! I never knew what that meant, like Prep…like Prep-are yourself to look amazing in these clothes! The Prep Shop! And they sold a lot of western wear, (Single String Suspense: Sublime Cinematic )and they had a real cowboy named Bob who worked for them and he knew actual martial arts, which allowed him one day, when no one was around, to pin me to a wall in their warehouse, with one of his long, long Kung Fu legs and hold me there with tip of his shiny cowboy boot just underneath my Adam’s apple, pushing real softly and looking at me with dead Greg Allman eyes and whispering: “I thought you were supposed to be funny.”
And Wes' parents were younger and way, way better looking than my parents. My father wore button down short sleeved white shirts, with a packed pocket, a high waisted sensible black slack, and a hard shoe. Wes' dad came home from work with zip-up boots that matched his f-ing briefcases man, shirts open down to here, that were made of silk, and polyester pants that would flare into something I would come to know as a Bell! Bottom!...and man jewelry. With big Bob Guccione sideburns, and sunglasses that spanned temple to temple. My father didn't even own a pair of sunglasses. I think he saw it as something quitters wore. “That's what squinting is for, Stephen.”
To me, Wes’ mom was basically a pint-sized country music star, with big Aqua-Netted Loretta Lynn hair and sporting white stretchy matador pants with a notch. When my mom smoked, it looked like shit was about to go down, but when Wes’s mom smoked, it looked like everything was gonna be okay somehow. And his mother would not start dinner until about 11:30 on a school night and there was a big lighted jukebox just off of the kitchen and it would play Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash, because Wes’ people were from Idaho and Wyoming, so dinner would be Tater-Tot Casserole or Tuna on Toast. Next to the stove was a big bottle of Black Velvet Canadian Whiskey, so big, it had the glass handle on the side, and Wes' mom would pour another glass, and dance a little, singing “Crazy…I’m crazy for feeling so lonely” cooking late into the school night as his tiny sisters traced figure 8’s on their tricycles around the enormous kitchen floor and over there, watching one of those giant projection screen televisions—that by today's standards would be super shitty—but, because they had money back then, it was considered amazing, because it was massive with those tri-color projection lights, sat Wes' dad in a high backed easy chair, with just his hand visible off to the side making the ice in the Black Velvet sing a little—watching The World at War, the World War II documentary series and I would see the white canopies of the parachutes filling the night skies over France and think to myself: My dad's on that show.
His parents would wake us up in the middle of the night, and lead us like zombies out into the motor-home, and they would drive in the cool of the darkness, and we would wake up in the morning...in the heat of the desert, where I learned how to handle an All-Terrain Vehicle and how to crash a motorcycle on a whoop dee do. The only vacation I ever remember my family taking, was the one where we went to the mountains and I was allowed to fight my cousins, slinging rocks the size of sweet potatoes and using metal trash can lids as shields.
Wes’ family would return home from the desert, and we would be sunburned and covered in white sand. We ate Big Sticks and listened to Cheech N’ Chong on their bubble stereo in their conversation pit, wondered aloud if jackalopes could possibly be real and looked up at portraits on the wall of John Wayne, that were painted on barn wood with frames made out of lariat rope. I didn’t know it at the time, but this little space-era, Kennedy Democrat was being partially raised…by Republicans…or what used to pass for them.
Wes and I would play with the king of toys; an American icon, a man-doll twelve inches tall…the original G.I. Joe, and I had a little low-end G.I. Joe, just one, with painted on hair and a scar, but Wes? Well, Wes had entire battalions of those kind of Joes. They were considered expendable …enemies even and if those Nazi Joes weren't talking, they’d quickly find themselves on the barbecue. “This should loosen your tongue, Nazi!” And their molded bodies would sizzle on the grill, dripping hot, molten Hasbro plastic on to the briquets below…while we double squeezed (donka donka) the can of lighter fluid (whoosh!) and screamed their too late confessions in gibberish German.
Wes’s main G.I. Joe, his hero doll, had beautiful blonde synthetic hair and a beard, and his mother, because they were in the clothing industry, would make underwear for our hero, on their industrial sewing machines—for real, like tiny boxer shorts that actually fit and little form fitting wife beater t-shirts for those especially hot days on the sands of Iwo Jima, and we would play for hours and then I would sneak out, and I would look up the street at my house, and expect there to be like, an ambulance in the driveway, or perhaps see fire blowing out of a hole in the roof and so I would disappear again, back into Wes’s backyard, into our little world of army men, blissfully lost in our stories and sound effects…because it was all about the sound effects. “Just a moment, sir” (Taking time out to pee sound effects) “You were saying, Corporal”
Sometimes when we played, I felt as if even my little cut-rate GI Joe was more real than me.
Wes' grandfather was the former Chief of Police of Laramie, Wyoming, and when he died, a giant crate showed up on their crowded driveway and when they pried it open, there stood an 8 foot high gun cabinet from his grandfather’s office at the police station, filled with all of the confiscated weapons from all of the criminals during the entire time that he was the Chief of Police, and it was made out of stained wood and etched glass and under that glass, there leaned thick clustered rows of long rifles, and the center part was devoted solely to sawed-off, filed down shotguns, and if you pulled open one of the big deep bottom drawers, it would just be brimming with ammunition, and you could just plunge your hands down into that cool lead, fish around for a couple of pistols and slowly raise them up, just dripping with bullets.
Of course, in the presence of his parents, we were not even allowed to reference the cabinet in conversation or look in the general direction of where they kept it, which was at the foot of their bed, where Bonnie and Clyde no doubt kept theirs, but, when they went to work during summer vacation, we got deeply into that shit. One such day, Wes and I became convinced that someone else was in the house with us, so we went to the cabinet, and with 9 fully loaded rifles under each of our arms, we swept the place, until it was all clear. Of all the “Wrong Houses” to rob in the neighborhood, Wes’s house was by far the “Wrongest” house of them all. How his parents didn’t return home to find what used to be their son and the remains of that poor little red-headed left leaning orphan up the street, I will never know.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, Wes' dad had a vast and far-reaching collection of what I would come to know as pornography. Playboy, sure. Penthouse, yeah, more to the point, but he also had genre porn: Western genre porn. You know, like when you go to the State Fair, and you put on a big cowboy hat, and you’re wearing a vest with a star on it, because you’re the sheriff, and you've strapped on some chaps, and your lady friend is next to you, and she's dressed like a saloon girl: With a big feather in her piled-up hair and a boa and a bustier and it's all photographed in sepia tone...like that, only people fucking. Saddles thrown over hay bales in a horse stall…you get the simulated faded picture.
My parents knew they couldn't compete with Wes’s family, but it didn't stop them from trying, and one Sunday afternoon, I went up the street and my dad was home, and he said, “Let's go.” “Where are we going?” I asked. Dad said, “We're going skating. I'm taking you, Shelia, and your mom, skating. We're going to Skate Barn up in Santa Ana.” So, we got in my dad’s white Ford Torino, which meant we were almost there already. (engine sound) We took the Torino mostly because Mom wouldn't step foot in the green Datsun. So we go up to Skate Barn, and we get our skates on, and we're up on the carpeted area, next to the half wall that has the opening in it, and Mom is perched on a little bench, watching us. We’d never been skating before, so after Dad got his skates on, we went out through the opening and on to the wood floor with all the people and he taught us how to skate. We kind of Kit! Kit! Kit! Kit kit! And then kitkitkit kit kit!
And we went around and around, with Dad in the middle holding our hands and letting go a little and then holding them again, and after a while we floated back over to the opening in the half wall, and onto the carpet and sat with our mom and started to take our skates off, but our dad was still standing on the wood floor, and he said to my mom, “I'm gonna go for one more turn.” And she blew smoke straight up, which translated to: “Knock yourself out” and then we watched as our father stood very still, slowly assumed a semi-crouch, looked over one dropped shoulder and then, with a clap of thunder and a burst of light that shot out of the middle of his chest, he took off! Backwards. Our father was skating backwards. We ran up to the half wall in our socks, and watched as our dad, with little half tosses over his shoulders, was suddenly bitch-slapping every other so-called skater at Skate Barn…only in reverse! He weaved effortlessly in and out of the moving crowd and when he got to the end of the room, and leaned hard into the big turn, his legs were pumping over and across each other like a racehorse, while one arm rested on his chest, and the other reached out, his fingers delicately brushing the air. Now he's coming this way, and we’re staring at his straight, upright back as he says something to some woman and he raises his hand up, hard and still and she raises her hand up into his, and now my father is waltzing with a complete stranger we've never seen before at Skate Barn—in and out, between all the moving people, and she says something and he says something and she pushes off his upright hand and my father turns, drops his head and fast as a Saturn V, is at the half wall and scorching to a stop on the carpet and my mother turns her attention away from my father’s roller mistress on the wood floor, levels her gaze and hisses at us: “Get your fuckin' shoes on.”
It turns out that our father, before and between the wars, was a competitive skate dancer. I once found a beat-up metal case in one of our closets. I opened it up and there were his skates with some instructional dancing manuals tucked between them and on the inside lid were stickers from roller palaces all across the Plain States. Our father, who for years we knew mostly as a pillow, was suddenly Fred Astaire.
So now, we're barreling home in the Torino, VROOOM and my mother is yelling over the sound of the engine “Stop this car, Gene Kearin!” and every time she says it, he drives a little faster. So she says, “I'll get out! I’ll get out right now,” and he says, VERRROOOOOOOM! So by the time we get to the big wide black brand new asphalt streets of Mission Viejo- Eeeeerrrrrr! Ka-chee! -she has opened the door, and has stuck her foot out, and is dragging one of her little Keds—and hot little corkscrews of her shoe sole are spiraling off— Kiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeuuuuuuuaaaaa! “Stop this car, Gene Kearin!” VerrrOOOOMMM! -and we're in the back seat thinking: All families are like this.
And down the hill and around the big corner we went with the car door still open and what was left of her shoe still dragging and crackling on the street, then hissing as we slowed onto the driveway until we stopped…and the marriage was over.
Our mother took Sheila and me into the bathroom, closed and locked the door, turned on both sinks and the shower to create a massive wall of sound, to tell us she was divorcing our dad, because she swears our family doctor had told her when she was in the hospital, that if she stayed married to our father, it would kill her, so she said, “I'm only doing what the doctor told me to do, if I wanted to live.”
It was at this time that I started to pray, and my prayer was to God, and I asked God to kill me, if my parents could please, please stay married—because at that age, when you're eleven, you blame yourself somehow, this was my fault and so every night, I just prayed to God to please kill me, if they could please stay married. That was the deal I was offering God...but God didn't kill me, and they didn't stay married.
The day my father moved out, I remember watching the Ford Torino leave, and I watched and I watched until it completely disappeared around the corner, first the front of the car, then the middle part with my dad in it, until the trunk, then the back bumper was gone...and my father moved into his office on Woodman Avenue, slept on a military cot, under his army blankets, next to a blueprint machine with a .22 pistol in the bottom of the filing cabinet, in case someone broke into the office to steal vellum.
And our dad would come visit us on Sunday mornings. My mother had given away my father’s prized John Deere lawnmower to our new neighbor with one condition…that he always be mowing his lawn on Sunday mornings when my dad pulled up to visit. “Welcome to the neighborhood, new guy.” But Dad didn’t seem to notice his lawnmower was missing or at least never admitted it and we would go out to breakfast and then drive around, listening to Stuart Hamblen host Cowboy Church on the car radio. Sometimes we would drive up the Ortega Highway, pull over and watch people jump off of a cliff strapped to giant kites called Hang Gliders…an exciting fledgling sport with a very poor safety record. Even if it meant occasionally watching people leap to their deaths, we were just happy to be with our dad.
Things just sort of went on this way for a little while; living in our strangely empty but beautifully carpeted house with our mom. Lisa was long gone, having moved out of the Schneider’s house up the street to go live with “some religious girls.” It was just Mom, Sheila, me and eventually a guy that started hanging around…a guy named Frank.
Frank had been in an explosion underground and burned his leg up pretty bad. He had worked for the utility company Southern California Edison, and after he recovered from that explosion, he started collecting disability and dating my mom. Frank was OK. Frank had a thick beard, curly black hair and a big beer belly, —he looked kind of like James Garner, if James Garner had one day just said, “Aww, fuck it!” and he had that bad leg, and when Frank would tickle me, and not stop even when I begged him to—that would be the bad leg that I would kick, and say, “You're! Not! My! Dad!” and then he would stop, because he really was a good guy, and he sure liked my mom. Frank picked up a little extra bread during the Summer, working pool parties as a Comic Diver. It’s okay. I wasn’t familiar with that genus of theatre either. Comic Diving, you know, where you’re a middle-aged man who’s packed on a few pounds, in a pair of long johns that are showing a little too much, and you're drinking a tall boy and holding a broom, and you're on the end of the diving board, and it looks like you're stepping off into the water, but instead your bottom bounces off the end of the board and you're suddenly standing on your feet again—Comic Diving! And now you're down at the edge of the board again, and you pretend to sweep the edge with your broom and that sends you into a flip into the water and you come up for air still holding your beer and you take a drink, even though it’s just been underwater and you slowly attempt to get out of the pool but intentionally never quite make it—showing now waaaaay too much in your soaking wet long johns—Comic Diving!
At lot sure had happened in a short period of time. Our father was now an office camper and our mother was sleeping with a pool clown.
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