“No they’re not.” I couldn’t sock him one because he was twice my size.
“Just give me another fucking dollar.” I should’ve known the freckles would be trouble.
“Jews aren’t cheap. Just so you know.”
I didn’t understand the anger, the way the words were spat out like rotten food.
I remember standing on the blacktop at lunch on my first day looking around and realizing I was the only white boy in sight. But I didn’t feel out of place. At least not any more than I did with the white kids with their surf T-shirts and new shoes who made fun of my old jeans and bubble gum sneakers until Bonnie took me to Mervyn’s to buy some new clothes so they wouldn’t tease me.
I knew it was racism, all these things Chris Faraday talked about. And I knew that racists were on one team and we were on the other. Dad said he never joined a gang in prison. That because he was so dark with his Italian skin people thought he was mixed or Middle Eastern and so he just never fell in with the white gangs. He even had an unsteady truce with the black Muslims since helping a man from the Nation of Islam who was pinned under a bench press working out in the prison weight room one day. “Everyone just left me alone. They didn’t know what I was.” He takes pride in this, this ambiguity. He doesn’t trust rich white men either. And even though Tony and I are towheaded Dutch-looking white boys, we know he’s talking about the men with the ties and suits, the ones with sedans and jobs in offices and power in the government, the ones who put him in prison.
Tony and I sneak off into the kitchen, where half-empty glasses of wine sit on the countertop. I grab one and take a sip. It tastes like grape Kool-Aid and gasoline. My chest goes warm and Tony lifts a half-full glass and gulps it down. He dares me to try the cherry wine straight from the uncorked bottle on the kitchen table. I take a big swig, laughing as I feel it flow down through my stomach over my legs, which go rubbery. There’s a sudden sweet amnesia, a shortening of time like a warm bath where I can just float and forget. So this is why they do it. What a relief, to not only feel good but feel nothing. It’s like the moment thirty seconds after you stub your toe when you suddenly feel better. That is what the cherry wine feels like: the moment when the pain disappears. I wonder if this is what Paul felt in his truck with his bottle, if this is why he couldn’t stop and just drank until he died. Is this why Dad had his needle in his cell? Why Tony was passed out on the floor among the trash from the party?
Is this what it means to become a man? A Jollett man? Tony and I slap each other on the back and sneak into the backyard to hide with the bottle of cherry wine. We crouch on the side of the house, passing it back and forth like bums around a fire. “Go easy, little bro. It tastes like candy but it’ll make you sick.” I feel the pulsing in my head, my vision blurry as I walk back and forth along the concrete path on the side of the house, testing my balance, a warmth in my chest radiating outward.
“Is this what it’s always like?” Tony smiles at me and I’m just so happy to be in the club, after all the years on the girls’ team with Bonnie and Mom, to finally be among the men.
“It’s just a little wine. You never drank before?”
I’m not even embarrassed. I’m only eleven years old. “No.” I stare at my hands as they become unsteady blurs in front of me.
We walk back into the room of candles, food, people laughing. I am light-headed, warm, groggy, stealing glances at my brother who smirks back at me because we have a secret and nobody knows we stole the wine. There’s nothing like getting away with it.
* * *
THE DARK ALLEY behind the church at the top of the block is the perfect place to smoke weed. All the lights are off and the parking lot is empty and it is just Tony and me and his red glass weed pipe as he packs it with small green nuggets and hands it to me with a lighter. “Happy birthday, little bro.” I hold it to my lips and light the bowl as I’ve seen him do so many times. I’ve started inhaling my Benson & Hedges Menthol 100’s now so I figure it can’t be so different and what better way to spend my twelfth birthday than to just get on with it? To get high.
I cough and hand the pipe back to him. He takes a hit. I feel a weightlessness in my legs, a dizziness, my lungs congested and black as I look at the parking lot, the alley, the brick walls of the church, as if seeing them for the first time. I never noticed how small these bricks are. Why are trash dumpsters green? I’m glad my brother doesn’t hate me anymore.
Tony socks me one in the shoulder and we walk down the hill giggling. The house is warm and there are plates of spaghetti and garlic bread that Dad made for my birthday laid out on the table as we eat dinner and Tony and I laugh until we’re red in the face.
“You guys are in quite a mood,” Bonnie says. She doesn’t know. How could she? I am the good son, the one who can be trusted. And instead of being the little snitch, the sniveling shithead, the sellout, the mama’s boy, I am my brother’s accomplice. Spaghetti never tasted so good.
When my report card comes back with straight Ds, I am grounded. “I don’t understand this,” Bonnie says. “You’ve always been good at school.” I shrug my shoulders and tell her I’ll try harder, that it’s just an adjustment to my new environment. What I don’t tell her is that we smoke weed in the alley before first period, me and the other kids from the Bowl, that we ditch school sometimes and go to someone’s house to drink vodka or whiskey. I don’t know these guys very well with their surf T-shirts and karate shoes, but they think it’s funny to see me, all of five feet two and twelve years old with a lit cigarette in my teeth and a beer in my hand.
I like the dare of it. I’ll show you just how much I don’t give a fuck about your meetings and pamphlets, your entire full-of-shit world. I think of my uncles, my dad, the men, all the men I never knew all those years wondering where the cowboys were, how they rode their horses, how they left town, always leaving. This is what we do. And maybe we’re destined for prison or juvie but at least we aren’t alone, crying in the corner with the women.
CHAPTER 26
BIG TALK
Doug treats me like we’re old friends. On the way back to Salem from the Portland airport at the start of the summer, he keeps calling me “pal,” as in “Hey, pal, how was the flight? Your mom and I got a nice house. You’re going to have your own room, pal.” It’s clear they’ve had a Big Talk. There’s an unsteady truce. I know he’s performing for Mom. She hugged me until I had to push her away in the terminal and she insisted I hold her hand all through the airport even though I’m nearly as tall as she is. I was uncomfortable but in the World According to Mom, I am her sweet boy returning to her because we are close and she is my guide for becoming Something Important, so there are just no words for my discomfort. I don’t trust Doug but at least he’s not trying to hold my hand.
After Tony’s party, Mom decided she couldn’t live in the Breys Avenue house anymore so she sold it. Doug came back (again) once Tony moved to Los Angeles and they bought a new house in a better neighborhood over by Market Street where the sidewalks aren’t crumbling and the driveways are made of actual pavement instead of gravel and dirt.
Doug drives the old VW camper van Mom and Paul bought for our trips up to Detroit Lake. He has trouble with the clutch, yelling at it as he tries to jam the long gear lever from third to fourth in the slow lane of I-5. I sit on the floor. There’s a hole in the metal between my legs the size of a dime through which I can see the pavement flying by beneath me at fifty miles an hour.
Mom is in the seat at the card table next to the little camper stove. She asks me about the flight and school and wonders if the public schools in Los Angeles can compete with the ones in Salem that she scouted out for us when we first left California. She says it’s good that I was so advanced or else I might’ve fallen behind the other kids here. She blurts out, “I’m just so excited you’re back for good!” pumping a fist in the air. “I think you’ll still go to Parrish Middle School but it might be a different district now. You’ll like the new neighbo
rhood. It’s cleaner and there are lots of places to ride your bike.”
I freeze. I forgot. I don’t know how I let this pass. We just never talked about it. She thought I was only staying in Los Angeles for a year. I never told her otherwise. It didn’t even cross my mind. I can feel the hot blood on my neck and a dread for what’s coming, for the Big Talk I know we are about to have.
“What do you mean, back for good?”
“I mean, you wanted to live with your dad for a year and now that’s over so you’re gonna come home.”
“I’m not coming back here.” I hear the words fall from my mouth before I can even think. I have no plan.
She puts her hand over her face and turns toward the window. She stares at the snowy outline of Mount Hood in the distance and says slowly, “What do you mean? You’re not coming home?”
“Los Angeles is my home.”
“You’re leaving me?” She puts a hand over her eyes and starts to cry. Soon she is sobbing, her long brown hair covering her face and shoulders. She climbs off the bench and settles on the floor of the VW van, pulling her knees up to her shoulders with her head in her hands. “We had a deal. You were going to go there for a year, then come back to me.”
I can feel a tug, a pull like a weight dragging me underwater.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“You’re really gonna leave me? You’re my son,” she says into her knees, under her hair, her forehead resting on her elbow. She practically screams, “How can you leave me? How? You’re supposed to stay here. You’re supposed to be with me.”
Doug is silent as he struggles with the gears. Downshifting from fourth to third. Gotta go easy with that old gearbox, tough guy.
Mom’s whole body shakes in convulsions. It’s hard to watch. I put a hand up like I’m trying to shield my face from it, the naked intensity of it all. I say, “It’s okay, Mom. It’s going to be okay.”
She just keeps repeating, “You’re gonna leave me? How can you leave me? You’re my son. You’re mine. Mine.” There’s the familiar blankness, the numbness that washes over me like novocaine in my chest so that I feel nothing but an emptiness and I’m able to say whatever needs to be said. It’s nothing like being high, that warm, forgetful numbness. I feel cold like there’s a scream being stifled behind glass and I’m on the other side pretending I can’t hear it.
“We can still have quality time. We’ll just make it count more.”
“How can you leave me? How?”
I turn away, listening to the VW engine as it struggles down the highway through the impenetrable wall of pine trees.
* * *
THE NEW HOUSE on Windsor Avenue is on a quiet cul-de-sac near Market Street where everything is cleaner. It’s a low green structure, more modern than the old A-frame on Breys Avenue, sitting behind a perfectly cut lawn. There’s a tree in the front covered in yellow flowers, a real garage, and a big backyard surrounded by a wooden fence. All the lawns on the street have been mowed. All the houses have real paint or clean red brick and aluminum siding instead of decaying porches and mold and black streaks from old fires. There’s brand-new furniture inside this new house, a new blue sectional couch, bookcases, and a polished oak dining table with matching chairs. It looks like a set, like a stage for actors.
I call Jake the minute we get to the house and he shows up ten minutes later. He’s taller than I remember, six feet six now with long blond hair shaved up on the sides and bangs that fall past his chin. My giant has gotten some style. He’s wearing a green sweatshirt, Bermuda shorts, and leather Florsheim penny loafers with no socks. He’s tan. I don’t know how he pulled that off in Salem, Oregon. It’s a relief to see him.
He’s obsessed with the Smiths. When we get to his new house out by the fairgrounds behind the AME Zion Church where the streets have no sidewalks and the weeds prey upon collapsing fences, stray cats linger in alleyways and large dogs lurch at you from behind broken-down porches, he puts The Queen Is Dead by the Smiths on his stereo in the drafty garage he was given as a bedroom. I don’t understand what it’s about except it seems like the singer wants to kill the queen of England. Or at the very least, see her in her underwear. It’s not clear which. Jake assures me the guy is cool. He’s thin with a massive square jaw and an enormous pompadour atop his head. His name is Morrissey and he gets all the girls.
Jake’s stepdad, Craig, is out of prison. He was arrested and went to San Quentin, which is even meaner than Chino prison where Dad went. Jake says Craig told him he once shared the yard with Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker who terrorized Southern California all last year, keeping me awake at night while Dad guarded the house with a baseball bat.
Craig is stocky with thick shoulders, short black hair and a black goatee. He wears tight white tank tops and brown pants like a cholo. He moves like a gorilla, his head down, leading with his forehead, arms slung low in front of him. He’ll pound on the door to Jake’s room in the garage and stick his head in, a lit cigarette in his teeth. “Jake, get the fuck up and clean this kitchen.” Jake doesn’t argue. He’s a scary man. Jake looks small next to him even though he’s nearly a foot taller.
We feel safer at night, after his parents go to bed, sitting in the garage playing cards and listening to music. So much music is about winning. Who’s the baddest or the meanest or the best? How deep is your love? How tough is your crew? How much do you party?
No one writes songs about losers like us. No one but Morrissey. It’s a relief to feel seen, to sit on the floor of the garage eating bologna sandwiches while he sings:
I know I’m unlovable, you don’t have to tell me,
I don’t have much in my life, but take it, it’s yours,
The music is a bubble, a protective shield that surrounds us everywhere we go all summer, to the mall, the train tracks behind the high school, sneaking out at night to smoke cigarettes and hide from the cops, stealing beers from the fridge, hoping like hell Craig doesn’t figure it out and burst into the room knocking Jake one in the mouth.
We are inseparable. We barely spend ten minutes apart the entire summer. We don’t want to be understood. We don’t want to play our part. We don’t want to find “the peace of the forest,” we’re not interested in “family time by the fire.” We just want to be left alone with our music. Exactly misunderstood. Precisely unlovable.
CHAPTER 27
MOTORCYCLES WILL KILL YOU
The motorcycle parked in the center of the garage on Christmas morning is a red Honda XR80 dirt bike with a blue seat, black engine, black pegs, red springs, shiny chrome forks and a yellow front plate. I can’t believe it. Since seeing a dirt bike at the L.A. County Fair, where we went to sell sunroofs for Dad’s business, seeing those beautiful machines in mid-flight on some dusty desert path, I’ve been begging for one. But I didn’t think it would actually happen.
Everyone in Synanon rode motorcycles. Mostly they rode small Japanese bikes. Dad was the rebel with his Harley, his old stories about racing cops from the border to San Diego, riding through the desert, watching the world go by at 120 miles an hour drunk and stoned with his brother Pete. It feels like the bike is an initiation. I am a gambler, a risk taker, my father’s son.
Tony gets a yellow Yamaha YZ125 two-stroke that spits black smoke into the street when we start it up. We can’t believe our luck. Bonnie is certain we are going to die.
We pack the bikes into the orange delivery van and drive to the makeshift dirt motorcycle course off a construction site on Sepulveda Boulevard called Hamburger Hill, named for the enormous steep dirt incline that rises five stories above the course to the Bluffs, the empty lots where older kids from the Bowl go to drink at night. There are moguls and a banked turn and even a jump where a kid can catch air and fly, kicking his feet out, hoping to land without breaking his neck.
Dad gives us a talk about braking and balance, awareness and acceleration, how to turn, and how to keep the damn thing from killing you.
When I finally start the e
ngine and ease out the clutch, when I’m suited up in my boots and helmet and goggles in the hot, sweaty, noisy space of my head, there is a thrill in my chest like a liquid heat that spreads out over my shoulders and knees to my elbows and toes as I shift the gears and lean into the turn, pulling open the throttle on the straightaway.
Dad stands patiently on the far side of the dirt lot in his blue sweatshirt and jeans, a toothpick in his mouth, barking instructions as we go by, “Okay, good, now this time try getting up on the pegs when you go over those bumps. Keep your knees bent and hold the gas steady. Let the bike come up to meet you until it feels like you’re gliding.” I drop my Honda a few times on the turns, unused to the weight and power as I lean too far. “That’s okay. Just pick it up before you start leaking gasoline all over the damn place.” I dust off my pant leg and jump back on. “Good, now kick it in the ass and see what kind of power you’re dealing with.”
When we’re done, he takes us to a pizza joint near the beach. We order Italian subs that we eat at a table in the sun. “There’s nothing like it,” he says. “The wind and the ground, the engine beneath you.” I nod and chew my food, thinking there is no feeling in the world, no moment I would ever trade for this one, eating in the sun with my father, dusty, dirty, my hands stained, reeking of oil and gas and smoke from the exhaust.
* * *
TONY FIGHTS WITH Dad at night. He sneaks out of his room and doesn’t care if he gets caught. He comes home in the middle of the night drunk or high or both, sneaking in through the bathroom window. He screams at Dad, “You can’t tell me what to do!”
Dad says, “Oh yes I can! This is my house, mothafucker!” Tony leaves and Dad tells Bonnie he’s calling the cops because he doesn’t know what else to do. He picks up the phone, calls the police station and screams, “My son is out of control!” then hangs up before saying his name or address.
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