Stories for Boys: A Memoir (20 page)
Read Stories for Boys: A Memoir Online
Authors: Gregory Martin
You didn’t fight?
“No. You don’t fight. You never fight. He would have killed me if I did. You have to be careful. You never go into a rest area without an adult. Do you understand?”
WHEN I WAS in my twenties I drove all over the West. I drove a rusted-out, red ’77 step-side Chevy truck that I’d bought from a peanut farmer in West Texas. Really. This truck had a ball mount trailer hitch, which meant, if I wanted, I could tow a horse trailer. I could haul up to 6,000 pounds. I’d ridden a horse twice in my life, three times maybe. But I liked what driving this truck with its trailer hitch said about me, about the kind of man I was. Western. Rugged. My truck – the Red Rambler – got eight miles to the gallon. This was before carbon footprints and fuel efficiency, when gas was cheap. When I drove the Red Rambler into the higher elevations, like the long climb up the mountain to Flagstaff, I was passed by sixteen-wheelers with their hazards on. I drove the shoulder, happily, without embarrassment. I drank a lot of coffee and stopped at a lot of rest areas. Every time I stopped at a rest area – or a lot of times, anyway – I thought to myself, Don’t go into a rest area bathroom without an adult. I thought this even though, by some measures, I was an adult. I still think this when I stop at rest areas, my bladder full, the pressure built up in my urethra – not the pent up aching river that Whitman wrote about, but similar. Back then, it never once occurred to me – why would it? – that the man who once pulled a knife on my father might not have been a thief, might not have wanted my father’s billfold, that perhaps it was my father who wanted something, or that this man wanted something that my father wouldn’t give, or vice versa, or that this man with the knife had not wanted to do anything but take a leak when he turned and saw my father standing there waiting.
The Right House
WE DROVE INTO LINCOLN, NEBRASKA. UP VAN DORN, left on 27th street, and a right to 2828 Stratford Avenue. Here we were. The house where I grew up. A large gray, two-story house with light blue trim and an open front porch. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday in July. We were driving from Albuquerque to St. Paul, Minnesota, to the house where Christine grew up and where her parents still lived. This was day two of a three-day drive. It was lunchtime, a good time to stop. I hadn’t been back to Lincoln since I was sixteen. Twenty-two years. At first glance, the house looked more or less the same as it looked in my memory, which I didn’t expect, perhaps because of the cliché about not being able to go home again. We all got out of the car.
A dog was barking from inside the house, from the room my parents had used as an office, just to the right of the front entrance, off the living room, separated by French doors with glass doorknobs. Nobody seemed home.
The basketball hoop my father had put up for me was still there, on its post at the left hand curve of the driveway. I announced this. “The basketball hoop is still here. I remember the day my Dad poured the cement in the ground for the post. Right there.” The boys were at my side. The net was old and weathered and hanging by threads from only two hooks. It may have been the same net that I had practiced on all those hours and years. It was impossible to tell.
The boys were excited for me. “I don’t know how many lay-ups I shot on this basket,” I said. “Probably a million.”
I pointed out how my brother and I used to climb up the white fence, right there, then we pulled ourselves up to the roof of our neighbor’s garage, then jumped the three feet from their garage roof to our garage roof, then climbed up to the roof of our house. Sometimes our black and white cat, Pirate, a lean tom who lived to be nineteen, would join us up there and follow us around. From the roof of our house we could look in every direction over the neighborhood.
“Granny and Grandpa let you do that?” Oliver asked, astonishment in his eyes.
“Not exactly,” I said, and winked at Oliver, and then I winked at Evan, too, to be fair.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Christine said.
Oliver rubbed his hands together diabolically.
“The treehouse is gone,” I said. “It was right there.” A flower garden was in the side yard now.
“Was it like our treehouse?” Evan asked.
“Sort of.”
I told them how the treehouse my father built wasn’t actually connected to a tree, like ours. It was two stories, freestanding. But it felt like a treehouse because, see – and I pointed – the branches of the trees extended out and over the treehouse, so that when you stood up on the open deck of the second story there were branches and leaves all around, just like our treehouse. I told Oliver and Evan, how, as I got older, I spent less and less time in the treehouse. I kind of forgot about it, like the boy in the Shel Silverstein story
The Giving Tree
. They nodded. They knew what I meant. I would sometimes go in the treehouse as a teenager and there would be cobwebs and the smell of mildew and rot.
The Giving Tree
. They nodded. They knew what I meant. I would sometimes go in the treehouse as a teenager and there would be cobwebs and the smell of mildew and rot.
I sat down in the side yard of my old house where the treehouse used to be. It felt like the right thing to do. Evan climbed into my lap. I wasn’t feeling the way I’d felt as we were driving into town. That heightened anticipation had gone away.
Oliver sat down beside me. I told the boys how, one day, when I was about ten, I was climbing up the ladder – which my dad had secured to the treehouse wall with only sixteen penny nails – when the nails just pulled out completely, and I fell backwards with the top rung in my hands. I fell flat on my back and the ladder fell on top of me. Right there. I pointed. I fell right onto the concrete under the basketball hoop. I was looking up through the net at the sky.
Oliver and Evan laughed. I smiled. I said it wasn’t that funny. Oliver said it was probably pretty funny but I just didn’t think so at the time. I said he had that exactly right.
“Did anyone see you?” Evan asked. He had a worried look on his face. I might have been hurt and no one would have been able to come to me.
“No. I must have been the only one home. I wasn’t that hurt, just sort of shook up.”
“Did you cry?” Evan asked.
“I probably thought that I was too old to cry,” I said.
We sat together in silence for a minute or so, looking at my basketball hoop.
Oliver leaned into me. “It’s okay, Dad.”
“Thanks, Oliver,” I said.
We got up and took a walk around the block. I narrated. I started to feel better. We turned right on Calumet Court, which was still a cobblestone street. We passed Corey Comstock’s house. He and I biked everywhere. We played CHiPs. Corey was John, I was Ponch. Our bikes would not make revving and accelerating motorcycle sounds on their own, and so we made these sounds ourselves. Corey’s dad lost an arm in Vietnam and so one of his shirtsleeves was always empty, folded up neatly and pinned close to his shoulder. He smoked a cigar. I didn’t mention Corey’s dad. I told the boys about my paper route. I pointed out the home where I often got a dollar tip on collection days. I talked about my alarm going off so early in the mornings, how my eyelashes were sometimes glued shut. I spoke at length about the bike handling skills required to balance, at speed, a full newspaper bag over handlebars, while at the same time making an accurate throw from the street to the steps of a front porch. I spoke about making this same throw in Nebraskan winter, biking over snow and ice. This honed ability would soon be gone from the world, like a knack for Morse code or the semicolon.
We stopped at the three-cornered lot, which now had a new name and playground equipment designed for the toddler set. It had been a triangular dirt and grass lot with a backstop when I was growing up. Oliver and Evan played for a while on the structure, then swung on the swings. Christine held my hand.
We stopped by my old elementary school. The boys wanted to go inside the big brick building. Some kind of open house was going on, and parents with preschool age kids were milling around the playground, going in and out the tall front doors. I experienced the august, senatorial feeling that often came to me when I was around other parents with children even slightly younger than my children. Evan was, after all, six-years-old and soon to be in first grade. We all went inside. The high ceilings and the wooden banisters were just as I remembered them. Except that I couldn’t remember ever remembering them. Perhaps it’s better to say that the high ceilings and wooden banisters, and even the lemony smell of the halls, felt accurately rendered.
We walked back to the car. As we turned the corner onto Stratford Avenue, there was my old house again, the second one from the corner. I thought to myself, I love that house. I had a happy childhood here. But it wasn’t as easy to access and entertain those happy memories anymore. My memories had been altered, amplified, re-interpreted. Familiar, nostalgic memories had turned darker, eclipsed by unfamiliar memories insisting on their priority, their own narrative emphasis.
I had the irrepressible feeling that something had been taken from me, or that I’d lost something, something intangible, maybe, but with the powerful emotional associations of an object, a possession, an heirloom. I kept feeling that I’d gotten something crucially wrong. My knowledge of my father’s secret life had tainted and bled into the way I thought about my past. I felt that my childhood, in many of its particulars, had been somehow falsified.
The story of my childhood I had been telling myself, and others, for years, had been, it seemed to me now, a children’s story. There was nothing trashy or tabloid in the vintage, age-appropriate version. No fraud. No heartbreak. No call for withering irony. No underlying narrative of bigotry and shame. All was calm and uninflamed. Not a single character disillusioned. It was hard now to make my life feel consistent, coherent, credible. I couldn’t untangle and clarify all the seeming contradictions. I couldn’t suppress the corrosive sense that I was an unreliable narrator of my own life.
LYDIA DAVIS, IN her essay “Remember the Van Wagenens,” writes:
If you don’t know that this house here is Mozart’s birthplace, you are not interested, even though you walk right past it, a great lover of Mozart.If you do know, you stand before it filled with a number of emotions and thoughts, including awe.On the other hand, if you have made a mistake, and are standing in front of the wrong house, thinking it is Mozart’s house, your thoughts and emotions are exactly the same as if you stood in front of the correct house … It won’t matter unless you find out it was the wrong house. Then in your own eyes you will feel you did not really have the experience you thought you had.
I WAS STANDING in front of the right house. I still sometimes lived here in dreams. It was true that my father, in this house and elsewhere, had been as I had experienced him: loving, kind, humble, with a reckless appetite for pecan pie and science fiction. But it was also true that he was motivated on a daily basis by the intent to deceive, so that his deception was ever-present, whether I was aware of it or not. It was in the air I breathed.
But nothing had been lost. The past cannot be lost in the present. Not even memories were lost, because memories are not fixed but ever-changing, because memories do not record the past but are only constructions invented in the present. They are a feat of the imagination. They are made now and last only seconds – flashes, images, evanescent, impermanent, gone. Forever. They are not even words on a page.
As I stood and stared at the place where I grew up, a sudden wave of homesickness left me weak in the knees. I looked around. It was a bright sunny day. Christine had the kids in the car, buckled up and waiting. I caught her eye. She gave me a sad smile, and I understood I could take as long as I wanted. But I didn’t need any more time. I walked over, got in the driver’s seat, put the car in gear, and drove off. We stopped for lunch at a coffee shop on South Street that had not been there when I was growing up. There was no such thing as a coffee shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the seventies. Grown-ups somehow made it through their days.
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