I fall asleep in the kids’ tent next to Tony in my sleeping bag, repeating the phrases. “I got the aces, pardner. You better ship ’em … Well, shit, I missed my king … Okay, who’s got the bitch?”
The AA campouts become a fixture in our world. Once a month we pack up Paul’s truck with gear and head to Detroit Lake along the Santiam River or the Deschutes National Forest where the ground is red everywhere you look. We go to Beverly Beach where we camp right in the sand and spend mornings running down the Oregon coast next to the huge rocks that guard the coastline like kneeling giants, looking for seashells, racing Pepper down the shore, dodging the waves as they break against the sand. We got a new puppy from Pepper’s litter that winter and named it Mork after Robin Williams’s alien in the TV show Mork & Mindy. We call him “Mork the dork.” He is a yappy black Lab mix, and when we take him to the coast, he jumps in the water then runs out away from the crashing waves up into our laps then tears off to search for crabs and starfish. Afterward, Tony and I pile into the back of Paul’s camper-shell truck with all the gear for the ride back to Salem. We fall asleep on the mattress in the truck bed somewhere in the winding highways of the coastal Cascade Mountains—a big pile of sand and salt, dirt, seaweed, kelp, pillows and wet dog.
We are happier in nature. All of us. We take long walks through the woods, stopping to smell the scent of pine in the air, the distant snowcapped peak of Mount Washington or Three Sisters reminding us we are small and young. Paul teaches us to light campfires, to create pockets of air for the fire to lick the wood, to keep our faces away from the flames and blow on the bursting red coals when we want the fire to grow. We eat lunches of hot dogs and baked beans, roasted potatoes that we wrap in tinfoil and throw into the smoldering coals. We sleep hard at night, getting up to pee outside the tent, worried about bears, wondering at the stars and silence except for a nearby stream or the dull hoot of an owl. We wake up at dawn, toasty in our sleeping bags as we eat cereal or scrambled eggs and bacon that Paul fried up over the morning fire.
Out in the woods we are able to crawl into that word: F-A-M-I-L-Y. To let it provide shelter like the blue tarp we hang from the branches over the tents on rainy weekends. Perhaps it’s that we’re too busy to fight or because we can forget about the house on Breys Avenue or the fact that in Synanon we were alone and didn’t even know what an F-A-M-I-L-Y was.
In a campground, everyone is cold, everyone sleeps in a tent and wears dirty clothes, so we’re not ashamed. Maybe it’s because Paul is so capable with his gear, his endless knowledge of trees, tents, tarps, fires, fishing and outdoor cooking. Mom is calmed by this. We all are. At the AA meetings, people say you can feel God when you walk through the woods, that he’s everywhere: in the fallen logs and bird nests, in the beehives, the grass, the meadows and trees, an unseen force that surrounds you, connecting you to other living things, reminding you that you’re part of something.
Maybe that’s family too.
CHAPTER 13
HOW TO ESCAPE A MEXICAN PRISON
Dad drives with his middle fingers sticking out, rocking the steering wheel back and forth like he’s flipping off every car on the freeway. We are heading south toward San Diego. He does this, he says, “for the assholes. So they know they’re assholes.” He yells at the cars that cut him off or tailgate or switch lanes without a signal or break too fast or cruise steadily in the blind spot of Bonnie’s silver Honda Prelude. He says, “Learn to drive!” over the music from the radio while Bonnie sits next to him in the front seat. She reminds him that none of the other cars can hear him so they don’t even know what he’s saying. Dad shakes his head, “They know they’re assholes. They know.”
The 405 freeway stretches out in front of us, twelve lanes of white concrete and cars, the busiest stretch of freeway in the world. We pass through fields of flame-capped smokestacks, storage tanks like massive white aspirin pills, pipes, catwalks, scaffolding, and industrial lighting, the refinery wasteland of Carson with its factories and fast-food joints. We’re on our way to see Dad’s family: Grandma Mary, the saint, and our uncles Donny, Pete and Wes. Tony and I are in the backseat with Egg McMuffin sandwiches. We don’t care where we’re going because we can’t believe we get hash browns and orange juice from McDonald’s which Mom says is an evil corporation that’s trying to destroy America from the inside by making everyone fat.
Dad likes to tell old stories when he drives, as if the point of the trip isn’t the destination but the long journey in the car, the education we receive on family history, a kind of classroom where we sing, listen to music and eat junk food while we talk. He’s got a slight smile on his face. “He likes having his boys around,” Bonnie always tells us.
“All the true badasses are either dead or in prison.” Dad is telling us about his brother Pete, who has a black belt in karate and does tai chi every morning. He was once an instructor in hand-to-hand combat for the Mexican federales who worked with Bruce Lee.
“Pete wasn’t scared of nobody. I once saw him take on a whole carful of guys by himself.” Pete did time too, four years in Folsom State Prison. When I ask what he got busted for, Dad laughs and says his usual line: disorganized crime.
Grandma Mary was born in San Francisco but then settled in the Little Italy area of San Diego in 1917. She worked as a hotel maid and raised four boys in a small house in East San Diego. She’d met Howard, my grandfather, but he only “stuck around” long enough to give her three wild boys “before he split.” She eventually met Don, her second husband, who gave her a fourth wild boy, my uncle Donny. Things calmed down. But it was too late for the boys. “We went a little crazy,” Dad says. He tells us that “a lot of I-talians” (pronounced “eye-talyuns”) got houses in the area so the neighborhood was filled with “dagos” walking around with spit curls in big seersucker suits. Dad had some crazy clothes: baggy pink suits with huge shoulder pads and a long wallet chain. He looks out over the asphalt and overpasses. “We needed money, so what else could we do? We ran numbers, smuggled drugs, stole some cars. You know, your basic nonsense.”
Dad wants us to know our heritage. Tony and I are sponges. It makes me feel important, like a prophecy that must be fulfilled. As if there is danger in our very blood. We pepper him with questions: “Did you ever shoot anyone? Where did you get the checks? How much money was it? Wasn’t Donny in Vietnam? Was he part of it?”
“I never shot no one. But I been shot at a bunch of times. It was never that much money, just enough to get by. We weren’t very good crooks.” Pete was the oldest and the first to do time, mostly in the work camps like Viejas, the honor camps where you sweat in the sun laying asphalt all day. Dad is the comedian, who did his time in Chino state prison and also got in some trouble in Mexico. Wes was the only one who never went to prison. He became a schoolteacher and took care of Grandma Mary, moving her into his house when she could no longer work. Donny was the baby, “a real sweet kid before Vietnam fucked him all up.” Something happened to him there. Dad says they never knew what. But it was probably drugs.
Dad wrote Donny letters from jail while he was in Vietnam but he never heard back. He says that he got into drinking and had some wild nights in Saigon. On the day he was shipped back, he got into trouble because on his way to a transport plane something moved in his giant duffel bag. The MPs got suspicious and stopped him right there on the tarmac. When they opened it, there was a small Vietnamese woman inside. At least that’s the story.