At the Bowl he introduces me to the guys he hangs out with. It’s a ragtag gang of white surfer-type guys in tapered pants and karate shoes, smoking cigarettes while they take turns playing Super Mario Bros. They nod at me, lifting their chins, and say, “Sup.” No one seems to care that they are smoking, even though they’re only teenagers. I light a Benson & Hedges Menthol 100 and smoke it right there next to the video games. I can feel the eyes on me, the disapproving looks from the adults as they walk by us juvenile delinquents. It feels good to feel bad.
Every family has a script. That’s something I learned in Alateen, along with how to blow smoke rings and make a weed pipe from an apple. In our family script Dad is the big, tough, masculine father and Tony is his son. I am the sensitive one who belongs to Mom and Bonnie. Tony draws pictures like Dad does and people say they are “exactly alike.” I like books, like Mom. At least that’s what people say.
Once Tony leaves for Oregon for the summer to stay with Mom because she still technically has “legal custody” and insisted on it, it’s just Bonnie and Dad and me in the house in Westchester, it doesn’t seem like Dad cares about the script. I am surprised when he says, “Hey, come give me a hand,” and I go outside to the garage to watch him stack boxes or organize his tools in the giant red Craftsman toolbox or to help him pack sunroofs into the orange industrial van he bought for his new business installing sunroofs. Mom says he’s nine-fingered, which is what they called Dope Fiends in Synanon, meaning they have something like a disability. But I count his fingers and there are always ten. Clasped around a jigsaw, messing up my hair, rubbing sunscreen on my back in the sand, tossing me in the waves at Toes Beach at sunset after we pack the van.
* * *
AT THE END of the summer Tony calls to say that he’s decided to stay in Oregon for the school year. He made friends at the football camp and wants to play for the North Salem High Vikings football team in the fall. He says this casually, like it’s his decision to make. At times like this he seems like a hero to me, the way he can ignore the rules the adults have made for us and do whatever he wants.
When we hang up, Bonnie says, “Well, what do you think?”
“About what?”
“About Tony staying in Oregon.”
I say it makes sense because he’s good at football. But all I can think about are the Indian burns and headlocks, the screaming matches, the weight of Doug’s knees on my shoulders, my fingers twisted back and sprained, the bruises, the spit in his teeth, the hazy outline of a fist. There is an anger that is new. The well. The blackness. The storm.
I blurt out, “I don’t want to go back to Salem.”
The words fall out of my mouth before I have the chance to think about them. She turns her head and calls my dad into the bedroom. “Tell your father what you just told me.”
I take a breath, unsure of myself, and tell him that I want to live in Los Angeles with them. Dad sits on the edge of the bed with his hands in his lap.
“Have you told your mother this?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a big decision. And you’d have to talk to her. But of course you can come live here with us. You’re my son.”
It’s strange to be referred to as his son, because everybody knows I am Mom’s son, I am Bonnie’s son, and Tony is his son.
“She’s gonna be upset,” Bonnie says. “I feel for her. Are you sure you want to do this?”
After a Big Talk, we call her from the kitchen and I tell her I have something important to tell her. I feel my throat go dry and struggle to find my voice. My hands are clammy as I wrap the white phone cord in circles around my fingers. There’s a long pause on the other end of the line. “Okay?”
“Bonnie and Dad and I have been talking and since Tony is staying there to live with you and he and I don’t really get along so well…” I know I can’t mention Doug. I know I can’t mention the wolf den or Paul or the 5:00 A.M. rabbit feedings, the slaughtering alone in the backyard with the ten-inch hunting knife that cuts my hand, the nights without food, her depressions that come like the rain, the feeling like my job is only to take care of her. There is a script, there were words I rehearsed not ten minutes ago with Bonnie and Dad, but I can’t find them. Tell her it’s about Dad. She’ll understand that. A boy needs a father figure. Isn’t that what she’s always saying?
But there is only an empty place where the words should be. I simply can’t make my voice do something she doesn’t approve of.
I close my eyes, trying to find the words. “And, well, since I’m, uh, gonna be a teenager soon and I don’t really know my dad that well and, um, a teenage boy needs his dad, like how you said with Tony…”
The words are drowned out by the songs I hear in my head, the lectures and talks and instructions on who I am supposed to be, what I am supposed to be in the world, the boy she is raising who is so special he can change it. The music. The old protest songs and folk tunes sung on those long car trips up to the woods:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
We would sing along from the backseat. Sometimes we’d ask her to sing a song in Dutch or French and we’d go quiet as the strange words filled the car, wondering where she’d lived and who she was and how she’d learned to speak whole other languages in another world, in another life sometime long ago before the changes, the crash, the wreckage, the terrible choices they were given between changing the world and turning their children into orphans.
“I think I should come live here with Dad and Bonnie for a year.”
I hear her take a long breath. I have a sinking feeling, exactly the way it felt to hit a baby bunny across the head, the presence of something dark inside me, something awful and cruel. And like the bunnies, I know she is stunned that for the first time in my life I am disagreeing with the World According to Mom.
“Is this because of Doug?”
“No.”
“Because I told him if it didn’t stop, I’d leave him and I meant it.”
“I know. It’s not Doug. I just think it’s time I get to know my dad. It’s only for a year.”
“Your dad was the love of my life.”
“Yes. You’ve told me that.”
“He and Bonnie have more money. I can’t compete.”
“It has nothing to do with that. This house is smaller than yours.”
“What did they say?”
“They said it was okay with them if it was okay with you.”
“Well, if it’s okay with them then I guess there’s nothing I can do. Only for one year, okay?”
“Okay.”
I hear her sigh heavily. There’s a kind of calm as I hang up the phone. I know I’ve caught her off guard. I didn’t think she would say yes. I know I’ve defied a rule, one made at a time before words, before I can remember, an ancient feeling that a promise has been broken.
These things are never said out loud. It’s just something I know.
CHAPTER 24
“NORMAL”
On the way into school on the first day at Orville Wright Junior High in Westchester, as a real-live student at a Los Angeles city public school, I walk past a wall with the word “CSR” written in big bubbly cartoon letters. Beneath the letters is a drawing of a rat on a skateboard drinking a bottle of malt liquor. On an opposing wall in much sloppier black spray paint are the words “w/s ROLLING 60’s 13.” The letters seem to run together. They remind me of the hieroglyphics I saw on a trip to the public library in Salem, Oregon, with the Talented and Gifted Program. I have no idea what it means but I know it means something important. Why else would someone bother to write it on a wall?