I scared the hell out of myself with the creepier sections of The People’s Almanac, the unexplained disappearances, the prophecies of the end of the world. I drew pictures of sharks, vampires, and a weird specialty: creatures with hands for heads. The hands were slanted, with motion lines around them, waving hello or goodbye.
School projects piled up. I was supposed to write a history of the space program, typed, with impressive diagrams and evidence I’d read at least several books. All I managed to turn in were a few pages in handwriting, with a model of a Gemini capsule that I’d half-finished because I didn’t know how to assemble the rest. D−.
There were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the basement. I kept my comics there. In the dead of winter, during the rains, I saw silverfish. When I pulled out some issues of Strange Tales, I couldn’t open them. The pages were crisply adhered to each other and rippled like riverbeds. Water had ruined them. There were no other leaks in the house. About half my comics were damaged. I felt like this had happened on purpose, to test me.
I would make my own comics. I stayed up at night with my door wedged shut against whatever was outside it. I had a typewriter. A new issue of Marvel’s fan magazine, FOOM, explained upcoming plot lines, so I decided I would write them myself and see how my stories compared to theirs. The Avengers were going to have a story with every character Marvel had ever created in it—that sounded big enough for me. I typed pages and pages. When I needed to think, I turned the TV volume up, poured a reservoir of Elmer’s Glue on my palms, rubbed them together to spread it from the heel of my hands to my fingertips, and waved my arms around until the glue dried, pacing and talking out plot ideas to myself. I would peel it off carefully, trying to make complete scurflike impressions of my hands. Some nights, the thinking went so deep I did that two or three times. Sometimes I pissed into a soda bottle to keep from leaving my room and passing the dressmaker’s dummy on the way to the bathroom.
The Tonight Show ended so early, one a.m., and then The Tomorrow Show ended, and some channels played the national anthem but others just went to static. If I kept changing the channel upward, into thinner air, I could get at least the fuzzy outlines of Jay Brown’s All Night Movie-Go-Round, broadcast from Santa Cruz on a station so deep into the UHF dial it might as well have been ham radio. Jay Brown would show 1930s melodramas featuring actors I’d never heard of performing without conviction on sets I thought I’d also seen in better movies. I sensed that neither the directors nor writers cared about the story lines, that there were bathtubs of gin on the set, that the players could have freely said or done anything and no one filming them would have noticed.
Every fifteen minutes, regardless of whether the scene had ended, there was another commercial for a used car lot, hosted by an apologetic Jay Brown, who seemed to like watching movies more than he did selling cars.
I had to squint through the electronic sandstorm to guess at the details of his set. Jay read letters from viewers. Mostly retirees who asked him if he took the same kidney medications they did, and who wanted reassurances he didn’t like drivers who broke the speed limit. I enjoyed hearing these because it meant there were other people awake like I was.
It would start getting light, and I would feel a sense of dread, as I had once again not gone to sleep, and there was another school day ahead. I felt ashamed of myself for not having taken better care of my evening.
Outside my door, which was closed, was a roomful of Pong machines. Dozens of them.
The Pong fad had gone belly-up. Most of the machines had been removed from restaurants, though my mother left a few of them in the more distant locations. The basement was filled with Pong machines stacked in the corners three tiers high. Some worked; some didn’t. They were scarred with cigarette burns, coin slots scratched up or jammed, chipped edges where brass belt buckles had caught the particle board. I plugged in all the machines I could, turned out the lights, and watched the luminescence spraying across the walls. Then I played the remaining machines to death. Repeating games until the knobs came off or the screens flickered out.
It took weeks of play, but I did it, I killed every single one of them. I was the champion and sole survivor.
* * *
—
When I’d gotten past the darkest part of the evening, I would go upstairs, to the living room. I would open the curtains. Gradually, I’d see a mixed-blessings kind of gift, purple light behind the skeletons of the trees.
In the future I would have friends. We would sit here on this couch, waiting for more friends who would be in the kitchen, chopping up herbs for complicated pasta dishes. People in the kitchen would have a whole set of jokes people in the living room wouldn’t know until we all shared dinner and then afterward we would dance, maybe in couples, maybe more free style. We would have adventures. I was convinced that there would be an earthquake and we would all be heroes, but we wouldn’t be conceited about it. We would save each other because we loved each other. I would have an Asian American girlfriend who tended to wear white painter pants and no bra. We would sleep in. I would be able to sleep.
* * *
—
I started leaving the house. I’m not sure how often I did this, but it happened in spring and summer, when I had to be on the streets no later than 4:30 a.m. to truly feel how empty it all was. There was fog sometimes, mist blown in a slant across the arc lighting of streetlamps. The first time, I stood on the curb outside my house, heart in my mouth, feeling like Columbus, like Reed Richards at the maw of Subspace in Fantastic Four 51. Ahead, darkness and streetlights making ovals in it, a man-made pattern of stars blending together as they ascended toward the horizon line of the nearest hill.
When I walked, the sound of my footfalls was muffled. I wore a down jacket, and I had to keep taking off my glasses and rubbing them against my shirt to blot the fog away.
Along Jackson Street, I looked at the lights in the windows of mansions. All the rooms I saw felt empty, but that was just the angle I could see from—the high part of a wall, the cake frosting of plaster around a chandelier. It wasn’t at all frightening to walk before dawn here, as every house gave off the calm impression of sleeping money. I imagined that the night before, parents had made dinner, homework was done, teeth brushed, pajamas put on, and then lights out, heads on pillows. The bullies were asleep in their beds. They were missing out on what I was seeing.
I wouldn’t see a single car in Pacific Heights, not even on Broadway, more of a thoroughfare than Jackson. Peter’s house was dark. It didn’t feel like anyone was sleeping inside. It felt like a cardboard backdrop this time of night, ready to be inhabited only when the camera was pointing its way. When he realized he couldn’t use me as leverage, I’d stopped hearing from him.
I left Pacific Heights. I could see a glow of traffic lights ahead, green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red, waltz time, changing without cars in the streets. When I did see headlights I knew the driver was so far away he couldn’t see me.
Henry Africa’s, dark in the hours after last call, was where the adults played. I was curious what happened after they left, hoping that there was a sophisticated shimmer left over like a spray of rhinestones. I expected to see barkeeps watering down the sidewalk or women in cocktail dresses woozily hailing cabs with one high heel shoe in hand, but I didn’t.
I hardly lingered. Polk was where the teen hustlers were, so I rehearsed what I would say or do if someone accosted me—my plans were inadequate. Yell, I think.
In the saddle of Russian Hill, I was aware I was too far from the Bay to see it, so I walked north on one of the less picturesque crosstown streets. When there were deep alleys in sight, I walked in the middle of the road. I avoided the nude bars of Lower Broadway, crossing through Chinatown instead. There was a vital, warm sort of feeling here, as if the sidewalk and the buildings were always awake and alive regardless of the time of day. It was the only place I rememb
er seeing people, usually just one or two older men walking with purpose as if someone were clocking them.
When I hit North Beach, the sky was usually turning blue, and streets smelled of something I couldn’t identify, but the air was heavy with it, a warm hickory scent that I associated for years with the opening of the day, promise, the city yawning and stretching. It turned out that I was walking by a coffee roastery. Then, bakery smells, windows damp with condensation, the metallic clanks of ovens opening and closing, AM radios turned to the news.
Sometimes I wanted to go to Coit Tower, but the park surrounding it scared me, so I would just walk around Telegraph Hill, to the Bay side, as tourists were starting to wake up. Sometimes I stopped in Washington Square and watched old people doing Tai Chi. No one ever talked to me, but maybe once, twice, there was a shout in the street as I walked by and my skin tingled and my shoulders climbed up to my ears in fear, and I kept walking.
I didn’t ask myself where I was going. The point wasn’t to find a place so much as it was to have walked and to have burned a new bit of the city into myself. When a vista was pleasant, perhaps the overwhelming vertical of a hillside with houses riding it like a wave, I might stop and tell myself how lucky I was. I could imagine a time when I looked back on this moment, this view, with a sense of loss. I would be nostalgic for now, and this thought soothed me—surely what was happening to me wasn’t sad. It couldn’t be sad if in the future I looked back with regret that this time had passed.
I knew how adults loved the city. You should have been here when, said every adult. Maybe that time had never existed, but pretending it had was part of our social grace. If enough of us didn’t believe it, it collapsed. Believing was on my shoulders now.
My mother’s shelves had interviews with artists, the long-form ones in City magazine or The Paris Review, about how they’d overcome hard times and I pretended that this, right now, was a hard time.
Maybe this was normal, and common, and maybe other kids were walking in a syncopation that prevented any of us from actually seeing the others. Maybe we all drove ourselves in the dark with a need to explain what was going on. Later, years from now, we would realize that we each had been narrating our lives to no one—ironically, if only we knew, here we all were for each other, each of us members of the other’s invisible audience. Walking in the dark was so long ago, we would say, and how we ache for the way the roasting coffee smelled. It was like we were royalty back then, with the empty city around us. It was great. We wish you could have been there. It was so beautiful and now it’s gone.
There was a little more to the walks for me. Why am I still embarrassed to admit this part? There was a block near Nob Hill that I tried to walk each way, coming and going. There was a cramped alleyway there, the kind of place I would normally avoid. It was lined with angel trumpets, yellow bell-shaped blooms that at night gave off a potent and friendly perfume. It seemed like a trap you would find in fairy tales, so I never went down it.
But I thought that if I weren’t expecting it, I would startle when I heard a familiar meow. I would look down the alley and see Leo trotting toward the curb. He would throw himself down on his side, showing off his belly, convulsing in pleasure at having found me. Oh Leo.
But I knew he was gone. The world didn’t work like that. Leo was fine where he was, his little sweet cat mind having forgotten me, him sleeping on the bed of his new owner without regret. Straighten up, Glen, stop it. No one comes back just because you miss them. My heart was broken, but it was better it broke without me showing it off like that.
* * *
—
When I was at home I spent a lot of time going through my mother’s files, looking for things I wasn’t supposed to know. There were papers relating to the divorce and there was a huge file on me, with everything from my birth certificate to my current, terrible report card.
I found my IQ test. There was a printed sheet showing the IQ bell curve, and how around 130 was “gifted” and 150 was “genius.” 170 was at the flat end, where the oxygen ran out. There was handwriting by the Eldorado School headmistress, notes from 1969 about how she’d administered the test and how I’d gone off the charts, 170+. The “plus” meant I had surpassed their ability to quantify me.
The number, with the weirdly imprecise yet clinical-looking plus sign, burned into my retinas. It was proof. I wanted it to be higher. I wanted it to surpass all ability to measure. Then I looked at the date. I felt suspicious. How can you tell how smart a five-year-old is? Also, it wasn’t a standardized test—it seemed to be a set of mimeographed questions the headmistress had made up herself. Draw a diamond. Which I did by drawing a square, then passing it to her at a forty-five-degree angle.
I wasn’t a genius but I was clever, and it felt to me like that test had mistaken the difference between the two. My parents had bought into an exciting fiction that had started the moment they’d seen that 170+ and continued until now, when my mother had left because she was convinced I could handle myself.
Then I turned the page and something in me broke. It was terrible to see. It was another IQ test, a commercial one, the type you might buy at a bookstore and administer to yourself. It wasn’t mine. It was my mother’s.
My mother had decided to see how she measured up to her impossible child, and she had scored exceptionally high, 135 points. She could have gone to Eldorado herself. And yet I knew she looked at that and found herself not good enough. It was evidence that I was putting her down, again. I felt this dull ache of guilt and sadness, as if I were responsible. Long after I put the files back, I could see the numbers as if they were projected right in front of me. I could imagine my mom taking the test dutifully and sighing like she’d failed the 11+ exam, which she hadn’t. Our results, hers and mine, confirmed to her that she was no good and that I judged her.
I understood something further, without steps of deduction—it arrived full-blown like divination. Looking at me while I was in my mother’s office was the portrait of her father, long dead, unassailably a genius. Somehow, my mother had confused me with him. She loved me and despised me like I was her father. She had fled to New York to show me she wouldn’t be crushed under my impervious, mighty thumb.
So much learning in such a brief time. I had no evidence to really support it except for how it sat in my clever heart. It felt correct and awful and it made me miserable for my mother. I felt like I’d sneaked a glance inside her medicine cabinet or her dresser drawer. I wished I hadn’t seen any of this.
* * *
—
For four or five months in 1976 and 1977, I lived like that. Adults were around sometimes, but mostly not. The longest consecutive time I was totally alone was about two weeks, I think. There were plenty of shorter stretches, too. I didn’t take up drugs. I didn’t get mugged or raped. As a result it took a while for me to understand it meant anything. In my twenties I had a well-oiled version of my basement story. I talked about it casually because it felt like nothing to me, and that seemed to shock people. I told it to get sympathy and also to look down on whoever was giving it to me. Oh, that makes your heart go out to me? You’re weak, I would think.
There are gaps in my emotions, the places where other people find continuity. I feel love and then it’s like I’m driving on black ice with no contact against the road. I love three days out of five. I have heard gentle suggestions that maybe I am trying to avoid being abandoned again, but that doesn’t seem right. I’ve taken on what Peter Charming said—the one who needs the relationship less controls it, and I have been with an unfortunate exception or two the one who needs it less.
Baby, you know they love you when they’re there. My mother used to say it ruefully when a Saturday night sputtered to a close without a phone call or explanation. She said it in that way of beating herself up for not having learned. Then she would fall in love again, stubbornly, forgetfully, as if knowledge like that wou
ld only knife her vital, overflowing heart.
Trevor was the first man of many she would discover, all in trouble, all ready to be pulled back with enough love and patience and sometimes cash. It would never work.
The price of understanding her with some compassion goes like this: if you know they love you when they’re there, then my mother loved Trevor but didn’t love me.
That should be painful. It’s not. From a distance I find her behavior brave. Why shouldn’t a woman love a man more than she loves her child? All I knew when I was twelve was that I had a challenge like surviving in outer space—your mother chose to leave and you’re clever or a genius or something, so how do you live well, Glen David Gold?
However, it’s more complicated than that. Trevor, regardless of being intriguing and soulful, was a terrible person. My mother knew it. That’s the part that’s painful. Neither Trevor’s situation nor my mother’s grasp of it was apparent to me when I was twelve. When she and I talked on the phone, she explained things elliptically, even by her standards. She was living in a hotel and Trevor was somewhere else. He visited. Things were tense. Sometimes they managed to go out together but mostly she had to wait by the phone for him. She wasn’t sure what was coming next, but if they could get through this rough patch, things would work out.
They would work because she loved him. She loved him so much I could hear the ache in her voice. She would never fail a man like that, even if he disappointed her. She would have a bigger heart than his, and that would show him the way to be a better man. She would be a better person than the man to whom she was devoting herself and that made her stronger, and he would see it eventually. Her love was a beacon and the result had to be inevitable.
I Will Be Complete Page 13