On the way out, I thought I should have mentioned instead all the science fiction I was reading. Those books, at least, were novels.
I sat in on Weston’s math class, which might as well have been theoretical biophysics. Worse, it was taught by Mr. Twitchell, whom I had already lost. He gave a pop quiz. In the awkward moments when I was looking around for a clue how to behave, Mr. Twitchell knelt down in front of me and asked with concern if I’d followed anything in the class so far.
I admitted I hadn’t. Instead, I’d been thinking about Dune. He didn’t know what Dune was, so I explained: it was science fiction, not a comic book, and I was wondering how to turn it into a movie. So while he was teaching, I was imagining sandworms and vast deserts through which they swam. He looked at me with what I can now identify as concern. Then he smiled, tapped on the desk a couple of times as if sorting out what to say, then went back to the front of the class and taught the rest of the lesson without having actually said it.
* * *
—
When my father asked how it had gone, I didn’t have much of an answer. I wished it had gone well, so maybe I lied to him.
I won’t prolong this. It turned out that there really was such a thing as a permanent record at Thacher. Mine began with a note from Mr. Twitchell. He’s weird, it said. But I like him.
It was true—Thacher had some standards beyond reading grade point averages. One thing that trumped grades was “weird.” I got in.
* * *
* * *
—
There was a school dance right before graduation from eighth grade. I had never danced before, but I felt pretty good about my future so I went to the dance, to critique it. I spent the first two hours standing by the punch bowl, telling Jon Epstein how stupid everyone was for dancing. I talked about the psychology behind it. All our unmet need for gratification marred by our flaws and shortcomings, our lack of insight into what we actually wanted. Movement didn’t solve anything. Dancing was a mistake. Eventually, he left, then came back, with girls.
“Tell them about the dancing,” he yelled, over the music.
I didn’t know where to put my hands. I remember I was leaning over one girl, who was trying to hear me, while Jon was paraphrasing, for another girl, my argument against dancing. Then she whispered it to another girl, and then the girl I was talking to took my hand and led me to the dance floor.
I danced for forty-five minutes. When the first girl was tired I found another. I’m fairly sure I danced with several girls at once. Other people stopped dancing, and I stopped, too, but they gestured that they wanted me to keep going, so they could watch.
By the time the dance was over, I had untucked my shirt, and kicked off my shoes, and I was sweating, and I could barely speak. There was a crowd around me. They all wished the dance had continued, if only so they could keep watching. Also, my philosophy against dancing had spread around. Everyone agreed I was really smart. I understood that they weren’t watching my dancing because it was good. It was more like watching a chimpanzee that had been chained inside a barrel until he was twelve years old explode through the staves, hurl the oak lid away like a champagne cork, and fling his body against the rafters until he exhausted himself. I would want to see that.
“We were all at a party last Saturday,” Andrew Vaupin said. “We were trying to think of who was straight, and we listed off a bunch of names. Then someone said ‘Glen Gold’ and everyone laughed really hard.”
Everyone laughed again when he said it. I laughed, too, like this: Hah hah? hah hah hah? I was trying to figure out what he meant by “straight.” I knew it usually meant “heterosexual” and yet I knew he wasn’t talking about that. There wasn’t much homophobia at Town School; we were in San Francisco and some of our teachers were gay and no one cared. Further, in this context, straight seemed to be something shameful. And regardless of how gay-friendly our junior high school might have been, it would never get to the point where anyone actually looked down on being straight.
I had no idea what was going on. So I kept laughing, to show everybody I knew exactly what they were talking about.
“So, are you?” a girl asked.
“Am I what?”
“Straight?”
I was about to say yes. But to be straight was to be laughed at during parties to which I hadn’t been invited. I was being invited somewhere now, maybe. All it took was giving the right answer. “No, well, yeah, sort of, I’m sort of, pretty much, no, sort of straight, kind of, you know.”
Only when the conversation had moved on did I realize they meant straight the way Peter said it, like stepping out of the shower to pee. That my classmates might have anything in common with that other life had confused me too much to make the connection then.
The kids around me were talking about how they figured I read Latin and spoke Greek and knew calculus. They didn’t know anything about me. They couldn’t have a clue that when I arrived in seventh grade, I’d already been banned for life from the Washington Square Bar & Grill. They didn’t know my grades were miserable. All they knew was what they saw, a sweaty, chubby, hyper-verbal kid without any grace. Of course they assumed I had to be smart.
The girl I had danced with the longest was nicknamed Froggy. She introduced herself that way. She had a raspy voice, and she was from some former British colony that produced girls with raw accents. “You’re smart and you’re funny,” she said. “Your mates want to see you dance again next week at Hamlin’s.” This was a girls school. She wrote her phone number on my hand. Then with some amazement, she swept her palm up my forehead and through my hair. She wiped her hand on my shirttail. “Nice heat,” she whispered.
There’s no reason to assume I slept that night. I went to bed sweaty and woke up with a sore throat from, I thought, having shouted and laughed so much. It had been the greatest social event of my life. In the halls on Monday, the other boys actually nodded at me.
Later I called Froggy. I was so nervous I’d prepared a joke “hello” that was so convoluted it was like dropping a New York Times acrostic in her lap. Five letters, sweaty, Freudian for “I want” with scrambled French “you,” remember? Oh yes, idiot.
She seemed a little abrupt but still open to me coming to the dance. I believe this was the moment she artfully let me know they’d allowed her to invite three boys, meaning two other boys in addition to myself whom she had invited before me. She knew we’d each have a good time with all that company. I couldn’t put my finger on why this seemed slippery. I wondered if it was possible that when girls issued invitations, you might not always get all of the story.
This, though it seemed like a plateau on the way to a better place, was actually the high point of eighth grade. I had found a tentative acceptance in that world, just as the component pieces were to scatter to different high schools. I learned about anticipation, for the coming dance was five days away, then four, then three, and I was out of my mind wondering what was going to happen. I did not kid myself that I would get to kiss Froggy, or rather I told myself that wasn’t going to happen so that I could be pleasantly surprised when it did, not that it would, et cetera.
The sore throat became walking pneumonia. The evening of Froggy’s prom I lay on crusty-feeling sheets, wondering what the dance was like. I also tried to talk myself into feeling like this was for the best. Writers aren’t really made to dance, I thought. We’re the ones who press against the window outside the ballroom, noting the beauty of skirts twirling in advance of a surrender, before we walk away alone, perhaps stopping on the damp pathway to make a brief, tubercular cough into our fists. There are more writers than babies conceived on prom night.
After I recovered, I was no longer teased at all. For the few weeks before eighth grade ended, I was the crazy guy at the dance who was moderately entertaining.
* * *
* * *
—
It was the summer I saw Star Wars repeatedly at the Coronet on Geary. Maybe this was the time I went to tennis camp? Why do I remember seeing Annie Hall with kids from my school?
My mother’s sister Susie came to town from England for a few weeks with her husband, Barry, and a scrum of cousins roughly my age. They were rightly prepared to fight with the rich, snotty, egotistical jerk they remembered from our last visit. But I had been humbled a little bit. I’m sure I was still kind of a dick, but I was also lonely. I shared my comics. I showed them how to play a somewhat-functional Pong machine for free. They taught me the words snide, wank, anarchy, Cadbury.
“You’re being snide, Peter.”
“I am not. Bollocks.”
“Don’t say ‘bollocks.’ ”
“What’s ‘bollocks’ mean?”
General laughter. I didn’t know what “bollocks” meant, and even the adults weren’t sure if you could say it, given how it was all over the radio now. Hadn’t I heard of punk rock? No? We stayed up at night, me telling ghost stories about the basement and them terrifying me by singing Sex Pistols songs.
Rosemary, my mother, Elizabeth, Anna, Susie, Georgina, Jonathan. Susie was as pretty as the rest of the girls, maybe prettier. Peter and Paul agreed it was weird how much their mates wanted to come over after school, just to look at their mother. Though she had the same sense of humor as my other aunts, the same belief that life ran on zest, a feeling that any day could be improved with the circus in it, there was something different about Susie. She was deeply responsible, which was weird for my family. Debbie, her daughter, told me Susie looked remarkably like a photograph of an American soldier that Elsie had kept in a dresser drawer for murky reasons.
My mother had told Uncle Barry he could make a living building houses in San Francisco. They could start a new life here. But the contacts she had lined up didn’t work out. It turned out there were union issues my mother hadn’t known about.
This caused my mother and Susie to fight. My mother was annoyed at her family’s inability to adjust to all the freedom she was showing them. Susie didn’t approve of her friends, Mom said. Trevor needed her, so she got on a plane again.
Susie, Barry, my cousins, and I took a road trip for a few days. Susie kept asking me who Trevor was, how Peter really made his money, what did my father think of all this? But she also didn’t press the issue. She had other sisters with more insistent problems.
When we arrived back in San Francisco, there was a message for me on the answering machine in my mother’s office. I can still hear the timbre of the voice, slow and deep. “This is Jim Shooter…Marvel Comics. Calling for…Glen…Gold.”
By the time he said that, I had already fallen over. I was faceup on the carpet. I was having so much trouble breathing I started to belch. Susie worried—what was wrong with me? It was a small office. Barry, Peter, Paul, John, Debbie, I think all of them crowded in to see what was going on. The boys dragged me upright, telling me to stop being so dramatic, and then there was an argument about who among us was being snide. It was decided: probably me.
I had to play the message back to understand it. I played it so many times I worried I would snap the tape. Jim Shooter had gotten my story about S.H.I.E.L.D., and he wanted to talk to me about it. I should give him a call when I could.
I was curious whether I should be weeping. I jumped up and down, but that didn’t seem right. I kept saying, “This is so surreal.” Susie didn’t understand what was going on—I said that the editor of Marvel Comics, my favorite comic book company, had called me, a kid, about a story I’d written. That still didn’t explain anything—it was just a plot summary that she understood already.
The rest of the pack fell away, and it was just me and Susie in the office. She was kind and her reactions to things were so deeply normal that they startled me. She asked me if I wanted to tell my mother about these Marvel Comics. Oh. Yes, I guess.
Susie had been right to suggest it—I wanted Mom to know. It offered evidence I had survived. Here was my faith in the power of words. I had written my way out of the basement.
On the other end of the phone, I could tell my mother was beaming. Also, unsurprised. I don’t know what her actual words were but I could feel her pride overshadowing everything else. I was entering a world larger than myself, one she already knew, where there was magic and reward. How simple her reaction seemed as she was saying, Of course you did it, darling. Of course. We were both living our dreams.
* * *
—
Thacher started in September. In August, my mother had some business to attend to in Reno. I came along.
I had talked to Jim Shooter of Marvel Comics. Shooter had started writing comics when he was twelve, too, and he wanted to encourage me to keep writing. Learn about science so I could make up inventions that sounded like they could exist. He added a hesitant beat to that. When I was in high school, I should read all the literature I could. Updike, for instance (I wrote down the name). I thought this was to polish my comics skills, but he said that wasn’t quite it. He said I might read enough that I’d forget about comics. Which was fine, he added.
I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at. I tried to rephrase what he was saying so it sounded more like “you’re so talented we’re going to hire you soon.” There were some killing silences until we agreed I would keep sending him stories from Thacher and he would critique them. But no, I wasn’t hired.
The truth was that I wasn’t as exceptional as I’d hoped. And I hated having patience. But I read Updike short stories while my mother and I were staying in a Reno hotel casino.
My mother met with a high roller who had a big house at the edge of town with a swimming pool. He drank cocktails with lunch, swore a blue streak, and called my mother “lady.”
We left his house at high speed. My mother was furious to the point of tears—he’d talked her down in price, giving her something like half of what they’d agreed on.
I’d like to say I had some reaction to the fact that we had abandoned at a stranger’s house—a cheap bastard’s house—the Fabergé chess set. But it meant nothing to me then.
I took in something as I was in that hotel room, looking at the flashing marquee sign. Downstairs was a cathedral-sized room full of people who were leaking money into the casino, quickly or slowly. They were suckers. They didn’t look at a situation from an angle to see what choices they really had.
I understand fate is unjust. Fate is a bully. My mother flees across the country with baskets of valuable things. There are bumpy roads and bridge tolls, cops on the take. By the time she limps into the city, she has been picked clean, and it’s just her and her empty basket and the story of all the hard luck she has faced.
I can see it as it’s happening. Is it a betrayal when I’m wondering this, also—The wheel is cold, or the wheel is hot, but why is she playing?
* * *
—
I wish that before I’d left San Francisco I’d walked across the city again to take in what I was leaving. I wish I’d stood on one of the peaks whose names I never learned—San Francisco below Market was for me as distant and hot as the Martian landscape. It would have given me some perspective. It was 1977, which was the apex for a certain gentle kind of San Francisco life. The doo
med George Moscone was mayor, the ascending Dianne Feinstein was on the Board of Supervisors with Dan White and Harvey Milk. Bars would have ferns in them for a little while longer, and the music people played still had a disco beat and a horn section. The Sex Pistols had just been booked at Winterland. There were bathhouses in the Castro now. There really was a page turning.
I made myself some promises. In high school I would find something athletic to like. I would be less sarcastic and more genuine. I would tell people my name was David.
Days before I left for Thacher, I did something terrible. During the shuffle of all our possessions, the collection of coins was in my bedroom for a few days.
From the 1969 series, there was a one dollar bill, five dollar, ten, twenty, fifty, and hundred. They were still face value in 1977, in other words worth $186. They were never likely to be worth more than that, even in uncirculated condition. I pocketed them. I put all the rest of the coins back where they should be, but I kept those bills in a secret compartment in a Chinese chest in my room. I knew it was wrong.
That weekend, there was a comic book convention at the Jack Tar Hotel. I faced the dealers’ room with a sage look on my face. I ran into the dealers from Comics & Comix on Columbus and the Best of Two Worlds but I didn’t buy anything from them—there were much better deals to be had if only I was prudent. As I was combing through the back-issue boxes, I was narrating the story: this is just fine to do, I will feel no guilt, I should feel no guilt, I am a kid on my own, making the best of this situation. At the same time I was explaining it to myself as a rehearsal for what would happen if my father found out I was stealing.
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