Sea Monkeys

by Kris Saknussemm

  As soon as my mother and sister had fallen asleep (and without Dad in the house they were scared too), I’d climb up on the roof in a blanket, where I could see in all directions. It was cold, even at that time of year, come early morning. But it was safe. I could watch the shadows of the little men who lived in the juniper . . . and the earwig soldiers. The neighborhood was alive with things and beings wanting to get me. Still, I knew that the greatest danger lay waiting for me on my way to and from school. That’s when I was really alone, except for the Creature, and he scared me almost as much as the Demon. Riding a bike would give me speed and another way to come home. Freedom. It wouldn’t keep me from being ambushed again. It wouldn’t keep the fear away . . . but it would help.

  So, I took the longest walk of my life down that fallen ladder of iron moonlight with my sister’s bike—fresh oil on the chain. Dogs barked in the distance. I saw a couple of cats prowling. All along the old Southern Pacific railroad line that spanned the valley was a jungle of cottonwoods, swamp oak and sumac . . . remnants of forts and hideouts kids had made of cardboard boxes. Things moved in the branches and in the mess of blackberries that had sprouted up over the drainage culvert. Rats maybe, raccoons, but not mad hoboes, not the Demon.

  Arriving finally at the darkened school was at first a gigantic relief—and a mystery. The moon made sheets of diamonds of the classroom windows, all the desks waiting silently, filled with erasers and rulers, orange peels and wads of gum . . . the SRA Reading Laboratory boxes on the table beneath the chalkboard, with their color-coded cards (everything needed to have some hint of the laboratory in those days).

  I thought of how I’d been huddling in the back of the library after school buried in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet . . . Rifles for Watie . . . and Homer Price (I liked the story about his unstoppable doughnut-making machine).

  It seemed very odd to hear the school so quiet—so still in fact I could hear the big clocks ticking in the classrooms even through the windows. Although I’d missed weeks, I could recount where every single member of my class sat, only they weren’t there.

  It had never occurred to me before to think about the secret life of empty classrooms... the dead flies the janitor Mr. Kosesky hadn’t found . . . the maps . . . the boxes of pipe cleaners and Styrofoam balls. What went on when we weren’t there. They made us square dance on rainy days. I pledge allegiance to the flag... my book report is about . . .

  I found the darkness and the silence hypnotic. Then I remembered why I was there. It was time to face the challenge.

  The moonlight made the monkey bars and the jungle gym look unearthly . . . things arrived from outer space. I was suddenly afraid. But I got on the bike.

  I steered between the four-square blocks and the hopscotch boxes. I teetered. I wobbled. I fell over and banged my knee. But the moment I let the wheels roll I found I could make a turn. The bike wanted to go—it did the work—all I had to do was pedal and steer. The sheer, smooth field of the blacktop glazed with moon made me feel like I was sailing over water. I shot around the tanbark where the slide and the swings were. I circled! I flew! My legs pumped and pumped, and I learned after but one crash, how to use the brakes. I learned how to change gears between the three speeds. Even when I really wiped out because I’d taken a corner too sharp, sprawled on the hard surface, staring up at the sky seemed like discovering some local heaven. I saw a satellite.

  For two hours I whizzed around and mastered the bike so completely I could do the forbidden thing of riding in the corridors, all vacant now, doors locked, only once bounding off the walls, but never losing control. I vowed I would ride everywhere after that. I didn’t care if I was riding a girl’s bike. I’d go back to my job at the dry cleaner’s and make enough money to buy my own Schwinn three-speed. Bright green. Then I could ride to the Plaza shopping center where a man wearing a welder’s mask had robbed the Wells Fargo Bank. I could ride to school. I rode all the way home.

  The fear would come back. The Demon and the Creature, too, weren’t to be left behind so easily, but still, I learned a great lesson that night. I taught myself. When some of the light inside you is stolen, risk a bit more darkness to steal some of the moonlight back. Whenever I’ve fallen, ever since, in any way . . . I think of those rusted spokes tick-turning silver in the moonshine out on that proving ground playground. I think of riding, almost flying, past the place where I nearly died, my own blood mingled with the rust on the rails.

  I think of that night I walked out alone, heart thudding, through the shadows to meet the moon—and how I rode home with it in a basket. Never quite as alone again, yet not as haunted.

  OFF RAMP

  My stepbrother and I rode our bikes without lights down the steep hill that would whip you straight onto the freeway, heading for the bridge. The centrifugal speed was intense. The design of the on-ramp was so bad the view was basically blind. If a car was coming you were history. That was the beautiful simplicity of the challenge.

  You had to whoosh the curve, push hard on the straightaway, glide across four lanes, then pump, drive, fly for the off-ramp a quarter mile down. The chute was sharp, steep and coiled like a spring. Grinding for speed across the freeway, you couldn’t afford to brake until you were clear of the lanes. Then you had to worry if someone came up behind you fast because all you had was a tinny little reflector on the back—not to mention the very real possibility of crashing into the sides or losing control down at the bottom when you were well advised to shoot the too-abrupt traffic light and bogart for the darkness of a side street so the cops didn’t burn you.

  It was a marvelous thing to be hiding alone down at the very bottom, heart still thudding, between the streetlights on a misty night, listening for the ticking of a certain set of bicycle wheels, knowing that once more you’d made it, that you’d cheated that dark wild thing. Listening. Waiting for a shadow, very like your own, to emerge out of the fog.

  CAPTAIN GALAXY COMES BACK TO EARTH

  His real name was Ron Walsh, but I knew right away when my father introduced him that he was Captain Galaxy, the star of one of our local children’s TV shows. Every afternoon for years, I’d watched and cheered when his spaceship took off. In the very early days, it was an old rocket ship with rivets and bolts, filmed in black-and-white. Over the years, he got a shiny chrome flying saucer and slipped slowly into color.

  He wore a bright orange space suit and grinned and waved—and was given a sharp black baseball cap with a red comet emblem when he started losing his hair. He introduced shows like The Whirlybirds and cartoons like Peter Potamus. He invited kids in for quizzes and special prize drawings in the Control Room (how many kids wanted to have a Control Room?).

  He was such a constant and larger-than-life part of my growing up, the thought of meeting him in the flesh had never occurred to me. How could I? He was off in his spaceship—or as I grew older—off in some studio made to look like a spaceship. He certainly wasn’t out playing golf in the middle of the day with a nutty psychologist who drank with his alcoholic clients and a young boy on the verge of insanity.

  But that’s where I met him. At the Chabot Golf Course in the hills of Oakland, where years before, my father had baptized me in a water hazard. Dad was a very keen golfer. In fact, one of the great crises in his postwar, post-divorce, post-heart-attack life was when he was playing a round alone early one morning and he hit a hole in one—nobody there to see it. Boy, did that irk him. He had to write a sermon about it. He called it “Your Whole in One,” and it was about whether good deeds or triumphs have to be witnessed by other people to be real—doesn’t God see everything? My mother called it “The Sermon on the Green.” Anyway, I was eleven years old and Dad would let me hit a few shots on every hole, and make believe I was his caddy. Ron was staring down a long green fairway speckled maddeningly white with thousands of little daisies, trying to locate his ball. “You know,” he said, winking at me, “I have this dream. It’s a recurring dream. I’m searching fo
r a daisy in a field of golf balls.”

  He’d seen enough kids to know there was something not right with me. Sometimes the fear would overcome me in midsentence—an idiot blankness sucking all the oxygen out of the air. How could I explain it? How could I be clear in the bright sunlight surrounded by green grass and the cool menthol of the eucalyptus? I moved and breathed minute by minute. And that was fine by him. “You know what the pro over at Round Hill told me?” he asked. “Relax in the back swing. Just loosen your grip, let it happen. So I did—and you know what happened? I hit him with the three-iron.”

  His firm belief was that the key to a successful round of golf was a cheeseburger in the grill afterward, with a crisp, cold pickle and a basket of French fries. We sat there chomping away under a glossy poster of Jack Nicklaus blasting out of a sand trap (what could be sadder than grown men worshipping professional golfers?), and he told me how they filmed the spaceship—about gaffes with the kids in the audience, like the little boy who peed on the navigation console, or the girl with the glass eye that popped out and got crushed by a camera man. It didn’t occur to me that mishaps and unforeseen circumstances were a fact of life for everyone. And on television? Wasn’t everything rehearsed, even when it didn’t seem like it?

  Simple things like dumb jokes and a cheeseburger were more important than I’d realized. My world had collapsed inside itself so that almost no surprises could happen—or if they did, they only added to the fear. Everything seemed linked, planned, designed, aimed and geared toward frightening and humiliating me. When I was alone at home waiting for my mother and sister to return from wherever they were, I’d take refuge on the roof. From there I could defend and be on watch on all sides of the house. I learned that from Zorro. The importance of the high ground. I could, if worst came to worst—which of course it would—leap over the fence. There was no evil capable of catching me in either the walnut grove behind our house (which I knew well enough to run through at full speed on a moonless night and where I had many hiding places) or the Hatcher’s backyard next door. The Demon couldn’t get me.

  But I thought of sad Mr. Wyman, who leapt to his end from a roof. And I thought of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, leaping from their space capsule into the dust of the Sea of Tranquility.

  Have you ever jumped off a roof? It takes careful, painful, paratrooper astronaut practice, especially to do it really well in the dark. In those dark days, I was on the roof almost every night. I’m not sure where my sister was then. She maintains she was home looking after me while our mother was out cavorting with various men—which I’m sure was true on many nights. But some nights she’d be out at friends’ houses, and in winter, the darkness fell early. Men on the moon.

  In any case, I got to where I could hurl myself off the edge, clear a six-foot wire fence eight feet from our house, tuck, roll and run—and if the Hatchers weren’t home, scramble up onto their roof from on top of their garbage cans and be in position to leap for the shingles of Marilee Thomas’s garage if need be. I could move like a cat. Not because I wanted to or because it came naturally to me. No one was ever more afraid of climbing a tree. I became a suburban astronaut and an artist of evasion in spite of my instincts. I developed new instincts, and there’s nothing more exhilarating or terrifying than that.

  Each night, I became quieter, stealthier, slipping out from first my room, then when the fear grew too great, my sister’s bedroom—sometimes even my mother’s bed. There was the Demon to worry about—the earwig soldiers and the juniper men. And always the half-seen things in the streetlit darkness—luminous—all gill, claw and feeler. I grew keener and quieter.

  But the price paid was an increasing invisibility, a fading. I knew that one day I would be fear itself. One night I’d be able to see in the dark because I was darkness. I’d fly because I couldn’t fall. I’d have crossed over into that realm that lay beyond the walnut grove. I knew in my thumping heart that the familiar neighborhood nights of automatic sprinklers and Manchurian pear trees masked a shadowland of breath and scent, undead faces, unknown threats and predators waiting like trap-door spiders. Suddenly, I felt the green of the golf grass and the pink of Jack Nicklaus’s shirt signaling to me, calling me back.

  Captain Galaxy was suspiciously good company for me that day, and I wondered if my father might’ve had an idea in mind—and perhaps more than an idea, a true therapeutic technique, for which I’d never given him credit. He was, as I came to see, an unorthodox thinker that way. It was another one of those days that helped change my life.

  Although I didn’t realize it at the time, you don’t lose your mind all at once. And you don’t find the way back all at once. It’s a gradual process that can often look in the moment like getting more lost. I thought of these things. About the grace of everydayness. About what and whom I really feared. About my father and his peculiar brand of healing, which in the end did him so much harm.

  But what I thought about most of all was what my father said when he drove me home. I asked what was wrong with Captain Galaxy. Dad looked at me for a moment as if he was going to stop the car—I think because it struck him that everyone I saw him with was one of his counselees. Then he turned to me and said, “It’s not about being wrong; it’s about feeling better. If you think there’s something wrong with people, than you want them to be right. I want people to feel better.”

  “Does Captain Galaxy want to feel better?” I asked.

  “Yes, he does. He just has great mood swings that he can’t control. Sometimes he’s all revved up, or relaxed and funny—other times he feels so bad he can barely get out of bed. At his worst, he feels suicidal. He wants to die.”

  I was very sorry about that. The thought of his shiny spaceship crashing struck me as a great tragedy.

  Many things happened in the weeks and months that followed. I started sleeping in my own room again (a big step) and actually in my bed instead of under it, or sneaking out to huddle on the roof. I finally went back to school. My mysterious and long absence had made me something of a legend. I had to take several tests to prove I shouldn’t be held back a grade. I passed pretty easily, thankfully. The thought of being kept back was hellish.

  I was picked for teams again and even captained some. I was confided in. Once a boy named Terry Williams ridiculed me and I threw him against a pole in the hallway and he slumped to the concrete. Gradually my grades returned to normal. I even stepped ahead.

  Meanwhile, my father remarried. He had a new family and so did I, including a stepbrother my age. The days went by and the old fears seemed to fade. I could look out my window at night and not see the shadowland. The metallic perspiration scent of the Evil became rarer.

  My father moved out of his apartment in Berkeley to a drafty house in Oakland, just off College Avenue. I saw him and the new family almost every weekend—every other one at least. Captain Galaxy lived only a few blocks away, although we didn’t call him that anymore. The show had sadly been canceled, after all those years. But I think part of him was glad about it.

  Because he’d been a childhood hero, I’d never considered that his role was something of an embarrassment to him. Often we saw him for parties and he got Dad tickets for things. He had a lot of connections around town, but you could tell by the way people talked about him that he was a source of amusement. Everyone seemed to know his catch cry . . . “Now, Star Team Troopers, it’s time for . . . ” I think it got on his nerves. He’d become an executive at the station and did some community theater (he even had a bit part in a Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movie). But he didn’t look happy. He set up a bay fishing weekend for Dad, me and my stepbrother, but he got so smashed and seasick we never saw him on deck.

  Ron, as we came to call him, had long before been through the divorce shredder, only his ex-wife had moved to San Diego and he rarely saw his kids. Then his second marriage broke up. After that he had a fling with an eighteen-year-old, which raised some eyebrows—not an easy thing to do in the Bay Area, and in those da
ys almost impossible. I didn’t know what to think of his third wife, and from the looks of things, neither did Ron. To be honest, I didn’t really care much about him at that point, even though we’d come to know him as a neighbor and family friend. I associated him with the dark time—or with the lost time that came before—and I was too caught up in my own recovery, the changes in my body at the onset of puberty, a growing attraction to girls, whether it was Debbie Blee or Miss January. I’d come back from the shadows of the dead, having leapt off the roof for the last time. Almost the last time.

  I found that my training regimen had made me far more agile and daring than I’d expected, which was a good thing, as my stepbrother was already a mass of scars and colorful stories. Together, he and his friends—Carlos (who might’ve become the first famous Hispanic magician had he not died in a car accident), Petey, a big pasty-faced Danish boy with a bowl haircut, and Fergus, a little black cigarette thief who was later blinded by an M-80—developed a gung-ho version of hide-and-seek called Lights Out. It was free-form and allowed for the creation of conspiracies and alliances. The one basic idea was to scare the shit out of people.

  The game, as the name suggests, was best played at dusk going into dark and made use of the most extreme hiding places, such as neighborhood roofs, the underbellies of cars—wherever it was most challenging. (Each of the core players had his own unique style, so that you could just glance down a street and know right away how Carlos had seen it . . . the options he might’ve considered . . . and that became a critical part of the art . . . to both follow your signature style yet to keep surprising everyone, outdoing your last masterpiece.)

  We eventually had between twenty and thirty kids participating at any one time. Every time we went hunting for each other, in daylight or darkness, some adventure took place, some vision. Balanced on a section of rusted rain gutter, about to fall fifteen feet into a rose arbor, I watched Mrs. Broadbent kneel by her bed to pray, then take out her teeth and kiss them. Once, my stepbrother ran a whole block on the hoods of cars to get away from a savage Doberman and even then had to beat it off with the bicycle chain he wore as a belt.