Life in Modesto was not exactly on the fast track. The only movers and shakers around were the farm machines that shook the fruit out of trees. Not even the name was a standout—Modesto was Spanish for “modest.” It got the name when a railroad tycoon refused to have the town named after him.
The biggest news, other than pileups from tully fog on Highway 99, was an occasional local boy killed in Vietnam, although it did have a couple famous home-grown boys. In later years, the world would know the town as the boyhood home of movie king George Lucas. But even Star Wars George was probably embarrassed about the dusty town in the Golden State’s central valley—it was supposed to be the small town in American Graffiti, but he filmed much of the movie in other places.
Also giving the town claims to fame was swimming great Mark Spitz, the first athlete who won seven gold medals at a single Olympics. A more tentative claim was country singer Merle Haggard. Although he was born in a boxcar near Bakersfield, a bit farther down Highway 99, Haggard, who had a poverty-stricken youth and rode the rails, entered a music talent contest in Modesto before he took time off from his fledgling career to do time at San Quentin for burglary.
Marlowe ran and caught up with Robbie before they had to go in different directions for their classes. “If it’s true that Dad is hitting Mom, why would he do that?”
Robbie shrugged. “Maybe because he can.”
16
Robbie stood in the shower in the boy’s locker room after PE and let the hot water run down his body. It was a communal shower, with enough spray nozzles to handle an entire class at a time. He had deliberately chosen a shower head in a corner. He wasn’t entirely sure why he felt uncomfortable in the showers. Maybe some of it had to do with the horseplay and grab-ass that took place—he felt more vulnerable when he was naked and the other boys started throwing bars of soap or slapping with wet towels. But there was another feeling he had been experiencing, a feeling he didn’t quite understand but that had been with him for a long time. He found himself sexually aroused at the sight of the other boys’ naked bodies.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Jimmy Dent rinsing off a few feet away. Like himself, Jimmy had little body hair. Robbie found the other boy’s body sensuous, even seductive. His only sexual experiences of any kind had been self-administered, mostly in the bathroom and under covers at night. Ever since he was eleven, he had been experiencing more frequent erections and they always came at the sight or thought of another boy. Without any overt acts on his part, without discussing his secret passions, somehow other boys had picked up on his feelings. Maybe it was a look he had given them. He didn’t know how it happened, but the bully Yeager had become the most vocal about it.
He had not talked to anyone about his feelings. To talk to his father about his passion toward boys would have been only slightly less painful than poking needles in his eye. His mother would not have understood. She probably would have blamed herself for his “perversion” and started crying. Marlowe was the only one he considered actually talking to, but he didn’t want to expose himself to possible ridicule from her. He knew his sister well enough to know that she would not deliberately humiliate him, nor would she expose his secret, but she never really understood her strengths and his weaknesses. Few people thought of homosexuality as natural—it was almost universally condemned as an illness and perversion.
Marlowe would be horrified at first, then she would want him to see a doctor for a pill or a shot to make him “well,” and finally, she would put up her fists and be ready to fight her father if he tried to punish Robbie for his “perversions.”
As he watched the glistening water flow down Jimmy Dent’s buttocks, Robbie started to get an erection. He quickly turned on the cold water. When he stepped out of the shower and turned to grab a towel off the shelf, he got a sharp pain to his rear. He yelled and spun around. Yeager, naked, had wet his own towel and cracked Robbie with it.
Yeager howled with laughter.
“You son-of-a-bitch!” Robbie said. He hurt like hell.
Yeager stopped laughing and stepped up close to him. “You called my mother a name, shitface.”
“I didn’t call—”
“Yeah, you did, you called my mother a bitch.” Yeager gave him a shove, sending him back. “I’m going to kick your ass, Roberta.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Ohhh, did you hear that, guys? Roberta wants me to leave him alone.”
The other boys in the locker room started making catcalls. “Give the faggot what he really wants.”
Yeager grabbed his cock and pushed up against Robbie. “This what you want, Roberta? Get down and eat it, you little cocksucker.”
Robbie’s knees trembled. He started crying.
“Knock it off!”
The reprimand came from Mr. Ramirez, their gym teacher. “Get your clothes on,” he told Yeager. He glared at Robbie, disgust in his face. “Wipe those tears off or I’ll send you over to the girls’ gym.”
17
“You bastard!”
Yeager whipped around. He was barely out of the schoolyard, on his way home after school, when he heard the curse.
Marlowe James came at him, red in the face.
“What’d you call me?”
“I called you a fuckin’ asshole, you prick. You ever touch my brother again and I’ll see you pay for it.”
“Oh, I’m so scared. What are you gonna do, shitface? You gonna hit me with that flat chest of yours?”
She got up close to him. Other kids had gathered at the commotion.
“I’m going to tell everybody you tried to fuck my brother.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Is it? I’m going to tell everyone that I caught you trying to do it doggy style to him, that’s why you pick on him, because you’re horny for him.”
“You lying bitch, nobody’ll believe you.”
“Your old man will. Everybody knows what he did to you when he caught you fucking a goat. And I’ll keep spreading it, letting everybody know.”
Yeager shook with rage and fear. Bullies operated in a hierarchy of muscle and his old man was the meanest, cruelest father in town. He wouldn’t just believe it, he’d make the story his own just for the pleasure he’d get in beating his son.
“Fucking bitch,” Yeager said as she walked away. But the defiant tone was gone and he spoke almost in a whisper.
Marlowe burst into tears before she’d gone a hundred yards.
“Poor Robbie,” she said.
There was no one around to hear her.
Her girlfriend, Betsy, caught up with her.
“I heard you just reamed Yeager,” Betsy said, breathless.
“That asshole.”
“It’s all over the school,” Betsy said.
Marlowe glanced at her. “What d’you mean? I just did it.”
“No, I mean about Robbie being a queer.”
Marlowe stopped and faced her. “Don’t you call him that.”
“C’mon, you know what I mean, homo, fag, whatever, jeez, don’t blame me, I’m talking about what happened at the Sadie Hawkins.”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
Sadie Hawkins was a once-a-year event in which roles were shifted and girls invited boys to the dance. The concept became popular back in the thirties after a Li’l Abner cartoon featured a hillbilly girl named Sadie Hawkins who was in dire need of a husband.
“Nancy Karr invited Robbie to the dance, she thinks he’s cute. What I heard is that when he took her home, they parked outside her house to make out. Nancy wanted him to feel her up—”
“Nancy’s a slut, every guy in school’s been in her pants, she’ll never make it to senior before she has to drop out with a kid.”
“Tell me … she lives two doors down from us. Every time she gets into trouble over some guy, my parents give me a lecture and ground me like I’m going to catch being a slut like you get a cold.”
“So what if Robbie didn’t
feel her up? Robbie’s got good taste.”
“C’mon, Marlowe, guys don’t think like that, they’d feel up a cow’s tits if they got a chance.”
“I’m going to kick her ass if she keeps saying things about Robbie.”
Betsy gaped. “Girls don’t fight.”
“Why not? If she says something about my brother, I’ll punch her. I will, too. Haven’t you ever heard of the girl gangs in San Francisco? The girls all wear blue jeans and carry switchblades.”
“No way, José, that’s just bull.”
“Let me tell you something that isn’t bull, and you can pass it on to that slut neighbor of yours. She better stop mouthing off about my brother or else.”
“Jeez, Marlowe, how did you get so tough? Definitely not from your mother.”
“You have to stand up for yourself and your family because no one else will.”
They parted company at the corner. Marlowe didn’t get ten feet before her knees started shaking and tears welled in her eyes.
“I’ll protect you, Robbie,” she said quietly.
18
Marlowe was flopped belly down across her bed, sleeping with her head buried in her algebra book, when Robbie came in and woke her up.
“They’re in their room, I think it’ll happen tonight.”
“Whaat?” she answered sleepily.
“I think he’ll hit her tonight.”
Marlowe twisted off the bed and got to her feet. “How do you know?” It had been three months since Robbie first claimed that their father hit their mother. After a few days of intense anticipation and anxiety, the notion had gone cold and faded from her mind.
“Didn’t you notice them at dinner? He was on her about buying that new tire at the gas station, he said he could have gotten it cheaper at Monkey Wards.”
“He isn’t going to hit her over a tire.”
“Shhh, they might hear us.” He closed Marlowe’s bedroom door.
The family had a modest, fourteen-hundred-square-foot California ranch-style home, a rectangular house with the kitchen-family room at one end, a step up to a living room, then the “bedroom wing,” three bedrooms and two bathrooms crowded together at the end of the house opposite the kitchen.
Robbie and his parents shared a common wall with an aluminum air-and-heat duct serving both bedrooms.
“You don’t get it, do you? He doesn’t hit her because something she does makes him mad. He looks for an excuse to hit her. Mr. Crowell told me that.”
“He’s your swim coach. You told him that Dad was hitting Mom?”
“He’s a good guy, he isn’t going to tell anyone. I told him because he’s the only person I can talk to.”
“You can talk to me.”
“You’re too damn old,” he told her. “Sixteen going on sixty. C’mon.”
They went quietly down to his room. He closed the door after they came in and put on the Beatles song “Yesterday.” “Have you heard this song?” he asked as they sat with their backs to the vent, one on each side.
“Yeah, they’re okay, I’m not crazy about those guys like you are.”
“There’s a new group out of San Francisco I like better, the Grateful Dead.”
“What a stupid name. They’ll never make it.”
“It isn’t stupid, you’re just not hip.”
“Yeah, and you are. Look at you, you hippie.”
It was the mid-sixties and new words had entered the vocabulary—hippie, LSD, Beatlemania. Words like gay and cool, which had been around a long time but not been widely used, were suddenly popular. There was a neighborhood in San Francisco called Haight-Ashbury where guys wore their hair long like girls and college dropouts gathered in rooms and took off their clothes, smoked pot, and played folk music while they had communal sex.
Most of her information came from Robbie, who talked about San Francisco like it was a new rock band that played seductive music. He had let his hair grow long and had started wearing a turquoise necklace. When she called it Indian jewelry, he corrected her and said it was made by “Native Americans.” Marlowe wasn’t attracted to the San Francisco counterculture scene, but her body was suddenly developing curves that seemed to form overnight and there was a lot of talk about something called the Pill that young women were taking to keep from getting pregnant.
Besides his outrage at the idea of young people having sex, her father took particular umbrage against a former Harvard psychologist named Leary who was trying to get everyone high on a hallucinogen called lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD for short.
Sometimes her mother would stare at Robbie and Marlowe and complain that the world seemed to be constantly changing under her feet. To add to the turmoil of a drug-sex-rock-and-roll scene that kids were being inducted into was a war brewing halfway around the world—President Johnson had sent over a hundred thousand young Americans to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia, women were demanding equal rights with men, and Americans of African descent were demanding to be treated as equals. There were even a few voices who said it was all right to be gay or lesbian, but those were whispers and not shouts.
Marlowe had watched changes coming over Robbie that she didn’t understand and couldn’t relate to. Yeager, the school bully, had gone on to fresher meat, but Robbie brought on jeers from other boys because of his long hair and jewelry. While her parents’ problems had faded into the woodwork over the past few months, her concern for Robbie had increased. That she was increasingly coming to realize that he was not sexually orientated like everyone else around her, like everything she had been taught to expect about sex, had made her conclude that he was sick and she needed to find him a cure.
Men who loved other men rarely showed any inclination toward their sexual preference in public. If they did, they were subjected to scorn, ridicule, and beatings from straight guys. Homosexuals were not just banned from the army, many companies would fire them if they made their sexual orientation known. As her father was quick to point out when he saw Liberace on The Ed Sullivan Show, homosexuality was illegal. “That sodomite bastard belongs in prison,” he said.
She couldn’t imagine what two men would find attractive about each other, being hairy and muscular and all that.
She hit a stack of books next to her with her elbow and one fell off the pile. A scrap of paper used as a bookmarker slipped out. She read it as she started to put it back in the book. “‘The love that dared not speak its name.’ What does that mean?”
“It’s something that was said during Oscar Wilde’s time.”
“Who’s he?” The picture on the cover showed a strange-looking young man of great height with girlishly long curly hair and a velvet suit with a lace collar. “He looks like a giant version of Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
“He is,” Robbie said. “Oscar Wilde was the model for the Little Lord Fauntleroy painting. He was a poet and playwright back in the Gay 1890s.”
“Was he queer?”
“He was a homosexual, if that’s what you mean.”
“Robbie, are you queer?”
“Fuck you.”
“Don’t talk to me that way.”
“Then don’t talk to me that way.”
“Shhh,” he said, as she started to verbally pounce on him. “Listen.”
Marlowe heard the voices coming through the vent from the other room.
A sound came through, causing Marlowe to flinch—a slap. A sob from her mother followed.
“He hit her!”
She was on her feet before Robbie could stop her. She flew through his door and tried the handle on her parents’ bedroom door. It was locked. She banged on the door. “Let me in! You son-of-a-bitch! Stop hitting her! Stop it! Let me in!”
She pounded until her hand hurt. When she stopped, she heard her mother crying. Her knees went weak and she slipped to the floor. “I’m here for you, Mom, I’m here for you,” she sobbed.
19
Marlowe stayed in bed and didn’t get up for school the next morning
. She heard her father leave as usual at six and Robbie left for school nearly two hours later. It was ten o’clock before she got up. Usually her mother would have bugged her by now. When she walked in the kitchen, her mother was making dough for a pie.
Her mother didn’t turn to look at her when Marlowe entered. She continued to knead the dough, pushing it harder and harder with her hands. Marlowe could see her mother was tense.
She fought back tears as she came up behind her mother. “Mom, why do you let him hurt you?”
Her mother swung around and slapped her. The blow sent Marlowe staggering back.
“Mind your own business!” Her features were raw and ugly. She was trembling. Marlowe had never seen her angry or explode before.
“What happens between your father and me is our business.” Her mother shoved the toaster off the counter. It flew over the edge and dropped until the still-plugged-in cord stopped it. “I don’t want you ever spying on us!” her mother screamed as the toaster flopped against the cupboard door.
Marlowe left the room in a state of shock. She cleaned the flour and dough off her face and left the house. Her mind was swirling. She needed to talk to Robbie. She didn’t understand why her mother had hit her, why her mother had not accepted her as an ally in the terrible treatment that she was getting.
Nothing made any sense, her father hitting her mother, her mother not fighting back, her brother dressing like a hippie queer.
At sixteen years old, it felt as if the whole world had gone crazy.
20
“You can never tell what goes on between a husband and wife in their bedroom,” Tom Crowell told Robbie.
They were seated in the enclosed patio at the back of the Crowell home. Tom was the high school swim coach. Robbie sometimes came to his coach’s house to practice and receive instructions from the coach as Robbie swam in a long, narrow lap pool in the backyard.
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