But now, watching the neighborhood kids on their bikes, I recalled the little banana seat bike we’d had at the commune, and I wanted one. Now. I jumped off the roof into the barbecue pit and set off to find my dad, to make my request known.
I can still feel my fierce determination, but how Liam and I came in possession of our own BMX bikes has escaped me. I told my dad and sometime later—a few weeks, maybe?—the bikes appeared.
One of the first things we did after we had wheels was tool on over to Ma Goodness, hopping off curbs and perfecting our wheelies. There was a small window over the stove on the side of the building. We rolled up and demanded warm flour tortillas with butter, hands down our favorite thing on the menu. My dad was cooking that day. He dropped a pair of tortillas on the grill, slathered them with butter, tossed each one onto a square of wax paper, and passed them through the window.
SKYLINE
ONE DAY SOMETHING INCREDIBLE happened. Our dad came into some money and he gave Liam and me $100 each. It was maybe 1974. Skateboarding was it. Dogtown and Z Boys down south in Venice Beach was ground zero for skateboard culture, which was evolving from the moves surfers made on the waves in Santa Monica, but we had no clue about that. We had no clue about any of it, just that our dad gave us a hundred dollars apiece—we had never seen anything close to that amount of money in our lives—and we went to the skate shop near the university and bought Banzai metal decks and Road Rider 4 wheels and Tracker trucks and we were set.
Now we had our BMX bikes and our skateboards. Looking back, I think it was only by the grace of God that we didn’t wind up grammar-school dropouts.
We threw ourselves into making jumps and ramps. Jumps were easy. Any angled surface was a jump. We’d steal plastic milk crates from behind the grocery store and tie them together with twine, socks, belts, anything we could find, then lean a piece of wood on it. A couple of two-by-fours nailed together side by side worked. But sometimes, if we were on our bikes, the front tire would knock the board off and instead of going up the jump we’d crash into the now obstructing board and egg crates. Plywood was better, but weak in the middle, so it’d bow and eventually crack without reinforcement.
We scouted the city for new construction, where the ground would have to be leveled and graded. There might be several tiers of smoothed earth separated by a slope of dirt that made for great bike jumps, especially if there was a hill or slope leading down to the site. Then we’d pack the gutter with dirt to create a little ramp from the street over the curb. We’d ride up to the top of the hill and come zooming down over the curb, into the construction site, and right up the dirt tier. The tiers were three or maybe four feet tall, so with a big enough run-up, you could jump your bike six feet or more. More than a few times we’d jump too high, come down, and break a pedal. Also, if you landed too heavy on the front wheel, you’d taco the rim and end up face-first in the dirt.
Making ramps was more work. Building a halfway decent ramp could be an all-day affair, and building a good one could take an entire weekend. The size of the ramp would be determined by how much plywood we could steal. With a couple of sheets, as long as they were the same thickness, we could build a ramp that was about six feet tall and eight feet wide. We’d build a frame with whatever lumber we could find. Two-by-fours were best, but usually they’d just be scrap ends that needed to be nailed together to make longer boards. The back rectangle would be about six feet high, and the base about four feet deep. Cross braces—at least three of them—were then nailed from the back to the base. Then we’d nail plywood sheets on the frame. Even though they’d work their way out so fast and catch our tires, wheels, or skin, we were proud of ourselves. We had never been so industrious in our lives. And maybe even since.
Sometimes, our dad would drive us up to Codornices Park where there was a long steep hill. Whether on bike or board, coming down felt like straight-up flying, going so fast your cheeks wobbled and eyes watered. Then our dad would take us up to Skyline Boulevard, the ridge road that runs behind Berkeley. Skyline was even longer, and I couldn’t bring myself to stand on my skateboard and ride that windy and steep road down into town. It was too scary. So I sat on my butt and raced on down. We called it butt hauling. The road wound through the forest, between stands of eucalyptus, pine, and bay oak. Sometimes between the trunks I glimpsed the sun on the Pacific, shiny like a gold coin.
WOLF
MOM CAME AND WENT. Some mornings Liam and I ran outside to grab our bikes to go to school and we would find her wrapped in a green woolen army blanket, sound asleep in a hammock she’d strung between two trees. If our landlords, the doctor and his wife who lived in the main house, disapproved of a woman camping out in their backyard, I never knew about it. Meanwhile, my dad’s girlfriend, Sheri, had moved in with us. We may have moved on from the commune, but it was still the days of love the one you’re with, and Mom hugged her when they met and shared a joint with her now and then. Still, Mom refused to eat at Ma Goodness. Instead, she ate at one of the local soup kitchens or homeless shelters along with the rest of the local hippies in need of a free meal. When it started getting cold at night, and the army blanket she traveled with wasn’t enough to keep her warm, she moved to a neighbor’s house, where she crashed on the couch.
Not long after that we saw her walking down Shattuck with a guy so tall his head floated above the crowd of freaks and flower children drifting along. She wore the army blanket around her shoulders like a shawl, her blond hair in braids. He reminded me of a Viking from a picture book, with long curly blond hair and a big nose and jaw. They turned into the occult bookstore on Ashby. Liam and I sometimes stopped on our bikes to look in the window. Crystals dangled on thin threads, throwing out beams of rainbow when the sun hit them just right, and there was also a crystal ball on a black wooden stand.
That was the last we saw of our mom for a while. We didn’t think much of it.
Jackson Liquor Mini Mart was where we bought our baseball cards. The store was down the street from Ma Goodness. We thought that was also the name of the owner, who sometimes hired me to watch the register so he could run outside and shoo away the panhandlers in front, or to make deliveries on my bike. In those days, you could call up Jackson Liquor and tell him you needed a pint of rye and I might show up at your doorstep with the bottle swaddled in a brown paper bag, and he would put it on your tab.
Jackson Liquor sponsored the local Little League teams, including ours. Behind the counter black-framed team pictures marched up the wall, two by two. In the front of the counter among the gum and Life Savers, Jackson Liquor sold Topps baseball cards. My dad left change around the house on the kitchen counter and on his dresser, and Liam and I would help ourselves to it and combine it with my income to buy out Jackson Liquor’s entire stock. Handfuls of packs, every day. Then one day Jackson Liquor called me back into the storage room for some reason or another and I saw the shelf where boxes of candy bars were stacked. I saw there were also boxes of Topps baseball cards. From that day on Liam and I started buying our cards in bulk.
Rookies Dave Winfield; Ken Griffey, Sr.; and Bucky Dent. Veterans Pete Rose, Nolan Ryan. There was a crown on Hank Aaron’s card because he was the “New All-Time Home Run King.” Our jaws ached from chewing all those hard slabs of pink gum that came in every pack. We kept our cards in shoe boxes under our beds.
We quickly figured out that Topps rigged it so that you would have fifty of some outfielder no one had ever heard of, but maybe only one of Hank Aaron with his crown. We figured out how to make strategic trades, and I tricked Liam once or twice into giving me one rare card for, say, six cards that showed up again and again. Because he was five he was swayed by the sheer number I was offering—six for one!—but he quickly learned. Our solution was to whip up baseball card mania in other kids in the neighborhood, then make our sneaky trades before they, too, wised up.
Liam and I felt like the junior mayors of our neighborhood. We were resourceful. When we were low on cash we went door
to door collecting glass bottles that we’d then take to Jackson Liquor for a refund. We also baked brownies and made lemonade and put them in our Radio Flyer and cruised around the neighborhood—an early mobile food cart.
We were busy expanding our empire—moving on from baseball cards to football cards and comic books—when Mom reappeared early one sunny morning. She stood in the living room with the tall Viking, whose name was Wolf.
“Get your brother and your stuff,” she said.
My dad was at the restaurant. Sheri hung in the doorway of the kitchen. She’d been baking bread. Had she talked to my dad about this already? Was it okay with him if she just grabbed us and went? I never knew.
Liam didn’t want to go. He hid under his bed and I had to pull him out by the ankles. Wolf had a car, and we climbed in the backseat. We sped out of town and headed east, through the scrubby hills of Vacaville, which I’d heard from one of the kids in the neighborhood had a couple of prisons, and I started staring at the hitchhikers we passed by the side of the road, imagining they were escaped convicts. I felt a shiver of anticipation. What if Wolf picked one up? Would he sit in the backseat with Liam and me and tell us tales of his life of crime?
Liam wasn’t quite so adaptable. He was emotional, even as a kindergartener. He liked things the way he liked them, and one of the things he wasn’t so hot on was change. He stared out the window. Not happy.
In the front seat Wolf and our mom talked. Or rather Wolf lectured and our mom listened, like a teacher and a pupil. He talked about the lost continent of Lemuria under the Pacific Ocean, and how the earliest and most holy races of humanity once lived there, but now that their continent had sunk, they lived in Mount Shasta in a series of tunnels and caves.
We were also headed to Mount Shasta, it turned out, but not to join up with the Lemurians. Our mom turned around and said she and Wolf had seen all the billboards around Berkeley advertising a messenger of God named Clare Prophet speaking at Mount Shasta. She was the leader of a religion called the Summit Lighthouse and preached about having a one-on-one relationship with God, who you could talk to all the time, and he would hear you and answer you.
The road began to snake around a big lake and up into the mountains. The air was cold and piney, and I occupied myself watching for Mount Shasta with its crown of dirty white snow that would catch you by surprise, rising up, as you rounded the next corner. Just as it was getting dark we stopped at a campground crowded with RVs and mobile homes from all over the country. Wolf said they were pilgrims, just like him and our mom, there to hear Clare Prophet talk to God.
Wolf and Mom got out of the car. I climbed out, too. Liam lay down on the backseat. Wolf began to set up camp, which was our sleeping bags rolled out on the dirt beside the car, when a little hippie no taller than our mom trotted over waving his hands. He wore a denim shirt with a leather vest and wire-rimmed glasses. He said that before we got settled in we should know that if we were here to see Clare Prophet, the tickets were sixty bucks.
“More like Clare Profit!” said Mom.
She and Wolf didn’t have the money for such a thing. Instead, we piled back in the car and followed the little hippie to a neighboring campground where his group, called the Rainbow Family, a bunch of gypsies and leather and jewelry makers, were having some sort of reunion. They had an extra teepee we could stay in—in my memory it was white with buffaloes painted around the bottom, but I suspect I am imagining that—and Liam smiled and allowed Mom to give him a kiss and a hug. Everything was good.
CHRIST FAMILY
WE SETTLED IN WITH the Rainbow Family. They were all about the stuff my mom was drawn to—peace, love, and mind-altering substances. I found some sweet cherry trees to climb and jump out of, and I tried to talk some of the other kids in the camp into chopping down one of them so I could ride it to the ground. But they had never heard of such a thing, and there were no handy machetes lying around anyway. Liam and I would try to catch minnows in a creek that ran behind the campground. They winked in the sun and darted away from us every time we plunged in our hands, the water so cold it made our bones ache. I managed to catch one once and popped it into my mouth, swallowing it whole. The minnow squirmed and tickled all the way to my stomach. Liam said I was a show-off.
Sometimes Mom and I made tortillas over the campfire and passed them out to the assembled gypsies and hippies, the self-styled fortune-tellers and spiritualists, and they ate them right up, even without the butter. At night, Liam and I sat cross-legged in the teepee with a flashlight and looked at our baseball cards, or played tag with some of the other kids in the camp. I was learning that as long as I had something to occupy myself, I could be happy and it didn’t much matter where I was.
One day I realized that Wolf had left. The little hippie with the denim shirt had also gone off somewhere. My experience of grown-ups was that they appeared and disappeared at will. The concept of obligation, duty, or responsibility was foreign; I had no idea that your job or family might keep you tethered to one spot. Even when the Rainbow Family began to disperse and the gathering was over I wasn’t too worried.
Then one day Mom took us aside and told us we were leaving with another Family, this one called the Christ Family. She explained that we were now to think of her as Jesus’s sister. If God was her father, she said, and Jesus was his son, that meant she was his sister. Liam and I were too young to take this argument to its logical conclusion—that God was also our father, which meant we were Jesus’s brothers and thus her brothers and not her sons.
She presented us each with a white robe that she’d hand-sewn from sheets. There was a hole in the top for our heads and it tied around our waist with a piece of rope.
We were supposed to wear these robes without shorts or pants or shoes, just as Christ did. I was no stranger to walking around in broad daylight with no clothes on—I’d toddled around the commune buck naked, and played in the waves on the beaches in Mexico scared the roosterfish was going to bite off my ding dong buck naked, and ran around buck naked in the jungles of Belize until the Mennonite children befriended me and then I had to put on pants—but the idea of wearing a white robe like an angel on Halloween with my skinny legs sticking out the bottom filled me with shame.
She put on her own robe, draped her army blanket around her shoulders and built a fire. It was late morning, a strange time for a campfire. Liam and I watched as she threw in her blouses and skirts. Before she tossed in her fringed leather shoulder bag she pulled out a little change purse, withdrew some folded bills, and threw those on the fire. When the fire was roaring she tossed on our clothes, our sneakers. We watched the plastic parts melt. I grabbed Liam’s hand and we stood there, not moving an inch.
“Christ wandered the world like the wind. He didn’t need anything and neither do we. No killing, no sex, no materialism,” she said.
She smiled and gave a little nod, then turned and started walking away from the fire, away from the teepee that had been our home, down the dirt path that led to the highway.
We followed.
OUR MOM believed she had found the truth about how to live. Walking. Owning no possessions. Traveling south as the weather got colder. Telling everyone we met that we were followers of Christ, and believed in no killing (peace between nations, vegetarianism), no sex (there were already enough humans on the planet, we were all brothers and sisters in the eyes of the Lord, and sex caused the separation of brothers), and no materialism. This last part needed no explanation. We were barefoot, and wore our blankets around our shoulders and carried our bedrolls.
We walked twenty, twenty-five miles a day, chanting “No sex, no killing, no materialism. No sex, no killing, no materialism. No sex, no killing, no materialism. No sex, no killing, no materialism.”
Funny, one time I remember walking down the road and someone called out to us, “Then where did the kids come from?”
My mom didn’t insist that Liam and I chant, but we had to keep up. At first, Liam and I would goof off, grab
the other’s rope belt and swing him around. Liam liked to pick up cigarette butts, and tried to smoke them. I thought it was nasty and could never bring myself to do it. After days and weeks of walking, we stopped messing around. We grew weary and sullen.
We slept under trees and freeway overpasses and in churches, if they let us. U-Haul trailers parked in rental lots were almost always unlocked. We would slide the door open and unroll our sleeping bags in there.
We foraged, subsisting on fruit and vegetables we found along the road in orchards and fields. My mom had dried some apples when we were living with the Rainbow Family—a trick she’d learned from Mad Bob—and she would dole these out from a pocket in her robe on days when there were no orchards or fields, no apples rotting on the ground or tomatoes hanging off an abandoned vine.
When our group reached a town or a city, first thing in the morning we’d go in search of a cup of coffee at a McDonald’s or Denny’s. We would get in line at the drive-through and one of the women would make the request at the window. She might say we were there to give the counter help a “heart check,” as in, could they find it in their heart to give some traveling Christians a cup of coffee. Normally they said yes.
We’d wander into grocery stores and ask if we might have any produce they were about to throw out. Sometimes, we’d just go around back and search through the Dumpsters. Sometimes, if we really hit the jackpot, we would take our haul to a local church and beg to use their kitchen and make a big pot of stew and take it to the park, where we would dish it out in plastic bowls to the hobos, drunks, and hippies looking for a handout.
Hound of the Sea Page 4