One day someone at one of the churches we stopped at offered to let us sleep at her house. We were somewhere in the Northwest. I remember thick forests of what appeared to be Christmas trees and heavy, pine-scented air. The woman lived in a big square house, with a wraparound porch and tall windows, and a grassy backyard where we were told we could sleep. She asked Liam and me whether we wanted to meet her sons. While the adults were setting up camp, she led us inside to where two boys about our age were sitting cross-legged in front of the living room TV watching a football game. They glanced up at us but didn’t gawp—apparently they were used to their mother’s generous ways—and we sat down and watched the rest of the game with them. Then their mother gave us a snack of potato chips and RC Cola. We went outside and they showed us their bikes before hopping on and riding off down Main Street, leaving Liam and me behind.
IN THE WIND
THE FOUNDER OF THE Christ Family was named Lightning Amen. I never laid eyes on him all the time we were in the wind, drifting from place to place. But from what I understood we were on our way to meet up with him. He was either Jesus’s mouthpiece here on earth, or else Jesus himself. It was unclear which, and in any case I’d stopped paying attention. But every time someone we met along the way offered to take us home, I prayed to Lightning Amen that there would be some kids there watching a game on TV. But that never happened again.
Months passed. Walking the streets. Walking the highways. No sex, no killing, no materialism. Only taking a ride when somebody offered a ride. Only accepting food when somebody offered food. Otherwise, the Dumpsters behind Safeway, eating garbage.
We kept thinking something would change and Mom would go all Gitana on us and take off and we could find our way back to Berkeley. Once, in a town in Washington not far from the Canadian border, she made a call from a phone booth. Liam and I sat on the curb pulling the blistered skin from the bottoms of our feet. We had been told by one of the other women to leave the blisters alone, that if we tore them open our feet would get infected and then we would have to go to the doctor, where we would be given a shot. Privately, I had no fear of shots. But I imagined a kindly nurse who might give me a Tootsie Pop for enduring one.
Mom called the restaurant to assure our dad that we were okay. He told her that Luis had shown up looking for her, and was now in Vancouver, Canada, waiting for her. After she hung up the phone she cried a little bit.
“How did he know to come up here? Is it the Lord’s will that I reconcile with Luis?” she asked us, as if we had any idea. “And stop picking your feet.”
The phone booth was at the corner of a service station near the freeway on-ramp. Liam and I stood up and followed her as she crossed the street toward the northbound lane. Then she abruptly turned and headed toward southbound. She crossed the street again toward northbound. Liam and I stood on a weedy patch waiting for her to make up her mind. We looked around to see whether there were any cigarette butts. We despised Luis, but less than whatever it was we were doing now, marching all over the country in our dirty white robes. I figured if Mom and Luis hooked up again, we would at least be able to ride in a car somewhere.
Then she disappeared for a week. Did she meet up with Luis? We never knew. In my memory she left Liam and me sitting on the curb, in the care of a fellow Family member named Ed. He was a stranger to us; the only thing we knew about him was that he also walked at the back of the group because he had a clubfoot. He wore a torn T-shirt around his head like a turban, and even though he was one of the slowest members on account of his foot, he would yell at us all day long to keep up. Unlike our mom, he didn’t mind Liam smoking the cigarette butts he found along the road. After we stopped for the night he calmed down a little and showed us how to whittle little pot pipes from scrap wood.
One night I saw an opportunity. I told Ed that my brother and I wanted to go home. “We miss our dad, we miss our friends.” Liam figured out immediately that the goal was to lay it on thick and started to say we missed our bikes and skateboards. We were supposed to be against materialism, so I elbowed him to shut up. I asked Ed to call our dad for us, and he agreed, but I didn’t know the phone number or even our address.
Sometime later our mom showed up at a church where we’d spent the night. We were somewhere desert-y then. Arizona maybe. Where the nights were black with stars and cold, but the heat of the day made you oh so thirsty, and the sun beat down on the top of your head.
“Look at the two of you. You need some new robes.” She consulted with the group leader about stopping by a Laundromat so she could check to see whether there were any sheets left behind, or perhaps someone washing their clothes would donate one. I said no, that I didn’t want a new robe, and neither did Liam. I remembered once, back at the commune, when my dad spanked me for something or other, and I asked him whether that felt good, spanking me like that, and he looked surprised that I’d spoken up, but also that he’d never spanked me again.
“We want to go home,” I said. “We miss our friends. We miss school.”
Maybe she prayed about it, maybe she consulted Lightning Amen, but a few days later she and my brother and I hopped a freight train headed home.
THE TRAIN station was a good four or five miles from Shattuck Avenue and our neighborhood. We arrived in late morning, and started walking. We passed through a neighborhood of big warehouses and car dealerships, and then we were near the university and there were bookstores and little clothing shops and cafés, and clusters of hippies sitting on the sidewalks strumming their guitars. Then we passed Ma Goodness, which wasn’t open because it only opened for dinner; and Jackson Liquor; and I saw a few kids we knew riding their bikes. I grabbed Liam by his rope belt and pulled him into an alley behind a row of trash cans. I was not about to walk past kids I knew wearing that stupid white robe. But the alley was a dead end. There was no way to get home without walking down our street, past Jackson Liquor, past Greg Serber and a few other kids on their bikes, circled up and watching as we passed by in our white robes, up the front walk to our dad’s house, our walk of shame.
FIVE BROTHERS
FIRST DAY HOME OUR dad called up LeConte Elementary School and enrolled us there. Fresh start, he said. New life. Sheri had left, gone off with another guy. He got up in the morning and stood on his head for ten minutes in his bedroom, or out in the yard if the weather was warm. Sometimes I would stand on my head with him. Then he drove us to school, made sure we had lunch money. I was in fourth grade, Liam in second. The school entrance had three sets of double doors. We stood in front and waved until he drove off. We walked through the middle door, down the long hallway, and out the back.
We must have gone to class, must have had spelling tests and math homework. I must have made a California mission out of sugar cubes for social studies, as all fourth graders were required to do, but I have no memory of it. Dad insists, now, that he has fond memories of us coming to the restaurant after school, before it opened for evening service, to do our homework and have a snack, but that man did a lot of drugs.
We had a pair of old skateboards hidden in some bushes nearby. Not the sweet Banzai metal decks with Road Rider 4s our dad had given us money for before we left, but a pair of used boards he’d scrounged up for us. We’d roll up Telegraph Avenue, straight to the university, and that’s where we got our education.
Once in a blue moon we’d run into him around town. Once, we rolled by a coffee shop and there he was, sitting in the window with his new girlfriend. Nabia was more voluptuous than his usual type. She had a mass of curly dark hair and a big white smile and the biggest boobs we’d ever seen. She wore Indian print skirts and lots of bracelets that jangled when she walked. We heard our dad call her voluptuous. One day when we were sitting around the house we saw him walking up holding hands with Nabia. We knew they’d head straight to the bedroom because that’s what our dad always did with his girlfriends. We sped into the bedroom and belly crawled under his bed. We held our breaths and watched as ankles appeared
and our dad’s cotton pants collapsed around his feet. It took all the discipline we could muster not to giggle like maniacs when they started going at it.
Later that day, in the kitchen, I saw him and he saw me and our eyes locked and I never thought he could move so fast. His wooden chair fell back as he leaped to his feet. He was on us before we had a chance to escape, grabbed us by our collars, threw us in the back of his car, and sped back to school. Where he walked us right up to the front door.
“Get in there!”
We went inside. We still had our boards under our arms. We watched through the window as he marched back to his car, climbed in, and sped away. Then we went straight out the back.
On Berkeley’s campus we patrolled the commons and dining halls, where students left food on their trays. We also found a vending machine that, if you kicked it right, would drop a bag of Fritos. After we’d eaten, we cruised over to a popular snack shop with a wooden deck where students stopped between classes. There were gaps between the boards, so after the students cleared out, Liam and I would crawl under the deck and collect all the spare change. That would fund our activities for the day. If the pickings were slim, we would find an unoccupied corner on University Avenue and beg for money for a little bit. We played up our big dark eyes and sad T-shirts and frayed pant legs.
Then we went to Silver Ball Gardens, the pinball place. Having hammered pennies until they were roughly the size of quarters, we’d throw them into the machine and get a credit. Or we’d take a quarter, balance the rim on a piece of dental floss, feed it into the slot, wait a second, then pull it back out. We could play a video game for hours on one quarter. On a regular basis the manager caught us and kicked us out. We’d wait a week or two, then come back. We did this over and over again.
We found our way onto the roof of some building where we discovered a tidy little pot-growing operation going, maybe a dozen plants in white plastic buckets. We pulled off enough buds to fill our pockets. We’d take the pot home and dry it and roll up the fattest joints you’ve ever seen. The bigger the better, we thought. One day we’d had a huge haul and decided we wanted to roll the Biggest Joint in the World. It took six rolling papers and was a foot long, easy. We had a secret spot in the back side yard where we routinely did our sneaky things. We were standing there trying to figure out how to actually smoke it when our mom suddenly came around the corner. I tried to hide it behind my back.
“What do you have there?” she said.
“Well, it’s grass,” I said.
“From the yard?” she said.
“No, like weed.”
“Let me see that.”
I stood up and handed it to her with both hands. She lit it and took a hit.
“Hey, that isn’t bad,” she said.
Our dad signed us up for Little League, and baseball became our number one sport. We rode our bikes to practice after school. We discovered soccer, we discovered hockey. From sunup to sunset we were skating or bike riding or swiping pot or playing some team sport. I got my job back at Jackson Liquor and began rebuilding my baseball card collection. We were full-blown urban kids and we were happy.
Dad also paid me to do chores around the restaurant. He paid us a quarter to break down boxes. One time Liam put a box on his head. I tried to kung-fu kick it off and wound up giving him a black eye. He came back at me, determined to throw a punch, but I hugged him to me hard, said I was sorry sorry sorry, and he gave up.
That’s how it was now between us. The days of treating him like an irritating tag-along baby were done. All those weeks of being in the wind with the Christ Family, trailing behind our mom barefoot in our white robes, had taught us to rely on each other. Liam was still sweet and sensitive. Even though he was almost as big as I was, I still protected him on the playground and on the baseball field.
One Saturday morning there was a moving truck on the next street over, and rumor was there were some new kids moving in, boys our age. That afternoon we saw them hanging around in the alley behind our house. They were bigger than Liam and me, with dark hair and pale skin. They looked more clean-cut, more put-together, like someone cared that their clothes matched and their T-shirts were clean. Liam and I were street monkeys, always in need of a haircut.
I cruised too close to the one who would turn out to be Alan, brushing his shoulder. He threw his arm out and it was on. I spun around and gave him a good shove. He staggered back but didn’t fall down. I expected him to shove me back. That’s how it usually went. Instead he came back with a closed fist and punched me in the nose.
Blood gushed from both nostrils, thick and salty. Liam dragged me off by my sleeve and we went home. Dad gave me a bag of frozen peas to put on my nose. In the way of these things, we all wound up becoming fast friends. Alan was eight months older than me, Bill was a year older than Liam. We played on the same baseball team and when I went to school, Alan was in my class.
I rushed to show them every cool thing, like how you could climb up onto Greg Serber’s garage roof and jump into the barbecue pit and strip the plum tree and throw the fruit at cars. Alan was taller than all of us and skinny. We started calling him Sir Lankelot, conflating lanky with Lancelot. Entrepreneurial even then, he thought that instead of wasting the fruit we should find some boxes and take it to the weekend flea market down on Ashby Avenue. Liam was a big supporter of this scheme because it meant we also stopped mashing fruit in his pants.
Everything was more dangerous and more fun with Alan and Bill. From the first day we showed them the cutting-school trick—waving with an eager-to-get-to-class grin as we were dropped off, then going straight down the main hallway and out the back—they were in. Their parents weren’t together either, so their mom, Nancy, dropped them off in the mornings. She had long thick brown hair and looked like a model from a magazine. She was from New York and used to hang out at a place called Andy Warhol’s Factory, which meant nothing to us.
The next time we went to the university to steal some weed it was a full-on heist. Liam and I had confined our pot stealing to easy rooftops and whatever we could stuff in our pockets. Alan found a tall, six-story residence hall where we could climb a ladder from the street. He and Bill brought a Hefty garbage bag for each of us, and once we made it to the roof they started pulling up entire plants by the roots and tossing them in their bag. The bags were so heavy! We heaved them onto our shoulders like Santa, climbed back down holding on with one hand, and rode home with the bags on our handlebars.
Anyone reading this with children probably can’t imagine how all this was allowed to go on. Didn’t our parents say anything when we showed up with giant black garbage bags full of weed? Didn’t they wonder where all the crap we stole came from? Or why we never seemed to have any homework?
You would think. But they didn’t. Bill was more introspective than the rest of us. One time he said, “I think we’re as free as the grown-ups, except they can drive cars.” And that was the truth.
Alan and Bill and Liam and I spent every waking hour together. Alan usually came up with the complicated schemes and I was the one who always wanted to climb up something and jump off of it. Bill was the thoughtful one and Liam was the softhearted one. We skateboarded in the parking lot at the new Berkeley BART station but rode our BMX bikes everywhere else. Berkeley was a city of parks and we combed every inch to see what kind of mischief we could get into. If there was a hidden tunnel or a little known hill we found it. We raced our BMX bikes past dreamy hippies strolling along the footpaths, hooting ai yai yai yai! as we passed within inches of their elbows, competing to see who could cause the biggest freak-out.
Everything was a competition. In 1976 we were racing down a steep street near Codornices Park. I was ahead and I was so stoked and I kept turning around and looking back to make sure they weren’t gaining on me and suddenly there was a crunching sound and I flew off my bike and into the driver-side window of a car door someone had opened right into me. I wrecked the tire, bent the forks, but was other
wise unhurt. Alan and Bill screamed past me, laughing their heads off.
We found a rope one day and strung it across Shattuck Avenue, the busy main street with office buildings and shops that bisects the city. Cars would stop, and when the drivers got out to see what the hell was going on, we would drop the rope and run and hide in the bushes. When the rope disappeared one day we stood on a corner pretending to beat one another up, to see if we could con someone into stopping and break it up.
The four of us started hanging around with a guy named Kevin, who taught us how to steal. We were fascinated by him. He came from a “nice family” (a happily married mom and dad, a real house) and still he was the gnarliest thief we’d ever met. A day spent with Kevin was a day spent stealing whatever you could get your hands on. We had more stuff than we’d ever had in our lives, and we wanted for nothing, but we loved the rush of pulling it off. We started with grocery stores. We knew better than to walk in and walk out without buying something, so we always stood in the checkout line with something small, a candy bar or bottle of soda, while meanwhile one of us would have a paper kite stuck down our pant leg. We’d discovered baseball and were big fans of the Giants and the Oakland A’s, and helped ourselves to batting gloves and fielder’s mitts at the local sporting goods store.
A chain link fence surrounded the back of Safeway, but there was a six-inch gap at the bottom. We’d wait until dark, then creep over. Alan and I would climb the fence, then pass cases of Dr Pepper, our favorite, through the gap at the bottom to Liam and Bill while Kevin went in search of a lone shopping cart. We filled up the cart. Then, worried that someone might think it odd that five boys were trundling down the street with a cart filled with cases of Dr Pepper, we stripped down to our shorts and hid our haul with our T-shirts. We divvied up the cases, tore them open, shook up the cans, and used them to hose each other down in an epic, hours-long soda pop fight.
Hound of the Sea Page 5