The next summer Cecily enrolled Amy and me in a 4-H program to raise and show sheep. She made a deal with us: she would buy two lambs and pay for their food, vet bills, and any other expenses if we agreed to care for, train, and show them at the 4-H show at the end of that summer. She was entitled to any money won in competition. We agreed, and promptly became the guardians of two lambs, Sunny and Sammy. That summer when we weren’t riding, Amy and I were training our lambs to stand in the proper sheep stance with their rear legs back, backs straight, and heads up and still, or to follow at our heels as we walked in a circle, then stop on command. It took all summer because they weren’t the quickest learners, but constant repetition paid off. We showed them at the local 4-H Fair, where Sunny won Reserve Grand Champion and was bought for four hundred dollars. Though I was a country boy, I wasn’t a farm boy. Years later I realized that the man who bought Sunny probably didn’t buy her because he wanted a pet lamb. I just hope her end was quick and painless.
The stable became my little family for those two summers. Cecily’s boyfriend, Jan, was a kind, thoughtful guy who took an interest in me, and we became friends and continued to write to each other even after he and Cecily had broken up. I was in boarding school by then, and he was living on Long Island. Cecily was a laid-back mother figure, maintaining order with a gentle hand, never losing her temper, easily managing a small swarm of children, teaching us horsemanship and having fun at the same time.
My parents knew almost nothing about how I spent my days those two summers, though I learned much later that Hunter knew of and approved of my work at the stables. Though I told Sandy about the horse shows and my sheep Sunny, neither she nor Hunter ever came to any of the shows nor ever came to the stables after that first day. I don’t recall Amy’s parents ever attending our horse shows either. As a parent I am very conscientious about acknowledging my son’s tiniest achievements and attending all his events, but perhaps my son will complain in the years to come that we shouldn’t have made such a big deal about every little thing.
Hunter was traveling quite a bit. He had begun to do university lectures and in 1974 went to Zaire with Ralph Steadman to cover the famous Ali-Foreman Heavyweight Championship fight for Rolling Stone (one of many assignments he never did complete). Not that this meant anything to me at the time. All I knew is that for a few weeks, it was much calmer at home, and then suddenly one day Hunter reappeared bearing gifts for Sandy and me. From Zaire, he brought me a pair of souvenir gold boxing gloves that are still hanging on the living room wall at Owl Farm. Sometime shortly afterward, two giant elephant tusks appeared on the mantel over the fireplace, smuggled into the country god knows how.
In general, Hunter wasn’t one to acknowledge holidays or special days. My mother organized my birthday parties and I don’t remember him ever being a part of them. Every now and then, though, he would do something significant. One Christmas he bought me a combination record player/tuner/amplifier with separate speakers. I remember him carrying this big box through the front door one night and saying it was for me. I promptly set it up in my bedroom, grabbed a few records from Hunter’s collection, and began playing a record every night as I went to sleep, singing along with the songs. I cycled through a small selection of records including Jimmy Buffett’s early albums and the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead. I can still sing most of those songs from memory.
I see now that the boxing gloves and the stereo were awkward tokens of love. Hunter wasn’t much for demonstrations of love, at least not his love of family and friends (lovers were an entirely different matter), so he did it through gifts. For Hunter, the gloves represented Ali and his victory, and Ali was one of the few people Hunter unabashedly admired with the enthusiasm of a fan. Ali was extremely smart, funny, courageous, and good with words, all qualities Hunter admired. It didn’t hurt that they both grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Ali won the fight against Foreman not through strength but through strategy, something that deeply impressed Hunter. The gloves weren’t just souvenirs, they were symbols of the victory of intelligence and chutzpah over brute strength, and I think he gave these to me as some kind of talisman. It would have helped if he had tried to explain this to me at the time, since I cared about boxing about as much as I cared about the GDP of small central African nations and knew nothing about Ali or the fight, but better late than never.
It was the same with the record player. Music was extremely important to Hunter—if the TV wasn’t showing a football game or the network news, music was always playing. Back in the 1970s he had a sound engineer build him a set of speakers audacious in their conception. They consisted of eight separate enclosures containing a total of eighty separate speakers. Each woofer box had four sixteen-inch cones, and each tweeter-midrange box had sixteen little speakers in a tall, narrow cabinet. These pairs of enclosures stood like four monoliths in each corner of the living room, were loud as hell, and were Hunter’s pride for many years. Later, he bought a Nakamichi mobile sound system that included a high-end cassette player and two small but very heavily powered speakers that fit into a dark gray plastic suitcase that, when loaded, weighed around thirty pounds. I can only imagine how he terrorized his neighbors in hotels as he traveled around the country, cranking up Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” at three a.m. I’m sure he wanted to pass on his love of music to me, as I hope to pass it on to my son. It would be many years, though, until I could appreciate his gifts and his motives.
I was coming to fear him more and respect him less. His anger, quick to erupt and unpredictable, was a terrifying thing, and could be triggered by trivial provocations. It seemed that when I did get his attention, it was more likely to take the form of an angry outburst about something I had done wrong.
As an only child and a curious one who wanted to know how things worked, I often took things apart. I didn’t always know how to put them back together so they worked again. Often this was harmless because the subject of my investigations was a toy of mine or something from the secondhand store, but sometimes I would investigate machines that were still useful, like Hunter’s portable cassette recorders. When I failed to make them work again, Hunter would yell something like: “You stupid waterhead bastard! What the fuck have you done! If you’ve broken this, goddammit, I’ll give you a beating you’ll never forget!” The fact that he had never beaten me before did not stop me from being absolutely certain that he would this time. I almost always got the machines to work again, and he never did beat me, but I couldn’t forget my fear of him. I couldn’t understand at the time that this was just bluster and noise. I was terrified of him. Just because he didn’t beat me this time didn’t mean he wouldn’t beat me next time.
There was one time when we were living in Washington, D.C., that I still remember clearly. It must have been shortly after we moved there. I was playing with the remote garage-door opener, a new and fascinating toy for me. I somehow locked it inside an antique bureau that came with the house, and I had no idea how to open it again. When I realized what I had done and that I could not undo it, I was absolutely terrified. What would happen when Hunter found out? I must have told Sandy, though I can’t remember what she told me. Whatever it was must not have been comforting because I went up to my room and hid under my bed. I was sure that when Hunter returned, he was going to beat me. I don’t know what I was thinking. That he wouldn’t find me? He wouldn’t see me under the tall, narrow bed? And what if he didn’t see me? Did I think he would go about his night as if there were nothing strange about his seven-year-old son being missing from the house?
It was a long wait. I lay under the bed imagining the worst: how he would enter my room huge and terrible like a giant warrior from a Viking legend, his eyes small and vicious, his walk and all his movements radiating dangerous power and rage. Then the yelling and cursing, “You stupid waterhead freak!” and so on, one colorful and poisonous curse after another—followed finally by the inevitable and unavoidable punishment—a beating. Fully apprecia
ting the power of the right word, he never called it a spanking or even a whipping. He always called it a Beating, with its implication of severe pain. A Beating implies the overwhelming physical dominance of one person over another, with no mercy and no restraint, in which the victim is bloody, broken, utterly vanquished, and pathetic. I was sure my beating would involve a belt, though he had never used a belt before, and that he would hit me very hard, many times. I didn’t think about exactly how many times he would hit me, or where. All I knew for sure is that it would be excruciatingly painful.
With this scene of horror in my mind, I hid like a dog that had crapped on the rug, trembling, in the smallest, farthest corner it could find, waiting for the boot to the ribs and the heavy stick on the back.
He never came. There was no Beating. In fact, he never beat me, not so much as a spanking, a whipping, or even a slap. I remember him and Sandy trying to reach the landlord to find out where the key to the bureau was, and then later that evening a locksmith coming to unlock the drawer. Beyond that, nothing—no reprimand, nothing. Maybe I was wrong about him.
Or maybe there were worse things than beatings. One day I got my hands on a pellet gun of Hunter’s and was trying it out. I had had a Daisy spring-loaded BB gun rifle for years as well as a spring-loaded .45 replica that spit out a BB about fifteen feet on a good day. In contrast, Hunter’s CO2-powered pellet gun was powerful—definitely worth playing with. Somehow I managed to jam the tiny lead pellet in the breech, and in the stupidity of panic, dreading the consequences, I didn’t confess but put the gun away and hoped he wouldn’t find out. Of course he did—it was just a matter of time—and he was furious. This time, though, he didn’t rage and then let it pass. This time he was furious in a new way. He didn’t yell, he was cold and angry. There was no sign of forgiveness or understanding. He unscrewed the front sight from the pellet gun, gave it to me, and told me to carry it with me as a reminder of what I had done, of what a stupid thing I had done. And that was it. Of course I knew I had made a mistake, and had compounded it by trying to cover it up. Of course I felt horribly guilty about it. When he gave me that sight as a talisman of shame, though, I hated him for it. We never talked about it again, but I still resent him for it.
I look back on these incidents from my perspective of the present and my own fatherhood, and I consider different ways of looking at them. I know from my own experience with my son that I would be angry also if I found a useful machine dismantled on the living room floor, or I found that he had broken something and hidden it away in fear and shame. I don’t doubt that Hunter was trying to teach me responsibility through consequences, but I can’t find a way to understand the cruelty, because it felt like more than punishment.
Then, there was the .410 shotgun incident, which he handled uncharacteristically well. On my tenth or eleventh birthday he had given me a small-bore .410 shotgun of my own, well suited to my size. This was my first real gun and also a serious, dangerous weapon. It was a rite of passage and an indication of his trust in me. He made one condition: I was not to kill any animals. I agreed, and for a year or so I would bring it out during clay pigeon shooting contests in the yard, a favorite pastime of Hunter’s. Then one day I got the idea to try to shoot a magpie. I had nothing against them; I just wanted to see if I could actually hit one. I took my shotgun into the fields behind the house and took several shots at some birds, missing all of them. I gave up and returned to the house and laid the gun on the couch in the kitchen, intending to put it away. However, I got distracted and later that day Hunter noticed the gun on the couch. He asked what I had been doing with it, and if I had been shooting at birds. I admitted that I had. He picked up the gun and took it downstairs and put it with his own guns. He didn’t yell, he didn’t rage, he didn’t call me names. He just took the gun back. I was sad and ashamed, but I was not angry at him. It was fair and just.
I had lost my first gun because I had violated the ban on killing animals. However, there was an exception—shooting gophers for hire. One summer when I was twelve I became a hit man for our neighbors. They had a serious gopher infestation in their lawn and they hired me to take care of it. I got permission from Hunter to use his 20-gauge shotgun to shoot the little bastards, and for a few weeks I would hike up the road to the mesa overlooking our house with the gun and a pocketful of shells, present myself at the neighbors’ door, and after some juice and cookies, get to work. This meant sitting very still in a giant field of dirt and weeds with the shotgun loaded and pointed, waiting for a gopher to come up out of his hole and stand up. They are easily spooked and work together to protect the colony. When one gopher perceives danger he starts squeaking and then all the nearby gophers flee to their holes and dive. The trick was to not have to move much to get one in my sights. I was patient, I was determined, and I was paid per head, and I killed dozens that summer. I wonder what the neighbors thought of repeated shotgun blasts in the middle of a summer day, day after day, but no one complained. That was part of the beauty of growing up in the country. Guns were a part of life, and neighbors left each other alone unless there was a damn good reason to interfere.
My employers for the gopher extermination were Carol and Palmer, a young couple who rented the house on the mesa next to us for a few years. Carol was Mrs. Cleaver for the ’70s. She was tall, slim, beautiful, and very kind to me. Her husband, Palmer, was a mellow guy from the South who smiled a lot, talked slowly, and had an accent that was easy on the ears. Going to their house was like coming in from the cold. It was bright, clean, and calm. There was no tension here, just peace. Seeking refuge, I spent more and more time with them that summer. I could no more imagine Palmer going into a rage than I could imagine him sprouting another pair of arms. The pot helped, no doubt, but then they were the Cleavers for the ’70s, not the ’50s. Being in their presence was a balm, particularly since by 1976 my parents’ marriage was quickly disintegrating and they were no longer able to hide their conflicts, which were growing louder and more savage.
With Hunter and Sandy circa 1977, when I was thirteen, just before their separation and divorce. We were not a happy family.
FOUR
THE BREAKUP
“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”—Broken glass in the morning—Victim, witness, judge—In the Bahamas with Buffett—California, the Promised Land—Police in the night—Leaving for the last time
HST TIMELINE
1976 ’76 presidential campaign.
Hears Jimmy Carter’s Law Day speech and endorses him for president.
Coverage of Jimmy Carter in Rolling Stone magazine.
1977 Continues to lecture at college campuses for next several years.
SOMEWHERE AROUND 1976, when I was twelve, the conflicts between Hunter and Sandy reached new and frightening levels, and I came to despise my father. It was the fighting that did it. Looking back, my mother and father had probably been fighting for years, but I didn’t know that at the time. I suppose I knew that parents fought, but I had never seen my own parents fight. Up until then, they had managed to keep their voices down to avoid waking me. Finally, though, their fights escalated into outright war in the middle of the night with shouting, crying, things being thrown and broken, and eventually the arrival of the police.
As I recollect today, I am struck by the absence of any connection between the late-night fights and my daytime world. The fighting took place in an alternate universe that came into being in the middle of the night and was gone the next morning. I went to school, I played with my friends, I read Hardy Boys books and Archie comics, built model cars and eighteen-wheelers, cleaned my room and mowed the half-acre lawn, and I never talked about what was happening at night to anyone. It wasn’t a conscious effort to hide anything; it was as if those terrible fights were utterly detached from my real life. It was a little bubble of a recurring nightmare that held only my mother, my father, and me.
The first time I entered that bubble I woke from a deep sleep,
not knowing why I was awake, and heard the shouting. At first I didn’t know what was happening, or who was screaming. And then I realized it was my mother, and that the deeper voice yelling was my father. I don’t know which was worse, waking up and not knowing what was happening, or waking up to realize that it was my parents. There were brief intervals of silence when I couldn’t hear their voices, and then out of the silence came Hunter’s voice, sharp and powerful, followed by my mother’s voice, high and shrill. Then there would be silence or murmuring, then more yelling and shouting. There I was, willing myself not to wake up fully, hidden in the dark, wishing that I could just go back to sleep and pretend this wasn’t happening. Hunter was not simply angry, he was enraged. My mother wasn’t just frustrated, she was furious and terrified. Each was trying to overpower the other. It went on and on. Their fear and rage rolled through my dark room like huge ocean waves. I just wanted it to stop.
The next morning the memory would fade like an evil dream. And then, days or weeks later, it would happen again, I would be dragged out of sleep in the middle of the night and I would again try to forget, try to find that safe and comfortable place where parents didn’t fight.
This went on for months. Each time when I woke I felt a shock like cold electricity, and I clenched up inside. The battles got longer and louder. Some nights there was a new sound, the smash of glass or ceramic shattering like a bomb. Eventually I would fall asleep again—I can’t imagine how.
The next morning I would look for evidence of what had been broken. Usually my mother would clean up the mess before I woke, but not always. I remember one morning finding the remains of a watermelon spread across the kitchen and into the living room. Often it was plates of food or glasses. I remember worrying about what had been lost. Was it something important, something sentimental? One time it was a pottery plate that Hunter had brought back from Mexico or South America before I was born, and that had hung over the kitchen sink for as long as I could remember. It was as if each of those objects was a physical manifestation of our family, that they represented the good memories and were the glue that held us together.
Stories I Tell Myself Page 4