Brian remembered the same thing. “There were serious amounts of yelling in our family, and terrible arguments,” he said. “They drove me into my own little zone. My reaction was to just withdraw. I used to go to bed early on purpose, so I wouldn’t be around it.”
Unlike me, the other boys never seemed to do anything wrong, or never seemed to get in trouble for it. Brian was a good kid. He did what he was told, and stayed out of trouble. And George was smarter than me at avoiding detection. We’d do the same thing, but I’d get a spanking and he wouldn’t. He was the favorite.
For example, Lou had strict rules about coming home from school. I had to come straight home or I’d get punished. But George could dawdle, hang out with friends, whatever. If I did that, I got sent to my room, or worse. I knew this wasn’t fair, but I didn’t know what to do about it. My dad wasn’t home that much, and when he was home he didn’t want to be bothered with a lot of stuff about “Lou hit me” or “Lou spanked me” or “It’s not fair.” When he came home, he might have time to give me a spanking, but not for a conversation about it.
So there wasn’t any reason to go to him and complain about Lou. He didn’t want to hear it.
I don’t know when I started having trouble in school, but I did. I had the same trouble there that I had at home. I didn’t like being told what to do. I didn’t like rules. I liked doing what I liked doing, but I didn’t like doing what I didn’t like doing. I did well in the subjects that interested me, but that was it. I’d get bored, and I’d get into trouble. It wasn’t malicious stuff. It was just stuff a kid does when he’s bored or wants attention.
The school was typical of California schools of that time. It was a collection of one-story bungalows—stucco buildings painted an institutional beige—connected by walkways that were covered like a carport. Between each building was a planted area. Behind the school was a large grassy field.
I’d sit in those bungalows, staring out the window, thinking about things I’d rather be doing, wishing I could go outside and play. I was bored. I didn’t feel challenged. So I got into trouble.
Like one time, in the third grade, I took a black crayon and colored in the area around my eye. I made up a story about what happened. When I went home I told Lou that I fell down on this crayon and it colored my eye in.
I got a big spanking for that one.
Another time we had a rainstorm. It started coming down in buckets. For some reason our teacher was out of the room. Suddenly I wanted to be out of the room, too. So I just left. I went outside and ran down to the athletic field and stood in the rain. I got soaked to the skin, and I got sent home.
I got a big spanking for that one, too.
Another time I was running down the walkway between the classrooms and I ran into a post and split my head open. I got in trouble for that, too—not for splitting my head open, but for running.
My behavior was a bigger problem, for me and the school, because my dad was a teacher at Hillview. Everybody knew whose kid I was. So when I did something bad it got noticed. It must have been embarrassing for my father to have his kid in trouble all the time. There were many after-school discussions about Howard in the teachers’ lounge.
Like I said, I never did anything bad. I didn’t get into fights. Later on, I would start stealing things for real, but then I was just high-spirited.
I wasn’t a stupid kid, and I didn’t get bad grades. I got A’s and B’s in history and art, because they interested me. I liked to draw. I liked to make things up. I liked stories, too. I was interested in the Old West. (I thought of myself as someone who would have lived in the Old West—that outlaw thing.) But if a subject didn’t interest me, I didn’t make any effort, so I got C’s and D’s.
I wish I had saved my report cards. Only one survives from that period. It’s for seventh-grade math, from the first quarter of the school year in 1960. I was eleven. I got a B. What’s surprising is that in the “Work Habits” and “Citizenship” categories I got mostly satisfactory or excellent marks. I was satisfactory in things like “workmanship,” “self-control,” “courtesy” and “obeys school rules.” I was excellent in “reliability” and “promptness.”
I shouldn’t be surprised by the B. I was pretty fast with numbers, and I was very good at games that involved logic. I was a good card player, a good checkers player, and an excellent chess player. I could beat most people at checkers, and by the time I was six or seven I could beat anybody at chess. My brothers and my father stopped playing with me because they couldn’t win.
Maybe if I had developed more of an interest in things like that—things that challenged my brain—I could have stayed out of trouble at school and at home. But I couldn’t stay out of trouble. I was always doing something that made Lou mad. Sometimes, she got real mad. And then she got violent.
One time, when we lived on Hawthorne, Lou hurt me so bad that it scared my dad. He told me later that one afternoon when he was coming home from work, he knew there was trouble at home before he got out of the car. Halfway down the block he could hear this horrible screaming. He ran into the house to find me in the bedroom, pinned down by Lou, one arm twisted behind my back, yelling my head off.
Another time, Lou was cutting all the boys’ hair. I was last. I was sitting on a little stool, waiting for her to finish. She was cleaning up, using an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner to pick up the hair. For some reason, she took the metal end of the vacuum cleaner hose and hit me on the top of my head with it.
I flinched.
She said, “Oh, did that hurt?”
I said no. I wouldn’t admit that anything hurt.
So she hit me again, but harder this time. I flinched again. She said, “How about that? Did that hurt?”
I said no.
So she hit me again, real hard this time. I felt dizzy. She said, “How about that? Did that hurt?”
I didn’t answer. I figured if I said no again she’d hit me again. I thought she was going to knock me out.
The last time she ever really spanked me was about a year after that.
She had gotten mad at me about something—it could have been anything—and she made me go to my room. Then she came up there to give me a spanking. She usually had something with her when she did this, like a paddle or a wooden spoon. Her hands were too small to do any damage. It used to scare me to see her come into the room carrying a wooden spoon, because I knew what she was going to do with it.
But this time, for some reason, I didn’t care. I wasn’t afraid. She looked small to me. She looked weak. So when she started spanking me, I started laughing. It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t scary. It was funny.
When she stopped, I didn’t say anything to her. I stopped laughing, and I glared. I stood up to her for the first time. After that, I was punished only by my dad. Lou knew I wouldn’t laugh when he spanked me.
I was getting to be a big kid—too big for Lou to spank, too big for her to scare—and I think that must have scared her. It must have made her wonder, What if he ever turns on me? I never raised my hand to her, and hardly ever raised my voice, but she must have wondered what would happen if I ever fought back. Because I was big, and because she hated me, that must have been a frightening thought.
She’d have to find another way to keep me in line.
In the summer of 1957, when I was nine years old, we moved house again. I don’t know where they got the money, or how they afforded it, but my father and Lou traded in the two-bedroom Hawthorne bungalow for a huge, seven-bedroom mansion, a one-hundred-year-old Queen Anne Victorian, at 762 Edgewood. It was only a couple of miles away from the house on Hawthorne, but it was as different as night and day. My father later remembered that he and Lou sold the Hawthorne house for about $12,000, and bought the Edgewood house for about $25,000—a lot of money for a guy who was making only $4,000 a year, with a wife who didn’t work.
The house had an interesting history. It had been built in 1840, when there was nothing but oak trees for hundre
ds of yards in every direction, and was owned by a member of the Winchester family. These Winchesters had built their fortune on the famous rifle made by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—the gun that won the West.
The Winchester house on Edgewood was miles away from that other Winchester house—the Winchester Mystery House, which had a strange history. It was owned by the widow of the original gun company owner, and she was construction-crazy. She started building the house in the 1880s, and kept workers going around the clock for more than forty years. The house, which turned into a big tourist attraction, was seven stories tall and was supposed to be haunted.
The Winchester house on Edgewood wasn’t haunted until we moved into it. It was just a big old house. It was two stories, not seven. The paint was peeling. Some of the woodwork was sagging. Some of the shingles were missing.
But to me the house was beautiful. It sat on an enormous piece of property and was hidden from the street by big pepper trees, oak trees, pine trees, and fig trees that were great for climbing and building tree houses and forts. It had a big front porch, a sun porch, and a sewing porch. There were oak floors and a huge oak front door, and a mahogany banister going up to the second floor. (You could really get in trouble if you got caught sliding down that banister.) There were six bedrooms upstairs—I had my own bedroom, next to Brian’s—and two bathrooms. There were five fireplaces, too. We always had a fire going in the living room and the dining room—partly because my dad liked fires, and partly to save on heating bills. I spent a lot of time out in the backyard chopping wood for those fireplaces.
There was a big bay window in the living room that looked out onto the front yard, and tall windows on the second floor, and two round port-hole windows on the side of the house near the garage. There was a spooky attic above that.
I slept upstairs, on the side of the house closest to the garage. For the first time since I was a little boy at Spartan Village, when I was still an only child, I had my own room. I had my own closet. I had some privacy.
But it was also creepy. Going to bed by myself was kind of scary. The house felt haunted. At night when it was windy or raining, the house felt like a ship rolling on the sea. The tree branches would scrape against the side of the house. On Hawthorne I had been bothered by fears of what was around me when I slept. I thought the floor was crawling with alligators, or snakes, or spiders, and they were coming to bite me. Now I’d lie awake at night and hear these noises and be sure something was coming to get me—monsters, vampires, kidnappers, you name it. Like I said before, I was a kid with a vivid imagination, and at night my imagination turned against me. My mind did a lot of scary things with that old house.
Television didn’t help. There were always creepy movies on TV, starring Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi. Things like that got inside my head and gave me terrible nightmares.
Other than being afraid, living in the new house was pretty good. The yard had all kinds of places to play. George and I made up games, and had lots of room for cowboys and Indians, or army. We spent a lot of time climbing those trees. Binky, who was into cars and had a hot rod that he liked to work on, dug a pit in the backyard, a kind of work bay like they have in gas stations where you can go under the car without having to lie down on your back. He’d do his lube jobs and oil changes and stuff down there. George and I used that as a fort when Binky wasn’t around.
The backyard was a home for our dog, Monster, a short-haired mutt that moved with us from Hawthorne. It was also a place for discipline. My dad had all kinds of plans for landscaping and gardening there, and we were his work crew. If we’d done something wrong, he’d sentence us to picking weeds. He’d take two stakes and drive them into the ground and stretch a string between them. He’d say, “I want you boys to clear out all the weeds from here to that string.”
It didn’t take me and George long to figure out the solution to that problem. You’d just wait until Dad wasn’t looking, then pull up the stakes and put them back into the ground closer to the house. You’d be done in no time! My dad always seemed surprised that we got finished so soon.
I was in the fifth grade when we moved to Edgewood. Soon after that, our family situation started changing. First Binky moved out. He went to live with his dad and his dad’s new wife. Around the same time, we found out Lou was pregnant. A short time later, she gave birth to a boy she and my father named Kirk, after a doctor of their acquaintance. He was a sweet-tempered little blond kid.
Now we were a proper Los Altos family, so we had to keep up appearances.
On Hawthorne, things had been a little loose. There was that homemade third bedroom, where Binky slept. There was that homemade swimming pool. When my dad decided to build that, he tore down the old split-rail fence and put the swimming pool right in the front yard. He hung a sign on it that said, WE DON’T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET, SO PLEASE DON’T PEE IN OUR POOL.
But now we were Los Altos people, living in a real Los Altos house. It had been owned by the Winchesters. There wasn’t going to be any pool in the front yard on Edgewood. We were hardly allowed to even play in the front yard. In fact, by order of Lou, we were not allowed to go out the front door at all. When we wanted to go outside to the front of the house, we had to use the service entrance.
Moving to Edgewood meant we had to dress differently, too. That was part of keeping up appearances. We lived among the rich people now. So Lou and my dad made me wear corduroy pants and a button-down shirt to school every day. Green corduroy pants and a green corduroy jacket! I was nine years old. What happened to blue jeans and a T-shirt? That’s what all the other kids were wearing. That’s what I wanted to wear. That’s what every kid in America wanted to wear. We wanted to look like James Dean, not Little Lord Fauntleroy.
But we were keeping up appearances.
Lou began to furnish the house nicely, too. She had a thing for cherrywood furniture, and she’d search antique stores and estate sales and barn sales looking for affordable pieces. Soon the downstairs part of our mansion really looked like a mansion. Needless to say, we were told to keep off the cherrywood furniture, never to touch the cherrywood furniture.
Lou was really obsessive about things like that. She had all kinds of rules about keeping the house clean. You could not go into the dining room at all. The furniture was special and expensive and you weren’t allowed to touch it. You could walk from the living room to the kitchen, or vice versa, but never through the dining room. We were also supposed to stay out of each other’s rooms, and we were never allowed into her sewing room.
The dinner table rules became stricter, too. You weren’t allowed to speak at the dinner table unless you were spoken to. You were supposed to keep your elbows off the table and your napkin in your lap. Mealtimes were tense.
If my dad was home for dinner, he’d demand a full report of your day: What happened at school? Did you do your homework? Otherwise, we ate dinner almost without speaking. Lou would dish it out and we’d sit, me and George and Brian and Lou, without talking. If we did something wrong, we’d get punished.
For me, moving to Edgewood, everything changed and nothing changed. I was still the same person. So, I did things wrong and I got punished. I spent a lot of time in my room. Lou didn’t like my table manners. She didn’t like how rambunctious I was—and being in the big fancy house on Edgewood, the Winchester house, with all that cherrywood furniture, made it worse. I think I was embarrassing to her. Like, a lady with a beautiful Victorian house on Edgewood should have children with beautiful manners.
I didn’t have beautiful manners. No one had ever taught me beautiful manners. I was a big kid, and I was a hungry kid, and when it was time to eat I got busy. I chowed down.
Lou didn’t like that. She didn’t like me goofing off with George, or picking on Brian, or making jokes at the dinner table.
So she started making me eat dinner alone. I’d eat in the breakfast nook, before the other kids ate. I’d be sent to my room while the rest of the kids had their dinner
. Some nights we weren’t together at all. I’d get my supper in the kitchen. Then Lou would serve something to Brian and George. She’d feed the baby upstairs. Then my dad would come home late and eat in the living room, in front of the TV. By then I would usually have been sent to my room for something or other.
I remember feeling very sad a lot of the time, and left out. I could hear the TV going downstairs. I could hear Brian and George laughing, watching Disneyland or Father Knows Best. I could hear the theme music from Gunsmoke or Peter Gunn or Dragnet. I felt isolated, and lonely, and unhappy. And mad. It wasn’t fair.
I was always being punished for doing things that my brothers did. I didn’t get rewarded the way my brothers did, either—especially George. When my dad built the swimming pool on Hawthorne, George got swimming lessons. I had to learn on my own. When we moved to Edgewood, George got a new ten-speed bike. I got a bike that my father had bought used and then repainted himself.
What was so special about George? What was so bad about me? How come I didn’t deserve a new bike?
Years later I found out that George’s special stuff came from his dad—Red Cox. George spent a lot of weekends visiting with Red and his new wife, and for Christmas or his birthday he’d get things like that new bike, or a new baseball glove—from his dad. His dad had paid for his swimming lessons. If someone had explained that to me, I might have understood. But no one told me.
So naturally enough I imagined that I got treated like a second-class citizen because I was a second-class citizen. I thought they just didn’t love me as much as they loved George. I wasn’t good enough.
This wasn’t the whole story, of course. I found out years later that Red never paid much child support or alimony. The gifts he gave George might have been flashy, but there weren’t very many of them. George told me later that his dad wasn’t into Christmas, or birthdays, and sometimes didn’t get him anything at all. He also told me that his father was a real alcoholic, who would sometimes get drunk and stay drunk for days at a time. (Alcoholism ran all over that family. Red’s father was a drunk, too, George said. So was Lou’s father. George said he figured out in his early twenties that he’d better be careful with alcohol himself, or he’d wind up an alcoholic, too.)
My Lobotomy Page 4