I had suspected for a long time that I was getting the short end of the stick. When anything went wrong, I got blamed—and punished. But when George got caught red-handed, nothing happened. Now here was the proof. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t making things up. It was true. I couldn’t catch a break.
Sometimes, when I thought I did something good, it turned out I had done something bad.
For example, George and I were on Little League baseball teams. We were both obsessed with baseball. I idolized guys like Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, and Willie Mays. George later told me I was the better athlete of the two of us, even though he was more popular and usually got picked to play before I did when we were choosing up sides.
One time, my team played against George’s team. It was a good game, and my team won. But I wasn’t congratulated for playing well and winning the game. Instead, I was criticized for not cheering loud enough for George when he was up at bat. What kind of sportsmanship is that? Even if it is your brother, you don’t cheer for the other team during the game.
I don’t have only my own memory to rely on when it comes to my childhood. George would tell me, much later in my life, that it was just as bad as I remembered it.
He remembers Lou telling me, in front of the family, in front of my dad, things like, “You make me sick. You eat like a pig. Let me go get you a trough.” She’d say, “You eat like an animal. I’m going to get you a shovel.”
If I asked for a second helping of something, she’d get mad at me. George remembers me complaining about going to bed hungry—and getting caught if I did something about it. There was a big cookie jar in the kitchen, with a heavy screw-top lid on it. George would go and get a cookie if he wanted one, and nobody said a word. But if I went into the kitchen and Lou heard that screw-top lid being opened, she’d come screaming in there and tell me to leave the cookies alone.
I don’t remember Lou ever doing anything that seemed like fun. She didn’t enjoy herself much. She did have an accordion, though, a great big old-fashioned one that she kept locked in a box. Every once in a while she’d take it out and sit by herself, playing accordion music. I thought she played very well, and I liked listening to her. But she almost never played. She almost never had any fun.
Mostly, it seemed like, she worried and got angry. My cousin Linda remembers going to the beach at Santa Cruz with Lou and her sons. They’d spread a blanket on the sand. Linda would run down to the water. But as soon as Cleon or George would leave the blanket, Lou would start yelling at them to be careful, to not go near the water, to not get dirty.
George remembers her being neurotic about cleanliness, too, and also remembers her inspecting my underwear. If she found anything in there, any stains, I got a beating. George remembers Lou screaming her head off, dragging me up the stairs by one arm on the way to giving me a beating.
I got lots of beatings.
“Mom would start and Pop would finish it when he came home,” George said. “You had bruises on your body almost every day of your life. You had marks all over you.”
George felt guilty about it. Brian did, too. He said, “I was no threat to anyone, and no competition for anyone, and I was adored. No one had to punish me.” He and George never got hit. Especially George. My dad was not allowed to touch him, criticize him, or punish him in any way. Brian never did anything bad, and Lou refused to punish George, no matter what he got caught doing. So he felt bad when he saw me getting a beating for something he was probably doing himself.
“I knew they were hurting you and I knew it was wrong,” he told me later. “And I know that if it happened today, someone would be going to jail.”
Was it all bad? It couldn’t have been. Sometimes I wonder if I just remember the bad things. Brian says he doesn’t ever remember happy times, living in that house with me and George and Lou and Dad. Could we all have forgotten some of the stuff that was good?
My stepbrother George remembers some of the good things. He remembers Lou helping us build a tree fort. He remembers her buying us paint-by-numbers kits, and taking us to the library.
I don’t remember that. I don’t even remember celebrating most of my birthdays. George remembers one year I got three of the same gift, a board game called Calling All Cars. We kept one and took back two. Birthdays weren’t anything special. You’d get a gift, but it was usually clothes or a book. That was the one thing that my father and Lou weren’t cheap about. There were always books around. They would buy books, new books. You could always get a book. Lou would bake a cake. I didn’t like her cakes much, but it was nice to get a cake just the same.
Christmas wasn’t a big deal, either. There weren’t a bunch of presents. We didn’t have a giant Christmas tree with a mountain of gifts under it. It was almost like a regular day, except that you’d get a baseball mitt (used, always) or something like that.
I do remember that I was the only kid in the family who got new clothes that were really new. Everyone else got hand-me-downs. There was no one big enough whose hand-me-downs I could wear. So I usually got new clothes and new shoes.
I don’t remember hearing anything during that period about my little brother Bruce. He had survived and was adopted by my father’s uncle Frank and his wife Bea, who lived up in Centralia, Washington. But I do remember seeing him one time. He was at one of my uncles’ house—either Kenneth’s or Gene’s. He must have been seven or eight years old by then. He would stand and put his left foot in front of his right foot and rock back and forth and make a little noise. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t recognize his own name. He could walk if you helped him. Otherwise, he would just stand and rock back and forth. He didn’t seem unhappy, or happy, or anything. He was just sort of there.
Seeing him made me sad. It reminded me about my mother. It must have reminded my dad about her, too. Brian believed this was why Bruce never lived with us—because my father couldn’t bear to be reminded about the death of his wife. He later told me that he never saw Bruce again after that day at my uncle’s house.
With all of this trouble at home, it’s no surprise that I was starting to get into trouble away from home, too.
There was a five-and-dime store in Los Altos called Sprouse Ritz—part of the chain of variety stores, like Woolworth, that were all over the country. The store was right in downtown Los Altos, and it had a front door and a back door. If you were smart about it, you could go in one door, pocket something quick, and go out the other door and not get caught. I got to be pretty good at stealing things.
But I also got caught stealing things. One of the first times, I got caught by my own father. He saw me playing with a yo-yo. It was a beautiful yo-yo, the classic yellow Duncan Butterfly. My dad knew he hadn’t bought me the yo-yo. He probably knew I didn’t have enough money to buy it myself. He asked me to show it to him.
“That’s some yo-yo,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”
“I bought it, down at Sprouse Ritz.”
“How much was it?”
I wasn’t stupid. I knew how much a yo-yo cost. He couldn’t catch me like that. So I told him, “One ninety-nine.”
“And tax?” he asked. “How much was the tax?”
Well, he had me there. I knew how much a yo-yo was, but I didn’t know how much the sales tax was. He knew I’d stolen it. He took it away from me.
First he punished me. I got spanked. Then he told me I was grounded. I wasn’t going to be allowed to go out and play for maybe a week. Then he told me we were going back to Sprouse Ritz to return the yo-yo.
I think he called the store in advance, because they didn’t seem that surprised to see me or hear why I was there. We went into the store and marched up to the counter, and I handed over the yo-yo and explained I had stolen it. My father stood somewhere in the back of the store—near enough that he would have known if I’d just dropped the yo-yo on the counter and taken off.
That was pretty humiliating, but it wasn’t my only yo-yo shoplifting incident. Another time I was in thi
s little store where I was stealing candy. I had my pockets stuffed with candy. I started to leave but the lady behind the counter caught me.
“Come here,” she said. “Empty your pockets.”
I was busted. I took all the stuff out of my pockets—candy, chocolate, bubble gum—and put it on the counter.
“And the yo-yo,” the lady said.
Then she looked at the yo-yo. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t in the package. It belonged to me. She thought I had stolen it, but now she saw she was wrong.
“All right,” she said. “Never mind. Get your stuff and get out of here.”
So I filled my pockets back up with all that candy and took my yo-yo and left.
Usually I did my criminal things with a partner. I wasn’t a brave thief. I had to have a partner in crime, someone working with me on the big jobs. That’s what I did with the great train robbery.
It was actually a train station robbery. The train used to run along what’s now Foothill Expressway. The Los Altos depot is still there, right down the street from Whitecliff Market, where my dad worked after school.
There were some newspaper racks at that little train station. We’d have to cross the tracks to get from our house to the elementary school or the junior high, or to go to town. So we went by the station all the time. That’s how I got the idea of robbing the newspaper racks.
Me and a friend of mine named Danny figured out that, even though there were sometimes people around there, usually no one was watching the newspaper racks. So I’d be lookout. I’d stroll around the station, keeping an eye out for the cops, while Danny went and turned the newspaper racks upside down and spilled out all the coins. Then he’d turn the racks right side up, collect the coins, and we’d get out of there. We’d take the coins and turn them into toys and candy. We never made a lot of money, but it was enough for two ten-year-olds to keep themselves stuffed with chocolate and candy bars.
After we’d been doing this for a while and not getting caught, I got lazy. One day I decided no one was looking—without checking to see if no one was looking. Three cops jumped out and grabbed me and Danny. That landed us in the Los Altos police station. We were questioned, then my dad came to pick me up and take me home.
For some reason, instead of pressing charges, the cops and the newspaper people and my dad made a deal. I would get a paper route, and I would deliver the San Francisco Examiner until I’d paid all the money back.
Now I had a job. I got some of those newspaper bags to hang on my bicycle handlebars, and every morning before school I had a paper route.
I didn’t like to work. And I didn’t like getting up in the morning. But the paper route was okay. It gave me a chance to do something on my own, with no one looking over my shoulder. I got to go off by myself. I liked being by myself. With other people around, it was easy to get into trouble. When I was off on my own, I never had any problems. I never got into trouble. Well, usually I didn’t, except when I was bored.
My dad started taking me to work with him at night, probably to get me out of the house and out of Lou’s way. He’d drive me into Palo Alto to the Eastman Kodak processing plant. There was a big employees’ parking lot. He’d park the car and tell me to stay in it until he got back.
I think he worked a six-hour shift. That was a long time to leave a ten-year-old kid in a car by himself and expect him to behave. I’d be okay for a while—doing my homework, or reading, or whatever—but then I’d get bored. I’d get out of the car and cruise around the parking lot and stare into the parked cars. I saw lots of interesting things in those cars. So, one night, I took some. I found a cool cigarette lighter. I found a yo-yo, and some sunglasses. I found a very nice eight-ball gear-shift knob that screwed on and off. I filled my pockets with this stuff, and then took it all back to my dad’s car to play with.
I realized that my dad would notice if I had a pocket full of stolen items. So before he came back I hid them all under the seat, where he wouldn’t see them. I figured I’d sneak them out of the car another time, when we were back home and he wasn’t looking.
My dad finished his shift and came out to the car, and we drove home. As soon as he hit the brakes, stuff started rolling out from under the seat. He said, “What’s that?” It didn’t take him long to figure out what had happened. My dad had to return the stuff to the cars I’d stolen it from.
At school, too, I was in trouble a lot of the time. I was a cutup. I was bored. The more routine school stuff didn’t interest me. When we had multiple-choice tests where you’re supposed to fill in the boxes, I’d just fill in the boxes so they made an interesting pattern. There. That looks nice!
I didn’t want to be a good student. I didn’t want people to think I was a nerd. My dad was a teacher at the school. I didn’t want to be perceived as Mr. Dully’s little goody-goody son. So I was wild.
By the fall of 1960, I’d graduated from Hillview and moved to Covington, the local junior high school.
It was almost as close to our house as Hillview. I could walk there. I didn’t have to ride the bus. Even better, on the way to school there were lots of fruit trees, especially apricots. I could eat my fill of ’cots before I even got to school. That made it easier not to steal other kids’ lunches. I wasn’t arriving at school hungry every day.
Junior high was a little scary. Covington was the big time. They had initiation at Covington, and every kid in Los Altos knew about it before he got there. If you were a new kid coming into the seventh grade, you knew it could happen to you. They would take a guy and strip him, and run his underwear up the flagpole. You did not want to be that kid. Or they’d hold you down and put butch wax in your hair and brush it straight up, and they’d roll your pant legs up above your calves. You had to stay that way all day long or you’d get beat up.
I was afraid that was going to happen to me. But it didn’t—I think because I was so big that everyone thought I was an eighth- or ninth-grader who had transferred from another school. Initiation was just for seventh-graders. I got off easy.
I looked big for my age, and I was trying to seem older than I was, too. I had already started smoking.
It was George who first got me started on it. He would steal cigarettes from Lou. She had a cute artsy-craftsy box on the kitchen wall that held her cigarettes and her matches. George would steal them and take them into the backyard. We’d go around the back of the garage, or we’d go hide in The Pit—that hole in the backyard that Binky had dug to work on his car and that we had converted to a fort.
But he made fun of the way I smoked. I didn’t inhale. I couldn’t inhale. I wanted to, but I couldn’t figure out how, even though he tried to teach me. He showed me how to French inhale, and how to blow smoke rings, but I couldn’t get it. So he’d tease me and laugh at me.
We were bold about stealing the cigarettes. Lou was absentminded, and sometimes she’d light a cigarette in the kitchen, set it in an ashtray, and then leave the room without it. We’d grab it and smoke it right there—snatch a couple of quick puffs before she came back into the room.
Later on we found a way to buy our own cigarettes. Clint’s ice cream parlor had a cigarette machine in back. If no one was looking, you could sneak back there and drop in the coins and get your smokes.
Covington was a new school, but I was still the same kid. I was bored. I didn’t take school seriously, even though my dad wanted me to. To inspire me, he gave me a leather briefcase to put my papers in and take to school. A leather briefcase! Can you imagine anything lamer than that? I was eleven years old. What did I want with a briefcase? So I found a bush where I could ditch the briefcase on my way to school and pick it up on my way home. Otherwise it would have been too embarrassing.
I don’t remember having a favorite teacher. I didn’t like any of them. I didn’t like Mr. Pollock, the English teacher; or Mr. Proctor, the civics teacher; or Mr. Purdy, the PE teacher. I wasn’t too keen on Mrs. Latham, the art teacher; or Mr. Christianson, the vice principal. I don’t rememb
er having a crush on any of my female teachers at Covington, either.
But I did have a crush on Janet Hammond. She lived in the house at the end of our street. My room looked down over her backyard. Unfortunately it didn’t look down on her.
I thought about Janet a lot. I used to dream about being married to her. I used to dream about lying awake next to her at night or first thing in the morning—in bed, next to my wife. We were married, and we were happy. I wanted to have that feeling. I was so lonely all the time. I didn’t have anyone special, just for me. So I dreamed about that. I would be married, and I’d never feel lonely anymore. I was thinking about getting away from Lou, I guess, and about getting away from home. I’d have my own house, and my own wife, and my own life. I’d be okay.
Sex was included in those daydreams. I had started to have sexual thoughts. And by junior high school I started noticing girls, big time. I noticed which ones had nice breasts, or nice rumps. I liked girls in short skirts—in those days, girls were not allowed to wear pants to school—and I loved their hairdos. I liked beehive hairdos, and hair that was teased out.
Girl watching didn’t keep me out of trouble. It gave me something to daydream about, but between daydreams I got bored. And when I was bored, I got into trouble.
In wood shop in the seventh grade, I started out okay. I made a pair of salt-and-pepper shakers. But then I was fooling around with a chisel one day and I cut myself. The teacher got mad and wanted to know how I did it. He had just told us that day not to play around with the chisels. So I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth. Instead, I lied and told him I had injured myself on the band saw.
My Lobotomy Page 6