Save the Children

Balboa Stadium felt like a huge white-noise experiment, a gigantic energy dynamo that could draw waves of sound from the deep, unexpressed emotions of the crowd and make you feel it all in your solar plexus. Thousands of us crept carefully in among the seats that filled the football field and the stadium itself. Now and again, a soundman would cross the distant stage, a structure built to stand temporarily in the middle of the field, and he would be followed by a dancing chorus of screams from the teenage girls.

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A couple of years before, I had been driving west on the freeway from Redlands to Los Angeles, listening to a small, local radio station which was making its living by feeding off the local population of youths. Barely listening at first, I heard a recording of singers who sounded unlike any I’d ever heard before. The Isley Brothers, maybe? No. Soul music? Not exactly. Pop? Sort of. They sang with wild abandon, unafraid of the imperfections in their voices, a high wire act that would eventually fall into the net far below. Or miss it entirely.

“That was ‘From Me To You’ by the Beatles,” the radio announcer said absent-mindedly, as if such a miracle appeared on the airwaves every day. It was the very first Beatles recording I’d ever heard. (The second, for those who wonder, was “Thank You, Girl.”) The song knew innately how to bounce and laugh and dance and play and wake up every cell in your body. It showed up at the dinner party wearing wild neon-colored shorts and longish hair and talking far too loud.

The disc jockey was playing from a vinyl album that quickly became a rarity. The Beatles, then utterly unknown, had been first released to potential fans—and to radio stations, to the press, to reviewers—on a VeeJay Records pressing. “To you, to you, to you, to yeuuw!” they sang. I’d never heard anything like it before.

They caught the listener up in their remarkable lack of self-concern, their inappropriateness, the way they didn’t seem at all worried what anyone might think of them. They weren’t afraid to come on too strong, hit their notes slightly off key, lose their voices in the middle of a chorus. (If you doubt this, listen to an early version, unedited, of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and notice Paul’s goof. It was cleaned up when those who created the masters of their songs in America figured out they should work with some degree of care.) I imagined them with red faces and sand-papered vocal chords at the end of each song, filled to overflowing with joy.

I didn’t find a copy of the VeeJay recording for a couple of years. By then, I already had all of the Beatles’s songs in my growing collection of the Capitol Records albums. The Beatles were such a stunning combination of innocence and cheekiness that most fledgling fans—like me—would do whatever they commanded, as when George, at the close of their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, waved at the screaming audience and declared, walking off-stage, “Buy our reckords!”

We did!

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A girl behind me in the San Diego stadium screamed a plaintive “RINGGGO!!!” with no evident provocation and my ears rang helplessly, nearly begging for mercy. Then she screamed again. It was all too much. “Who’s your favorite Beatle?” I heard her yell at the friends seated around her. I didn’t answer, of course, not being a friend, but I took stock. John was doubtless my favorite. But favorite for what? And why? And wasn’t this a bit like asking, “What’s your favorite color?”

What exactly were we celebrating here?

My brother (then 14), sister (10) and I (21) felt we’d landed on some other planet and were trying to blend in with the aliens; we were treading water whose level was a bit above our heads; we tried to keep calm and cool.

August 28, 1965. It was the second American tour. (We hadn’t made it to the first.) Our father had kindly arranged to get our tickets. My job was to get myself and my siblings to our seats, make sure they didn’t disappear into the wonder of the occasion or the overwhelming sound system—and to get all of us home through the thick and dazed traffic that would emerge from the many parking lots after the show.

Finally, a couple of local disc jockeys, who weren’t quite up to the occasion either, stumbled out on to the stage with mikes, welcomed us, told us the first act would start in a few moments and then, big mistake, disappeared. The crowd grew anxious and surly. They wanted the red meat. Now.

Every few moments, someone broke from the stands, jumping to the field and dashing toward the stage, only to be chased down, tackled and carried to the waiting police by one or two bouncers from the army of out-of-work Sumo wrestlers circling the stage. It had been entertaining enough to consume the interest of others in the stadium until the disc jockeys tantalized us all.

“Where are they?” people yelled out from different parts of the stadium. The trick was to get 20,000 Beatlemaniacs into a profoundly compressed space, keep us from rioting and make sure none of us got hurt.

The day before, Brian Epstein, their manager, had carted the group up to Elvis’s Los Angeles home. A state meeting, with the King of Rock’n’Roll pressing the flesh of his obvious heirs, and pretending they could all be good buddies as they competed for audience share and fan dollars.

The Beatles’ time had come, though, and Elvis doubtless knew it. One of the opening groups for the first tour, a show we hadn’t seen, had been the Bill Black Combo, starring Elvis’s stand-up bass player. The die was cast.

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August 28, 1966: Exactly a year later, we saw the L.A. stop in the third American tour at the Dodger Stadium. We sat once again in open-mouthed awe. The stage, off in the distance, was ringed by people in wheelchairs—invalids who had come in hope of being blessed by one of the Beatles and perhaps gaining a healing from the experience.

The Beatles were not only a magnet for star-crazed young fans, they were also attracting crazies of all persuasions, who projected their neuroses on them, stripping them of their own humanity, their actual identities. John Lennon—who was amazed and horrified by many of the responses to the group—had recently remarked in a kind of stunned amazement that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. He hated being made into someone he wasn’t, a demi-god. The music and fun were being drained from the experience. And the concert had a macabre edge to it; death threats had been delivered to the band at every stop on their tour this time.

They were a phenomenon they themselves could not contain or control. For many reasons, the show’s usual closer on this tour was “I’m Down,” which referred warily to the drugs they were using as well as to the feelings they were trying to medicate.

The Dodger Stadium concert was attended by about 45,000 people. We all saw, and were part of, a moment of history that would never repeat itself. I remember the show being started by a cheery singer named Bobby Hebb (“Sunny” was the title of his hit). He was followed by The Ronettes (a girl group led by Phil Spector’s wife, Ronnie); the Cyrkle (a group whose hit, “Red Rubber Ball,” was co-written by Paul Simon—they were managed by Brian Epstein, and the quirky spelling of their name was a John Lennon idea); and the Remains (a strong, talented group with a garage band quality who never quite grabbed the brass ring of fame and held on for very long).

Then, the Beatles stepped up to the plate to sing the Chuck Berry song, “Rock and Roll Music.” “It’s got a back-beat, you can’t lose it,/any old time you use it./ Gotta be rock and roll music,/ if you wanna dance with me.” And so it was: straight-ahead rock and roll music. The set was heavily tilted toward the 12-bar blues structure, relatively easy to play: There was no room, no aural space, for intricacy in this concert. The band couldn’t hear itself think over the screaming of its audience.

John, in frenetic moments—as when they took solos on “I’m Down”—played the electric piano with his elbow, running wildly up and down the scales. We were sitting close enough to see (with binoculars) John with a disbelieving but maniacal glee lighting up his face. Thinking back on it, though, John was surely very close to screaming, “Enough!” And leaving it all behind. He was willing to persevere, but, as we later learned, George had just about crossed that line already.

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"I'm not saying we’re better or greater than Jesus, or God as a thing or whatever it is, but it was wrong, and now it's come to all this." John Lennon in 1966

December 8, 1980. I was driving home and a news bulletin on the radio announced John’s death. What could possibly have convinced this person that John should die? For me, and for millions of others, John represented life lived fully, searchingly, creatively. Not death!

It was one of those few moments when my world simply collapsed, suddenly becoming very small and dark and incomprehensible. “The day,” to borrow Don McLean’s phrase, “the music died.” The music, the explorations, the sense of freedom, the opening to a better world.

Eerily, I think of a weird wish I’d often had inside that it could be me up there, playing my guitar, singing my songs, flailing over the electric Rhodes with my elbow, making music that mattered somehow. As if there were something real in that fantasy portrayal of fulfillment. The real Bill up there, acting out the part of the truly fulfilled Bill. As if we weren’t just wrapping our deeply wounded hearts and souls in the solace and energy of the music and the mind-numbing buzz of the crowds and the overwhelming, echoing, mesmerizing sound of the stadium.

If we couldn’t be truly genuine and authentic in our art, utterly aligned with our beliefs about a better world, we could at least act as if we were. And then someone’s internal Caesar cried, “Kill the Gladiator!” Our deepest fears find it deeply abhorrent when people act out their deepest and best sense of what is real and true. It is a huge taboo.

Mark David Chapman, John’s murderer, was a deeply confused youth, of course, yet there was a method to his madness. I don’t hope to understand, but he seemed to be acting out the various fragmented facets of his response to John and, ironically, his own need to protect the people, the children, from the phoniness prevalent in the world—protect us all from the LIE by killing the bringer of TRUTH, protect us by making it impossible for us to actually confront the truth itself. He saw himself, it seemed, as a Holden Caulfield, catching the children in the rye, before they fell to their doom.

“There’s something else I want to say,” he soon explained in an impossible stab at repentance. “I feel that I see John Lennon now not as a celebrity. I did then. I saw him as a cardboard cutout on an album cover. I was very young and stupid, and you get caught up in the media and the records and the music. And now I–I’ve come to grips with the fact that John Lennon was a person. This has nothing to do with being a Beatle or a celebrity or famous. He was breathing, and I knocked him right off his feet, and I don’t feel because of that I have any right to be standing on my feet here, you know, asking for anything. I don’t have a leg to stand on because I took his right out from under him, and he bled to death. And I’m sorry that ever occurred.” Mark David Chapman in 1980

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June 16 – 18, 1967: About a year later. The Monterey Pop Festival. Jimi Hendrix’s major debut. Janis Joplin’s. Don’t forget Otis Redding. John Phillips, Mama Cass Elliott, Jerry Garcia. And don’t forget Brian Epstein, the Beatles’s manager, dead in a drug overdose a little over a month after Monterey Pop took down its festival stages.

They were all dead not very long afterward.

And why, I wonder, have the explosions of new musical expression and lifestyle experiments and personal philosophies brought with them so much death?

It’s true: I have felt the wish to be a star, up there on a tightrope, as if true happiness and lasting fulfillment could only be found at great and dangerous altitudes. And I have watched too many stars fall, including my teenage role model Ricky Nelson, whom I once met on the set of Ozzie and Harriet, the teenage son of the bandleader Ozzie Nelson and one of his lead singers, Harriet, playing the teenage son of the bandleader Ozzie Nelson and one of his lead singers, Harriet…as if working in a hall of mirrors.

After this flurry of deaths, rock seemed to move into the direction of self-conscious excess—whether it was David Bowie bending genders, or Peter Gabriel turning his every performance into a frame full of art, or the rest of us, just singing and playing our instruments for the joy of it as if we were chasing the experience of music and transcendence that kept dying before out eyes.

But the feeling of loss is undeniable.

Arnold Toynbee, one of the past century’s great historians, looked at the field of flowers and unwarranted optimism that bloomed in the Age of Hippies—the ironically self-destructive time of mutual tolerance we’ve been reviewing here—and observed that the whole edifice collapsed under the weight of its inability to encounter evil and stand up to it. Its demise was, he said, inevitable.

Very few rock bands still sing, “We can change the world.” Instead, songs are all too often filled with invective, with the “F-bomb” and with stunning disrespect for the rights of women and the importance of mutual empowerment. But most of us haven’t forgotten how to dream of what it would be like to find the social and spiritual philosophy we can all ride from here to an everlasting heaven and the creative glory that will elevate us to truly fulfilling levels of prosperity, fame and invulnerability. Most of us are still saving up for the ticket home.

Great Beyond Belief

1951. Roy Flumm, his wife Fern, and their two children, Tom (4) and Irving (3), lived three houses from us. Because the children were younger than I was, I didn’t have much to do with them. And parents didn’t have that much to do with each other when their children didn’t.

They got my attention, though. There was something oddly intriguing about this family. They all seemed to speak in slow motion and, probably, to think slowly as well. And they never asked, always answered, and often seemed a sentence or two behind.

“Roy, how are you?” my father might call out, and Roy would look up slowly, as if gauging the likelihood of rain. “Mmm,” he’d say eventually. “And you?”

“Doing fine,” Dad might say.

“Mmm,” Roy would respond. “Weather,” he might add.

“Yep,” Dad would say. “That’s one sure thing we’ve got here,” he’d add, beginning to sound a bit folksy. “We’ve got weather.”

“Mmm,” Roy would affirm. And Dad would make a hasty retreat to our house or garage, afraid of spending the rest of the day caught up in Roy’s slow, incessant “Mmm’s,” trapping the truth beneath their meaninglessness the way a lawnmower grinds grass.

“Wow,” Dad might say, shutting the front door behind us and moving into the living room. “He’s a bit scary.”

“Mmm,” I’d quietly.

“Don’t say that, son,” Dad would bark.

I didn’t say a word. Or make any other sound. It was Sunday afternoon and I could hear my Lincoln Logs calling.

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I overheard my Mom and Dad’s conversations about Roy and Fern several times.

“They’re really, really poor,” Dad said once.

“I know,” Mom said. “The whole neighborhood knows. We try to take them food sometimes—maybe a cake or a tray of cookies or even a meatloaf—but it seems so hard for Fern to accept our kindness that we’ve mostly stopped trying.”

“Really?” said Dad, trying to remember if we’d had a meat loaf within memory. “You cooked some extra food for them?”

“Well, no,” Mom admitted. “I just helped pay for it.”

“Oh. Well, that was good of you.”

“Some people are hard to help,” Mom sighed.

There was such a deep sorrow to these observations that I found them hard to listen to and, without thinking about it, I began to ride my bike past the Flumms’ house, looking in their windows, hoping to see something that might make me happy.

“What you doing, Fisher boy?” Fern called out to me from the backyard one afternoon. I had foolishly ridden my bike nearly within her reach as she trundled out to hang up her laundry. Against all expectations, the woman was oversized like a St. Bernard, overweight, and very loud. Unsurprisingly, though, she moved slowly, and I could ride my bike away before her beefy hands grabbed my steering wheel.

“I’ll getcha next time,” she would call out.

“No you won’t,” I’d call back, and much to my relief, she would laugh. So I’d giggle loudly and speed home.

In time, I was riding past the Flumm’s accompanied by T.J., who remained a good deal more afraid of Fern Flumm than I did. One day, Fern tripped and all but threw her body, laundry basket and all, in front of us, and we wound up in a tangle on the grass of the front yard.

“Hey!” she said. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?”

“Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?” I replied, as T.J. sped off toward his home.

“Help me up,” she said, and I made a valiant effort to get her body off the ground. “Come on,” she urged. “Pull!”

I did and, in time, she was standing again. She smelled of soap and hot dogs.

“Can I go now?” I asked.

“What’s your name?” she asked slowly.

“You already know,” I responded.

“Tell me why you never stop by and play checkers or something with my Tom.”

“He’s too young,” I answered.

“Don’t think so,” she responded. “Bet he can beat you.”

“He here now?” I asked.

As if by magic, Tom appeared with an old, ragged checkers board and box of checkers in his hands. And he beat me. As his father would have said, very slowly, “He up’n beat the tar outta you.”

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There was something about The Flumm guys that reminded me of Br’er Bear, always on the verge of knocking my head clean off for no obvious reason other than the slow, seething anger inside of them.

Fern Flumm, on the other hand, seemed to appreciate me for some reason. “You like butterflies, don’t you?” she said one day.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “Used to collect them.”

“I saw,” she said.

The more I was around Fern, the more I became aware that she saw things. She noticed. I liked that, and I’d lost any trace of fear for her.

Tom’s Dad, Roy, on the other hand, seemed like an explosion that was slowly and ominously developing. My fear of him had no bounds.

He spoke about how unfair the world was, often talking about people who had money and other people who, like Roy, didn’t have money. “Could be a good life,” he would say slowly, “if the rich people didn’t keep all the good to hisselves.” He thought for a moment. “I could probably be a star or something,” he added. “On TV.”

I was glad, in that moment, that I wasn’t a rich person. I wouldn’t have minded being better at checkers, though, because Tom continued to beat the tar outta me.

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One year, very spontaneously, our neighborhood created a Fourth of July picnic, the sort of hot-dogs-and-burgers-and-mustard-and-mayonnaise meal that makes us glad to be Americans. For the second annual picnic, Roy Flumm astonished the entire neighborhood by insisting that we all gather in his backyard. He asked us to bring chairs, food and fireworks. “Seems like maybe he wants to join the human race,” my father said.

When the big night came, we all brought food and drink and Red Devil Fireworks Assortments and settled into the Flumm yard. Then a silence settled stubbornly over everyone. No one could think of a thing to say.

“Hey, everyone!” Fern finally called out. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Meow!” I called out, and soon T.J. and several of his siblings joined me, and Fern joined us, and the cat noises rose until everyone was just laughing loudly, and suddenly we were all talking about normal things, like the weather and school and work and washing machines and the sound of Rice Krispies when you first pour milk on them.

It was a good feeling, and I looked over at Fern and smiled. She smiled back and scratched the air like a cat.

Roy, meanwhile, must have eaten five hamburgers. “Haven’t eaten like this in years!” he declared to his wife, who visibly shared his pleasure. “Wait until you see the fireworks I got,” he added.

Why, I’m not sure, but Roy’s enthusiasm worried me. It felt as if everything were moving along in an orderly way but, without warning, it might all whirl out of control. Look out!

Soon, it was dark enough, and Roy called out slowly, “Tom, go get our fireworks!”

Tom obediently dragged his oversized body into the Flumm garage and emerged with the biggest box of fireworks anyone had ever seen, much less contemplated buying.

“That’s an $8.98 Red Devil Special,” Tom McGarry uttered in reverential tones. Nearly everyone was astonished, filling the air with the sound of involuntary “oooh’s.”

“Eight ninety-eight!” T.J. mouthed to me as if he had never even imagined such a huge sum of money for fireworks. “My God!” he cried involuntarily, and his mother, Mary McGarry, cuffed him on the ear. “Don’t cuss, T.J.!” she declared. “How many times do I have to tell you? Seven ‘Hail Mary’s’ this week, okay?”

T.J. nodded absently. Then young Tom Flumm handed the box unceremoniously to Roy, who laid it on top of the other assembled boxes, which Roy’s box dwarfed. “I been looking at this box of whoppers down at the stand by the gas station for a month now,” Roy told us. “Wanted to make this a very special night.”

And with that, he cleared his throat and began to sing, “Oh-oh, say can you see….” And we stood and sang with Roy Flumm. And when we were through, we clapped our hands enthusiastically. Roy Flumm, to everyone’s surprise, really didn’t sing badly at all.

“Tom!” Roy called. “Irving! Bring me the matches.”

Irving, with exaggerated solemnity, walked the box of matches to his father with Tom just behind him. Clearly, they’d had to rehearse.

“And now, friends, neighbors, and countrymen,” Roy said, “I propose to begin this here ceremony with the best firecracker in my collection, the Red Devil Garden of Absolute Bliss.”

“Ahhh,” we all declared, deeply impressed.

Roy carried his prized firework as far from the other boxes of fireworks as he reasonably could and placed it on a flat piece of wood. He held up the matches, pulled one out, lit it, and lit the fuse on the firework.

For a few moments, it was a garden of bliss, indeed. But then it suddenly sputtered like an infant unexpectedly and violently losing its dinner and two flares flew from the end of the garden of bliss, one of them landing on my shirt and the other one smack dab in the middle of Roy’s $8.98 Red Devil Memorial Collection.

Soon the other fireworks in the box began to ignite. Neighbors rushed to pull their own fireworks from the conflagration and my stomach began to burn. Suddenly, there was Tom, blubbering a bit, pulling off my shirt, uncovering my belly, putting out the fire that was threatening to consume me. With his own hands.

I was incredulous. We rolled on the grass. I heard the familiar overwhelming sound of a Piccolo Pete flying just beyond my ear. Tom grabbed a CocaCola and poured it on me. I kept thinking, “This boy is risking his life. For me!”

Then we just watched in stupefied enjoyment and pain as a few dozen fireworks competed with each other for our attention and admiration. By now, everyone there—the whole neighborhood—was shouting, “Wow! Wow! Wow!”

As the last firework offered up its own unique, sputtering cascade of dancing fire, though, we noticed Roy, lying in a fetal position on the ground, wailing, crying, overwhelmed by pain. “Just once!” he said. “Just once I wanted to be the star.”

I ran to him. T.J. followed, as did a few other kids. “No, Roy!” I said. “You don’t understand. That was great! That was tremendous! It was the best fireworks display we’ve ever seen!”

But Roy wailed and cried and yelled at us, “Out of my yard, bastards. Out!”

And I know that every one of us, for many years if not forever, found ourselves waking from fondest dreams, saying, ‘No, Roy! It was great!’”

We never had the chance to convince the man, though. He and his family moved within three weeks. At least I had a chance to tell Tom before he left what a hero he’d been. I was pretty badly burned, but without his help, I might have spent a day or so in the hospital. And even that, maybe especially that—even the remarkably surprising experience of Tom’s bravery—was great. Great beyond belief!

Jellyfish Hunters

At about seven o’clock one bright summer morning, driven by the natural forces that cause flowers to seem to open like time-lapse photographs and grass to grow visibly beneath our feet and between our toes, my mother and our next door neighbor Toni, mother of Dick and Susan, stepped into their respective back yards and began to chatter over the backyard fence like a pair of delighted songbirds.

“What a beautiful day!” I heard my mother declare.

“Yes, it is!” said Toni. “Know what?” she added. “We should do something today. We should gather together everyone in the neighborhood who wants to and can, and we should go to the beach. Do you suppose we could all pack up some sandwiches and our kids and go to the beach for the afternoon?”

“Yes!” cried my mother. “Let’s do it!”

Wow! The beach! What a great and stupendous idea. This was the sort of thing that made my crush on Toni Harwood deepen and sing and dance the foxtrot inside my stomach. This and the fact that she was kinder and gentler than a newly-mown lawn and as attractive as a steaming plate of Toll House Cookies.

“It doesn’t have to cost us anything, really,” Toni continued. “We’d make sandwiches if we stayed home anyway, and there isn’t anything else to buy. Except maybe some potato chips and a few Nehi sodas.”

What followed was a flurry of maternal energy. Mom and Toni called all the neighbor moms on the phone and got together a group of about sixteen mothers and children, four cars’ worth. Mom gathered a couple of towels, dressed me in layers—swimming suit, over that some jeans, over them a tee shirt and a sweatshirt. Soon I was ready to be the most overdressed child on the beach.

Susan and Dick were dressed similarly. We talked T.J.’s mother into letting my mother take care of him since Mary McGarry couldn’t bring all the members of her unwieldy brood, some of whom were still infants. Wendy from next door and her sister came along with their mom. Even Tom and Irving Flumm (whom we called “Slow-talk” and “No-talk”) and their mother, Fern, were part of the group. And before you knew it, we’d formed a caravan and were headed toward Redondo Beach, where people and oil pumps play together a few feet from the Pacific Ocean.

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You had to feel good about a neighborhood that could, on a moment’s notice, improvise its way into a whole new idea of how the day would go. The beach day rose up out of nowhere like the unexpected arrival of a flock of beloved second cousins. Obviously, we’d chosen a nice place to live.

Just a few days before, T.J. and I had been climbing across some neighbors’ backyard fence, and did these neighbors complain? No!

They said, “Why, hello. You look like the children we’ve seen over on Sycamore.”

I smiled and declared, “3837 South Sycamore Avenue is my address and this here is T.J. He lives right across the street and he has a growing family [a term my mother often used] with lots of brothers and sisters.”

“Ah,” said the neighbor. “And what is your name, young lad, and how did you happen to memorize your address?”

“I’m Billy Fisher,” I said proudly. “My mom had me memorize my address. She said it was for safety.”

The man, who had curly silver hair and a slight beard on his chin and cheeks, held up his hand, looking at his wife. “That name,” he said. “Doesn’t it have a familiar ring to you, Mita?” Mita had hair as black and long as a night in the desert without stars, and she wore a silver chain around her neck with a bright blue disk like a knowing eye attached to it.

She considered a moment. “Wasn’t there a famous hunter named Fisher?” she asked. “And didn’t he live on Sycamore, Hal?”

“Think so.” He looked at us. “Think he had a sidekick named “P.J.” or something.”

“T.J.,” my friend insisted.

Hal, who had been standing over an open grill, said, “Oh, yeah. It was T,J.” And T.J. beamed, but he asked skeptically, “You haven’t really heard of us, have you?”

“Why yes,” Hal said. He looked at the meat he was grilling. “Know what this is?” he asked.

“Something to eat,” I said, confidently.

“Um, yes. But what exactly?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“It’s elephant steaks!” he said grandly. “And if you can stay just a minute, I’ll give you a bite.”

But we heard my mother calling, and T.J.’s mother as well. “Gotta go,” we said.

“Well, come back any time,” Hal offered. “We’d love to hear about your adventures.”

“Okay,” I said, and the deal was struck.

“Nice guy,” I said to T.J. as we ran home.

“Yeah, but did you notice that she talked a little funny?” T.J. asked.

“So did he, I guess. So what?”

And as I looked both ways and ran across the stree, I called out. “I hope they have some more elephant steaks next time we drop by.”

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Our caravan soon reached the beach and our cars emptied out.

“Stay by the cars!” all the mothers commanded. And we did, hopping up and down excitedly as if we were waiting for our turn in the restroom.

“What’s this?” Wendy asked, pointing at what looked like a lump of clear jelly in the sand.

T.J. and I were on the case, Sherlock and Watson, in a flash. We poked and prodded. “What would this jelly be doing on the beach?” I asked the mothers, but no one seemed particularly concerned.

“Seems like jelly to me,” T.J. said. “Pure and simple.”

We soon lost interest and found ourselves sitting on our towels in the sand, downing baloney sandwiches, potato chips and sodas, which we’d stopped for on the way to the beach. I was a big fan of Nehi Grape, which I rarely was given. Milk was standard fare.

“Eat all your food,” mother said. “Don’t waste a bit. Remember the starving children in Ethiopia.” No one had an idea who Ethiopia was or why we should worry about her diet, but my mother brought her up frequently.

“And remember the seagulls,” I added mischievously and threw a corner of my sandwich high into the air, where a trio of squawking birds dove to retrieve it.

“Do that again and you won’t go swimming today,” Mom warned.

We were ready to swim the moment we’d finished our food. “Now, mom?” I implored.

“No,” my mother said. “We have to wait a half hour while your food digests. Otherwise, you’ll get a cramp while you’re swimming and you could end up at the bottom of the ocean.” (We’d heard it before: “Other mothers would make you wait a whole hour.” So who needs other mothers, anyway? A half hour was torture enough.)

“Aw,” I complained, and soon all the children joined me in a chorus of “Aw’s.”

“Enough!” said Fern Flumm in a serious but good-natured way. “Play hide-and-seek or something.”

“On the beach?” we said. “You’re kidding.”

But we invented games that generally involved chasing one another and covering ourselves with sand.

At last, we were allowed to go into the water. We all ran and dove like I’d seen my father do. But I dragged along the bottom of the sandy shore, scraping my chest. Still, I didn’t tell anyone how much it hurt.

“Ow!” said T.J.

“Sshhh!” I whispered.

“Oh—ouch!” said Wendy.

We climbed out of the water, all of us saying there were bees or something in there and we were being stung.

“Nonsense,” my mother declared pithily. “Get back in and enjoy the ocean.”

But Toni, who so often seemed to save my day, said, “Oh, dear! You don’t suppose the little ones are being stung by jellyfish.”

Everything stopped.

“Jellyfish?” I said.

“You know, stupid—those pieces of jelly all over the beach,” Wendy explained. “They’re out in the water and they want us for lunch.”

“Not exactly, dear,” Toni explained. “But we’d better find a drug store and get some calamine for these stings.

We looked at ourselves. We were covered with little welts and there was a stinging under our skin that you couldn’t stop, not by rubbing, not by scratching, not even by rolling in the sand and cussing.

“Don’t talk that way, children,” a mother warned. And soon we drove off, a caravan in search of relief. We found a drug store, bought large bottles of lotion, and drove home, where each of us was deposited in a bathtub, and our skin was rubbed down with ice cubes.

“I hate this!” Wendy cried, and though we couldn’t hear her since she was ensconced in her own bathtub, we all heartily agreed.

>>> 

“Got any more of those elephant steaks?” we asked Hal a couple of days later as we scurried like squirrels along the top of his fence.

“Ah, Mita!” he said. “The great hunters, Billy and P.J.—“

“T.J.!”

“and T.J.,” he said, “have returned. Sadly, my men,” he added, “we have no more elephant meat. Tonight we are cooking up some ground anteater meat.”

“Mmmm,” said Mita. “Verily good,” she added.

“So what are the latest adventures?” Hal asked.

“Anteaters?” I demanded, trying to appear nonchalanet.

“Not bad after the first bite,” Hal explained. “Magical, in fact. But you—what have you been doing?”

“We were nearly eaten up by jellyfish,” T.J. said, exaggerating slightly, and he unbuttoned his shirt and pointed at the welts that remained on his chest, each of them covered with calamine.

“Ah, I read about those jellyfish in the newspaper. Sounds like a very, very dangerous enterprise,” said Hal. “You must be some of the bravest hunters I’ve ever encountered.” He held out his hand to shake each of ours. “Very proud to know you,” he declared.

Inexplicably, the welts felt a bit tamer and the itching subsided a bit, as if Hal’s words had a healing effect on them.

He cooked the anteater burgers over charcoal, sprinkling them liberally with salt and what looked like ketchup (“sauce made from the blood of water buffalos,” Hal whispered secretively to me), and soon we were all eating.

“Like it?” Hal asked.

T.J. was visibly surprised. “If I didn’t know any better,” he declared, “I’d say these were regular hamburgers. But they taste better.”

“What about you, Billy?”

“I agree,” I said. “Especially about how they taste better.”

“Well,” Hal said, “I’m proud to be able to offer a good meal to my friends, the hunters.”

Mita said, “Me, too.”

“Thanks,” I declared. “You are very nice people.”

“And so are you,” said Hal. “You shall have to return now and again. It gives me great pleasure.”

He took a long drink from his glass and clinked his ice. “Now, I must go to bed soon, my friends, so I will have to ask you to go to your homes. I need my beauty rest.”

T.J. and I each finished off half of our anteater burger, thanked our hosts profusely, and scrambled back over the fence.

“What do you suppose beauty rest is?” T.J. asked as he and I ran home together.

“Gosh,” I said. “I don’t know. Mom talks about beauty rest sometimes.”

“But that has to be different,” T.J. said skeptically.

“Well, Hall and Mita are both kind of beautiful, I think, even though they’re old. Maybe their tribe needs special sleep each night or they begin to fade away.”

“Maybe,” said T.J. And we ran into the pleasures and dangers of the approaching evening, hoping Hal and Mita would still be there, cooking up unexpected nourishment the next time we visited.

1966. For years, our long-suffering neighborhood had put cotton in its ears and turned up their television sets, trying to drown out the sound of my voice and guitar and bongo drums, which I played with drumsticks. I, you see, had fantasies of being a music star, a recording artist, a teen idol. I had started to write songs—my first, “I’m a Wanderer At Heart,” was a brazen imitation of several songs recorded by Ricky Nelson, but not at all as good. “I’m a wanderer at heart./ I must go, it’s time we part.”

Now, it seemed to me to require a singular chutzpah to declare that I wanted to make musical waves in the world. It was like demanding that people pay attention to me, and that they even pay to do so. But it didn’t require a great deal of courage, cloistered in my bedroom, to sing along with Ricky—“I’m a Travelin’ Man,/ made a lot of stops/ all over this world”—at a volume and pitch that would carry my voice travelin’ throughout the neighborhood. Besides, maybe an agent, the same guy who discovered Fabian in front of a fire station, would drive by one day, stop, listen with keen interest, recognize the obvious talent and knock on our door, asking me to come and sing for a few guys in a Hollywood studio. More incredible things had happened, after all. Elvis had saved up the money to make a recording for his mother, Gladys. “Old Shep,” for heaven’s sake. That worked for him. This might work for me.

So I played along with “Bongo Rock,” a ferociously flawed but successful hit for Preston Epps. I sang along with Elvis, Bobby Darin (“Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang”), Carl Perkins, Ray Charles and the Big Bopper (“You know what I like!”). Less obnoxiously—or, at least, more quietly—I watched American Bandstand most afternoons and Saturday evenings and sang and danced along.

But life wasn’t merely about music and the possibility of stardom. I also looked forward to being a football player whose gravity-defying antics translated into hundreds of touchdowns. And I wanted to give some of my time to baseball, setting new records for home runs.

One of the home runs I managed to hit by way of practice in my own backyard sent a tennis ball high into the air—you could almost hear it whirring—until it crashed through the bedroom window of the neighbors who lived two houses away from us. A laudable hit, yes—but the cost of a new window wept its way like tears out of my allowance.

The neighbor, though, was extremely kind. We called him immediately. Yes, he knew about the broken window. Yes, he had looked it over. Yes, you know, kids will be kids. Yes, it will be very kind of Billy to apply his allowance for a several weeks to the cost of a new window. Yes, it’s fine. Really.

He was a man named Westmore, acting like he’d been to kindness school and graduated summa cum laude. I wanted to run down to his house and do a thank-you dance, or sing a song perhaps on his front law. Dad suggested, though, that I just let it go.

So I did. But I’ve remained grateful to him to this day.

>>> 

Which Westmore it was is beyond my memory. Mom told me in mildly reverent tones that the Westmores were all famous make-up artists in Hollywood. But this one was extremely kind and forgiving. Michael, perhaps.

I saw very little further of him, and my musical work moved on from Ricky Nelson to the Kingston Trio, and soon I was pounding on my guitar and singing, “Greenback Dollar” and “They Call the Wind Mariah.” My best friend Salty Sutton and I formed a group that we called Nothing in Particular and we attempted to impress our girlfriends with our contributions to the so-called 60’s Folk Music Revival. My parents asked us to play at family gatherings.

One day, while making our music at the home of my girlfriend, a neighbor of hers who managed a local pop music station came by and listened to our version of “Mariah” and “Sweet Peggy-O.” I knew even then that we had added nothing to the body of work surrounding these often-played songs, so when the neighbor offered to get us in front of a guy at Liberty Records, I had my doubts.

“Maybe we should drop ‘Peggy-O’ and sing, “’But I don’t give a damn about a greenback dollar,/ Spend it fast as I can.’” Salty didn’t care. “Let’s just do this thing,” he said.

The meeting never took place, of course. Liberty Records ran out of money not long thereafter. The world would have to wait for the enthusiastic guitars and vocals that added up to Nothing in Particular. And we would have to wait, too, though our lives were moving inexorably forward toward college and marriage and other activities that seemed inevitable yet outside of our control.

>>> 

Soon it was indeed time to go to college. I went to one school, Salty to another. He dropped out after a year or two and went into the Coast Guard. Soon he was stationed in Alaska somewhere. It was many years before I saw him again.

Before my first drive to Stanford, though, my mother asked me to sit and talk for a few moments. Sit and talk? It worried me.

But we sat, and she composed herself. “You remember our neighbor down the street?”

“You mean Mr. Westmore? Yes—very nice guy.”

“Yes,” mother responded. “Nice guy. And a remarkably talented family.”

“Make-up,” I said, smiling. “Making beautiful people even more beautiful and creating terrifying monsters that won them Oscars.”

“Gone With the Wind, too,” Mom added.

“Frankly,” I said, trying to be witty and failing utterly.

“Frankly, Scarlet, you don’t give a damn,” Mom said, smiling. “But I’m afraid you’ll give a damn about this.”

“About what?”

“Well, one day about two years ago, there was a knock at the door and there stood our neighbor.”

“Did he come because we didn’t pay enough for his window.”

Mother didn’t even smile. “He came,” she said, “because he’s been listening to you all these years, singing up there in your bedroom.”

The room grew silent and heavy. “Something wrong?” I asked.

“Well, he just wanted to know if maybe he could take you to some people at Dot Records—I think that was the name.”

My face began to burn, my scalp prickly. She rose to her theme. “Dot Records,” she repeated. “He thought they might want to train you, to groom you to be a star. You know, the next Ricky Nelson or something.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told him that we wanted you to finish your education first.”

That was all she said. The living room descended into a mournful silence for several minutes.

“But,” I said, stifling emotion, “you never asked me.”

“No, but I’m telling you now, and now you’re leaving for Stanford, and you can take your guitar and play your songs and find other people who like your music.” She looked at me with reddened eyes. “It’s a hobby, Bill. That’s all it is. A hobby. And you’ve got to make a living. Do you understand?”

“You never asked me,” I repeated. “It’s my life but you never asked.”

She looked at her hands.

I stood, feeling utterlyly defeated. “We don’t ever need to talk about this again. Ever.”

“But you could still become a recording star after, you know. After college.”

“Thanks so much,” I said.

“Don’t be bitter. I only want the best for you.”

“I know that. I really do. But I want the best for me, too.”

I excused myself, leaving Mom spread over the couch like yesterday’s wash.

“Have a wonderful time in college,” she called out.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m sure I will.” I threw a few more records and piles of clothing onto the back seat of my car, which was piled high with the detritus of a teenage life.

She wandered out by the car and gave me a $20 bill for lunch on the road.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I already have some money, Mom.”

“Take it,” she demanded. “And remember—these kids you’ll be going to school with are some of the smartest in the country. It’s all right if you only get ‘C’s.’”

“It’s what?” I demanded, feeling a complete disconnect from my own mother’s alien thinking.

“Nothing,” she concluded meekly. And soon I had driven off in silence and was on the road, my tires beating out a monotonous “Klup-Klop Klup-Klop Klup-Klop” on the L.A. freeways, my tear ducts stinging and overflowing lightly, my future suddenly bereft of its mystery and excitement.

Peanut

1949. Wendy, who lived in the house to one side of ours, was the sort of friend you just didn’t see for weeks, and then all of a sudden, there she was, in charge of one of the big events in your life. She was like a pony, filled with spirit and pride and determined to live life in precisely the way that made the most sense and would bring her the most fun.

I liked that. Occasionally, it made me want to involve her in my life more often. I mean, there was nothing resembling romance here—I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in romance yet, though I didn’t, like many of my male friends, think girls were yucky and gross. She just sometimes seemed an apt friend, someone I could rely on. Even though, in many ways, she always proved that she wasn’t. She was sort of like a toy gun that had a way of going off at the wrong time, leaving scars.

In any case, she decided that we should meet behind her house one afternoon after school while the sun was still warming the grass and give one another an anatomy lesson. We would hide behind her parents’ garage, lower our shorts, and compare our private parts.

I was rather pleased with this project. I’d never seen what a girl looked like in the nether regions and I wanted to know. And there was an odd, indescribable thrill to the idea of showing off my own apparatus. My whatsit, thingie, “wee-wee” was a total mystery to me, of course. It could suddenly get smaller or larger or it could change shape, sort of like a snail’s antenna but, of course, it served quite well the purposes of peeing, which I often found very important…but also rather funny, for some reason. My best friend T.J. and I sometimes peed patterns into the dust with great pleasure, or left our mark far from our homes on the fences of vacant lots.

So Wendy and I marched rather giddily into her yard, behind her garage, and stood for a moment, each of us waiting for the other to be the first. Wendy was never to be outdone, though, so she pulled her shorts to the ground abruptly as if she were showing them she was definitely in charge. Showing me, as well.

Not yet looking at her, I pulled my own down as gracefully as I could. And we stood there.

I was shocked. “Wendy!” I said, looking with interest and concern at her crotch. “There’s nothing there!”

“Is too!” she responded, looking down. It’s called a vergina, and my mom has told me that mine is very healthy.”

She added, “I had hoped you might have found it attractive—you know—compared to other verginas.”

“But I don’t have any other verginas to compare it to, Wendy! And so far, it doesn’t look like a vergina is anything but a few little folds in your skin.”

Wendy looked at me with fierce anger in her eyes. Then she did a deep knee bend and pointed at herself. “See?” she said. I looked at her young apparatus. I saw.

“This,” she explained is where I go pee-pee. It’s a very handy thing.”

“But you can’t point it,” I said. “You can’t aim it.”

“Yes I can. I never miss the potty. I can aim.”

She looked at my young apparatus. “And what is that funny thing? It’s so small. Compared to my Dad’s wee-wee, it’s an itsy-bitsy midget.”

This was not going entirely well. “It gets the job done,” I said, starting to pull my shorts back up.

“Okay,” she said. “Fine. But what is it called?”

“Like you just said about your Dad’s. It’s a wee-wee.”

“No,” she countered. “It has an older people name. You could call mine a wee-wee, too, but it’s really a vergina.”

I zipped up my shorts. “Well,” I said, my voice darkened by regret, “I really don’t know what it’s called. I just call it my wee-wee.”

“What does your mom call it?”

I was silent again. “Wee-wee, I think.”

“We’re not getting anywhere here, are we, Billy? I think that, as soon as you can, you should ask your Mom what it’s called. Will you do that for me?” That, as it turns out, was the way her mother talked to her when she was getting angry, and when her mother yelled at her, you could hear it—easily—four streets away. So I quickly promised her, “Okay, I’ll find out,” and started out of the yard.

“Find out today,” she called to me. “Or I may get mad.”

Suddenly, I remembered once again why I didn’t play with Wendy all that often.

>>> 

I aroused my mother’s suspicion later that afternoon by saying I wanted to take a bath. “What’s up?” she asked. “You’ve never wanted to take a bath before.”

“I do today,” I explained pithily. “I actually like playing in the bathtub,” I explained.

Mother looked at me sternly. “Well, don’t splash water all over the place. If I have to clean up a bunch of water on the floor, I’m going to be very angry.”

“I know,” I said, as cheerily as I could. “I’ll be careful.”

“Darn right you will,” she affirmed, and marched me unceremoniously into the bathroom. “Take off your clothes while I fill the bathtub,” she ordered, “then bring your Howdy Doody towel over here. And don’t drop it on the floor.

When she had filled the tub, the water, as always, was far too hot, but I got into it without complaint. I dropped my World War II combat destroyer in and it quickly got lost among the bubbles. So I steered it carefully to a safe port and called to shore on what I pretended to be the boat’s radio, “We are taking on water. SOS. We are taking on water.” Then, ceremoniously, I pushed the boat underwater and it made its back-and-forth way to the bottom of the bathtub.

“Um, Mom?” I said, off-handedly. “What is my thing—you know, my wee-wee—really called?”

“Who wants to know?” Mother asked, and I hoped she didn’t see the flash of fear light up my eyes.

“I want to know,” I said. “I think I’m old enough to know what it’s called.”

She started to laugh. It was more of a sympathetic laughter than a derisive laughter. I was glad for that.

“It’s called a--” She was splashing the soap from my body and I didn’t quite hear what she said.

“A what?” I asked.

She repeated herself. But she couldn’t possibly have said that. A peanut? I distinctly heard her say, ‘a peanut.’ I would never, ever live this down. What would I do?

Finding no alternative, and hoping she would set me straight, I told Wendy that very evening, “My mother told me it’s called a ‘peanut.’”

“What?” Wendy cried out, laughing. “A peanut?”

“That’s what she said,” I affirmed.

“You’re crazy!” Wendy declared, and started to laugh and, once she had started to laugh, she started to howl.

“Billy’s got a peanut!” she yelled for the neighborhood to hear. “Billy’s got a PEANUT.”

I ran home. Waiting at the door for me was my Mom.

“Billy’s got a what?” she asked, slowly and evenly.

“It’s what you said!” I shouted, accusingly.

“And you, Mr. Dumbhead, went and told that to Wendy?”

I started to cry, feeling utterly trapped.

It only earned me one powerful slap on the bottom. Then Mom gave me a little lecture. “Be careful what you say to girls, especially that little girl. If you give her something that she can make you feel bad with, she’ll use it. It’s as simple as that.”

I nodded my head earnestly.

“Is that why you wanted to take a bath last night?” she asked and I kept nodding. “For some god-forsaken reason—and I don’t want to know what it was—you wanted to find out what your penis is called?” I stopped nodding.

“Penis?” I asked, sensing my way out of this mess.

“Yes,” Mom said. “Penis. But you haven’t really shown me you’re old enough to know that, like you said last night.”

As soon as I could sneak away, I ran next door and told Wendy—who was in the process of making a sign that read, simply, “Boys has peanuts”—that she had misheard me. “I said ‘penis,’ not ‘peanut’! This information I delivered with as much dignity as I could muster.

“What kind of word is ‘pee-niss’?” she demanded.

“What kind of word is ‘vergina’?” I countered.

She looked at me blankly.

“And Wendy,” I declared solemnly, “ I won’t be telling you any more secret things. Ever. Especially about…you know.”

“No, Billy, I don’t know.”

“Do too,” I argued.

“Not,” she said.

“Too,” I said. And I left, clutching at least a fragment of my dignity, which was buoyed by my resolve not to tell something like this to a girl again. Ever.

With Ira and Helen in Paris

1963. I was sitting in the handsome dining room at the hotel where we stayed one night in Andorra, the small country in the foothills of the Pyrenees between Spain and France. With me were my grandmother and grandfather—Helen and Ira Frisbee, my mother’s parents. They had decided to build their own trip around the conclusion of, and my return from, a two-semester stay at Stanford’s campus in Florence, Italy, picking me up at the Florence train station.

My wallet with passport had fallen out of my jacket pocket as I got off the train, and I had enlisted the station police in the frenzied task of finding what I’d lost. I spoke better Italian than I have at any time before or since and the head of the station police lectured me grandly on how, if there were any possibility whatsoever of finding the wallet, he would.

I was dubious, but an underling in an oversized hat, approached us after about forty-five minutes with something in his hand. The Captain grabbed my wallet ostentatiously, turned and presented it grandly to me.

“And what have I been saying, signore?” he asked me, smiling proudly and pushing aside his underling. It was he, the Captain, who had accomplished this near miracle with so little effort.

I thanked him profusely, of course, wiping sweat from my brow. I expressed great admiration for the way in which he did his job, the obvious effort he put into solving any problem that might arise on his watch, the superior intelligence carried in the genes of all his ancestors—yes, I covered that as well—and eventually, he said, “Oh, no, I need no extra money for this.” Strange, because I’d offered none.

I bestowed blessings on his children and their children and all his blood line into perpetuity, and saw my grandfather fretting his way toward us some distance away, looking at his watch, and dragging my grandmother behind him like a little toy truck.

“Gramp!” I yelled. “Good work! You found me.” But the man was weighted down by the stresses of his most recent attempt to drive on “these damn foreign roads.”

I soon stepped behind the wheel, much to his relief. I was, at this point, loving the man—in spite of his inclination to blame foreigners for not being more like US. Soon we were negotiating the narrow city roads, which had been built long before any engineers had had reason to imagine more than one lane with a mule-drawn cart in it.

A friend had warned me weeks before. “All you really need to know is that you have the right of way if you are as little as two inches ahead of the car to the right or left of you. And even more important,” he added,” that other guy has the right of way if he’s just a dog’s hair ahead of you—and he will take that right of way and drive your right off the road with it.”

It was true. Remember to follow that one rule, and you will avoid infinite numbers of potential fender-benders. But don’t forget the prayers. You’re as lost without them as a teenager who just dropped his wallet on the track at a train station.

>> 

“Bill can speak Italian and French,” my grandfather would say to anyone who would listen. It was an exaggeration of my abilities, without question, but I could always help find a bathroom when Gramp needed one. And, as I’ve said, I could demonstrate a degree of mastery if I lost my wallet and passport.

As we sat in the Andorran dining room, our conversation managed to merge with the not-unfriendly conversation of a Scots couple at the next table. (They warned us early on that they weren’t “Scottish.” Nor was their favorite drink “Scotch,” which, as they rather disparagingly noted, Americans tend to “drink with water and ice. Which just won’t do.”

“How do you drink it?” Grandfather asked, frowning, “and I’m assuming you do.”

“A fine Scots whiskey,” the gentleman explained very kindly and patiently, “should be sipped without any addition of water or anything else.”

“Well,” my grandfather said. “That’s not the way I drink it, I assure you, not the way I’ll ever drink it, either.”

“Truly?” asked the man at the next table, mildly amused.

“Truly!” my grandfather said. Case dismissed.

Our Scot raised a hand as if about to sign a contract and said, “Can I suggest an experiment?”

“If it involves drinking Scotch—er, Scots—at room temperature with no water or ice—no,” he declared rather firmly, as if someone were asking how many anchovies he wanted in his morning orange juice.

“What I was going to suggest was that you try a sipping glass with a fine single malt Scots whiskey after dinner with me,” said Mr. Scot.

“After dinner?” Grandfather asked. “I always have my drink before, always will. No thank you, sir.”

I couldn’t restrain myself. “I would love a bit of Scots whiskey after dinner,” I said. I did, in fact, rather like the stuff—though I’d never had anything with genuine distinction to it. But, at nineteen years of age, I liked my coffee very black, my wine round and fruity, and my Scots whiskey straight up.

“Very good,” said the gentleman, even more amused. His wife at long last joined the conversation, and we were off into more expected subject matter, like where precisely we were from, what we did there, and how we happened to be taking this trip.

“I have an accountancy firm,” Grandfather said, when asked what his profession might be.

“Ah,” said the Scot’s wife, “I might have guessed.”

I liked these people. They never beat around the bush or equivocated and yet they said everything so elegantly.

“Might have guessed what, may I ask?” wondered my grandmother, perhaps a bit testily.

“Your husband,” said the woman with a warm smile, “is very specific in his likes and dislikes and habits.”

“Yes, he is,” said Grandmother, her face reddening slightly.

“Good character traits in a man who deals with figures, taxes, money,” said Mrs. Scot. “I imagine your Ira is very good at what he does.”

This changed the tenor of the conversation. “Indeed, he is,” Grandmother said. “And what does your Bruce do?”

“Very little,” said Bruce. “I am a co-director of the Edinburgh Cultural Committee. We sit around and write reports on what we would do to stimulate more touristic activity if we only had the money to do them. But we don’t have the money. So I think we could say I don’t do much for a living.”

“But I would guess that your work involves you in everything from theater to festivals to universities to the making of Scots whiskey,” I put in, and our little space of the dining room seemed to brighten noticeably.

“That’s right,” said Brenda, Bruce’s wife.

“So you are doing a rather refined and exciting sort of nothing, sir.”

“Yes,” my Grandfather agreed. “Sounds very good to me.” He was proud of the warmth his grandson was bringing to the conversation. “Tell them what you’ve been doing for the past six months, Bill.”

I couldn’t help it.. At this point in a conversation, I often felt like the gawky puppet brought out by a ventriloquist to bring some charming wit to the pleasantries. I said I’d been studying at Stanford-in-Italy for half a year and I’d had wonderful opportunities to travel with other students.

“Cheaply,” I assume, Bruce chuckled.

“Hostels, hitch-hiking and handouts,” I affirmed.

“Bill speaks Italian and French,” grandfather put in with genuine pride. “Say something in Italian, Bill.”

I sighed. “Qualcosa in Italiano, Bill,” I said, and Bruce thoughtfully changed the subject.

“How about some fine Scots?” he smiled at me. He served me a small glass of the whiskey, no ice, no water, room temperature, and it seemed to me as fitting a conclusion to a meal as any liqueur.

“Like it?” Bruce asked.

“Very much,” I said. “Want to try a sip, Grandfather?”

“No,” said Ira, very firmly.

>>> 

Five years before, the first time my grandparents had me join them for a European tour, we had avoided France assiduously. “The French are dirty people,” Grandfather explained, though I never knew what exactly he meant by that. I pieced together a vague understanding having something to do with such obscenities as naked breasts in the Folies Bergeres and other dangerous and damaging cultural oddities he’d heard about. Perhaps slipshod bathing practices.

On this trip, however, having traveled for a week in France—Paris, mainly—with old social friends and having emerged no worse for the experience, Grandfather had incorporated into our trip a brief stay in Provence, two days in Lourdes, and four days in Paris.

By the time we arrived in Paris, though, my grandparents were exhausted. Grandfather had done the lion’s share of the driving, since I had been sick with food poisoning for most of the road trip, and his driving skills didn’t measure up well to the dangers around every bend of the narrow European roads. He'd left countless angered and frightened French peasants shaking their fists in rage after the car passed, and nearly hit, them and their horses, donkeys and cattle.

Worn out from (and not just a little outraged by) all of that, my grandparents decided to take it easy for our final four days abroad. They napped and read and, occasionally, emerged from our little hotel in Paris to wander among the shops and witness whatever Paris had to offer within a short walk of their hotel room. I imagined my grandfather watching the older men in their grease-stained berets playing bocce ball and declaring, “What a silly game, Helen.”

And I imagined my grandmother saying, “Yes, dear.”

Meanwhile, I had four heavenly days in which to explore Paris on my own. I gawked at Les Invalides, wandered through Shakespeare & Company, spent hours at L’Orangerie, sat by the Seine with my notebook and aspired to complete a fitting poem, asked a woman, in French, how to get to L’Hotel Byron (where Le Musee Rodin is housed) only to have her tell me, in English, “Just keep going the same way you’re headed, and turn right at the fourth corner. You’ll run right into it.”

>>> 

In the early evening, I would return to the hotel, and my grandparents would be sipping their evening Scotch and water, the Scotch brought in a plastic bottle from home. I would shower, and they would order me up a CocaCola. Then I’d write three or four pages in my journal, and at about six, I’d knock on their door—clean, refreshed and ready to read them my journal entries of the day.

What I must say is that they listened as I read—listened deeply, taking it all in as if it mattered somehow. And when I was finished, and had described the last muscular curve on the bodies of those partaking in Rodin’s passionate Kiss, Grandfather would look with deep pride at his wife and say, “Wasn’t that nice, Mommie?” And he meant it. Truly. And I knew. “I wish I could write like that,” he’d add. And we would sit in one of the sweetest and most personally affirming auras of mutual appreciation I’ve ever experienced.

Then we would make ourselves presentable and go out to dinner, and dinner in Paris with Ira and Helen was always an adventure. The maitre d’hotel would show us to a seat while Grandfather developed a joke for him. Something about the pigeons on the heads of the statues outside, perhaps. And the dignified Frenchman had no idea what sort of response my grandfather sought.

“Eh, oui, monsieur,” he would say, which Grandfather assumed to be the cold, Gallic temperament that so many people had warned him about.

A waiter met us at the table, asking for Grandfather’s wine order, which always frosted him because he didn’t like wine. (“Don’t they know it gives me gout?” he would ask us). And once when he’d asked for a martini, dry, with an olive, he was given a blank look and served a full glass of vermouth, distilled and bottled by Martini, Italy’s famous maker of vermouth.

This experience made grandfather bark about the restaurants in Paris being uncivilized (“They can’t even mix a simple martini,” he’d moan quite loudly) and I was beginning to plot ways of tossing him into the Seine. Instead, however, I decided to get his goat by ordering escargots for dinner.

“What’s ‘S-car-go’?” he asked, as I gave my order to the waiter.

“Snails,” I said off-handedly.

“Did you say, ‘snails’?” The word nearly stuck in his throat. “The boy is ordering snails!” he declared as if his entire life were standing before him with utter horror on its face. “He’s going to eat snails!” he would add.

“Yes,” I looked up to see the shock on his face. I’ll confess it. It was one of the cheap passive aggressive thrills in life, pulling my grandfather’s chain, ordering—say, for example, snails—in an elegant manner, drinking a fine glass of wine with the meal, and enjoying every unique, garlic-laden, buttery bite.

“Enjoying that?” Grandfather asked after my third bite. He winced every time my fork reached my mouth.

“Very much,” I affirmed. “Want a bite?”

Well, no!” he said firmly. But I finished every bit of it—every snail—thanking him for the experience and smelling intensely of garlic for weeks.

Laugh and Be Happy

[1951] “Laugh and Be Happy/ And the World Will Laugh with You.” Sheriff John’s theme song.

I was, as often as possible, a member of Sheriff John’s Lunch Brigade from 1952 until I outgrew it. The soft-spoken sheriff was John Rovick, who was born in 1919 and was a radio-operator and gunner—a hero of sorts—in World War II. He went into radio broadcasting as a civilian and then, as a new technology spread into the nation’s households, he went to work for KTTV, Channel 11, in Los Angeles, where he held forth with a couple of children’s programs that radiated his simple, positive message—laugh and be happy, be patriotic, follow the rules for safety, and by the way, here comes another cartoon. He served up the Crusader Rabbit series, in which stills mixed with minimal animation and the silly Crusader mixed it up with his partner, Rags, the Tiger. He also showed Porky Pig cartoons.

He made a very big deal of children’s birthdays. For some reason, I never sent in a card with my name and photograph on it, and never requested a special drawing by “Sketchbook Suzie,” but once or twice I did send in for one of the special products he advertised.

Like Mr. Rogers later, Rovick had a way of creating a mood, an appealing ethical quality in a television world that was blissfully separate from the boredom and anxieties we lived in when the TV was turned off. It seemed possible, even probable, that those who remained good little citizens would enjoy happy little lives forever and always. (Rovick, as I write this in 2012, is still alive and happy himself, retired in Boise, Idaho.)

Unlike a rival children’s show host, Engineer Bill, Rovick was never totally identified with one product. Bill, every evening, would goad his child guests into drinking a glass of milk mixed with Bosco (a chocolate syrup Bill hawked constantly—“Remember to drink your Bosco, kids!”) by having them drink when he cried, “Green light,” and stop drinking abruptly when he said, “Red light.” Not exactly dazzling stuff, but you can imagine children all over greater Los Angeles watching their TVs and downing a big glass of milk and Bosco, much to the sponsor’s pleasure.

Rovick’s sunny outlook elevated him above such nonsense, though with some exceptions, and you would never expect the kind of serious error from him that apparently earned his rival Captain Jet a pink slip. (Tradition has it that, as the Captain’s show ended one evening—alas, before the microphones were turned off—he muttered, “That oughta hold the little bastards for the night.” And the station’s telephone lines quickly and outrageously overloaded.)

One day, though, Sheriff John introduced a product that he thought we kids would get a lot of enjoyment from. It was, quite simply, a set of about six small tubes of oil paint.

The Sheriff demonstrated: He squirted a bit of each color into a bucket that was nearly full of water. (This was rather like watching your shy and retiring Aunt Edith demonstrate how to wash her brassieres. The Sheriff was barely up to the task of doing this solemnly.)

Soon, he had various colors whirling in a rather mesmerizing way in the bucket, and he declared, “Now for the really fun part.” He picked up a stick and pushed it slowly to the bottom of the bucket, then pulled it back out. It emerged covered as if by clouds in a bright black-and-white television sunset. “Wow!” I declared. And there sat the Sheriff, with a satisfied but concerned look on his face. He obviously didn’t know what to do with his remarkable creation.

“There,” he said tentatively. “See?” And the TV screen suddenly filled with the information I found myself hungering for. “How,” I wondered, “do I get my very own set of Color Tubes?”

I scrawled the address on a piece of newspaper with a pencil and ran to the kitchen where my mother was attempting to iron a dress. She had flunked ironing school, just barely passed cooking school, and completely avoided gardening school. I was certain, though, that she had a set of hidden abilities—one of which I knew to be the wielding of a terrible temper, which I carefully avoided.

“Color Tubes!” I shouted. “I need some.”

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It was nearly a century, I was sure, before the Color Tubes arrived. I’d saved up $2, addressed the envelope, made my own return address immensely legible, and taken the whole affair to the local U.S. Post Office, being careful which slot I put the envelope in and asking a Postal server how long he thought it would take for a package to arrive from Pennsylvania.

“Dunno, son. It all depends.” And he set off on an explanation that lost me in moments. I stood and listened as politely as I could, wanting to be on the right side of postal workers, but I was grateful when Dad took my hand and whisked me back to our Ford.

And then, for about six weeks, I asked my mother—even on Sundays—if my package from Pennsylvania had arrived and she, saying “No, dear,” once again, tried to assure me that I should be patient. “The more patient you are,” she said, “the sooner it will get here.” (I ran back outside before she elicited a Captain Jet-style response from me.)

A remarkable sense of grand possibility grew up around this project. I would be able to take simple sticks and make works of art from them. I might master the medium. I might become known as the Color Tubes genius. People might pay real money for my productions. Kids might ride their bikes for miles to watch me at work and beg to buy their own Color Tubes. Teachers would give me “A’s” in art and beg me to be in their classes.

Life might change in glorious ways.

So I was in a hurry for these Color Tubes to arrive, but they were taking their own sweet time. Laugh and be happy?

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Then they arrived. I bounded in from a long day of school and Mom said in an almost offhand way, “Oh, your color things seem to have arrived.”

“Seem?” I asked. “What do you mean, ‘seem’”?

She handed me a package. It said “Color Tubes” on it. It said “Pennsylvania” on it. It all but said, “Here is your New, Exciting Life” on it.

Mom grabbed me as I took off for the back yard. “Need a bucket,” I yelled.

“Now, wait a minute. Let’s talk this over,” Mom said.

“Talk? Talk? Talk about what?” I demanded.

“I want to know what we’re dealing with here,” she explained. “I don’t want you to make a mess.”

“We’re dealing,” I said, “with magic.”

At that moment, my best friend T.J. McGarry knocked on the front door. “Anybody here?” he called out.

Mom let him in and laid down the law. “T.J., Billy has some kind of new toy. I want you to help him with it, and if either or both of you make a mess with this stuff, your bottoms are going to sting for weeks.”

“We won’t!” I declared, though I was a bit worried by the warning. Mom had gotten an “A” in spanking with a hairbrush.

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“Whoops,” T.J. uttered.

“Whoops?” I asked. “What whoops?”

I looked and saw that T.J. had managed to create a thin stripe of red paint down the front of his parochial school trousers. “Let’s wash it off,” I suggested.

We tried to eliminate the paint, scrubbing it with a wet cloth. The harder we scrubbed, the more tenacious it became.

“Let’s try coloring a stick, like you said,” T.J. suggested.

“Maybe we should stop,” I said. “Maybe you should go home and ask your Mom to wash these pants or something.”

“Maybe,” said T.J. “But let’s just try it once.” He grabbed the stick and stirred the colored water with it. The water was very rapidly becoming a monotonous brown tone throughout. Perhaps we had forgotten an important ingredient.

“That’s not the way it looked on TV,” I said.

T.J.’s stick emerged from the water sadly, not in any way special or life-changing.

“Maybe I should go home,” he said quietly.

“Good luck, T.J.,” I said, sadly, knowing his mother would punish him severely for ruining his pants.

The bucket was turning a pale brown inside. I didn’t know what to do with its contents, so I threw the browning water into the garden, as far in the back of our yard as I could go.

I was crestfallen, I admit. My career as an artist seemed to have been so easily extinguished.

In less than a month, though, I was asking my mother every day if my Kellogg’s puppet had arrived. It would be a hand-puppet version of “Snap,” “Crackle” or “Pop,” the gnome-like characters in the Rice Krispies ads. I was hoping for “Crackle.” I’d developed a falsetto voice for him.

Life was changing. I would become a famous puppeteer, if only the puppet would arrive. So I waited. And waited.

At last, it arrived, and survived a few preliminary shows that I performed in the garage for bored friends who all wanted their turn. All too soon, though, “Crackle” was beheaded by a trip through our senile washing machine when I mistakenly threw him in with my dirty clothes. Though clean, it would no longer fit on my fingers. I was finished, for the time at least, as a puppeteer.

It was time to rethink my career with care. And I’ve continued to do so, more or less, for most of my life.