Next it was movies. Somehow, Eddie knew his movies. On Friday nights it was mandatory for Dan and Alice to take their sons to see, for example, Escape from the Planet of the Apes. All four Kings went to a matinee of Fiddler on the Roof and to the opening night of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. By early February, Eddie was putting his Oscar predictions in writing, hitting on Bedknobs and Broomsticks for visual effects and Fiddler for cinematography, but striking out on all the big awards, which left him irate. “It wasn’t me,” he said, before going to bed. “The Academy made idiotic choices.”
Then Eddie wanted to play football. After his first game, in the car, on the way home, he said to Dan, “I hate playing guard, I want to be quarterback, how come I can’t be quarterback?”
“Are you good at quarterback?”
“Way better than Timmy.”
“I don’t know why, then,” Dan said. “If you’re better than Timmy, and I’m sure you are, how come your coach plays you at guard?”
“It’s unfair,” said Eddie. “I should be quarterback.”
There were also problems, that spring, in baseball, because Eddie couldn’t seem to get a hit. An optometrist said he needed glasses for nearsightedness. “No, you look very handsome,” countered Alice, when Eddie tried some on for the first time and declared, “I look like a retard.” The optometrist’s assistant explained that, for sports, glasses could be secured with an adjustable band. “I don’t want an adjustable band,” said Eddie. “I don’t want glasses. I’m not wearing glasses.” Alice had him fitted for contact lenses.
Where Eddie truly excelled was in the swimming pool. His swollen foot was no longer swollen, just a little thicker than the other foot. Each summer he became more dominant in the water; each summer he smashed club records. He began to call himself Ed, not Eddie, and recoiled now when his parents called him Edeleh. Still, it was fun for Dan and Alice to sit on bleachers—while Simey ran around with other kids—and watch Ed, in his racing suit, outdistance the field in the butterfly and freestyle, and anchor the swim club’s medley relay team to a Seattle private-club historical best. With his rangy shoulders and narrow waist, wringing out his hands and curling his toes around the edge of the starter’s block before the firing of the pistol, Eddie gave Dan a new take on his birth parents, who were present—for Dan—at a moment like this, as the true font of Ed’s success. Alice was less prone to give them the credit and believed that her efforts in getting Ed to 6 a.m. turnouts—not missing one—was essential to his glory. She glowed with each of Ed’s swimming triumphs, enjoying them, sometimes, with tears in her eyes. Now when she called Pop he liked to say, “Put Mr. Mark Spitz on the telephone with his zaydie, I want to ask him how are his seven gold medals and if the girls already are crazy for him.”
The girls were; Ed King was popular. There were two bathing beauties on his swim team, both older, who liked to sit with Ed on adjacent towels during meets, play Crazy Eights with him in the clubhouse, double up against him during splash fights, and alternately challenge him to games of tetherball (high-speed and giddy bouts, Alice saw, from her post in a chaise longue under an umbrella). There was a well-developed girl at Saturday school who turned crimson in Ed’s presence and who showed up to watch him play basketball at the Jewish Community Center, where Ed commonly scored twenty or more points while leading his team to summer victories. There was a girl down the block, a year older than Ed, who was fanatical about music and had a record collection, a stereo, and posters of David Bowie and Patti Smith in her bedroom. And there was a girl from school who called to ask him if he wanted to join a group of friends for a trip to the Northgate Mall. Ed went, and they wandered—Ed and two blondes. After lingering on a bench, where they ate bags of French fries, they saw Jaws. Ed sat between his tandem dates, holding in his lap a box of popcorn into which they dug their fingers, giving him a hard-on.
Ed and Simon now attended Gladys Glen’s new middle school, where, in the back of a math classroom sat four bulky computers—a first in the area for students their age. There they discovered video games, and because they talked about video games so much, and pointed their parents in the right direction, Dan and Alice bought them a Pong console for Hanukkah. The boys wore out the paddles within three months, damaged the television, and made so much noise playing Pong—hooting, hollering, arguing, even screaming—that Dan and Alice had to institute a Pong curfew that began, on school nights, at ten. Ed and Simon started going to an arcade on weekend afternoons to play Jet Fighter, Shark Jaws, Stunt Cycle, and Gun Fight, competing to see their initials digitally emblazoned next to the term “Hi Score.”
Suddenly Ed’s Bar Mitzvah loomed. He had to meet with Rabbi Weisfeld to go over his Torah and Haftorah portions and to discuss their interpretations. Weisfeld, keeping a straight face, grilled Ed mercilessly. Knowing that the boy wasn’t born a King, he was impressed all the more when Ed memorized with such rapidity that, as he put it while lauding this stellar student to his parents, “not even a yeshiva bucher could do better.” “It’s easy for me,” Ed explained, when they passed on such rabbinic compliments.
Five hundred fifty people filled the sanctuary on the day of Ed’s Bar Mitzvah. There he stood at the head of the congregation, in a new suit and gleaming shoes—the birth son of Walter Cousins and Diane Burroughs and the adopted son of agnostic Jews—reading, in Hebrew, about the ritual for cleansing lepers, which included pigeons, hyssop, shaved hair, and dead lambs. When that was done he read the speech Alice had slaved over for three nights: “My Torah portion from Leviticus 14 and 15 tells us that God, in his infinite wisdom, makes way for the return of the healed soul into the community of Israel. Why one ephah of flour mixed with water as a grain offering? Why does God allow for either two turtledoves or two young pigeons, according to what the sick man can afford?” He paused to let those questions sink in. Almost everybody was smiling at Ed, and his view from the pulpit was of widely approving faces. “Today, in our world, questions like these don’t make any sense, not if we ask them literally,” he read. “It is their meaning and symbolism that we are meant to explore. God always has a deeper purpose, and when He says that a priest should put the blood of a lamb on the tip of the right ear of a leper, and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot, we need to ask ourselves what God is really saying.”
He paused again. A few people were nodding. Ed turned the next page of Alice’s script. “The Lord is mysterious,” he read. “It’s no fault of the leper that he’s a leper. In olden times, lepers were banished. They had no chance. They were shunned and died alone. Find yourself a leper and your life was over. One day you woke up with a sore on your arm, and that was the end for you.”
More nodding. Ed nodded, too, as if commiserating with the congregation about the dark, unjust past. “All right, the ritual sounds completely strange. The ritual is even ridiculous and stupid. Here’s God telling Moses that if a Jew wants to make the house of a leper clean he needs to find a priest, and that priest needs to find two birds, cedar wood, scarlet, et cetera, bring it all to the house, kill one of the birds in an earthen vessel over running water, dip everything else in the blood of the dead bird, and sprinkle the house with the blood and water seven times.” More smiles, more laughter, more inside-joke nodding. Ed smiled, too, then waved at his grandmother. “Here,” he read, “we have to think of God like the Wizard of Oz, handing out medals and certificates of achievement. Abracadabra, two birds, seven sprinkles, a little scarlet, a touch of hyssop, and presto—the leper’s one of us again, he doesn’t have to go into the desert, God makes the way for his impossible aliyah, just as he led the Jews to the Promised Land and, in 1948, to Ha’aretz Israel. God has a plan and a method to his madness, even if it looks like just smoke and mirrors, even if to us it’s dead birds and water. But if you think about it, is that different from a Bar Mitzvah? I stand up here, I say the magic words, and—presto!—today I am a man.”
Another pause. Ed turned the last of Alice’s pages
. A few “hmmm”s, more chuckles. Pop, Ed saw, had his handkerchief out and was wiping his eyes while holding his glasses. A few other people were crying, too, but most of the congregation was beaming.
“Actually,” Ed read, “I’m the same kid I was an hour ago, except there’s now been this ritual, my Bar Mitzvah, my own personal dead birds and slaughtered lambs, with you, my friends and family, as witnesses. Thank you all so much for coming.”
Clapping in the synagogue wasn’t generally done, but a number of people couldn’t help themselves. Someone even called out, “Brilliant, brilliant!” and from there Ed launched into his list of specific thank-yous.
Ten-year T-notes, savings bonds, checks for fifty or a hundred dollars, and cash tucked into gilded cards—Ed, in his reception line, standing between his parents, stuffed all of these into the side pocket of his coat while shaking hands and suffering hugs and kisses. The well-built girl who attended Ed’s basketball games turned crimson again while congratulating him inaudibly. Later, after lunch, and after Dan had stood up at the head table to thank in particular the friends and family who’d traveled far to be there, Ed lured her into the empty choir room, put his hands inside her blouse, and squeezed. She told him no, he did it again, she insisted no, he squeezed even harder. Then she pulled his hair, kicked him in the shin, called him a jerk, and fled in tears.
That summer, Ed went girl-crazy. Swim team was impossible. The girls in their racing suits, with their wet thighs and tan lines, plowing through a hundred laps before hauling out at poolside—where they giggled, whispered, breathed hard, rolled, and made wiggling adjustments to the nylon across their butts—for Ed, they were live pornography. Almost every day after swim team, he jerked off in the Kings’ basement bathroom. Sometimes he took a mythology book with a full-page print, Hylas and the Water Nymphs, that depicted naked naiads emerging from lily pads to lead a young hero to his doom. Sometimes he took a Dionne Warwick album. He also liked Herb Alpert’s whipped-cream girl, and Peggy Lipton from The Mod Squad. Then there was Raquel Welch as a mute cave siren in One Million Years B.C. and, even better, Welch attacked by antibodies in Fantastic Voyage. All of this was mixed up with the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old mermaids with whom he cavorted six days a week in the pool, especially a girl named Tiffany Wicks, who had a lithe, blond swagger like Peggy Lipton’s. And Samantha Caldwell—Sam—with swimmer’s shoulders, a nose plug, a latex cap, and a ritual of elaborate crotch adjustments each time she hopped onto a starting block. And Terry Tomlinson, who was as skinny as Twiggy and had a face like Mia Farrow’s. And Barb Marconi, whose sunburned nose, blue eyes, and round butt popped up in his imagery constantly.
Then there were the Jewish girls at B’nai Brith Camp, where Ed jerked off quietly in a cabin full of fellow campers also quietly jerking off. It was the summer of the American Bicentennial, and these thirteen-year-olds liked fireworks and masturbating.
From the boys’ showers, through a hole in the concrete, Ed and his cabin-mates watched girls going at their soap and shampoo, and caught glimpses of their shining wet—the term was—muffs. Best, though, were the late-night dances, held in the dining hall with the tables pushed aside and a rotating strobe light overhead. As soon as the main lights in the hall went out, Ed would head for a girl named Susan Weinbaum, whose principal features were long arms, long hands, long hair, a long waist, and, everyone in his cabin agreed, great tits. Ed hung on to her with the objective of making it to the night’s first slow dance, usually four or five numbers in, during which he felt he had every right to press Susan Weinbaum with his trapped, straining boner. She never said a word about this, not even when—it had to have been obvious—Ed splooged in his underwear. Finally, one night, on a tumbling mattress in a dark corner of the rec center, Ed got his fingers inside her panties. Believing the point was to simulate a penis, he poked at her until Susan Weinbaum said, “Ow, you’re hurting me. Don’t do that!” Then he went back to what he preferred anyway: squeezing her breasts, pinching her nipples, and grinding against her crotch.
That summer there was also the girl down the block with the stereo in her bedroom. She had a boy’s flat body and a bad case of pimples, but she also liked to lock her door, strip off her T-shirt, and give Ed a handjob. He asked, then begged her, to take him in her mouth, but she refused him with “No way, that’s gross.” She did, however, with her hand over his, teach him not only how to locate a clitoris but some good things to do once he found it.
Great information. Ed would get with a girl and, guided by her breathing, squirming, and clenching, do what it took to make her happy. Sometimes his attentiveness led to reciprocity, sometimes not, but his percentage of handjobs definitely went up, so the effort was worth it. He kept count of the girls who gave him handjobs—seven by the time he turned fourteen, including a straight-A ninth-grader whose secret was a tube of K-Y Jelly. After school, Ed and this girl would “study” in his basement, with the television on and cans of pop. She was good at what she did, so good that he always checked in at lunch to make sure they were still on for after school. All fall, she and Ed studied hard in the basement, until, one afternoon, Simey popped up from behind a chair and said, “I’m telling Mom!”
Ed quickly stuffed himself back into his underwear. The straight-A student put her lubricant behind her back. Simey ran for the stairs, but Ed caught him by the shirt. Simey was pencil-necked, knock-kneed, and uncoordinated, so hanging on was easy. He was also a crybaby. “No!” Simey screamed now. “No!”
“Wimp,” said Ed, still holding Simey by his shirt. “You Peeping Tom. I ought to thump you.”
“I hate your guts,” answered Simey. “Let go.”
“Ouch, I’m so wounded,” Ed sneered. “Whatever, ya crybaby, but if you wanna get thumped, go ahead, Simey—tell Mom.”
“I am telling her.”
“See what happens.”
“I’m telling her right now.”
“Go ahead, wimp.”
Simey told.
Ed got an Apple II for his birthday and began to play, obsessively, Dark Planet. The object of the game was to storm a cavern protected, vigorously, by the vassals of the Shadow Lord—each of whom wielded a medieval weapon—and, once past them, to rescue a maiden. This mostly naked blonde was handcuffed in a lair replete with instruments of torture, and guarded by a salivating, red-eyed wolf-man—the evil Shadow Lord himself. Ed, battling away furiously, found himself admiring the Shadow Lord, and prolonged his duels with this trying foe in order not only to assess his bag of tricks but to watch the cuffed maiden writhe against her chains in orgasmic ecstasy.
As high school approached, Dan and Alice chose University Prep for their sons, because of its fine academic reputation and its record of sending grads to first-tier colleges. This was all fine as far as Simon was concerned, but Ed wanted to go to a public school, because, he said, he was tired of snobs and rich kids. Dan thought public school was a bad idea, but Alice thought Ed should make his own decisions, so Ed chose Nathan Hale High. He quit sports, took up smoking, and got interested in fast cars. One Thursday night, when Ed walked in the door at twelve-thirty, he found his parents waiting sternly on the couch. Dan referred angrily to Ed’s friends as “greasers,” but once again Alice rose to his defense, this time by lauding the fact that he “embraced people from different socio-economic backgrounds.” Ed laughed at both of them and said, “Get bent,” which angered Dan so much he grounded Ed until Monday. Ed spent the weekend with his stereo on. Its bass thump could be felt in the kitchen.
“What the hell happened?” Dan asked Alice. “It’s like taking in a wolf cub—he grows up to be a wolf.”
“It’s just a phase,” Alice answered. “He’s a teen-ager.”
The phase intensified through Ed’s sophomore year, during which his parents were completely in the dark about weed, beer, LSD, and cocaine. Ed kept his stash of drugs and paraphernalia where they would never find it, and employed eyedrops, gum, sunglasses, and breath mints. He gravitated toward junio
rs and seniors, and became a regular at late-night house parties and at keggers in the deep lairs of public parks. Mostly, though, there was nothing to do at night except drive around at high speed, high or drunk or both, with guys who had licenses. One Saturday, in a downpour, Dan had to go to a police station at 2 a.m. to collect Ed, who could hardly stand up. “We’ll talk about this later,” Dan said, through clenched teeth, on the way home. “For now, the main thing is, don’t vomit in the car.” Ed did.
After a prolonged consultation, and then a rift, with Alice, Dan grounded Ed for four weekends. Incarcerated in his room, he combed his quiff and plucked at a guitar attached to a used amplifier. For Ed’s sixteenth birthday, Alice made reservations for Sunday brunch at the Roosevelt Hotel, where she and Dan ate eggs Benedict and lox while Simon read Children of Dune at the table and Ed, appearing hungover, drank black coffee, yawned, and made trips to the bathroom. They gave him a card—We’re Proud of You, Son—and a check for two hundred dollars.
With this money, his Bar Mitzvah haul, and some cash he made selling pot, Ed bought a ’66 Pontiac GTO, fitted it out with a quadraphonic 8-track, painted it black, and added racing stripes. Behind the wheel, in his bucket seat, fondling his stick shift, Ed liked to irritate and anger other drivers. He also liked to go to empty parking lots to practice dangerous turns. Dan reluctantly paid for Ed’s car insurance, and Alice gave him gas money when he asked for it. She also paid for his guitar lessons and for the karate class Ed decided to take after seeing Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. Ed, it turned out, was good at karate, with quick feet for someone who was six foot three and weighed two hundred pounds. His lessons should have had a silver lining for Simon, because Ed’s sensei emphasized “winning without fighting.” Instead, Ed took a fresh fraternal pleasure from inflicting pain on his younger brother in the guise of passing along self-defense tricks.