King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography

  My mother never sat at the table with us, but rather “pieced,” as she called it, eating as she prepared the food at the counter or at the stove and drinking Tab and Jim Beam whiskey from a glass sitting in the closed cupboard behind my dad’s head. At the height of her drinking she sipped away a full fifth, starting at four or so in the afternoon as she started cooking and stopping when her head hit the pillow around nine-thirty or ten, minutes before my dad would wake up from his after-dinner nap to watch the ten o’clock news followed by the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

  So we’re sitting at that small Formica table slid into a small nook in a very small kitchen. Big house, small kitchen. My mother hates that; she’d rather have it the other way around. Less space to clean, more to work. My dad sits at one end, my brother at the other, my sister, Candy, and I across from each other in the middle. My mother is nibbling on a piece of raw steak, which I will later come to call Oklahoma sushi, from the stove between sips.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Crutch says in response to someone asking for the potatoes, followed by no one picking up the potato bowl with the right hand, switching it to the left and passing cross-body to the right toward the person who made the request. “From now on when you want something on the table, say the name of the person closest to it. We don’t need all the confusion.” That’s how a rule gets set in stone, in response to some phantom “need” only Crutch sees. So it has been said, once, so it shall be done. He will hold both passer and passee responsible for compliance: If someone asks for something and doesn’t say the name of the person, no one is to pass it. The culinary version of Simon Says. It is the latest in a long list of edicts one starts learning at five, when he or she is, as I said, no longer allowed to eat peas with a spoon. (No wonder my mom doesn’t like to sit down with us. It’s tough enough to remember all these rules when you’re not killing brain cells.)

  Back to the business of eating and catching up with one another’s days. My brother is in junior high school, and he’s excited about a debate they’re having at school tomorrow. Pro and con in the Old West: cattle ranchers versus sheepherders. John’s saddling up with the cattle ranchers. I like that. Roy Rogers is a cowboy, and I don’t know any shepherd heroes, with the possible exception of Jesus, and the sheep He moved from place to place were mostly His apostles. At this stage of my life, riding a golden palomino has it all over riding a cross. I imagine a stampeding herd of cattle. I imagine a stampeding herd of sheep. I imagine steak. I imagine mutton. No contest.

  To keep my brother sharp, my dad gives him cattle, takes sheep, which delights John no end because he has prepared for this. My dad then proceeds to kick his ass, metaphorically, all over the kitchen. One animal has as much right as the other on the open range, which is, as advertised, open; and beyond that, one American has just as much right there as any other American. One by one, my dad shoots down my brother’s arguments until John is nearly in tears and I’m about to turn in my six-guns for a shepherd’s crook. “Elbows off the table,” my dad says to Candy. “The table is for your food and your plate.” To me: “Don’t play with your food, Chris.”

  I tell him I’m not playing with it, I just can’t keep the peas on the fork. I recite an old poem he taught me:

  I EAT MY PEAS WITH HONEY,

  I’VE DONE IT ALL MY LIFE.

  IT MAKES THEM TASTE QUITE FUNNY,

  BUT IT KEEPS THEM ON MY KNIFE.

  He smiles. “Just don’t play with your food.”

  My brother sits there gathering himself, probably wishing he had taken sheepherders for tomorrow’s debate.

  My dad says to him, “Okay, now you take the sheepherders.”

  John brightens. He has great short-term memory, prepares to take my dad down with his own arguments.

  This is where I’m grateful for being the second child. I have long since learned to watch my brother navigate the faster rapids so I can see the best places to negotiate them when it’s my turn. John goes with the basic human and animal rights Crutch just unloaded on him, and my dad hits him with the fact that the ranchers were there first and they have a right to the life they have carved out for themselves in that rugged country. The finer points pass over me, but one thing is clear. My brother had his butt kicked from the table to the sink; now it’s getting kicked from the sink to the table. He is one pissed debater, drinking from his large glass of milk to keep from crying, then excusing himself from the table.

  “Break your bread into quarters before you butter it,” my dad says to me. “And you were right to take the butter from the butter plate with the butter knife, but you don’t use it to butter your bread. Use your own knife. The butter knife is for everyone.”

  I’m almost ready to eat the bread dry. My dad watches John plop down in a chair in the living room, pissed and pouting. In a few minutes he’ll join a cowboy gang so he can kick the sheepherders’ butts tomorrow in school.

  “So which one is right?” I ask my dad.

  “Depends whether you’re a sheepherder or a rancher,” Crutch says.

  “Yeah, but which one is right?”

  “If you’re going to play with those cookies,” he tells me as I twist open an Oreo to lick out the frosting, “you’re going to lose them.”

  I return the cookie to its original form. Not long ago I peeled all the chocolate frosting off a piece of cake to eat as a dessert for my dessert. I ate the cake, then excused myself for a minute to go to the bathroom and bleed off any hint of discomfort. Eating that frosting with no cake to cut the sweetness would be heaven. When I returned, the frosting was gone—into Crutch’s stomach. “If you’re going to play with your food,” he told me, “you’re going to lose it.” And you can guess as to whether there was room for bawlbabies who had just lost their frosting at our dinner table.

  I wait now for the answer to my question. “Neither,” he says. “Both.”

  Obviously that can’t be the real answer. Next he’ll be telling me to put my hands into freezing cold water or go hop into the furnace. Again. I tell him one of them had to be right.

  He points to the corner of a candy-bar wrapper sticking out of my pocket. “What do you think that’s worth?”

  “You mean after I already ate part of it?”

  “New.”

  “Five cents.” (Boy, those were the days.)

  “What if it were the only one left in the store?”

  “It’s still worth a nickel,” I say. “It says so right on the wrapper.”

  “What if there were only one left in the store and Ron Boyd’s right there with you and he wants it as badly as you do and he tells Woody he’ll give him a dime?”

  Damn. That Boyd…

  “Okay,” he says. “Let me make it easy. Say you’re out in the desert. You’ve been there ten days without food, and you’re almost ready to starve to death; I mean, drop over dead. You see an oasis in the distance but know you can’t make it because you are so weak from hunger you can’t take another step. You have ten thousand dollars in your pocket that you can spend on anything you want once you make it to safety, but you have no food and no water. Now Ron Boyd shows up with that candy bar. You offer him a nickel, and he says, ‘No way, man. I’ll give it to you for ten thousand dollars.’ You say, ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ and he says, ‘Perfect. Give me the ten thousand, and I’ll give you the candy bar.’ What do you do?”

  “Pay ten thousand dollars for a candy bar? No way.”

  “So you’d rather die. How much good is the ten thousand to you if you’re dead?”

  “What if I tried to give him five thousand?”

  “Well, you’re proving my point, but let’s give it a try. I’ll be Ron.”

  I’m into it. I get down on the desert sands of the kitchen floor. My mother steps over me to get another drink. I say, “Ron…Ron…I’ll give you five thousand dollars for that candy bar.”

  My dad shakes his head emphatically. “Nope. Ten thousand or nothing. And you have fifteen seconds to decide because a
fter that I’m going to eat it myself.”

  Aaaauuuuugh! “Wait! How about six thousand?”

  “Ten seconds,” my dad says. “Nine…eight…seven…”

  “Okay! Okay! Ten thousand.”

  We pretend to make the exchange. My dad finds it necessary to remind me that under normal circumstances it is bad manners to lie down on the kitchen floor during dinner, but there was a lesson here, so on a one-time basis, it is permissible. The man has interesting priorities.

  “There’s not always a right answer,” he says. “There’s only an answer in context. Which is right about the candy bar? Is it worth five cents or ten thousand dollars?”

  I point to my wrapper. “It says right here, five cents.”

  We are quiet a moment, and John has gathered himself and come back to the table. I say, “So you didn’t answer my question. Who is right, the cowboys or the sheepherders?”

  My dad’s eyes roll: his most emphatic emotional expression. He says, “The goat men, Chris. The goat men.”

  He starts repairing the damage with my brother so John can go into school tomorrow and kick a little woolly ass, and as I excuse myself from the table—“May I be excused, please?” is the only proper avenue of escape—he turns to me. “You know that candy bar you have in your pocket?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll buy you two of them if I don’t get a note from Mr. Knee tomorrow telling me you got a bloody nose for trying to sell one for ten thousand dollars.”

  Candy spent the rest of the evening putting “Lever bought a candy bar for ten thousand dollars” to music.

  I was seventeen when I knew I’d never be married. When I look back on that time, when all the vibrance of learning and interacting and relating was going on in the kitchen, my mother moved through it like a ghost waitress, refilling her glass, drinking herself inconspicuously into a state of numbness. Before I knew what she was doing, I thought she was solar powered. The sun went down and she got dumb. In fact, as the sun was setting, so were her brain cells. Sometimes I think part of the reason she drank was because my dad’s kind of thinking scared her. She had so many unarticulated wounds of her own and wanted some way to address them simply, though she could certainly never give herself permission. She came from a time and a people who valued men’s responses more than women’s, so she seldom stood up for herself other than to get angry when she was totally fed up with not being heard. She was kind and helpful and sacrificial to a fault, and she seemed to feel inept as a mother and as a wife because she could never please except by staying out of the way and not challenging my father for fear of getting the cowboy/sheepherders treatment. So we went by the king’s-in-his-castle rules, and the king had no respect for the expression of emotional pain. You could express it, just don’t expect a response.

  My parents were considered by the townspeople to have a solid marriage. There were few suspicions of infidelity and they never fought in public and seemed to respect each other. My dad was an intelligent, relatively successful man who was always supported by his wife and whose kids were generally well behaved in public and would probably not grow up to go on welfare. They were community minded and accommodating, and you could always count on them to do their part, though my dad could be what the Bilbaos’ mom described as “a little hard to get to know,” which meant he was intimidating. It was a great package, but inside that package, for whatever reason, it fell to me to make my mother feel better. Because she could never please, she could never truly be pleased, but I’d work my ass off to do it anyway.

  The evening scenario around that dinnertime interaction went something like this: Jewell would see Crutch coming up the walk out the kitchen window and pour him a gin and tonic, handing it to him as he came through the door. He drank it as he watched the evening news, rattled the ice when it was empty, which signaled her he was ready for his second. If for some reason the TV was louder than the ice clinking against the side of the glass and she didn’t hear, he rattled it again and the second drink appeared. Then we had dinner, which Jewell swept through like a ghostly waitress, and afterward Crutch would have a glass of iced tea, stretch out on the couch to watch TV, and fall asleep, while my mother cleaned the kitchen and polished off the Jim Beam. I would sit in the living room, planning to go outside and play hide-and-go-seek or kick the can or ante-eye-over with my friends. Often I could hear them out there starting up the game, sometimes even calling my name to hurry and come out.

  Now, understand that the front door to our house was a large double French door opening out onto a sprawling front lawn. The back door was a standard-sized door just off the kitchen that opened onto a patch of backyard. I could have escaped out the front without notice, simply hollering, “I’m going outside to play” as I disappeared through it. But that would have been unfair. The trick for me was to try to get through the kitchen past my grieving mother.

  I’d walk through, pulling on my jacket. “I’m gonna go out and play for a while.”

  Sigh. “Okay, honey. Have a good time.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing. You just run along. I’ll be fine.”

  “It sounds like there’s something wrong.”

  “No, dear. I’m fine. You run along.”

  But I didn’t. I’d stand and wait, feeling for a moment like a hit-and-run driver, wanting to go ahead, inching toward the door.…

  “It’s just hard, that’s all.”

  Shit. “What’s hard?”

  And off it went. She was loosened up enough to lament about the sad state of world affairs or her life, which, at that degree of impairment, were one and the same. I did my best to convince her things weren’t as bad as they felt (I learned that from watching her do it with her depressed friends), and she did her best not to be convinced, interrupting me every half hour or so to tell me to go outside or my friends would be done, and I’d say, “I’ll go in a minute” and never do it. She’d finally go to bed and pass out; I’d go upstairs to my room with some faint feeling of having saved her. After “The Star-Spangled Banner” played to end the TV day, Crutch would go into the bedroom and read himself to sleep. My mother, by her own report, never had a hangover in her life, so she got up early in the morning, ahead of him, and fixed his breakfast. My father was a voracious reader—of any genre, fiction or nonfiction—and because he loved to read in a completely quiet house each morning, she went back to bed until it was time to get us up to go to school.

  As I said, they seldom fought out loud and seemed to treat each other respectfully, at least as I understood respect at the time. They promoted and supported their kids’ accomplishments, and no one in town knew the amounts of alcohol that were consumed in our house. That’s what I thought marriage was, and I didn’t want any part of it.

  Though I could never have come to this conclusion then, I now look back at my parents’ relationship without judgment. It wasn’t a good thing that my dad could turn almost any situation into a PBS moment, any more than it was a bad thing that I felt responsible for my mother’s emotional well-being, any more than it’s good or bad that what I learned from all that probably shaped the best and worst parts of my relationships with women in the following years. I’m sure I shied away from traditional family life because of what I saw, but a traditional family life would surely have steered me in a different direction from the one I took, and I would likely not have had the experiences as a teacher and a therapist and a writer that I have had. It’s easy to look back and say if things had been perfect, I could have accommodated all of those things into my life. But as a therapist I do not allow that word to be uttered in my office after the first session, because I believe the only reason for the existence of that word is to make us feel bad. It’s the only word in the language (that I know of) that is defined in common usage by what can’t be. It sets a vague standard that can’t be met because it is never truly characterized. I prefer to think that we’re all out here doing our best under the circumstances, looking
at our world through the only eyes through which we can look at it: our own. The universe is kind enough to give us as many chances as we need to work through the things that cause us pain, and loving enough not to care whether or not we remedy them.

  For the final seventeen years of my mother’s life she was clean and sober, and discovered things about herself she might never have discovered had she not been impaired all those years and determined to stay free of that impairment. In the end, it is what it is.

  I came back to work one more year in my father’s service station during the summer after my freshman year in college and had an enlightening conversation with him. We were sitting in the front office during a lull in business, and I said, “So what was the big deal with all the table manners?”

  “I just didn’t want you to go out in the world and embarrass yourself.”

  I said, “Crutch, if I ask the guys I eat with to pass the bread, I better be ready to go long. If I take the butter from the butter plate with the butter knife, which is nonexistent, and put it on my plate before breaking my bread into quarters and buttering it a piece at a time, the butter melts on the hot plate, and all my buddies want to know if my condition has been diagnosed.”

  My father was unflappable. “I wasn’t teaching you to eat with animals,” he said. “It’s for those times when you need them.”

  I said, “Something must have happened to you. This manners thing has to be the result of some trauma. I mean, I get your demand for Certified Clean Restrooms á la Phillips 66 and making us wear these nineteen-forties uniforms. But the manners—”

  “Her name was Rosa Campbell,” he said.

  I made a mental note to remember that name.