But not all of my life was Eden.
When I was nine, for reasons I never understood and my mom never talked about, my dad ran off with another woman. Deserted us. I couldn’t explain it then. Can’t now. To quote my brother, Bobby, “He just left.” His absence left a hole in my chest the size of the Milky Way. The man who was supposed to pick me up when I fell, put his arm around me, tell me I had what it took, and say, “I’m proud of you,” didn’t. For me, the whisper of his departure said, “I’m not proud of you.” For Bobby, his departure whispered, “You don’t have what it takes.” Both were lies. But in the absence of any voice to the contrary, they sounded true.
The silence of my father’s absence sent some bad signals through a young boy’s mind. My mom tried to raise us, but as much as we loved her, she couldn’t fill that hole. Couldn’t speak the words we needed to hear. That empty place, in both Bobby and me, began to fill with some ugly stuff. Maybe the best way to describe it is to say that I reacted outwardly, while Bobby reacted inwardly.
Bobby was two years older and didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Whenever we played neighborhood sports, I was picked first and he last, if at all. Same mother, same father, different gifts. Bobby’s gift was empathy. He picked ticks off stray dogs. Fed homeless cats. He was quick to listen and never in a hurry. His body posture, along with a thick set of glasses, told you that what you needed to say was important. Folks used to say that Bobby was “more sensitive.” They said it like it was a weakness, but I never saw it that way. I felt like Bobby drank life through a fire hose; if I felt an emotion, he felt it ten times as strong. It was as if his emotions were hooked up to electricity. Magnified. As a result, I think our dad’s absence may have been harder on him.
Given his willingness to listen, everybody talked to Bobby. I was a 98-mph freight train with no ears. I charged headlong, didn’t really care what others had to say, listened when it suited me. Complicating matters, I had found a switch inside me. When I flipped it, I could get angry fast.
Bobby had anger, but no such switch. Or, if he had a switch, its effect was internal. Not external, like mine, where the world could applaud what it accomplished. Medals and wins. The defeat of others. Whereas my gifting tore down, his built up. The world around us perceived me as brave and dismissed him as not, but Bobby was no coward. He just reacted more slowly. More measured.
Without a man to toughen us up, Mom had worked out a deal with the local martial arts school. Two for the price of one. We worked our way up the belt system in tae kwon do. This required self-control, the perfecting of complicated patterns of forms and physical dexterity and strength. We both had that. In truth, Bobby was a better technician than me. His form was more exact, and he just looked more graceful. When we tested for black belt, Bobby actually scored higher. But there was also a competition and tournament aspect to tae kwon do. Involvement in tournaments was not required in order to advance up the belts, but I jumped in because it meant I got to kick people in the head. I thought maybe if I kicked them hard enough, my dad would hear about it and come home. Tell me he was proud of me. That I measured up. That I had what it took.
Bobby watched me compete with no interest. He appreciated my ability, but he thought the idea of two guys trying to knock the sense out of each other rather silly.
One year I was sick in bed with the flu when our team was competing at a national competition. My instructor, Master Steve, came by the house to pick me up in the team van, but I was half delirious with fever and Mom put her foot down. Seeing me lying in bed, Bobby stepped up. Not because he had any desire to fight anyone, but because I couldn’t go. Because he was my brother. That’s all. Master Steve had a real dissatisfied look on his face when Bobby appeared in the doorway with my gear bag, but he relented.
Sometimes I wonder how differently our lives would have turned out had Bobby not gone.
When they returned that evening, the van slowed just enough to let Bobby roll out. He had been knocked out in his first match. A spin hook kick he never saw coming. When he woke up, Master Steve immediately threw him into another match, where some kid threw a back kick followed by a round kick. Bobby was out for the better part of ten minutes. Our team lost.
Master Steve reinforced verbally and publicly what my father’s absence had spoken silently. “You don’t have what it takes.” It became the lie that defined him. The ridicule and taunting from my team members were unrelenting. They nicknamed Bobby “Cockroach” for the way his hands had stiffened as he lay on his back, straight as a board, eyes rolled back in his head.
The following weekend, in a similar tournament, I flipped my switch and knocked out both kids, standing over them in angry triumph. My first of several national championships. I had wanted revenge for what they’d done to my brother. For what my father did to us. And I got it. Or so I told myself. What I didn’t realize was that Bobby had watched with both pride for me and shame for himself. Once more, I had done what he could not. Word spread, and even parents in the neighborhood picked up on it. Bobby became known as the kid who could not. I became known as the kid who could. He retreated to his books and hung up his belt.
By the time I turned thirteen, I had one real love. Cars. The faster the better. Wanting to get my hands on everything chrome, I volunteered after school at the auto repair shop in town. This meant they let me sweep the floor and wipe down greasy tools and listen to stories about fast cars. Come weekends, me and both my underarm hairs thought I knew enough to rebuild engines and replace brakes.
Fifteen-year-old Bobby worked afternoons at the grocery store. Gifted with an affable demeanor and gentle humor, he was everybody’s favorite bag boy. People looked at me with skepticism, wondering what trouble I was either in or about to get in, while people trusted Bobby and liked being around him. His tips proved it. We looked so similar, though, that people often confused us or thought we were twins.
I was lying under Mom’s wood-paneled station wagon one Saturday, wrestling with the oil drain plug and spilling oil all over the garage, when the hollering started. Doors were slamming and Mr. Billy was screaming, “Allie!”
I guessed that she had blockaded herself in her room. I wasn’t sure where her mom was, but from the sound of things Mr. Billy was about to break down her door.
I slid out from beneath the car and found Bobby coming out our front door. I looked at him, wondering what to do. His eyes were blinking real fast. He took one uncommitted step toward the Pines’ house and said quietly, “We . . . we better do something.”
Wrapped in Allie’s scream was a new sound. Fear. Bobby and I bolted through our yards and hit the Pines’ back porch at a dead run. I climbed the lattice and lifted Allie’s window. She was sitting on her bed, knees tucked up into her chest, staring at the splintering door and screaming, “No, Daddy!”
Bobby and I landed on Allie’s bedroom floor just as Mr. Billy broke the door off its hinges. Mrs. Eleanor took the first blow, which splattered blood across the wall and sent her rolling backwards like a bowling ball. She hit the base of Allie’s bed with a thud, where she lay muted and motionless. Mr. Billy stood there laughing, holding the brass doorknob in one hand and a Mason jar in the other.
I looked at Bobby, who was looking at Mr. Billy. Bobby’s pants were wet, and he stood frozen in a puddle of his own pee. He took a weak step toward Mr. Billy, who laughed at him and said, “Why don’t you go bag some groceries.”
I was sick and tired of people picking on Bobby, and I was sick and tired of Mr. Billy beating Allie and her mom. I jumped between Allie and her dad, straddling Mrs. Eleanor. He stood two feet taller than me. “Mr. Billy,” I said, “you need to back up.”
13
When I woke up in the hospital, Allie was sitting next to me. Tears on her face. Lip trembling. Holding an ice pack on my cheek. Mrs. Eleanor, whose face was equally swollen, sat holding my mom’s hand, their chairs scooted up next to the bed.
I was nauseous, my vision was blurry, and my head was split
ting. The last thing I remembered was Allie’s hand grabbing my arm as I stood between her and her dad. Mr. Billy had broken my jaw with the Mason jar, and surgery had wired my mouth shut. When I tried to speak, my words sounded all garbled, making Allie recoil and cry even more. I motioned for a pad and paper and, struggling to write with a split middle knuckle on my right hand, scrawled Milk shake?
Allie smiled, and the tears that had been hanging in the corners of her eyes cut loose and trailed down her cheeks. Two milk shakes later, she curled up in a ball next to me and slept. Throughout all of this, Bobby had been sitting quietly in the corner of my hospital room. He never said a word. I would find out later that he pulled Mr. Billy off of me and bit off the top of his ear. Which explained both Bobby’s puffy black eye and the odd shape of Mr. Billy’s ear.
When I asked my mom about the split skin on my knuckle, Mrs. Eleanor said I’d made it up the lattice with a crescent wrench in one hand. When Mr. Billy came at me, I knocked out his front teeth with the wrench and threw one good punch before he turned out my lights.
Mr. Billy spent ninety days in jail, which sobered him up but did little to erase the debt no one knew about. With great contrition he returned home, but the damage had been done. If a little girl is born with a hole in her heart that only her father can fill, Allie’s had been permanently closed. Mrs. Eleanor had had enough, so Mr. Billy moved into one of the honeymoon cottages on the property and helped his wife run the business from there. They remained married, but I doubt the two were ever affectionate after that.
These events, and the ripples that resulted, created a wedge between Bobby and me. We were quickly learning that the world we lived in valued knights who stormed the castle. Got the girl. Rescued the city. Bobby was a boy like the rest of us. He desperately wanted to be a knight. He just wasn’t any good at it. And when he tried, everyone let him know how miserably he failed and how immensely I succeeded. I compared myself to everyone. He compared himself to no one. I was constantly trying to be “better than.” Bobby was constantly trying to be “with.”
In 1964, the stop-motion animated Christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer debuted. It was a good picture of our life. I was ever the young buck off at reindeer practice, showing all the other bucks how well I could fly and fight. “Pick me, pick me, pick me . . .” Bobby, on the other hand, had been banished to the Island of Misfit Toys.
I used to lie awake at night and listen to Bobby cry in his sleep. While we could not have been more different, one thing was true for both of us—pain had rooted in the middle of our chests. I medicated mine with the drug of competition. Fast cars. Bravado. Bobby medicated his with the drug of offending no one.
As the distance between us increased, Bobby began hanging out with the island crowd. The unaccepted who accepted him.
I hung out with one girl.
14
The Blue Tornado had been an icon on the west coast of Florida for over sixty years. The walls inside were covered in photos of Allie and her mom with famous A-list actors who’d flown in from California to Europe just to eat here and walk what was routinely voted Most Beautiful Beach in the US by most every travel magazine.
I pulled into the parking lot to the realization that a lot had changed since I’d last been there. The restaurant looked as though it hadn’t been open in months. The boarded-up windows and doors, faded and chipped paint, and half dozen No Trespassing signs suggested Allie was no longer serving the best seafood anywhere and wouldn’t be anytime soon. Rosco and I walked around, one of us looking and the other sniffing, but other than a few footprints of people crossing the property en route to the beach, there was no sign of life.
A pattern of rusted nails was the only remnant of the fifty or so picnic benches that once populated the porches. A couple of floorboards were missing, exposing the sand dune beneath. Deep grooves were all that remained from the sixty rocking chairs that previously lined the front porch to help alleviate the discomfort of the average two-hour wait. Rusted eye hooks screwed into the rafters above looked naked absent the swings that once hung there. The takeout window had been covered with a sheet of plywood on which someone had spray-painted Trespassers will be shot in blue paint. I peeked into a side window and was amazed to find the kitchen had been stripped bare. Either stolen or sold, not a single stainless piece of equipment was in sight. No fridge. No fryer. No sink. No grill. Only dangling and disconnected exhaust pipes, frayed wires, and cut water lines. On the other side of the building, somebody had cut a hole in the wall of the kitchen big enough to drive a truck through.
I went back to my oceanfront motel a mile down the road. My second-floor room offered a breeze and panoramic view of the beach for several miles in either direction. For dinner, Rosco and I split a can of Vienna sausage, a can of sardines, and a pack of saltines. At nine o’clock I pulled a chair out onto the walkway, leaned against the wall next to my air conditioner, propped my feet on the railing, and stared down on the waves rolling up on shore just below me. I adjusted the radio antenna, thinned out the static, and attempted to dial her in, but the signal was still too weak. A few more minutes and the AM signal would clear up. It was only six o’clock in California. I checked my sugar, gave myself a few units of insulin, and laid my head back against the concrete block.
AS HER SHOW REACHED a certain level of success, Suzy began calling more of the shots. About ten years ago she’d built a studio in the barn of her California farm just north of Malibu. Hosting a nightly show while staring out across the Pacific. Not a bad gig. She played a healthy variety of most every kind of music known to man. People tuned in because they loved the sound of her soothing, raspy, understanding, empathetic, easily animated voice, and they called in their heartfelt questions because of her uncanny ability to listen and offer sage advice. Given her style and intimate, wrap-you-in-her-arms sound, a lot of callers asked her to marry them. Sight unseen. They’d propose on the air and she’d laugh and play along, and then dig deeper and try to figure out what hole they were trying to fill. She was brilliant.
If you listened long enough, you got to hear her story. You could also buy her New York Times number one bestselling autobiography. Suzy was the beautiful blue-eyed daughter of a Vietnamese model who’d fallen in love with a GI Joe. Given his death somewhere in southeast Asia, Suzy had never met her father—a Marine helicopter pilot. She had accidentally become the spokesperson for an entire generation when, nearly two decades ago, she began talking openly about the framed telegram and the folded flag her mother kept on her father’s side of the bed—for years after his death.
Her quest started with a simple question: “Hi, my name is Suzy. Does anyone know what happened to my father?” No one knew. Not even the military. He was initially listed as MIA. Eventually that changed to KIA for reasons that were never explained to her.
In an effort to discover the truth, she took to the airwaves. Her personal approach drew listeners. By the thousands. And what became one person’s quest soon became the mantra for a generation. Hence, her audience grew, and grew loyal. As her platform expanded, so did her focus. From a missing father to missing children to getting women and children out of the sex trade to interventions for those lost to addiction. Suzy focused on reaching lost loved ones.
She would have made a great medic. She was not afraid to run back across the battlefield. But every November and every July, Suzy would faithfully honor the military crowd in the buildup to both Veterans and Independence Day. She invited men to call in and share their stories or make a request. Anything to get them talking. Most requested classic sixties and seventies rock with a rather strong emphasis on Lynyrd Skynyrd and Creedence Clearwater Revival, but some had an affection for Janis Joplin. Suzy was a regular honoree at Bike Week in Daytona and at the annual Ride to the Wall, where a couple hundred thousand black-leathered and tatted men rode eardrum-splitting bikes from all over the US to converge on Washington, DC. She was a regular on the news networks regarding anything having to do wit
h veterans and had made a name for herself as the spokesperson for the silent generation—those who went, were lied to, lost, came home, were spit on, and never said a word.
Suzy True became known as the voice of the voiceless.
In an odd twist, she became a connector in a world where connections had been severed. Through letters or call-ins, Suzy was able to help more than one military wife or child come to know the true story of their father’s death or disappearance in a country twelve thousand miles away. Oddly enough, in all her searching she had never been able to learn her own father’s fate. But in a world characterized by stoic silence, Suzy had garnered such affection that more than one man had pledged undying fidelity and sworn he’d take a bullet for her. When critics challenged her methods or her subject or her steely unwillingness to “just let it go already,” thousands came to her vocal defense. They also loved her for her uncanny ability: while some people possess the gift of never forgetting a face, Suzy never forgot a voice. Some guy would call in once to request a song or send out happy birthday wishes to a buddy he lost or tell a story about a dog he’d rescued from a village. A year later he’d call again and she’d pipe up, “Oh yeah, you’re Bob from Topeka. Served with the 3rd Special Forces unit. Two tours. Seventy-one, or was it ’72? Lost a leg to a bayonet in a tunnel, I think it was.”
Many of the bikes that made the trip to DC were covered in Suzy 4 Prez bumper stickers.