I said “yes” a couple of times with throaty conviction and asked her if she remembered how in geography I figured out why the Nile flowed up, not down. I told her that I was still good at geography and that I was getting good at words. I left more moisture on her neck and then breathed, “You exude feelings that remind me of Istanbul.”
I perfumed the air with more beauty, then called it a night with a long, long kiss.
______
The Drive-in Movies
FOR OUR FAMILY, moviegoing was rare. But if our mom, tired from a week of candling eggs, woke up happy on a Saturday morning, there was a chance we might later scramble to our blue Chevy and beat nightfall to the Starlight Drive-in. My brother and sister knew this. I knew this. So on Saturday we tried to be good. We sat in the cool shadows of the TV with the volume low and watched cartoons, a prelude of what was to come.
One Saturday I decided to be extra good. When she came out of the bedroom tying her robe, she yawned a hat-sized yawn and blinked red eyes at the weak brew of coffee I had fixed for her. I made her toast with strawberry jam spread to all the corners and set the three boxes of cereal in front of her. If she didn't care to eat cereal, she could always look at the back of the boxes as she drank her coffee.
I went outside. The lawn was tall but too wet with dew to mow. I picked up a trowel and began to weed the flower bed. The weeds were really bermuda grass, long stringers that ran finger-deep in the ground. I got to work quickly and in no time crescents of earth began rising under my fingernails. I was sweaty hot. My knees hurt from kneeling, and my brain was dull from making the trowel go up and down, dribbling crumbs of earth. I dug for half an hour, then stopped to play with the neighbor's dog and pop ticks from his poor snout.
I then mowed the lawn, which was still beaded with dew and noisy with bees hovering over clover. This job was less dull because as I pushed the mower over the shaggy lawn, I could see it looked tidier. My brother and sister watched from the window. Their faces were fat with cereal, a third helping. I made a face at them when they asked how come I was working. Rick pointed to part of the lawn. “You missed some over there.” I ignored him and kept my attention on the windmill of grassy blades.
While I was emptying the catcher, a bee stung the bottom of my foot. I danced on one leg and was ready to cry when Mother showed her face at the window. I sat down on the grass and examined my foot: the stinger was pulsating. I pulled it out quickly, ran water over the sting and packed it with mud, Grandmother's remedy.
Hobbling, I returned to the flower bed where I pulled more stringers and again played with the dog. More ticks had migrated to his snout. I swept the front steps, took out the garbage, cleaned the lint filter to the dryer (easy), plucked hair from the industrial wash basin in the garage (also easy), hosed off the patio, smashed three snails sucking paint from the house (disgusting but fun), tied a bundle of newspapers, put away toys, and, finally, seeing that almost everything was done and the sun was not too high, started waxing the car.
My brother joined me with an old gym sock, and our sister watched us while sucking on a cherry Kool-Aid ice cube. The liquid wax drooled onto the sock, and we began to swirl the white slop on the chrome. My arms ached from buffing, which though less boring than weeding, was harder. But the beauty was evident. The shine, hurting our eyes and glinting like an armful of dimes, brought Mother out. She looked around the yard and said, “Pretty good.” She winced at the grille and returned inside the house.
We began to wax the paint. My brother applied the liquid and I followed him rubbing hard in wide circles as we moved around the car. I began to hurry because my arms were hurting and my stung foot looked like a water balloon. We were working around the trunk when Rick pounded on the bottle of wax. He squeezed the bottle and it sneezed a few more white drops.
We looked at each other. “There's some on the sock,” I said. “Let's keep going.”
We polished and buffed, sweat weeping on our brows. We got scared when we noticed that the gym sock was now blue. The paint was coming off. Our sister fit ice cubes into our mouths and we worked harder, more intently, more dedicated to the car and our mother. We ran the sock over the chrome, trying to pick up extra wax. But there wasn't enough to cover the entire car. Only half got waxed, but we thought it was better than nothing and went inside for lunch. After lunch, we returned outside with tasty sandwiches.
Rick and I nearly jumped. The waxed side of the car was foggy white. We took a rag and began to polish vigorously and nearly in tears, but the fog wouldn't come off. I blamed Rick and he blamed me. Debra stood at the window, not wanting to get involved. Now, not only would we not go to the movies, but Mom would surely snap a branch from the plum tree and chase us around the yard.
Mom came out and looked at us with hands on her aproned hips. Finally, she said, “You boys worked so hard.” She turned on the garden hose and washed the car. That night we did go to the drive-in. The first feature was about nothing, and the second feature, starring Jerry Lewis, was Cinderfella. I tried to stay awake. I kept a wad of homemade popcorn in my cheek and laughed when Jerry Lewis fit golf tees in his nose. I rubbed my watery eyes. I laughed and looked at my mom. I promised myself I would remember that scene with the golf tees and promised myself not to work so hard the coming Saturday. Twenty minutes into the movie, I fell asleep with one hand in the popcorn.
______
The Groups
THE BEATLES seemed like they would wash their hands before eating, while The Rolling Stones would laugh and urinate on a wall. My best friend Scott and I liked The Stones. We sat on a canal levee, looking to the west where the sun burned a feathery blade of cloud. We were sixteen, with cut muscles on our stomachs and one or two ideas in our heads. One was to move out of our parents’ houses by the time we were eighteen. The other was to be famous by twenty, and to learn to play the guitar well enough that girls would lean out of their Volkswagens and ask, “Are you famous?”
We weren't famous sitting on the levee. Sparrows swooped from scraggly elms to peck among the sulfurous reeds. Toads bloated themselves on air and hideous song, and gophers raised their fat faces at us, Punch-and-Judy puppets come alive.
“The Animals are pretty good,” Scott said. “Do you think San Francisco is over there?”
I looked where he pointed. The blade of cloud was gone, having either moved on or been evaporated by the Fresno sun. “Yeah, they're pretty good.” I thought of “Down in Monterey” and “Sky Pilot,” a message song about the destruction of mankind which was now number three on the radio. The eerie guitar and violin sounds on the record sometimes put me in a trance and made me think that I had lived before and was going to live again.
Scott laughed and threw a rock at a gopher. “Man, we used to like Freddie and the Dreamers. Can you believe it?”
I chuckled and flapped my hands. Freddie, a bespectacled rocker in tie and suit, had one hit, and only because he appeared on the “Ed Sullivan Show” flapping his arms and singing, “Do the Freddie, Do the Freddie. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.”
“Do you think The Stones will have another hit?” Scott asked, giving the boot to a sand spider scurrying in the sand. It had been four months since “Ruby Tuesday,” which hit number two, and eight months since “Under My Thumb,” which hit number seven. Not hearing a new hit by The Stones on the radio was a cause for real concern because The Beatles were pumping them out and “Hey Jude” was on the tip of everyone's tongue. Even my mother said she liked that song, “Hey, Jew.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Do you think The Stones are as good as The Beatles?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think The Stones will always be together?”
“Maybe.”
This scared both of us. We knew The Beatles were popular among the girls with better faces. We knew they had more hits and more movies, and they seemed smarter because you could listen to their songs and know that something was going on. The words to their songs made you want to put down your fork and j
ust listen. And how could you dance to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”?
The canal carried dark water and a slow glimmer of sun. A sparrow waded thigh-deep in the frothy reeds along the bank. I put a heel to a sand spider and remembered someone writing somewhere that “I Am the Walrus” was about Paul, the cute Beatle, dying. It was true that no one had seen him in three months. No one had seen John, either, because Yoko was now leading him around in long fur coats.
“Do you think Paul is dead?” Scott asked.
“Maybe. But I think John is alive. He seems like a thinker.” I looked west. Another cloud pulled in from out of town, whitening a portion of the sky. “Do you like Cream?”
“Not really,” Scott said. “Their songs are too long. You only get three on each side.”
The Beatles always had six songs to one side of their LPs. The Stones had five, which troubled me because it seemed that we Stone lovers weren't getting our money's worth. It also seemed that The Beatles had better album covers. You could stare at them in your bedroom and notice more each time.
“Do you like Led Zeppelin?” Scott asked.
Rednecks who stunk of motor oil seemed to like them, and people who ate a lot of reds and looked at dust motes for hours. “Some of their songs. But you need a good stereo for them.”
Scott and I had record players with quarters taped to the arm so our scratched records wouldn't jump from their grooves. When we bought a record we always promised to keep it clean and return it to its sleeve when we finished listening. We also promised to keep it away from the Fresno sun. But after a day or two we got sloppy. One time I let my favorite Stones album warp in the sun, which had crept around the back of the house and into my bedroom. The record was warped, and no matter how many quarters I stacked on the arm of my phonograph, the needle kept jumping, like a diver on a board.
“Creedence Clearwater Revival, they're OK, huh?” I asked Scott. Scott said all their songs sounded the same, the same Okie guitar chords over and over.
Jimi Hendrix made me think of black people in a mystical way, and The Moody Blues seemed like a group with a lot to say. Simon and Garfunkel made Scott look at my bedroom wall on a rainy day and think of it as a big album cover with a heavy message. Bob Dylan seemed like he had lived his previous life as a train conductor. That was OK. Look at him now, I thought. The guy is going places.
We were going places, too, once we moved out of the house. Our stepfathers didn't like hippies. They made us cut our hair every time our scalps disappeared under a little growth of hair. They made us sing as we slaved in the yard, butchering weeds for the millionth time. Our mothers were OK. They stirred a lot of pots and steamed up their glasses from hard work. They didn't complain about dirty bedsheets or the records we played.
We wanted to move to San Francisco because the music was there, and they had clouds to block some of the heat we had known all our lives. We had it all planned. We would work as gas station attendants, something we knew about from our years of mowing lawns and filling gas cans. At night we would go to college because one of The Stones said in an interview that what he missed most of all was a college degree.
Another cargo of clouds moved in, white with the promise of snow and rain. I said something about that sissy, Donovan, and Scott remarked that The Who was getting old. I didn't have an answer for Scott about whether I thought George and Ringo were dead, too. I was too worried about The Stones not knowing how to make hits. I flicked a rock at a gopher. The sparrows pecked at their black boughs. The canal water rushed by, and we stayed put, running sand through our fingers.
______
The Talk
MY BEST FRIEND and I knew that we were going to grow up to be ugly. On a backyard lawn—the summer light failing west of the mulberry tree where the house of the most beautiful girl on our street stood—we talked about what we could do: shake the second-base dirt from our hair, wash our hands of frog smells and canal water, and learn to smile without showing our crooked teeth. We had to stop spitting when girls were looking, and learn not to pile food onto a fork and into a fat cheek already churning hot grub.
We were twelve, with lean bodies that were beginning to grow in weird ways. First, our heads got large, but our necks wavered, frail as crisp tulips. The eyes stayed small as well, receding into pencil dots on each side of an unshapely nose that cast remarkable shadows when we turned sideways. It seemed that Scott's legs sprouted muscle and renegade veins, but his arms, blue with ink markings, stayed short and hung just below his waist. My gangly arms nearly touched my kneecaps. In this way, I was built for picking up grounders and doing cartwheels, my arms swaying just inches from the summery grass.
We sat on the lawn, with the porchlight off, waiting for the beautiful girl to turn on her bedroom light and read on her stomach with one leg stirring the air. This stirred us, and our dream was a clean dream of holding hands and airing out our loneliness by walking up and down the block.
When Scott asked who I was going to marry, I said a brown girl from the valley. He said that he was going to marry a strawberry blonde who would enjoy Millerton Lake, dirty as it was. I said mine would like cats and the sea, and would think nothing of getting up at night from a warm, restless bed and sitting in the yard under the icy stars. Scott said his wife would work for the first year or so, because he would go to trade school in refrigeration. Since our town was made with what was left over after God made hell, there was money in air conditioning, he reasoned.
I said that while my wife would clean the house and stir pots of nice grub, I would drive a truck to my job as a carpenter, which would allow me to use my long arms. I would need only a step ladder to hand a fellow worker on the roof a pinch of nails. I could hammer, saw, lift beams into place, and see the work I got done at the end of the day. Of course, she might like to work, and that would be okay, because then we could buy two cars and wave at each other if we should see the other drive by. In the evenings, we would drink Kool-Aid and throw a slipper at our feisty dog at least a hundred times before we went inside for a pop-tart and hot chocolate.
Scott said he would work hard too, but now and then he would find money on the street and the two of them could buy extra things like a second TV for the bedroom and a Dough Boy swimming pool for his three kids. He planned on having three kids and a ranch house on the river where he could dip a hand in the water, drink, and say, “Ahh, taste good.”
But that would be years later. Now we had to do something about our looks. We plucked at the grass and flung it into each other's faces.
“Rotten luck,” Scott said. “My arms are too short. Look at 'em.”
“Maybe we can lift weights. This would make up for our looks,” I said.
“I don't think so,” Scott said, depressed. “People like people with nice faces.”
He was probably right. I turned onto my stomach, a stalk of grass in my mouth. “Even if I'm ugly, my wife's going to be good-looking,” I said. “She'll have a lot of dresses and I'll have more shirts than I have now. Do you know how much carpenters make?”
Then I saw the bedroom light come on and the beautiful girl walk into the room drying her hair with a towel. I nudged Scott's short arm and he saw what I saw. We flicked the stalks of grass, stood up, and walked over to the fence to look at her scrub her hair dry. She plopped onto the bed and began to comb it, slowly at first because it was tangled. With a rubber band, she tied it back and picked up a book that was thick as a good-sized sandwich.
Scott and I watched her read a book, now both legs in the air and twined together, her painted toenails like red petals. She turned the pages slowly, very carefully, and now and then lowered her face into the pillow. She looked sad but beautiful, and we didn't know what to do except nudge each other in the heart and creep away to the front yard.
“I can't stand it anymore. We have to talk about this,” Scott said.
“If I try, I think I can make myself better looking,” I said. “I read an article about a girl whitening her
teeth with water and flour.”
So we walked up the street, depressed. For every step I took, Scott took two, his short arms pumping to keep up. For every time Scott said, “I think we're ugly,” I said two times, “Yeah, yeah, we're in big trouble.”
______
The Computer Date
AT SIXTEEN, neither Scott nor I were religious. We spent most of our time sitting on a levee pouring sand through our hands and looking west. That was the way our older friends went. They boarded buses and got the hell out, a fissure of light following them down highway 99 to 152. The next time we saw them, tattoos ran up and down their arms. They were in the army. Their voices were deep as a sack full of frogs, and the first worry lines cut across their brow.
In high school, girls were blossoms shaken from a tree and blooming with life. We didn't know how to talk to them, so we rehearsed by the school fountain. “Do you go to this school?” Scott asked, and I punched him in the arm. “Of course they do. Why else would they be here?”
I tried, “I walked by your house and saw that you have a palm tree. I have a palm tree. What a coincidence.”
Scott tried: “It's cold for December.”
I tried: “A June bug can live on a screen door for days.”
Scott tried: “It rains a lot in April, but the funny thing is the rain is either very cold or very warm but never in between.”
I tried: “My friend Tony said he would take the bullet for the president.”
Scott tried: “Chicken is my favorite food.”