Chinaberry Sidewalks (21 page)

Before we could muster the courage to set off on foot, a two-toned ’55 Chevrolet station wagon pulled up alongside. “What’re y’all boys doin’ out here this time of night?” a menacing-looking man asked through the passenger-side window, the driver hidden from view in the dark interior.

“Hey there, neighbor,” Ronnie Joe called out, his hollow tone of voice betraying his attempt at friendly confidence.

“I ain’t nobody’s neighbor,” the man replied, flashing a smile that looked more like a blood-stained dagger. “You anybody’s neighbor?” he asked the unseen driver, mocking Ronnie Joe’s fake chirpiness.

“Naw, I ain’t nobody’s fuckin’ neighbor,” the driver said, my imagination conjuring from his voice a drunk Robert Mitchum.

“Y’all got any money in them pockets?” the first man demanded.

“I got a little,” I said, as evenly as possible.

“I got some, too,” Ronnie Joe chimed in, “and we wouldn’t mind givin’ it up if it’ll get us outta this ditch.”

The ratcheting sound of the emergency brake being engaged echoed off a colony of white oil-storage tanks some fifty yards off in the darkness, breaking the audio stalemate. Enchanted by the rhythm of the station wagon’s idling engine, I was staring at the exhaust pipe, thinking of how it reminded me of an old dog panting on a hot day and wondering if it might accompany the sound of my own dying breath.

The driver’s door creaked open and a tall, skinny man of indeterminate age—he could’ve been twenty-five or fifty-five—stepped out into the light. He wore sunglasses across the top of his sandy-colored, slicked-down hair, faded Levi’s that hung impossibly off his hips, motorcycle boots, and no shirt. Jailhouse tattoos covered his upper torso, and I zeroed in on “Blood and Money” scrawled above his heart. The passenger stayed seated. “Give me all of it,” the driver said, lighting a Camel. Ronnie Joe and I coughed up sixteen dollars total.

In the back of the station wagon was an assortment of burglary equipment, including a hand-operated come-along. The tall, skinny man fastened the wench to a trailer hitch welded to the car’s chassis and the grappling hook to the Ford’s front bumper and jimmied Mrs. Falk’s car out of the ditch by hand, then put away the come-along and wiped his hands on an oily rag. “I reckon y’all think you was up to somethin’ out here this evenin’. This here’s our territory. I catch y’all back out this way, I’m gonna kill the both of ya.”

Safe inside his mother’s car, Ronnie Joe and I sat collecting our senses for a moment. The driver put the station wagon in reverse and backed up alongside us. The passenger flashed his tobacco-and-blood-stained smile one last time and laid a snub-nosed revolver across his right shoulder. “If y’all ain’t hard of hearin’, Ole Slick over here won’t have to go puttin’ nobody out of his misery.”

Late in 1966 the Arbitrators disbanded. Jerry and Ronnie Joe enlisted in the Army; Ronnie Hechler joined the family business; while Jeanette and I went straight, she as a cheerleader and me as a second-string quarterback. Had I known that by trading in the brooding-outsider persona for a more mainstream likability I’d experience a succession of intimate firsts with a quietly adventurous girl of Czechoslovakian lineage, I would’ve splashed the cologne on sooner. I’d never had a real girlfriend before and she was perfect in every respect, and I sometimes suspected everything was right in my world.

Senior year, my parents found a decent house to rent, and I graduated somewhere in the middle of a class of forty-three. For eight months of the fifteen that I commuted to Lee College in Baytown, I attempted to pass the courses required for a degree in political science or marine biology or English literature; I could never decide which.

In the summer and fall of ’69, my father and I built a three-bedroom house on a two-acre tract of swampland adjacent to an irrigation ditch north of Crosby. The neighborhood—assuming this mud hole and stand of pine trees qualified as such—was called Gum Gully. If a more unwilling participant in this venture was imaginable, I doubt my father could’ve dug him up with a steam shovel. And if arguments built houses, we’d have knocked this one out in no time.

From the beginning, his quest to complete the basic construction before Christmas was beset by obstacles far more troublesome than my general disinterest. Too much rain, not enough daylight, and the ebb and flow of out-of-pocket financing kept him in a state of perpetual anxiety for nine months.

My job description fell somewhere between unpaid laborer and unskilled craftsman. Suggesting that my mother was a more suitable partner, sympathetic to his cause and happy to do what I wasn’t, was a waste of breath. In his mind’s eye, the building of what he’d come to call “your mama’s house” had father and son written all over it.

My mind and body were in two places that summer. The Czech girlfriend had taken her leave, and I’d fallen under the spell of a red-haired twenty-eight-year-old, an ex-collegiate swimmer who taught nutrition at the college. Our acquaintance was made the night I experienced the effects of marijuana for the first time. I spent the evening plastered to a beanbag chair, listening to her extol the virtues of some guy I’d never heard of named Che Guevara while scorning Richard Nixon as a criminally insane warmonger who’d sold his shell of a soul to the military-industrial complex for a shot at immortality. The invitation to drop by her apartment the next day—she hosted a Sunday afternoon discussion group of some kind—put me in mind of Rhonda Sisler, and I wasn’t about to blow it a second time.

Degas nude prints, scarf-draped lighting, fresh-cut flowers, beaded doorways, a carved rosewood letterbox full of marijuana, and a component stereo system gave Renata’s garage apartment a feeling of warm existentialism. Pine-board-and-cinder-block shelves lined an entire wall, stuffed with books on astrology and Buddhism. Hardcover translations of Leo Tolstoy and paperback Khalil Gibrans could be found between
A Guide to the Macrobiotic Diet
and the Kinsey Reports. I scanned two or three pages of a handful of these and made a mental note to go back and read the ones I’d heard of, and maybe some others. The books, marijuana, record collection, and a well-stocked refrigerator were openly available to an assortment of misplaced characters who, like me, had nothing better to do than take advantage of her progressive lifestyle.

I didn’t share my exotic new mentor’s enthusiasm for the self-aggrandizing prognosticators who hung around her place quoting Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin. One guy in particular, always spouting off about the day when a single worldwide government and the
Communist Manifesto
would reign supreme, bored the hell out of me. But as long as there was a remote chance that, if I paid attention to them, Renata might renege on her refusal to have sex with me on the grounds of emotional and physical incompatibility, I considered each and every one a direct descendant of Nostradamus. Even after she confided in me about Monica, a soon-to-be-divorced lifeguard from Deer Park, I held fast to the notion that my new friend would swear off “girls” in favor of me.

One moonlit evening in July, Renata, Monica, and I spread a blanket in the commons across the street from Renata’s apartment and proceeded to get thoroughly stoned on white wine and Thaistick joints rolled in strawberry-flavored papers. Scattered around the park were similar parties listening to the news reports on transistor radios and, as if hoping to glimpse an astronaut walking on the moon’s surface, gazing at the sky in wide-eyed wonderment. In the middle of Renata’s rambling discourse on the subject of team sports and individual effort, which somehow pertained to the lunar landing, the thought popped into my head that my father’s determination to build a house was no less focused than NASA’s fixation with landing a man up there.

“My dad’s like the government when he gets a wild hair to do something,” I said aloud, though not intending to interrupt her monologue. A dew-drenched quiet fell on our picnic, and then Renata commenced a tutorial on “the alpha aspects of the father-and-son archetype.”

“It’s a trait I’m sure you’ve inherited,” she said, referring to his single-mindedness. “In your case, if the path doesn’t lead to pussy, you’re not the least bit interested. Put yourself in his shoes. Unless he offers up the vestal virgins as an incentive, he’s stuck with a cretin for a helper. It’s too bad you can’t appreciate that the opportunity to build a house with your father is nothing less than a divine rite of passage.” She loved the word “divine” in both sound and meaning. “Isn’t it interesting that the father’s instinct for the survival of the family and the son’s instinct for the survival of the species are so often at cross purposes? If I didn’t like women, I’d be drawn to the father. A young man would think nothing of fucking you in a garbage dump. With an older man, at least there’s the possibility of clean sheets.”

That night I drove home thinking my father’s project was right up there with the Holy Grail, and for a week, maybe two, my work reflected this epiphany. When he commented on the shift in attitude, I was ready with the quip, “If they can put a man on the moon, we can build a dad-gum house.” Failing to notice the reconciliation happening under her nose, my mother rejected the moon-landing analogy. “Aw, shit, son,” she scoffed. “They got them astronauts locked in a television station around here somewhere.”

This was also the summer I spent doing grunt work for a crew of alcoholic sandblasters who’d landed a contract to renovate the interiors of ten storage tanks belonging to the Shell Oil Company. Eight hours inside one of those, pushing a wheelbarrow and shoveling sludge out through its lone portal, put me in the mood to go somewhere and get drunk with my coworkers. Instead I’d head for Gum Gully and argue nonstop with my father about how to build a house, though I really had no concept of the end product.

It’s hard to say whether my workmanship was marred more by indolence or ineptitude. In either case, it was rare that I completed a task without my father yelling something like: “God almighty, son, you’re slower’n a prison sentence” or “Shit, son, if there’s a thought goes through that head of yours ’bout anything but poontang, I’ll be damned if I know what it is.” At best, the odds of my fetching whichever tool he’d called for on the first try were about one in seven.

Early one evening, I came perilously close to severing my mother’s arm with a Skilsaw. She was holding the end of a piece of two-by-eight siding I was cutting to my father’s specifications. When I finished the cut, the board collapsed between us and she toppled into the saw’s path, the blade skimming her left arm and leaving a long red welt similar to those she used to raise on my legs with a chinaberry switch. Another sixteenth of an inch and the teeth would have ripped her arm off. My father scrambled down from atop the ladder where he’d been watching this near disaster unfold, grabbed the still zinging saw out of my hand, yanked the cord unplugged, and flung the tool into the woods behind the house. “If y’all don’t wake up,” he declared, lighting the first of several rapid-fire Pall Malls, “I’m gonna pour high-test over every inch of this shit and burn the whole mess down.” A half hour passed before I was sent in search of the saw.

Following a plan that called for finishing the interior at a pace dictated by available funds, my parents moved into their shell of a house on the twenty-first of December. I have a clear memory of spending the long, hungover day after Christmas stapling strips of asbestos insulation to the roof’s underside and the attic floor, after which I wolfed down a tuna fish sandwich and collapsed, unwashed, into bed. Three feet from where I slept was a tall stack of the toxic wadding destined for the living room walls. An even sharper recollection is of my father as seen and heard through the still-naked wall studs at five-thirty in the morning, hugging the commode and retching up five-inch strands of nicotine-stained phlegm. Pointing out that I’d give up cigarettes if all I had to look forward to each morning were these predawn puke-fests garnered the comeback: “If you don’t like it, you can kiss my miserable ass.” Meanwhile, my mother was frying eggs and bacon on a butane camping stove and listening to the early-bird gospel hour on a transistor radio.

While I was stuck helping my father, the lifeguard was moving her belongings into Renata’s apartment. When I turned up after a monthlong absence, Renata greeted me no less affectionately than in the past, but I also sensed a disconnection. Monica appeared her usual self, distrustful of me and overly possessive of her girlfriend, yet even with her, things didn’t seem the same. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the spring semester I was sleeping four nights out of seven on their sofa. And when this grew tiresome for everyone involved, I was invited to find another couch. Although I’d known for months that Monica was sick of watching me follow her girlfriend around like a lost puppy, this ultimatum blindsided me. Since it was easier to blame it on my rival than admit to wearing out my welcome, I focused all my embarrassment on Monica. I’d never called anybody a fake lesbian before, nor had I ever been accused of having my head so far up my ass that I couldn’t spell the word, but once the slander got rolling not even the professorial Renata could get a word in edgewise.

Monica eventually pronounced our name-calling childish and stomped out of the apartment, leaving her partner the job of negotiating a final truce. I can’t say that “a mutual decision” or “we can still be friends” came as any real surprise. But “Monica’s never done this and I’m afraid I’ll lose her” struck me as the truest thing Renata had ever said to me, and on some primal level I already knew that our student-teacher liaison had run its natural course. I might have taken to heart her heads-up that in the future it might be a good idea if I tried to work on my all-or-nothing intensity, which at times was so downright suffocating that any girl interested in getting close to me would first need an oxygen mask. But some things you just have to learn for yourself.

I was sitting on the couch with my parents and watching
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour
when a voice inside my head offered this bit of sour advice:
Tonight’s as good a night as any to end this shit sandwich of a life you’ve got going on here. The 20-gauge will do the job just fine
.