Flight of Passage: A True Story (39 page)

As soon as we hit the San Diego Freeway, Uncle Jimmy asked about the waterbag. He hadn’t noticed it on the landing gear. I wasn’t alarmed. Kern had always told me that Uncle Jim was somebody you could be honest with, like one of the “cool priests” up at school or one of our older cousins. He wouldn’t sit on a boy for something, like my father would. Uncle Jimmy had already told me just to call him Jimmy.

“Jimmy,” I said. “Can I tell you this?”

Jimmy has a way of talking. He explodes on words, one at a time.

“It’s bullshit, right? The waterbag is
bull.
I just
knew
it.
Knew
it.
Oh
, that father of yours.”

“Total bull, Jimmy,” I said. “We never even looked for the thing.”

Jimmy roared. He adored my father. As boys, they had shared the same room and Jimmy never stopped being grateful for the way my father had chipped in and helped support the family during the Depression. But he understood his older brother quite well and had a good sense of humor about him, and he loved it when my father’s tall talk got him into trouble like this.

“Real fine,” Jimmy said, still laughing. “The waterbag is bogus. But look, don’t tell Aunt Joan about this. Her friends were really looking forward to seeing the waterbag and I don’t want everybody to be disappointed.”

Out on the freeway, the first thing I noticed was the traffic. Clearly, the automobile was a very serious preoccupation in southern California. Every vehicle on I-5, a dozen lanes across, glowed with wax and looked as though it was worn by its occupants as a piece of clothing or jewelry. Immaculately tanned and coifed men in long-nosed Jaguar XKEs glided by at eighty miles per hour, noiselessly darting across the lanes. There were surfers and lots of pretty girls in yellow Jeeps. Even the bikers and the cops looked spotless and neat, as if they were impostors, headed for a costume ball.

The car just seemed to be everything in California. At Anaheim, we pulled off the freeway and headed in toward Jimmy’s house in Tustin, gliding down sunny boulevards lined with palm trees, carpets of flowers and faux-Mediterranean façades. As we turned in for Jimmy’s neighborhood, every garage door was thrown open and men and boys inside leaned over the hoods of cars, classic cars, a ’51 Chevy pickup at the house on the corner, a T-Bird next door, lots of ’57 Chevys and early-model Corvettes after that. While the men Simonized their Deuce Coupes in the shade, their wives and daughters were outside on the hot lawn, mowing the grass in bikinis.

We hardly had a chance to settle into the house, which was tastefully decorated by Aunt Joan in beige and earth tones, with lots of nubbly fabrics and African and Mexican masks, before Jimmy called us out to the garage. In California, as soon as a house guest arrived, the car relationship had to be established.

“Boys,” Jimmy said, ushering us into his spotless two-bay garage, “First things first. Here’s your vehicle.”

There, in the bay next to Aunt Joan’s Cadillac, was a Ford Falcon station wagon, their “spare car.” It was several years old, but the red paint was like new and the grille and chrome trim gleamed like the brightwork on a yacht.

“Real fine,” Uncle Jimmy said. “This is your car, boys. You can use it for as long as you’re here. I don’t care what you do with it, I don’t care what time you get in at night. In fact, I don’t care period. You’re grown, mature boys—hell, you just flew an airplane all the way out here! Just don’t get me in trouble with your father. Aunt Joan just loves you, and she wants you to have a good time.”

Jesus. I always thought that this pie-eyed brother of mine was too extravagant in his praise of California. Aunt Joan and Uncle Jim couldn’t be as great as he said they were. But Jimmy really seemed to mean this stuff. It was paradise out here.

Kern and I immediately settled into a routine, and most nights in Tustin we paired off with Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Joan. The California neighborhoods never seemed to shut down, and my cousins, who were younger than us, were always running off somewhere, driving go-carts with their friends or helping the man next door repaint one of his cars. Aunt Joan, who was a great cook and enjoyed company in the kitchen, sat at the table inside with Kern, slicing vegetables for a Mexican-style dinner and talking. She’d always told everyone that Tom’s “darling Kern” was her favorite nephew. She was excited about him leaving home for college in the fall and wanted to know everything that had happened to him since he visited three years before, and all about his dates. Joan was very protective of Kern and determined to see him become a success, and she knew just how to make that happen. Dates. Kern, Aunt Joan thought, needed lots of dates with girls.

I sat outside in the garden with Uncle Jim. God, did I love California and Jimmy’s garden. Back in New Jersey, at Easter, my father was always careful to buy my mother a couple of these bird-of-paradise flowers, and this special kind of pink orchid that she liked, and the damn things cost about $15 a petal. In the east, these plants were considered rare. But Jimmy had at least a dozen bird-of-paradise plants back there, as thick as overgrown lilac back home, and the orchids were a dime a dozen. Ringing the patio, in neatly manicured beds, were all kinds of mimosas and bonsai trees, flowering ginkgos and all the rest, with a carpet of grass so green and plush a baby could fall right off a swing and not get hurt. The fragrance of all these plants together was otherworldly, and there was always a gentle breeze blowing in from the Santa Ana mountains.

I had never spent much time with Jimmy, and it was a relief to dawdle away my evenings with somebody in the family who was so like me, but then again, so normal. We were both interested in the same things—politics and history—and read a lot, and Jimmy often felt intellectually lonely in Orange County, being the only registered Democrat for miles around. We gorged ourselves on talk. Jimmy’s stories were expansive and grand and he reminded me a lot of my father, except that he seemed less insistent on proving a point, and more satisfied with himself.

Jimmy didn’t mind if I had a beer once in a while. In fact, I had many beers in the garden with Jim. But we knew that Kern might be concerned about this so Jimmy would sneak the beers out of the refrigerator for me and pour them into a glass with a big 7-Up logo. From the kitchen, Kern and Aunt Joan would look out to the garden, and think I was drinking 7-Up.

Jimmy wanted to hear all about our trip, and he had already gotten wind of the shit-shit-shit El Paso gam and other problems I was having with my father, because my father had complained about it. Jimmy was seven years younger than my father, and after the Depression hit, my father helped raise him. He understood what was happening, and anyway, Jimmy was a just good egg, somebody I knew I could talk to. Even without the beers I would have opened up to him.

“Jimmy, I just don’t know what to do sometimes. We flew all the way out here without getting lost, but every time I talk to my father I get the ninth degree. I’m bugged about it.”

“Don’t fight a problem, Rinker,” Jimmy said. “Understand it. Look, your father is a total kick-ass man. God, you should have seen him scrap his way out of the Depression. He’s got to dominate everything, because that’s all he knows. That approach might have worked with Kern. But then you come along, thinking you have all the answers, and Tom Buck doesn’t know what to do.”

“Yeah. Great. So where does that leave me?”

“Rinker, you don’t have to do a thing. Dodge the guy. Avoid him! Your father is so busy now with civil rights and politics, and God knows what else he’s up to, he’s not even going to notice if you just keep your head low.”

Kern had said the same thing. This was the agreement with myself I was supposed to make back in Yuma. I was trying hard to listen. Kern and Jimmy couldn’t both be wrong about the same thing.

California had its own light and smells. In the morning, fragrances of mimosa and birds-of-paradise wafted in through the bedroom curtains, and we woke refreshed. We ranged out in the red Falcon every day, spending long afternoons taking surfing lessons from the teenagers down the street, or visiting Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. Carol Brantley took us to Newport Beach a couple of times, and we got terrible sunburns. More reporters called for interviews, and Kern particularly liked a very thorough and accurate story on our coast to coast flight in
The Los Angeles Times.
When we flew the Cub up to the Orange County airport for a fifty-hour check, Frank Tallman, a famous Hollywood stunt pilot, strolled out of his hangar and made a big fuss over us. Kern took our cousins and the neighborhood kids for rides in 71-Hotel.

We were new boys out there, different boys. It wasn’t simply Jimmy’s creed of fun, or the absence of rules. He and Aunt Joan unconditionally loved us and couldn’t have cared less about all the great ambitions my father had for us. Aunt Joan took Kern shopping in the malls, bought him new clothes, and told him how wonderful he looked in this outfit or that. Uncle Jimmy was excited when I came in from the beach one night and told him that I finally managed to “get up” on a surfboard. In California, you could just live day by day and nobody seemed to worry about tomorrow. Everything was fine, real fine as Jimmy said, and everybody liked Kern and I just the way we were.

A few days after we arrived in California, Uncle Jimmy returned from his job at Allstate Insurance one evening and told us that he had received an intriguing phone call during the day. A dignified-sounding gentleman by the name of Harold Buck had read about us in
The Los Angeles Times
and tracked Jimmy down to inquire whether or not we were related. We weren’t, but Harold Buck was apparently a big wheel in southern California. He was a former close associate of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and had retired many years ago as a director of Hughes’s machine-tool company. He insisted on meeting his newly famous namesakes.

Jimmy felt sheepish about it. He didn’t want to impose another visitor upon us, but he was too polite to give Harold Buck the bum’s rush.

“Boys,” Jimmy said, “Mr. Buck sounds very old. And lonely. Could you just meet the guy, for me?”

“Real fine,” Kern said.

The next night Harold Buck appeared in the driveway and tooted the horn of his Cadillac. He wasn’t feeling particularly ambulatory that night and preferred to meet with us in his car. He was a sallow, white-haired man with a hearing aid and impeccable, old-fashioned manners. We sat with him in his car for an hour and listened to Harold’s long, lonely monologue.

He was so, so pleased to meet us. We reminded him of his own youth, striking out from the east for California. In the 1920s, he had risen quickly in the machine tool business, and then met Mr. Howard Hughes. Mr. Hughes was quite an aviator himself, did we know that? Mr. Buck wanted to show us the Hughes tool works. He could even get us in, he said in hushed tones, to the hangar in Long Beach where the biggest plane in the world, Howard Hughes’s famed amphibious boondoggle, the Spruce Goose, was stored. Kern stalled for time, making up an excuse that we had to do some work on our plane. I was exhausted from surfing all day and fell asleep in the rear seat.

It was our most bizarre California experience. Harold Buck returned a few more times, usually unannounced. When he was feeling especially nonambulatory, a chauffeur drove him. We sat out there in the driveway in an air-conditioned Cadillac, drinking Cokes that Harold provided, listening to this rich old geezer chat away. He was always trying to interest us in the various properties he owned. For example, he ran an avocado farm up in the hills somewhere, and he wanted us to see it. Politely, Kern kept turning him down.

“Oh, Kernahan, please, don’t apologize,” Harold said. “Of course, you must be very busy now. But can’t I at least bring you some avocados, as a gift? You can keep them in the plane and eat them on your return flight.”

“Oh fine, Harold,” Kern said. “Real fine. We’d like that a lot.”

It was decided. For our return flight, Harold Buck would make us a present of avocados.

At the end of our first, blissful week in California, my father impulsively decided to join us by hopping on an overnight airline flight to Los Angeles. This was another personality test for Kern and me. I was instantly depressed and furious about it and considered my father’s decision thoughtlessly selfish, proof that he just couldn’t let go of us and stay away. Kern was a lot more mature about it.

“Rink, guess what?” he said, bursting into our room at Uncle Jim’s on Friday night, just after we had returned from Newport Beach. “Daddy’s coming out! He’s already on the plane. Uncle Jimmy just told me.”

We both agreed that he had been furtive about it. This had never been part of the plan, and my father had simply called from the airport before he boarded a plane in New York. There was a “big mess” in his Los Angeles sales office, he told Uncle Jim, and his presence was suddenly needed to sort things out. It was the oldest ruse in the magazine business. My father had reached a nice point in his career. He was now associate publisher at
Look
, a classic holding pattern where talented executives waited for several years until the publisher finally stepped down. Because his politics had turned so radical, my father was beginning to sense that he would never be named publisher, but he wasn’t worried about it. His sales record was strong and he was particularly gifted at solving the myriad crises that strike publishing every week, and the magazine didn’t want to lose him. So he had a big corner office in New York, lots of secretaries, and an unlimited expense budget. There was always a “big mess” out in the L.A. office—my father had joked about it for years. Whenever he got bored with office routine, or just felt the need for racing along a balmy freeway in a rented Lincoln Continental, he had his secretaries book him a flight to “The Coast.” As soon as he stepped off the plane he did everything he could to assure that the “big mess” remained a big mess. That way, he could return next month to see his brother Jim and goof off with his pals from the Hollywood film studios.

“What a coincidence!” he told Jimmy. “I can see the boys.”