Still Growing: An Autobiography (4 page)

Frankie had a shirt that had the image of a ruler on it, so we held the lizards up to see how long they were. Then we perched the lizards
on our shoulders for a ride while we hiked. If they lasted long enough to make it home, we kept them and fed them tiny grub.

Later, someone showed me how to make a lizard noose and it revolutionized lizard hunting. It was so easy, all the fun was zapped from it.

My parents had a traditional marriage—almost. Until I got into the business, Mom took care of the home and Dad taught at a junior high school. Dad was always the leader of the family—there was never any doubt about that. He got home at 3:00
P.M
. each day, which allowed him the freedom to help Mom clean, prepare dinner and do the dishes.

Dad ran a tight ship with a firm hand. On weekdays, we had to be up at 6:15 in order to eat the healthy breakfast he had cooked for us. If you wanted to eat, you had to be done digesting your food by 6:40 or you missed your chance. Five minutes later, we took turns washing the dishes so we could be out the door at 7:05.

On his way to work, Dad drove us to school in this really ugly red VW truck. In junior high, I asked him to drop me off at the corner so that I could walk the rest of the way. Dad was no dummy. He knew I was embarrassed, so he circled the block and came around just in time to yell: “Hey, son! Have a good day at school. Daddy loves ya!”

Dad’s love extended to applying corporal punishment when we disobeyed. He took off his belt, folded it in half, snapped it together and said in a loud voice, “The long arm of the law reaches out!” I’d run to my bedroom and stuff books, shirts or underwear down my pants, hoping he wouldn’t notice that his son had developed extra junk in the trunk.

The real maddening thing I learned later was that when Dad was supposedly punishing Candace, he’d go in there, snapping his belt. But when the door closed behind him, he’d slap the belt on the bed while Candace yelped like she’d gotten spanked. You never saw a performance like that from her on
Full House
.

One day when I felt Dad was being a jerk, I got fed up and mad. I had no idea what made him so cranky this time. He was on us for nothing we could figure out. I gathered my sisters and the Rock boys and set them to work.

A week or so before, we had all helped Dad picket a man’s business who had not done the work in our house as promised. I saw how well that worked, so I found some wood slats in the garage and stapled pieces of notebook paper to them. On the papers I wrote in bubble letters:

DAD’S A LEAN, MEAN, SCREAMIN’ MACHINE.
DAD’S ON THE WARPATH AGAIN.

And an acrostic of his name, Robert: Rat, Ostrich legs, Bird legs . . . (sadly, no one can remember the rest).

We were ready for him when he got home from work: He pulled in the driveway to find us circling the yard, chanting the slogans we had written on the signs. All he could do was laugh. He laughed so hard that the pictures he took of us were cockeyed and cut off. But the scheme worked—Dad lightened up.

We used to watch my favorite show,
Happy Days
, after dinner as a family, but we never went to bed like ordinary kids. Dad loved affecting a voice from his barrel of bad accents. Instead of being told it was time for bed, Dad broke into song: “Happy trails to you, until we meet again!” or “The party’s over . . . let’s call it a day!” To this day, my sisters and I hate those songs, in part because we knew that the party
wasn’t
over. It was just beginning—without us. Once we were in bed, the Rocks would come over with (appropriately enough) Rocky Road ice cream for the adults to share.
So
not fair.

Mom tried her hand at business when we were little. She taught macramé classes in our garage and made enough money for my parents to splurge on a family buffet at a sit-down restaurant once in a while. But she invested most of her time and energy into loving and caring for us kids. I remember Mom singing or humming while she did the household chores. I admired her from my earliest memories—but, like most kids, wouldn’t have admitted it on paper.

Mom and I wrestled all the time. You’d think I would have won those fights, but she usually did. The Bausmith girls were all hearty and strong. My Aunt Joanne was a body builder and the first woman on the Los Angeles Fire Department. These were no helpless maidens. Dad
often had to intervene, “Careful, Barbara! Don’t hurt him! Watch the face! Don’t hurt the face!”

Together we did calisthenics at rest stops on long road trips. Dad, whistle in mouth, marked how many jumping jacks or pushups we could muster.

Mom and Dad encouraged us to get involved in anything that interested us. Mom was the taxi driver, schlepping us around town to this lesson or that practice. I played soccer and baseball and rode motocross. As I grew older I added racquetball, skiing, hiking, camping—anything active and outdoorsy. I also loved indoor activities that required precision and concentration, like putting together plastic models of Corvettes and Mustangs. I even put together a model of the human body.

To make my childhood even more traditional, I had three little sisters to tease mercilessly. I pinned their arms down with my knees and tried to dangle a long string of spit close to their screaming mouth without it actually falling in. (I didn’t always succeed.) I rubbed my thumb and forefinger behind their ear to make them think a bug had chosen their ear as a new home. I scooted up the walls of our darkened, narrow hallway—back against one wall, feet against the other—and perched against the ceiling for a few minutes. Then I called one of my sisters and when she came through the hallway, I pounced and flattened her.

One day Melissa and Bridgette were swimming in the pool next door. With one of the frozen chickens I kept to feed my snakes, I sat on the other side of the wall and calculated where it needed to go. I yelled, “Bridgette! Melissa! Look out!” I made chicken noises—“Baccch, baccch, baccch baach.” The next thing they saw was a frozen chicken flying over the wall, landing in the pool. It made a satisfying splash and an even more satisfying reaction.

I suppose one of the meanest things (not
the
meanest—that comes later) I did to my sister was when Melissa and I had to go to the doctor for something, probably to get blood drawn. All the way there I whispered, “Melissa, this is going to hurt
so
bad. It’s going to hurt more
than anything you’ve ever had done before.”

At the doctor’s office I continued to harass her. “It’s gonna hurt so much, you’re gonna scream for your life.”

By the time the nurse ushered her into the room, she was sobbing. But the tables turned and Melissa took the shot like a trooper. I, however, got one look at that needle in my arm and it was
my
turn to start sobbing like a schoolgirl who had just lost her pack of markers.

Mom made sure I spent a lot of time in my room “contemplating” how mean I was to my sisters.

I don’t suppose it should come as any surprise that Bridgette found the perfect chance to play by my rules.

We lived on a great street with a bit of an incline. The kids played in the street and cars patiently navigated around us. We built ramps and jumps for our skateboards and bikes. One day, I got the great idea to have Bridgette pedal her bike really fast and pull me on a rope while I rode on my skateboard—I figured I could get more speed with her pulling me than I could get on my own.

“Bridge,” I said, “you have to promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“Don’t go off the jump.”

She scrunched her face and said, “I wasn’t going to.”

“You’ve got to promise me.”

“Don’t worry about it, Kirk.”

“Bridge—promise me!”

With her sworn vow, we walked to the top of the street. I gave Bridgette The Look. She straddled her bike and looked back at me, making sure I had the rope in hand.

“Don’t, Bridgette. Whatever you do, do
not
go off the jump.”

She waved me away and took off pedaling as fast as her legs would pump. To this day, I don’t know why I didn’t let go of that rope. I
do
know why Bridgette veered away at the last moment. I, on the other hand, flew over the ramp and into the air.

Fortunately, the concrete broke my fall.

Lying in the street, I nearly blacked out from the pain. Bridgette ran into the house screaming, “Mom! Mom! Kirk somehow got hurt!”

Mom took one look and hoisted me into the car. En route to the emergency room, Bridgette’s face appeared over the back seat. To rub it in, I asked in a pitiful voice, “Mom, am I gonna die?”

As much fun as it would have been to torture my sister by dying, I only broke the radius and the ulna bones in my wrist.

I’ve always had the ability to memorize complicated things and remember them. I mastered the Rubik’s Cube by reading a book on it and memorizing the patterns and methods of aligning the colors quickly. I entered a contest at Magic Mountain theme park with a hundred other kids. I did it in 60 seconds, but the kid who won did it in 23.

Same for the video games I played. I read a book on how to master Pac-Man. The book had drawings of the patterns he could take in the maze. There were dozens of boards to memorize, but once I did, I could play the game for hours on a single quarter at Chuck E. Cheese.

Skee Ball had the added draw of spitting out tickets when you scored points that could be used to buy all kinds of stuff. Because my friends and I were more interested in the stuff than the game, we’d trick little kids: One of us distracted the kid while the other put a foot on the strip of tickets to snap them off without the kid realizing it. We didn’t have any problem using these stolen tickets to buy the stuff we wanted.

One day my dad found out and put all the stolen tickets in the trashcan. There were hundreds of them. We dug through the garbage until we found them, all soaking wet. We put them in paper towels in the microwave to dry them out, which only scorched ’em (giving new meaning to the term “hot goods”).

Mom and Dad enjoyed going out of their way to make every holiday special. Even non-holidays could be celebrated. They were always up for a party. For our birthdays, we could invite friends over from school. (When I blew out my birthday candles and made a wish, I wished for
two things—that one day I would meet a beautiful girl to marry and that I’d never get cancer. I’m 2 for 2, so far.)

Like Easter and birthdays, Christmas was a big deal in our family. Grandma Jeanne had the best tree in the world. It snowed little Styrofoam balls that fell around the tree into a trough underneath. Something sucked those tiny balls up through the tree so they could get out the top, snowing once again.

I tried to stay up as late as I could to catch Santa Claus, and never did. In the morning we all had to wait in our rooms until we got the go-ahead. When the signal came, we tore through the living room into the den to find a sea of presents. We were gluttonous little creatures. Sometimes our parents made us put the presents in piles and take turns one by one. It forced us to share in each others’ joy, but secretly we couldn’t care less what anyone else got.

The day ended with a Christmas dinner big enough to feed an army. We almost always had people with us at dinner who had no one to spend the holiday with. They could be nearly strangers, but Mom and Dad opened our home to them.

We didn’t have a nativity, nor did we tell the Christmas story. I knew that in religious homes, Jesus had something to do with Christmas, but wasn’t sure how He was connected to it. Was He a special carpenter in Santa’s village?

One year I got a BB gun as a gift. I practiced shooting soda cans and empty furniture boxes, but that got boring. I decided I needed to try my skills on a moving target. I’m sorry to say, I shot the neighbor’s cat in the leg. The vet bill came and my BB gun went.

I know, I know . . . I claim I always wanted to do the best thing, the right thing. But sometimes that excluded the insanity of being all boy.

1
. Barbara Cameron with Lissa Halls Johnson,
A Full House of Growing Pains
(Alachua, FL: Bridge-Logos Publishers, 2006), p. 7.

Around the dinner table one night Mom asked, “Hey, guys, remember your friend Adam Rich? He’s on a TV show. I thought we’d go to the lady who helps him and see if she would help you get on television, too. Would you like that?”

Mom’s eager face suggested only one correct response: “Yeah!”

Adam was the son of my mom’s friend Fran, a former New Yorker who liked to wear nightgowns and smelled of smoke. Mom had shown Fran a photo of us kids dressed to the nines at our aunt’s wedding. Her son, Adam, had recently become a child star as Nicholas Bradford on
Eight Is Enough
and she now insisted that Mom consider us for commercials. “They’d be perfect!” she persisted.

Though at first she resisted, Mom let Fran show the photo of us to Adam’s agent, Iris Burton, who was the top children’s agent in town. Shockingly, Iris agreed to see us.