Grace (2 page)

My story began in October of 1962 about ten days before the world was supposed to end. I think the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us as close as we've ever come as a species to extinction.

Even without the imminent threat of global destruction, the holidays looked pretty grim for my family. In November of that year my mom told us it would be a “Dickens Christmas,” and she didn't mean the festive kind with merry carolers wassailing in nineteenth-century attire. She meant the real Dickensian landscape of debtor prisons and want.

My family—me, my parents, and my ten-year-old brother, Joel—had just moved from a palm-tree-lined suburb of Los Angeles to a blighted neighborhood in south Salt Lake City, just a few blocks from State Street with its nightclubs, bars, and pawnshops. My father, a construction worker, had contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome, a serious disorder in which the body's immune system attacks parts of the nervous system. It started with weakness in his legs and for several months he was paralyzed from the neck down; the doctors said that if it got any worse he'd have to be put on a respirator to breathe. Fortunately, it never progressed that far. The good news, they said, was that he would likely make a full recovery, at least physically. Our financial situation was a different matter.

The first big thing to go was our car, a '61 Chevrolet Impala convertible, which was a pretty fine car even by today's standards. What I remember most about it was the smell of the red vinyl seats on hot days. It also had electric locks, which Joel and I flipped up and down until Mom yelled at us to stop. Dad sold the Impala, purchasing in its stead an ugly used utility van from the phone company, which cost him just two hundred dollars. The van was yellow with wide brown stripes running across its sides. Joel dubbed it “The Bee,” which was appropriate for more than its paint job. The van's motor made a high-pitched humming noise and it wobbled at high speeds, especially with Mom at the wheel.

The back seats had all been removed and there were no side windows. One whole wall was covered with metal shelves, cubbies, and drawers for holding tools and electrical supplies.

Things got worse. To Joel's, and my horror, our parents decided to move. My grandmother from Salt Lake City had passed away three years earlier leaving her home vacant. My mother and her seven siblings had inherited the house and couldn't agree on what to do with it. It was decided that we could live there until they came to a consensus, which, at the rate things were going, was a little less likely than a nuclear holocaust.

On the day we moved, Joel and I helped Mom load up the Bee. A few neighbors came over with going-away brownies and lemonade, and ended up staying to help as well. Dad just shouted orders from his bed. It drove us crazy but Mom said it made
him
crazy to be so helpless. I guess shouting at us made him feel useful. Fortunately we didn't have much left to pack.

The Bee pulled out of our driveway, with furniture and luggage tied to the roof. My mother drove the whole way, the passenger seat next to her piled high with boxes. My father sat on a La-Z-Boy in the back of the van, while Joel and I sat on and between boxes and bags, rearranging them as best we could for comfort.

The trip seemed to take forever as we abused our parents with the obligatory “How much longer?” and “Are we there yet?” Had we known our destination, we might not have complained so much about the journey.

Our new home was a warped, rat-infested structure that smelled like mold and looked like it might have fallen over in a strong wind—if it weren't for all the cracks in the walls that let the wind pass through. What was left of the paint on the exterior was peeling. The interior rooms were covered with wallpaper, most of it water-damaged with long rusted streaks running down the walls. Still, for a couple of boys from the California suburbs, the arrangement wasn't all bad. The house sat on nearly five wooded acres bordered on two sides by a creek that ran high enough to float an inner tube during the summer.

That summer we scaled every tree—and there were lots of them—worthy of climbing. We also valued the trees for the food they produced. Money was so tight that my mother had stopped buying luxuries like potato chips and ice cream and now brought home only staples: bread, peanut butter, flour, and an occasional chuck roast for Sunday dinner. The trees, however, generously bent with ripe fruit. There were Bartlett pear, crabapple, apricot, peach, plum, Bing cherry, red Delicious apple, even a black walnut. Every day that summer we ate fruit until we were full, which satisfied us, but more times than not gave us the runs.

Joel and I spent that summer alone together. Joel loved baseball so we played a lot of catch, though it bothered me that he was four years younger than me and had a better fast ball. We also engaged in a fair amount of insect torture. On the east side of our home, on the slope of the underground fruit cellar, we found a hill of ant lion pits. We'd capture ants and drop them into the pits, watching for the buried ant lion to suddenly emerge. If we felt more adventurous, we'd hunt grasshoppers in the tall grass of the back fields, incarcerating them in a glass jar. We'd try them for some indiscretion—like reckless hopping or ugliness—and summarily execute them, usually death by rock or BB gun firing squad. Every day was something new.

I don't remember whose idea it was to build the clubhouse. Years later Joel claimed it was his. Whoever's it was, we never could have anticipated the chain of events it set in place.

We had all the materials we needed to build. My grandfather, who died long before I was born, was a pharmacist by trade. He was also a builder, and sheets of weathered plywood were stacked up against the old greenhouse and warped two-by-fours were piled in the smelly, straw-floored cinder block chicken coop my grandfather had built fifty years earlier.

As far as clubhouses go, ours was pretty big, ten foot by twelve foot, half the size of our bedroom. It had a particle-board floor on which we nailed carpet. The ceiling was about six feet high, though it sagged quite a bit in the middle. We clearly lacked our father's and grandfather's building skills.

One afternoon Joel and I were taking a lunch break, eating tuna and pickle sandwiches on slices of wheat bread, when Joel said, “It's going to cave in when it snows.”

“Probably,” I said, with my mouth still full.

I studied the sagging ceiling until I saw a solution. After lunch we dragged a four-by-four beam from the chicken coop, cut six inches off the top with a rusted handsaw, then raised it in the middle of the room to brace the ceiling, pounding it fully upright with a sledgehammer. The pillar was useful in other ways. We put nails in it and used it to hang our flashlight and the transistor radio I got on my last birthday.

The fact that the ceiling was low was not a bad thing. We didn't plan to do much standing around and it was a certain deterrent to adults, though probably not as much as the size of the entry itself. The clubhouse's front (and only) door was only three feet high, which made it necessary to crawl into the clubhouse. Joel pointed out that this would be good in case of an attack, as it would make it easier to defend ourselves. I asked him who he thought might be attacking us. He thought about it a moment, then replied, “Well, you never know.”

We did our best to furnish the place with the creature comforts of home. For entertainment we had chess, Chinese checkers, and Monopoly. We hung artwork: a framed paint-by-numbers landscape, a poster of Superman, and a poster my mother never would have approved of—a Vargas pinup. Earlier that year I had started to take an interest in girls (alien as they were to my actual experience), and while we were first exploring the garage, Joel came across the rolled-up Vargas. The poster was pretty tame by today's standards—a young woman posing in a bright red swimsuit—but for its time it was considered pretty risqué. For us it was definitely taboo. I assumed it was my grandfather's, which was all the more reason for my mother to never find out we had it.

Our carpet and most of our furnishings came from the garage, an A-frame structure with a steeply pitched tar roof and two large wooden doors that opened like a barn. My parents stored some of our belongings in the garage when we first arrived, but with the exception of a brief and unsuccessful hunt for some missing pots and pans, I don't think my mother ever set foot in the place. Probably because it was dark, smelly, and housed more rats than a research laboratory.

To Joel and me the garage was a wonderland that housed a million things to ignite a boy's imagination. There were large spring traps, tin washtubs, boxes of ancient
National Geographic
s, a World War II GI helmet, and even a kerosene lantern with several containers of kerosene. Whenever we needed something we'd head to the garage where we'd either find what we were looking for or forget about it in the excitement of a greater discovery. Once we went in looking for a lamp and found a hand-pump brass fire extinguisher and an electric generator from an old telephone that produced enough voltage to knock you on your keister if you touched the contacts while someone wound the crank. To make our chess games more interesting, we attached wires to the generator—which the loser had to hold for one full crank. To this day Joel doesn't play chess.

On one of our expeditions we found a mattress in the rafters above the garage and pushed it down. It looked like generations of mice had made the mattress their home, but they all fled at our arrival (or died in the fall). We broomed off the mice droppings and a few dead mice, then dragged it to the clubhouse.

There was a water spigot inside our clubhouse, one of the old orange hand-lever types. We discovered it after we started building. Since we couldn't move it, we just built around it, later deciding it technically gave our clubhouse indoor plumbing.

Even better than plumbing was electricity. Joel found a light socket and an old yellow extension cord, which we ran from the garage. We hung it from the ceiling and attached a light bulb. That night we brought in our sleeping bags and slept there. We stayed up playing Go Fish and Rook while eating walnuts from our trees until two in the morning. When we finally turned out the light it was darker than a cave, which kind of scared Joel. The next time we slept out we plugged in a nightlight. It lit the clubhouse in an eerie UFO alien green, which was still better than total darkness.

One day I was sitting at the kitchen table drawing cartoons when Joel came running inside. “Hey, come out to the clubhouse,” he said excitedly.

“What?”

“You gotta come see.”

I followed him out and crawled through the door to be greeted by the astringent odor of fresh paint.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I painted.”

“It's purple.”

“Yeah.”

“It's
purple.”

Joel frowned, angry that I hadn't appreciated his surprise and hours of work. “It's all there was.”

“It looks…femmy.”

Joel turned red. “It's all there was.”

That summer I worried a lot. I worried that we'd live in that crummy neighborhood forever, and I worried
a lot
about the approaching school year. I had heard stories about inner-city schools and I lived in terror of what it would be like to go to one.

I also worried about money, or our lack of it. Every now and then Joel and I would try to earn some, combing the neighborhood looking for work. We'd mow lawns and do other odd jobs, but it was a poor neighborhood so we never got paid much. Once we helped Mrs. Poulsen, a two-hundred-year-old lady who lived at the end of our street, clean out her garage. That place hadn't been touched for decades, evidenced by the yellowed GERMAN STORM TROOPERS INVADE POLAND headline on a newspaper we threw out. It took an entire day, leaving us dirty and exhausted. When we'd completed the job she gave us each fifty cents. I stopped Joel from throwing his quarters at her door after she shut it.

In spite of the wasted day, two good things came from that project. First, we acquired an old fruit dryer. It was a square plywood box with window-screen trays that slid inside, which Mrs. Poulsen had us carry out to the curb for garbage pickup. We dragged the dryer home on the back of our wagon and put it in our clubhouse. It actually worked and we began drying apricots into fruit leather, which, to us, tasted as good as any store-bought candy.

Second, we spent our day's earnings on milkshakes, which led to my job at McBurger Queen.

McBurger Queen was on State Street about six blocks from our home. The name of the restaurant was my boss's genius. My boss, Mr. Dick (that's not meant to be derogatory, it was his actual surname), believed that by combining the names of the most successful burger joints in America he would capitalize on thousands of dollars of free advertising and make himself rich. The Queen, as we employees called it, was one of those places that had more items on the menu than a Chinese restaurant. It had sixty different kinds of malts, from grasshopper to caramel cashew (my personal favorite) and almost as many food choices, from fish burgers to soft tacos. My boss also sold water softeners and Amway products, and we were required to keep a stack of brochures for both on the front counter near the cash register.

Mr. Dick trusted no one. He believed John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the Pope belonged to a secret organization conspiring to rule the world. He also believed that all his employees were thieves bent on eating his inventory, which was sometimes true but not as true as Mr. Dick believed. Once one of my co-workers saw him in the parking lot across the street spying on us through binoculars. The very week I started working at the place, Mr. Dick hauled three of his workers off to take polygraph tests. I don't know if that was legal or not, but in those days kids our age pretty much went along with everything adults said.

I knew about the tests because Gary, the assistant manager (a forty-year-old guy with chronic, maybe terminal, dandruff), showed me the actual test results from the lie detector machine with its accompanying graph. The interrogator asked questions like: Have you ever stolen money from the till? (No spike on the report.) Have you given away free food? (Small spike.) Do you eat French fries without paying for them? (The spike went off the chart.)

After the inquiry, one of my co-workers never returned; I still imagine him languishing in a gulag somewhere. Of course the shakedown was meant as intimidation for the rest of us and it worked reasonably well. So, for the most part, we rarely ate on the job, even the mistakes, like when someone ordered a hamburger with no ketchup and we put ketchup on it anyway. At least not without looking over our shoulder a few times before wolfing it down.

What made Mr. Dick's actions more ridiculous was that we were paid like sixty cents an hour. I later discovered that Mr. Dick hired kids because minimum wage laws didn't apply. He eventually got in trouble when someone turned him in for making us pay our matching Social Security payments.