Rats Saw God (3 page)

There was no prominently displayed sign demanding that we freshmen, like lemmings, line up to join whatever group this was.

“Is this where I sign up for wood shop?” I asked.

“Skate or Die,” the Gregg Allman clone said.

“Right,” I said, as if his response made perfect sense to me. “So what is this thing, anyway?”

Once questioned about the purpose of his structure, “Gregg” felt obliged to demonstrate. He kicked a skateboard out from under the table and began doing things on that ramp—flipping the board, spinning on his hand—I had only seen executed in rock videos. Soon I found myself at the epicenter of a hemisphere of gaping fourteen-year-olds. They were all new recruits for Skate or Die (which was, I learned, a club—Grace's purveyors of skateboard and diehard thrash-punk culture). Gregg, actually a fellow named Doug Chappell, had signed them up to replace alumni who had received their driver's licenses over the summer.

Although I never officially joined Skate or Die, on a social level I might as well have. Doug, the president and founder, became the nearest thing I had to a best friend, at least until I met Dub. Doug had formed Skate or Die because only recognized clubs got their pictures in the yearbook, and the school constitution required every officially recognized club to include fifteen members. He wouldn't have given a rat's ass about this had it not been for his annual five-hundred-dollar bet with his old man that Doug wouldn't get his picture in the
book. Like the astronaut, Doug's parents fretted over their son's lack of popularity as well as his reluctance to participate in a high school social life they undoubtedly equated with malt shops and drive-ins. They had been, of course, joiners when they were his age. And though Doug won the yearbook bet, I'd be willing to make my own wager at the level of delight his parents took in his choice of peers. The Skate or Die club picture, which I'm certain the yearbook staff intentionally placed on the back side of a pizza coupon, featured sixteen scabby-kneed, male, potential “other cuts” models. I never set foot on a board, but I would follow them on a bike and hang out by the drainage ditch as they practiced maneuvers up and down its sides.

I didn't pose for the group picture or sign up on the roll that Doug had to turn in to the office. For almost exactly the same reasons Doug needed to be in the yearbook, I wanted to be excluded. I had a goal in mind—no activities would appear by my name in the yearbook.

My freshman year was rounded out by the landing of my first job—concessionaire extraordinaire at the Clear Lake Cineplex. There were so many things I loved about my job; where to start? Let's see, the red-and-white vertically striped shirt, the white paper Beetle Bailey cap, the button saying S
TEVE AT YOUR SERVICE,
or possibly the opportunity to pour rancid, fluorescent-hued nacho cheese for classmates who pretended not to know me.

•   •   •

The most telling thing I can think of to say about the man who sired me is this: He walked three miles to school, uphill,
both ways. With other adults, this would be hyperbole, but in the astronaut's case, it's true. He would walk to school at the highest point of Yakima, Washington (his birthplace, verifiable by the weathered B
IRTHPLACE OF
A
LAN
Y
ORK
legend on the “Now Entering” sign), then he would take a school bus down into the valley where he would pick grapes with the migrant workers before walking another three miles back home, uphill.

He might have stayed in Yakima his entire life if not for the first in a series of classic Alan York adventures. In a rare social excursion, he and a couple of friends went tubing down the Yakima River, which runs for thirty miles along the bottom of Kittitas Canyon. The river is notoriously dangerous, and given the number of drunken college students from nearby Central Washington University who float it, it's a wonder more don't drown than the annual average of two or three. To the point: Young Alan, in a feat that would today be re-created as an episode of
Rescue 911,
pulled some wasted college freshman out of the water and saved her life by administering CPR. Her uncle was an aide to the Republican senator from Washington who recommended the young dogooder for the Air Force Academy. As if it could get any cheesier, the woman he saved was my mother. They dated most of my father's senior year in high school, married in the summer, and moved to Colorado in the fall of 1959.

Alan had had no time for sports and school hadn't challenged him. That changed at the academy. His scholarship gave him his first modest ration of free time, and rather than spend it with his new bride, he went out for the football
team. Never mind that he'd played only sandlot ball, he had tenacity and spunk. He played quarterback or cornerback. One of those.

If you compare pictures of the astronaut from his last year of high school with ones from his first couple of years at the academy, it's as if he went through a second puberty that corrected all the shortcomings left by the first. He was as skinny as me in high school. Wiry, though. Hauling around grape crates had given him biceps. Other than girth, the change can be seen in his eyes. Though his expression doesn't change much over a fifty-five-year series of pictures (I defy you to find one where he's smiling), the images from his Yakima days suggest resignation, as if he's accepted a life of manual labor and debt. But over the next couple of years, he acquires two items indispensable for heroes: a glint and a chin. I can't explain where he got either, but he breezed up the ladder of military rank as a result. All this success landed him—now a captain—in Vietnam where he flew more than sixty bombing missions. He performed this task well enough to be decorated several times. Apparently his bombs killed more people than anyone else's bombs. Don't even get him started on Vietnam. He's of the we'd-have-won-if-they'd-only-let-us school of thought. He returned, became a test pilot, and then was asked to join the space program. The rest, as they say, is history, though in this particular case, it is literally so. If you want to read more, visit your local library. They'll be glad to help you.

DeMouy's office was empty when I arrived Monday morning. He caught me, a few minutes later, on tiptoes peeking over the top shelves of his fern-covered file cabinet trying to discover from whence today's sounds of the jungle were emanating.

“Aren't you supposed to be somewhere, Steve?” he said.

“Anatomy. But I've got something for you.” I held up the fern I had bought on the way to school once I knew I was going to be late. “This one raised his leafy arm and asked me to bring him to fern heaven.”

“Bribery, the last recourse of the desperate,” DeMouy said, taking the plant from me. The counselor found a spot on a bookshelf behind his desk for the latest addition to his floricultural collection.

“You offend me, sir; this is just my way of saying thanks. This technique you call literotherapy—it's the only thing keeping me off the hard stuff.” Somewhere a macaw screamed. “So, tell me, which parts have you liked best?”

I wanted to know if he was really reading it or if he was another one of those grade-by-weighters.

“There have been so many good parts, where can I begin?” he answered. I viewed this as evasion.

“Did you like the part about me wanting to join the circus?” I asked.

“Yeah, that would have to be my favorite part,” DeMouy said.

I smirked.

“Relax, Mr. York. I read it.” He opened a drawer and tossed
me the five-page printout. I could see comments written in green ink throughout the text. Green ink: The counselor knows his ed psych. We students subconsciously view red ink as aggressive and critical. Green ink comments merely represent advice from a kindly friend. Yoda would write in green ink.

I was gratified to learn DeMouy had a playful side and pleased I had overcome my initial qualms about planting a ganja seed in his fern. He wouldn't, however, write me a note excusing my tardiness to class.

In what would become an annual event, Sarah and I traded locales for the summer. Most of my time in San Diego I spent as my alter ego, Yard Boy. I mowed lawns, pruned trees, and weeded flower beds for the rental properties that Mom's real estate office managed. While it was grueling work, it did pay significantly better than peddling Junior Mints. I needed the money, as it was the only way I was going to get a car of my own. I had rejected the astronaut's less-than-attractive alternative method.

His offer: I play football; he buys me car. Now, to hear him tell it, the greatest moments of his life were not spent bouncing around the lunar landscape; rather they were those brief instances in which he heard air rushing out of lungs as he separated Army pukes from pigskins. Football, he told me, required time and effort. It was almost impossible for a young man to devote the amount of time required by the sport and still hold down a job. Therefore, if I were to go out for the football team, he would understand how I might not
have time for a job, and he knew how we teens needed to have a few dollars in our pockets.

Incidentally, when the astronaut said he would buy me a car, he was talking serious automobiliage, here. I could have been parking right up there in Miata row. Of course, mangled corpses can't really enjoy the fuel-injected madness a hot little sports coupe offers. I hoped the old fella's desire to see me in cleats and pads simply meant he didn't know what football players are like in a large Texas high school: one eye in the center of the forehead, hair on their backs, fangs.

By the end of June I had saved almost thirteen hundred dollars. After weeks of circling potential Yorkmobiles, I found one that I knew I had to make mine. The initial attraction may have been our similar ages. We were both sixteen, the 1975 El Camino and I. She had a metallic purple paint job, an eight-track deck, and shag carpeting. Like a Transformer, she was half car, half truck. I spent twelve hundred dollars on the car and another hundred dollars on eight tracks at a used music store on the beach called Play It Again Sam's.

At the end of the summer, Mom decided she would ride to Texas with me to visit a friend (also a former Bride of NASA) for a couple days and then fly back to San Diego with Sarah. Thanks to overexposure to films like
Duel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
and
Easy Rider,
she had been appalled by the idea of her soon-to-be sophomore son driving solo across a region peopled by cult murderers, gunslinging crackers, and homicidal truck drivers. The drive should have given the former Mrs. York and me some “quality time,” but she was engrossed in some Danielle Steel novel. Driving was so
thrilling to me, especially in new terrain, that I didn't mind the silence.

What I did mind was the astronaut's absence when we pulled into Château Sparse. When we'd called from San Antonio, Sarah had said he was there, but when we arrived in Houston four hours later he had vanished. He had been married to the woman for over thirty years, but he couldn't even stick around to say hello to her.

Sarah made some feeble excuse for the old man. He really wanted to see Mom, she said, but he got called into work. Mom stayed at the Hyatt for the next couple days, but the astronaut wasn't able to fit her into his remarkably hectic schedule. I drove Mom and Sarah to the airport, so his avoidance of his ex-wife was complete.

Funny thing, the man was looking good; his skin was bronze—a hue I didn't believe we York males were capable of attaining. In a futile effort at making the house more of a home, Sarah had magneted to the fridge several photos she shot during father-daughter weekend boating trips. Before returning to California, she gave the astronaut and me framed enlargements of her two favorite prints. The one she gave her father was of a salamander. The poor reptile had the misfortune of choosing our boat as a spot to sun itself. Sarah had tried to catch it and ended up pulling its tail off. (The shot of the disembodied salamander tail was displayed appetizingly on the refrigerator.) The twenty-four- by thirty-six-inch print given to the astronaut features the panicked lizard pressing itself to the glass in desperate hopes of avoiding the madwoman with the camera. My print was of a swan, wings
stretched back, breaking the placid green of the lake. It was the only thing I hung up in my room.