The Happiest Days of Our Lives (5 page)

Racing down the sidewalk, lying headfirst on my skateboard. Yes, I cracked my chin, and yes, I have the scar.

Getting a drink from the hose. Why does that chemical, vinyl, rubbery water taste so good? And is it really that cold? To this day, I love a drink from the hose when I’m working in the yard, even though it’s just as easy to walk into the kitchen and fill up a cup.

The barefoot dash across the parking lot, stopping at least once on the white painted lines before making it into the cool Thrifty drugstore, where ten-cent scoops of double chocolate malted crunch awaited. The cool linoleum and slightly dry-but-cool air-conditioned air inside is as much a part of summer as swimming and staying up late on weeknights. It was especially wonderful if a day in the swimming pool and chlorine-burned eyes put little halos around all the lights inside and made each breath of cool air burn my chest just a little bit.

Stargate, Mr. Do!, Super Pac-Man, and Gyruss at Sunland Discount Variety and Hober’s Pharmacy (they’ve blurred together in my memory), grabbing sips of a Slush Puppy between levels. I can still see the Slush Puppy cup sweating on the machine next to my hand while I played.

“Wanna go ride bikes? I have cards to put in the spokes!”

“Cool! We’ll race up to the whoop-de-dos by the wash!”

I was surprised to realize that in nearly all of my childhood memories, it’s hot, it’s summer, and it’s smoggy.

An older couple lived down the street from me. They had a pomegranate tree in their front yard, and if you asked them nicely you could pick one and take it home with you, where you’d smash it open on the curb and spit the seeds into the street (or at each other). One summer, they ended up with a few hundred boxes of mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches, and they gave thirty or so boxes to my parents, who had one of those giant freezers that opened on the top out in the garage. That was the same summer that we got Atari 400 and I got completely hooked on Star Raiders.

I grew up in a tract home in the Northeastern San Fernando Valley. All the homes around us were some variation of stucco with asphalt shingle roofs and dark wooden shutters stuck onto the sides of the street-facing windows. If you’ve seen
E.T.
, you’ve seen houses just like the ones I grew up in. Another 1980s film that features a house just like mine is
Poltergeist
. This is the only movie that still scares the everlivingjesusfuck out of me, and every time I hear Kaja Goo Goo’s “Too Shy,” it reminds me of the afternoon I watched it with my older cousins, stretched out on the floor of our den after swimming in our pool all morning in the middle of summer.

The idea was to watch the very scary movie in the light of day, so that by the time night rolled around, any residual terror would have been washed away by whatever casserole we had for dinner…but it didn’t quite work out that way. Now, you damn kids today, who grew up with the MTV and the VH-1 and the MTV2 and your baggy pants and your coffee-can exhaust pipes don’t remember this, but back in the early ’80s, there was this thing called ON TV. It was one of the first cable movie channels (SelecTV and Z Channel are the other two I remember) and predates HBO. Sometimes, between movies, they’d run something called ON Video Jukebox where they’d play these things that were like concert films and often had little stories and cool grass valley switcher video effects.

To ensure that the top-loading, portable (less than 50 pounds and measuring close to 18 inches square and five inches deep) VCR’s timer function captured the entire program, my dad would set it to start recording five minutes before the show was set to start and end five minutes after. This resulted in catching ON Video Jukebox pretty regularly, and before
Poltergeist
started, there was this band singing about being shy. I can still see and hear my dad as he stood in the doorway from the den to the pool, silhouetted by the glare of the midday sun (thankfully—my dad insisted on wearing a bikini Speedo throughout my entire childhood, regardless of how many of my friends were over to swim), as he said, “They call them ‘Kaja Goo Goo’ because they sound like they’re singing baby talk,” before cracking up at his own joke and disappearing into the glare seconds before we heard him splash into the pool.

Poltergeist
started up, and I instantly noticed how much the house and neighborhood in the film looked like mine. As the movie went on, I noticed other things that were just like my life: a little sister with a terrifying clown toy, a tree just outside my bedroom window, a swimming pool under construction a few houses over, quasi-hippie parents, and Zelda Rubenstein standing in the middle of my living room hollering about going into the light.

Well, most of that, anyway.

The movie terrified me so much, because it all seemed so plausible and looked so much like my neighborhood, that I put Amy’s clown toy in the garage (on top of the freezer with its bounty of ice cream sandwiches, where it was safely out of our house and in the perfect position to scare off any other kids who entertained notions of sneaking one or two out when nobody was looking) before I went to bed, where I slept with the light on. For several nights.

Those memories, and a hundred others, flooded over me like a burst dam in the fifteen minutes it took to drive from the freeway to Ryan’s class along streets that were at once familiar and alien, as memories twenty-five years distant struggled to reveal themselves through the progress of the last two decades…. like the time when I was eight and I didn’t have the courage to tell Kelly that it wasn’t right to shoot a dove on a telephone wire with his BB gun. I watched in horror as he fired. A little poof of feathers burst out of the dove’s side before it flew away.

That haunts me to this day.

my mind is filled with silvery star

      
Just like
close your eyes and then it’s past
, this felt like too much of a list, and not enough of a story, to include in the book. My editor convinced me that, if we put them next to each other, it would provide a nice little break toward the middle of the book. I think he was right, and I’m glad we kept it.

Y
ou can learn a lot about someone from the songs they listen to, especially if that person is like me and music is much more than just background noise. As an exercise one afternoon, I put my iPod on shuffle and wrote up the immediate—and often most powerful—memory associated with each song. As much as my elementary and middle school years are dominated by sense memories associated with video games and places, my high school memories are inextricably intertwined with pieces of music.