My dad, huffing and puffing—he was a lifelong smoker—rumbled down the stairs, and followed him. I didn’t see either of them again for hours. After it was dark, when I was already in bed, I looked up to see my mom leading Micah into our room. My mom tucked him in bed and kissed him on the cheek. Despite the darkness, I could see he was filthy; smeared with dirt, he looked like he’d spent the past few hours underground. As soon as she left, I asked Micah what happened.
“I told him he wasn’t going to swat me,” he said.
“Did he?”
“No. He couldn’t catch me. Then he couldn’t find me.”
I smiled, thinking, I knew you’d make it.
CHAPTER 2
A couple of days after I sent Micah the information about the trip, the phone rang. I was at my desk in the office, struggling through another difficult day of writing, and when I picked up the receiver Micah began rattling on almost immediately.
“This trip is . . . amazing,” he said. “Have you seen where we’re going to be going? We’re going to Easter Island and Cambodia! We’re going to see the Taj Mahal! We’re going to the Australian outback!”
“I know,” I said, “doesn’t it sound great?”
“It’s more than great. It’s awesome! Did you see that we’re going on a dogsled ride in Norway?”
“Yeah, I know . . .”
“We’ll ride elephants in India!”
“I know . . .”
“We’re going to Africa! Africa, for God’s sake!”
“I know . . .”
“This is going to be great!”
“So Christine said you could go?”
“I told you I’m going.”
“I know. But is Christine okay with it?”
“She’s not exactly thrilled, but she okayed it. I mean . . . Africa! India! Cambodia! With my brother? What’s she going to say?”
She could have said no, I thought. They had two kids—Peyton was only a couple of months old, Alli was nine—and Micah was planning to leave for a month shortly after Peyton’s first birthday. But I was certain that Christine, like Cathy, understood that Micah needed to see me as much as I needed to see him, albeit for different reasons. As siblings, we’d come to depend on each other in times of crisis, a dependence that had grown only stronger as we aged. We’d supported each other through personal and emotional struggles, we’d lived each other’s ups and downs. We’d learned a lot about ourselves by learning about each other, and while siblings by nature often are close, with Micah and me, it went a step further. The sound of his voice never failed to remind me of the childhood we’d shared, and his laughter inevitably resurrected distant memories, long-lost images unfurling without warning, like flags on a breezy day.
“Nick? Hello? You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Just thinking.”
“About what? The trip?”
“No,” I said. “I was thinking about the adventures we had when we were little kids.”
“In Minnesota?”
“No,” I said. “In Los Angeles.”
“What made you think of that?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” I admitted. “Sometimes it just happens.”
In 1969, we moved from the cold winters of Minnesota to Inglewood, California. My dad had been accepted into the doctoral program at the University of Southern California, and we moved to what some might consider the projects. Smack dab in the center of Los Angeles, the community where we lived still smoldered with the angry memories of the Watts riots in 1965. We were one of only a few white families in the run-down apartment complex we called home, and our immediate neighbors included prostitutes, drug dealers, and gang members.
It was a tiny place—two bedrooms, living room, and a kitchen—but I’m sure my mom viewed it as a vast improvement over her life in Minnesota. Even though she still didn’t have the support of family, for the first time in two years she had neighbors to talk to, even if they were different from the folks she grew up with in Nebraska. It was also possible for her to walk to the store to buy groceries, or at least walk outside and see signs of human life.
Three Weeks With My Brother
It’s common for children to think of their parents reverentially, and as a child, I was no different. With dark brown eyes, dark hair, and milky skin, my mom seemed beautiful to me. Despite the harshness of our early life, I never remember her taking her frustrations out on us. She was one of those women who were born to be a mother, and she loved us unconditionally; in many ways, we were her life. She smiled more than anyone I’ve ever known. Hers weren’t those fake smiles, the kind that seem forced and give you the creeps. Hers were genuine smiles that made you want to run into her arms, which were always held open for us.
My dad, on the other hand, was still somewhat of a mystery to me. With sandy, reddish hair, he had freckles and was prone to sunburns. Among all of us, only he had an appreciation for music. He played the harmonica and the guitar, and he whistled compulsively when he was stressed, which he always seemed to be. Not that anyone could blame him. In Los Angeles, he settled into the same grueling routine that he had in Minnesota: classes, studying, and working evenings as a janitor and bartender in order to provide us with the basic necessities of life. Even then, he had to rely on both his and my mom’s parents to help make ends meet.
When he was around the house, he was often preoccupied to the point of appearing absentminded. My most consistent memory of my father is of him sitting at the table, head bowed over a book. A true intellectual, he wasn’t the kind of dad who liked to play catch or ride bikes or go hiking, but since we’d never experienced anything different, it didn’t bother us. Instead, his purpose—to us kids, anyway—was to be provider and disciplinarian. If we got out of hand—which we did with startling frequency—my mother would threaten us by saying she was going to inform our dad when he got home. I have no idea why the very notion terrified us so, since my dad was not abusive, but I suppose it’s because we didn’t really know him.
Our years in Minnesota had driven us together as siblings. For years, Micah, Dana, and I had been one another’s only friends, and in Los Angeles that continued. We shared the same bedroom, played with the same toys, and were almost always in one another’s company. On Saturday mornings, we huddled around the television to watch cartoons, and we could spend hours playing with action figures from the now defunct Johnny West cowboy series. Like G.I. Joe action figures, there were cowboys (The West family—Johnny, Jane, and the kids), soldiers (General Custer and Captain Maddox), an outlaw (Sam Cobra), and Indians (Geronimo, Chief Cherokee, and Fighting Eagle), as well as paraphernalia that included forts, cowboy wagons, horses, and herds of cattle. Over the years, we must have collected every item of the set three or four times over. We played with the figures, conjuring up one adventure after the next, until they literally fell apart.
Because my sister was the youngest, she tended to stay inside with my mom while my brother and I gradually began to discover the outside world. My parents seemed to believe—rather naively, I now think—that we’d be safe together no matter how dangerous the streets were, and allowed us to freely explore the neighborhood on our own before I reached the age of five. Our only requirement was to be home in time for dinner. Neither my mother nor father ever bothered setting limits on how far we could travel, as long as we upheld our end of the bargain, and we took this freedom to extremes. Wherever my brother went, I’d tag along behind him with a rapidly growing sense of hero worship. We’d spend our afternoons exploring run-down apartments, or visit with our adult female neighbors as they stood along the boulevard soliciting customers. We could endlessly watch teenagers doing car repairs in the parking lot, and sometimes sat on the steps with various gangs as they drank beer and made out with their girlfriends. It was great fun—there was always something to see and do—and even when occasional gunshots sounded in the distance, I don’t remember Micah or I ever being overly frightened by them.
For whatever reason, we were safe there. I suppose it’s because everyone, even gang members, knew that not only weren’t we a threat, we were probably poorer than they were. We were desperately poor. As kids, we were raised on powdered milk, potatoes, and oatmeal—I didn’t know milk came in liquid form until I headed off to school. We never went out to eat, visited museums, went to a ball game or even a movie. The car my dad had purchased to get to work and the university had cost less than a hundred dollars. Once we started school, we’d get one pair of shoes and one pair of pants a year; if they ripped, my mother would iron on patches and keep ironing more on until our jeans looked as if they’d been originally designed with knee pads. Our few toys—primarily Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, and the aforementioned Johnny West figures—had all been Christmas or birthday gifts; we gave up asking for anything we saw when we went to the store with my mom.
It’s only now that I realize that we were probably living well below the poverty line. We certainly didn’t know it at the time, nor, to be honest, did we care. And my mom wouldn’t have put up with our complaints, even if we did. My mom was a big believer in toughness. She hated whining, she hated moping, she hated excuses, and she was intent on eradicating these traits in her children. If we ever said something along the lines of, “But I want it,” her response was always the same. She’d shrug and reply evenly, “Tough toenails, tiger. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.”
Her views on “toughness” would make most contemporary parents shudder. When Micah started school, for instance, school busing was being used to force greater integration of the inner-city schools. As a result, the school down the street wasn’t open to him; instead, he had to walk nearly a mile to the bus stop—along busy avenues, through rough neighborhoods, with a shortcut through a junkyard. On the first day of kindergarten, she walked with him to the bus stop; the day after that, he walked by himself. Within a week, he told my mom that some older girls, seventh grade or thereabouts, but huge to a kindergartener, had cornered him in the junkyard and taken his milk money. Then they threatened him; they said that if he didn’t bring them a nickel every day, they were going to hurt him.
“They said they’re going to beat me up bad,” Micah cried.
There are a number of ways a parent could handle such a situation. My mom could have started walking him to school regularly, for instance, or walked with him one day, confronted the girls, and threatened to call the police if another incident occurred. Perhaps my mom could have found out who their parents were and talked to them, or found someone to carpool with. Maybe she could have even talked to someone at the school.
Not my mom. Instead, after Micah told his story, she rose from the table and left the room for a few minutes. When she returned, she was carrying an old Roy Rogers lunchbox; rusty and dented, it had been her younger brother’s years before. “We’ll put your lunch in this tomorrow, instead of a brown bag,” she said, “and if they try to take your money, just wind up and hit ’em with it. Like this . . .”
Cocking her arm like a lion tamer, she began swinging the lunchbox in wide arcs, demonstrating while my brother sat at the table watching.
The next day, my six-year-old brother marched off to school with his hand-me-down lunchbox. And just as they’d threatened, the girls surrounded him when he wouldn’t give them his nickel. When the first one charged, he did exactly as my mom had told him.
In our bedroom that night, Micah related to me what happened.
“I swung with everything I had,” he said.
“Weren’t you scared?”
With his lips pressed together, he nodded. “But I kept swinging and hitting them until they ran away crying.”
The girls, I might add, never bothered him again.
In 1971, we moved again, this time to Playa del Rey—another section of Los Angeles. For obvious reasons (the nightly gunshots began sounding awfully close) our parents believed it was safer for us than Inglewood.
I’d started kindergarten by then, but given the year separating us and the fact that Los Angeles continued to bus my brother, Micah and I found ourselves in different schools. While the students in my class resembled students that might be found in an Iowa suburb, Micah was bused to one of the schools in the inner city, and was the only white child in his class.
Still, in the afternoons, we were together, and we spent our time as we had in Inglewood, a couple of little kids with no fear of the world. We’d leave our apartment complex and spend hours going anywhere we wanted—we’d walk a couple miles down to the marina where we’d look at the boats docked in their slips or climb up the underside of highway bridges or utility poles looking for bird eggs, or explore vacant, decaying, or burned-out homes in search of something interesting that might have been left behind. Other times, we’d head behind our apartment complex, cross a few avenues, and hop a few fences to visit the high school. In the late afternoons, it was usually empty, and we used to love the wide-open fields, which were much larger than the ones at our elementary schools. We’d race or hide, or simply walk the hallways, looking into the classrooms. One day, we spotted a raven in the trees, and were instantly captivated. We began following it as it moved from tree to tree. After that, whenever we went to the school, we’d look for the raven, and suprisingly, we’d almost always find it. After calling to it for a while, we’d head off to do something else. Yet, soon enough, we’d see the raven again, in one of the trees near where we were playing. Pretty soon, we weren’t able to go anywhere near the school without seeing the raven. It was always around. The raven, we soon realized, was following us.