Après l'école.

In 1984, I lived in San Ramon, California. My parents were about to get divorced, my sister had run away from home at 15, and I was in the fourth grade. My best friends were a group of three brothers from a strict Christian household: Joe, James and John. Their parents were named Joseph and Mary.

Joseph had an enormous beard and worked for Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas' company. He had art boards propped up around the house that would be used in Return of the Jedi-- big boards with intricate paintings of the interior of the Death Star.

I would go to the brothers' house to play Atari, hang out in their backyard fort, climb trees and do other Christian-friendly stuff. For seamier times, I'd hang out with my other friend, Brad. Brad was a latchkey kid like me. He'd steal money from his mom's purse and buy us candy and sodas. Then we'd leaf through his dad's porn collection.

But Brad and the brothers were weekend friends. The interminable weekday afternoons-- between getting out of school and my mother coming home from work-- I spent alone. I would while away the hours after school by dumpster diving for Amway samples or shoplifting from the Safeway by the video arcade. And I figured out that if I worked a metal nail file in and out of the quarter slot of the newspaper machines that the quarters would spill out, Vegas-style. Then, it was off to play Ms. Pac-Man.

What I mostly shoplifted was candy bars-- five or six at a time, all different kinds. When I got home I'd unwrap them all and arrange them on a plate. I also had figured out that a certain combination of button presses on the cable box would tune in the pay channels. And so, each day after school, with my plate of candy bars, I would kick my feet up in front of Escapade, the precursor to The Playboy Channel. All by myself on Interlochen Drive.

Miss Neighborhood, 1987.

Journal Entry: Sunday, December 10, 2000

It was the late 1980's. Our neighborhood was typical of the stale hot part of California east of the San Francisco Bay. In our section of Concord, we had an Elvis impersonator, we had a retired HAM radio operator, even a recycler. We had schoolteachers. We had psycho sex offenders and soccer moms and soccer kids and kids who beat up soccer kids and men who beat up their soccer mom wives. We had a Naval weapons facility; it lay at the fingertips of an arm of water that stretched eastward from the Bay, double-jointed and impossible, made possible by blasting and dredging and money. Ships and trains arrived daily trafficking nuclear weapons to and from earth-covered bunkers, scattered with antelope and invisible from the air.


The yards of the houses in the town were dotted with all types of fruits and vegetables now seemingly exotic and even incredible to me as an assimilated Midwesterner: walnuts, peaches, plums, guavas, figs, pomegranates, kumquats, loquats, oranges, apples, grapefruit, Swiss chard, persimmons. It seldom rained. It was seldom windy. Lawns were watered daily, garbage picked up weekly, and every other Thursday at dusk, dozens of pounding, black helicopters descended to dump Malithion onto our homes to exterminate our fruit flies. The government recommended we remain indoors.


I lived with my mother, her fourth husband, Jeffrey, and a truckload of insecurities in an Army green rambler on Margo Drive. My parents drove matching Dodge Darts and worked at the same middle school in Walnut Creek. Apart from that they had nothing really in common, save for an interest in Louis L'Amour novels and Gewürztraminer. On Sundays we'd have waffles for breakfast and then cruise the flea market at the Solano drive-in. They'd look for Louis L'Amour novels and I would covet old hi-fl gear and Beatles LPs. Apart from that, we weren't a family.


The only one-on-one interactions I had with my stepfather were boots to my bed when I slept through my paper route alarm and stern warnings about door-slamming. He knew a guy over in Solano who invented a little rubber device to make trees grow straight and so after his janitorial shift at the middle school, Jeffrey would go work at Grow-Strait until quite late. Doing god-knows-what. The weekends saw him shut in the garage turning wood on an industrial lathe or manipulating band saws, drill presses and the like to produce bizarre dishes and implements.


Each morning for five years I sat on the tiled floor of the front entry and folded newspapers. The smell of newsprint and recycled rubber bands collided with the exhaust from my stepfather's bright yellow Dart as it drifted through the screen door as he left it running endlessly in the driveway. He was very particular about his car. Once out of the house, I enjoyed the still, dark neighborhood and stumbled around throwing my papers and inspecting the yards and cars to see what had changed from the day before. I studied the front page of the paper: the extended weather forecast, the headlines, the pictures. The ink built up on my hands and I wet them with the dewy grass, wiping them clean on my canvas bag.

______
There was a girl who lived on my route named Shelly Doorak. She went to Concord High and dated a boy who drove a white Camaro. She was kind of a bad girl and never looked at me when our paths crossed. At sixteen, she was the cutest girl in the neighborhood and had never said a word to anybody I knew. At the end of the month I went around to each house to collect the $7 subscription fee and! actually prayed, to some god, that Shelly would answer the Doorak's avocado green door. She never did, but one morning in late summer there was a bra lying on the welcome mat where the paper needed to go and I picked it up, a little white piece of cotton, and wondered about it. I became nervous and didn't know what to do with it... leave it on the mat? Throw it in the bushes? Wrap it up in their newspaper? I decided the best thing was to stick it in my bag and take it home. I hid it inside of a toy helicopter and every now and then I took it out and looked at it but usually I was afraid to, until one day it was gone and I was paralyzed with fear and guilt. Who had taken it? My mom? Was I in trouble? How did she think a little bra ended up in my helicopter? What was she doing looking in my helicopter?


I was fourteen and my sexual slate was clean. Squeaky-cleaa In fact it had not yet been unpacked from the box. Rumors were all around school about Shelly and her sexual exploits with various high school bad boys. Standing in the Doorack's dark front yard. forty papers in my shoulder beg and breathing on my cold fingers, I watched her pull on sweaters and make her bed and put on lip-gloss. Huey Lewis played on my headphones and I watched her talk on the phone, flip over cassettes in her boom box and fight with her mom. I watched her brush, curl, crimp, tease and blow-dry her hair. I saw where she hid her cigarettes and where she kept her socks. I was looking in on Shelly Doorak's life and knew things about her that even the white Camaro guy didn't know. When I'd see her smoking behind the grocery store on the way home from school I knew how many shirts she tried on that morning and the color of her underwear.


In the summertime the sun came up early and I lost my window to Shelly's life. I knew it would be months before I would know her again. The sun pinned our town down like a tanned wrestler. The hills turned to gold in the distance, the antelope danced around on the nuclear missiles and my parents consumed more Louis L'Amour and Gewürztraminer. I saw Shelly smoking by the dumpsters behind the store and wondered how many shirts she had tried on beibre school. The yellow Dart choked me, the alarm was ignored and the bed was kicked for three more months. The helicopters dumped cancer and we remained indoors, windows closed, air conditioners on. I wondered about my older sister who ran away from home and whether she had a boom box in which to flip tapes or a hair dryer wherever she was living. I waited and waited until the cold weather and daylight savings would again change my world.

Beginning at The Beginning.

I was brought up godless and I stayed that way. I don't understand why, if people really believe in god, they aren't running around screaming and yelling with shivers constantly running up and down their spines and why they'd be able to concentrate on anything as mundane as earthly tasks like programming the TiVo or blanching green beans? Like how I might feel if I saw a flying saucer in the woods or if my cat abruptly turned to me and said "it's Tuesday, don't forget the recycling." I'd go bananas. Yet people believe a WAY bigger deal exists than a talking cat and yet they're just like "Whatever"?

In 1985 I had the Back to the Future soundtrack on cassette and I'd fall asleep listening to the instrumental side while thinking about flying a remote controlled airplane (the object of my desire at that time). I remember thinking: if I ever get my hands on an RC plane, how will I EVER concentrate on ANYTHING ELSE? My life and every minute of it would be completely and utterly devoted to flying that plane! Imagine 100 years previous, just the notion of an airplane AT ALL probably made the Wright brothers (and the rest of humanity) feel the same way!

Yet the plane showed up (theirs, not mine) and the world kept on keepin' on. The running around and screaming probably only lasted a few days and though a major era was born, people still found a way to concentrate on blanching green beans. So I wonder. Maybe I need a grander analogy still. What if there really was a time-traveling DeLorean? Would that be enough to cause mass hysteria? Lawlessness? I just don't believe that ppl truly believe there's a god or an afterlife.

Anyway... how about that local sports team?