Boys Keep Swinging

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  For my rocks, Kelly and Mark

  And my rolls, Josh and Brody

  I WAS BORN A SHOWMAN. For years, even my birth played out in my head as a grand entrance. I assumed my mother’s giant stomach had exploded in some public place, followed by a balloon drop, confetti cannons, and people celebrating in the streets. It would have been a mess, a gory birthday party, with a lot of cleanup involved, not to mention my poor mother would have had to have been put back together.

  I haunted all corners of my house, like a jazzy poltergeist with swinging hips and splayed hands. I terrorized my sister’s unsuspecting girlfriends. My favorite catchphrase, ironically, was “I looooooove women!” I was desperate for their revulsion. Ew, your brother is like . . . so gross. But then I would ratchet up the charm, a perfect little gentleman. Aw, he’s so sweet. Where’d you get those blue eyes, huh?

  In kindergarten, I told flat-out lies. I confessed that I was very sick, bathing in the concern of my classmates—and especially that of their mothers. God, sympathy was satisfying. One afternoon, my mom picked me up from school and my teacher said she hoped I would get better soon. My jig was up. “You can’t try to make people believe things that aren’t true,” my mom said afterward.

  But human pity was preferable to the distant regard my stuffed animals offered. They lined my bedroom shelves and did not bother to applaud my one-man shows, which I performed against the wooden footboard of my bed. No matter how loud I sang they just stared back. Tough crowd.

  My imagination was wild and irrational. The first time my mom took me to the doctor for my blood to be drawn, for some unknown reason I thought everyone would be wearing Victorian garb, that I’d be auctioned off to the highest bidder in some antiquated display. I was so sad, thumbing through a booger-ridden Mr. Happy book in the waiting room, thinking it would be the last time I saw my mother. I was relieved that there ended up being no auction, but the drab gray room into which they led me, where two ladies told me I’d feel something like a beesting, still wasn’t half as cool as the Dickensian scenario I had imagined. Unsurprisingly, I cried.

  My sisters would get their hair done at a beauty parlor that had a huge painting on its front window of a woman with giant, Medusa-like locks. “Is that what you’re gonna look like?” I remember asking just before they shut the backseat car door in my face. I was disappointed when they finally emerged from the salon, not with giant, freaky hairdos that could barely fit into the car but with simple, feathered blowouts. If only it had been my salon, they would have looked like super-vixens with ashen bushfires encircling their painted faces.

  Maybe that was why when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the first thing I could think of was a “hairdresser.” I loved going to the barber with my dad, feeling like a big boy riding in the front seat. My first haircuts were from a vampy woman outside the Phoenix suburbs by way of sleepy desert side roads. She had long black hair and smoked as she cut, a cigarette clamped between her lips while I sucked on my binky.

  Later, my regular barber spot was in the entryway of a Smitty’s grocery store. When I sat in the chair, a very tan, wrinkled man would ask me if I wanted “the G.I. Joe or the Mr. T?” Duh, the Mr. T: He had a Mohawk. My dad, as if he believed the barber were serious, tapped his shoulder and said, “Just a regular cut is fine.” I was crestfallen when we left. My hair looked like it always did.

  One day in a Stride Rite shoe store, an older, masculine woman wearing a polyester pantsuit found out I couldn’t tie my own shoes. She showed me the bunny-rabbit-ear method, making two loops and twisting them around each other. Suddenly I could tie them myself. I walked out of the store with a pair of lace-up Hot Wheels sneakers that she swore would make me run faster. On the playground, when I put them to test, it was total baloney. I ran no faster than I had in my old Velcro-fastened shoes.

  It seemed that everywhere I went, someone was up-selling a total dud. Whether it was some toy slime creature that didn’t secrete like it had in the commercial, or Michael Jackson not actually performing in Captain EO at Disneyland—it was just a 3-D movie of him that played all day long—the world was full of exaggerations. I felt gullible, and often embarrassed at my expectations of real magic. Sometimes I thought people could read my overeager thoughts, and it humiliated me.

  I didn’t understand that what I saw on TV wasn’t real. I stood paralyzed one Saturday afternoon, a dirty Cabbage Patch Kid dangling from my hand, as Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed Pink Floyd’s The Wall. They showed a clip of schoolkids walking into a meat grinder and getting turned into sausage. Where was that grinder, and what would cause me to fall into it? The image was now branded on my psyche, but so was that song. I needed to hear it again. I found my mom in her bedroom and did the best rendition I could, hoping she’d be familiar with it. What did “We don’t need no education” mean?

  Soon after, she took me to a plush multiplex to see the musical Annie. I’d been singing “Tomorrow” to the secretary in my dad’s office, to my friend’s mom, to anyone who would listen. The movie theater had gigantic glass windows in the front, and inside, red and orange velvet curtains and patterned carpets that stank of butter. Every theater door was a mystery; each one marked a new universe. But I was certain we would walk into the wrong theater and see something just as horrible as those kids falling into the meat grinder.

  Another time, my mother took me and my sisters to see Ghostbusters. As soon as the first specter popped out at the five-minute mark, the fabric of my reality unraveled even further. I dragged my mom into the theater lobby and, of course, cried. We went shopping in the adjoining mall while my sisters finished the film, and I watched as my mom flicked through a rack of leggings, the thin material in her fingers just like the scrim between our world and dimensions unknown. I was so scared that some hideous creature from hell would burst from behind the ruffle-neck maroon blouses and create total chaos.

  One single detail could now send me into an obsessive state of fear. There was a shot of someone’s hand in a bottling plant at the beginning of Silkwood: It seemed a harbinger of doom. The video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” played behind my eyelids when they closed, Tom Petty scooping up Alice in Wonderland’s insides as if they were a cake. I couldn’t sleep alone. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, pad into the hallway, and just stand there. The house was alive and breathing. I crept into my parents’ bed on my mom’s side. With a gentle hand she’d lead me back to my room and wait until I fell asleep. But sometimes she’d just give up and let me sleep next to her. That habit continued almost through high school.

  Still, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and was fascinated by what scared me. I would make my sisters give a play-by-play of Aliens or Gremlins. They were patient and skilled at breaking down the movies into acts, turning blockbuster thrillers into bedtime stories. I could browse forever in our video store. The VHS boxes were graphic and scary, and I hovered near their lewd cardboard cases until I was made to retreat to the children’s section, where I supposedly belonged. How I resented the woman at the counter. She always suggested I take home boring animal movies, or family westerns. I felt obligated and rented them to be polite, not wanting to hurt her feelings. At home, Phar Lap or The Golden Seal played while I sa
t alone and watched, bored. I hated the movies she recommended; there was never anything even resembling a Muppet, and the horses always died at the end.

  My nightmares were tempered by dreams of men. I thought of them holding me kindly. I wanted to fall asleep in their arms. While watching The Muppet Show with my sisters one evening, I turned to them and said that I was going to marry the episode’s guest host, Christopher Reeve. I imagined he would make a perfect husband, and wouldn’t it be great to be able to wrap my arms around his shoulders? My sisters were gentle but firm: Boys didn’t marry boys. My face flushed. It was the first time I remember feeling ashamed.

  At the cusp of the ’80s, Mesa, Arizona, was where the suburbs of Phoenix slowly transitioned into desert. It was a haven of RV parks, a simmering mass of gravel lawns and parking lots, pockmarked with newly constructed strip malls and chain grocery stores. New businesses seemed exciting only until the last of the grand-opening balloons popped, the dust wearing the sheen of the signs to scratched plastic.

  My family lived in a ranch-style house that my father had built in the ’60s. It sat on a square piece of land surrounded by orange groves and a cotton field, which was sometimes also a watermelon patch. The house was as Spielbergian middle-class as they came: yellow-patterned linoleum in the kitchen and foamy-looking olive-green shag carpeting in the bedrooms. Any hint of ostentation resided in the antiques my father had bought from an estate sale of some wealthy old-maid aunts of his. The Oriental rugs and oil paintings in their ornate frames made no sense next to our ’70s wallpaper and corduroy bedspreads, but from my low height, they were treasures from some other world, far from the baking desert.

  The popped top of my dad’s first Coors punctuated his days of hard work. My mom passed me the silver can, which I would deliver to him just in time for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. I’d lie at my dad’s side, content in the shadow of his satisfaction. He had done well for us, and if there were any stresses of not having enough money, I wasn’t aware of it. I would play with friends down the road, families with way too many kids in run-down houses sprinkled with cat pee. I never considered us rich, but to my friends nearby, my family probably seemed it.

  Both of my parents came from modest means, so there was very little extravagance other than Dad’s love for transportation and machinery. His main passion was planes, and he built boats and rejiggered old cars with his bare hands. Whatever money was spent on our leisure, it was accompanied by his own elbow grease and ambitious imagination.

  He was born Archibald Borders Sellards all the way back in 1928, just before the Depression, in California, just outside Los Angeles, which he remembered as a swath of orange groves divided by dirt roads. He did his best in school, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t learn to read. Turns out this was because he and his uncle had painted a whole house with lead paint when my dad was eight. Every day he’d be covered, colors running down his arms. No one realized at the time how badly it impaired vital learning skills. I always wondered growing up why my dad couldn’t spell very well.

  He dropped out of school in the seventh grade, opting instead to try and make money for his family’s survival. He took work filing down horseshoes. For a dime apiece, the cook at his old school’s cafeteria bought dead rabbits he’d shot. When he was twelve, he left with a circus, touring around California, his main task running the generator that powered all the lights in the tent. The circus traveled with one elephant, a chimpanzee, ring horses, and dancing girls. My dad drove trucks between gigs, having no license. It made him a careful driver for the rest of his life.

  It was all grueling, endless work—hard on a grown man, much less a thirteen-year-old with only the clothes on his back. One night, spilled battery acid ate through his pants, which he had to keep wearing until he found another pair. Eventually he graduated to spraying insecticide on lemon trees, riding on top of trucks, his head floating above the groves as he showered them in chemicals. He persevered month after month, and waited for any free afternoon that he could go observe the sky. He’d loiter at the airport, just to be in proximity to his real passion: airplanes.

  In 1943, the Rosemead airport, east of Los Angeles, was the perfect spot to get a job, small but active enough where he could be close to the planes and begin learning how to fly. The fifteen dollars a week he made gassing planes and starting propellers wasn’t half as valuable as the thirty minutes of flying lessons he’d get every Sunday. He then moved on to the tiny Palm Springs airport, where all of Hollywood came through, arriving to their desert getaways. Dad served and observed the famous and the rich, most of them friendly, but they must have seemed as if they came from another planet. Howard Hughes would land his four-engine with his entourage. My father would unload their luggage, exchange pleasantries, and watch them take off in a fleet of limos or in Hughes’s ’37 Packard.

  My father flew solo for the first time on his sixteenth birthday, the earliest he could get a pilot’s license. He then moved to Phoenix, which at the time had a population of only forty thousand. The government was unloading airplanes for real cheap from the war. My father teamed up with some buddies and they pooled together enough capital to start buying the planes that the government was dumping. Engines were inexpensive, so he used everything he’d learned and rebuilt the planes himself. From 1963 to 1986 they ran Globe Air with a fleet of bombers and brave pilots, fighting fires and crop-dusting with DDT. It was dangerous and sad work. They lost upward of fifteen men over the years, all friends working for my father.

  One of those guys, Bill Clark, had done a job up in Alaska, and his plane disappeared there months before he was to be married to Freida Jean Rector. She was a bubbly and hip young thing with a thick North Carolina drawl who had driven cross-country to Arizona from the Smoky Mountains to be with him. She wore miniskirts, smoked slender cigarettes, and sparkled with Southern charm. Now, her fiancé gone with no explanation. I imagine her for weeks after, smoking, her eyes dull, making pots of coffee, crying into the phone with her hope wilting. There wasn’t much closure; Bill’s family never had a funeral for him. Grieving, with her future uncertain, Freida got a job with Globe Air as a secretary.

  There, she met my handsome father, twenty years her senior, with two small girls and a teenage boy from previous marriages to women that he’s told me were a disaster. Being the first in Arizona to attempt firefighting by air had led to financial problems and a reliance on alcohol as self-medication that weren’t conducive to good marriages. He’s said to me, grinning: “You can’t blame those ladies for everything, just most of it.”

  Hoping that the third time would be the charm, Archibald and Freida eloped to the Little White Chapel in Vegas, no one else there but themselves. In the photograph, my mom sported a graceful updo, my father overgrown muttonchops, both of them with huge smiles on their faces. They’ve been happily married ever since.

  I’ve never liked the saying “Everything happens for a reason.” But what if that reason is yourself? Is it wrong that I’m thankful that my mom’s fiancé, the first love of her life, never returned from that fateful flight? I sometimes think of this alternate person that would have existed instead of me, a dream brother. I picture someone with my flaws and oddities ironed out, striding with ease through his normal, quiet life.

  Windi and Sheryl, my sisters from my dad’s second marriage, were nine and ten years older than I was, respectively, so by the time I was in kindergarten, their braces had come off to display sets of blinding white teeth. They were beautiful girls, with faces framed by coiffed brown hair out of a Nagel painting. I’d watch them get ready for a school dance, tucking and untucking the fronts of their shirts, trying their best to mimic the styles they saw on MTV, which was beamed into our home courtesy of the new miracle of cable.

  They knew I would believe anything and filled my head with false stories designed to fuel the flames of my anxiety. For example, they’d tell me I’d been found on the side of the road as a baby because some woman was tryin
g to give me away. Or Windi told me that if I got hair spray in my face, my eyes would turn blue and I’d die in a matter of minutes. Once I got some in my eyes and my screams ricocheted around the house; I thought I had mere moments left to live. Meanwhile, it never occurred to me that my eyes were already blue.

  My brother, Avery, was out of the house by then. He was twenty years older and got married as soon as he returned from a Mormon mission he had taken to the Philippines. My friends all had complex and brutal relationships with their brothers. Maybe because my father was older, I felt jealous and sad that I didn’t have a brother closer to my age.

  My father was fifty when I was born and I became conscious of his age when I was six. There was a Wednesday-evening church group that I attended, and one night everyone brought their fathers. I was initially excited, but when we arrived, all the other dads were so much younger. No one else had a father near as old as mine. I tried to send him home.

  We rode to and from his work on the airstrip, me in the back of his blue Datsun 280Z, crouched behind him in a kind of trunk with no seats, much less a seat belt. I had to lie flat, with my face propped up in my hands as he explained to me concepts that seemed abstract, like how an instrument wasn’t just something that made music. “See that phone booth?” He pointed as we drove by. “A telephone is an instrument too.” He thought about the world in a way that I had a hard time finding interesting. I didn’t share his fascination with machines and cars and boats.

  His face was serious. The lines of his rugged complexion, the result of years in the desert without sunscreen, pointed to a perpetual scowl. His observations came across in few words, but he had a big laugh on the occasions when it appeared. You could spot his distinct loping gait from across an airfield, hands greasy, the tattoos on his arms from boyhood blurred beyond recognition. All the same, we were buddies, and I loved spending time around his workshops and playing inside the old parked bombers.