Suddenly he stood looming over our giggling group. And as I introduced my stepfather to the first and only boy I’d ever invited into the house, Jocko turned to me with a sly look and the interrogation began. “What the hell have you got on your face, smart-ass?”
I was not allowed to wear lipstick, ever. I knew that, but since all the other girls wore it, when I was with them, I sometimes did too. Usually I was careful to wash it off, terrified to be caught behind enemy lines with Revlon on my face, but this time I’d forgotten and I got caught. I sat stunned on the sticky Naugahyde cushion, my mind began searching for possible excuses: I was in dress rehearsals for a play, I was testing it for a friend, my lips were really chapped so I grabbed the only thing I could find. Yet only a weak “I don’t have anything on my face” dribbled out of my bright pink mouth. I could usually lie like a pro, not because I ever had anything to hide—well, except lipstick—but because I liked lying to him. If he wanted the truth from me, he wasn’t gonna get it. He could ask if I’d had orange juice that morning and even if I had, I’d tell him it was apple. This time, however, I had actually broken a rule and needed a good lie. But I just sat there, so flooded with embarrassment that everything went white in my mind and I couldn’t think.
Desperate to show everyone—most especially this poor bewildered boy—what a lying sniveler I was, Jocko went to the sink, wet a dishrag, loaded it with soap, and as my mother stood silently at the stove with her hand over her mouth, proceeded to wash my face in front of all those who could bear to watch. He needed to beat me in whatever game this was.
Mom, where are you? Even now I want to call out to you. I want to look up and see you coming to help me. Gathering up these memories, forcing myself to look at ones that have been lying out in the open the whole time, I don’t know what to think. I’ve adored you all my life. But I’ve camouflaged the truth, fiercely believing my own fairy tale about you. I dressed you in clothes borrowed from the emperor, ones that didn’t actually exist, and during those important years you abandoned me. I don’t understand. I don’t want to discover that the piece I’ve been looking for is something I don’t want to see, I’ve never wanted to see… my anger toward you. I still need to hold on to you. Please help me to see something else.
I have a stack of letters Jocko wrote to my mother at different times during their marriage. Letters I’m sure she never wanted me to read, yet she didn’t rip them to shreds and flush them down the toilet, so she must have known that they’d eventually land in my box of puzzle pieces, helping me to see her and put it all together. I look at them now with my eyes squinted, my grasp light, ready to drop the onionskin airmail pages if I feel I need to take a break—maybe a quiet jog to the nearest fog bank. I’m surprised to read Jocko’s words, constantly pleading for her love, frantic for her approval, while she keeps him waiting for her answers. And though I have none of the letters she finally did write in return, I have a few pages of her journal writings, sometimes typed on an electric typewriter, sometimes written by hand in a spiral notepad. But there are so few entries—dashed off in a disorganized, misspelled way—it leads me to think that she put her feelings on paper only when she was at an overload point and blurry with booze; other than that, she kept her real anguish locked away.
On her private pages she nonchalantly writes that because we now had no money, she was faced with the overwhelming task of selling the Libbit house and finding us somewhere else to live as quickly as possible, while Jocko vanished. Hired to play the villain in the film Tarzan the Magnificent—which starred Gordon Scott and was being shot in Africa—Jocko had decided to leave weeks earlier than the production needed him. Baa writes that he had to leave, that he couldn’t watch, that he found it too painful to witness everything, all his cherished possessions, dissolve. And so, during the next few months we packed up our belongings and moved from our sprawling house in Encino to a small home in, yes, it’s true… Tarzana. Everything seemed to disappear at once: the house, the Cadillac, and for a while, Jocko.
Unlike the law stating that I couldn’t wear lipstick until I was five feet tall (which didn’t happen until 1963), one of my stepfather’s ironclad rules doesn’t seem completely unreasonable in retrospect. This edict—which Jocko had repeated regularly and emphatically for years—pertained to dating: I was not allowed to do anything that resembled a date, could not go anywhere with a boy alone, until I turned fifteen years old. But I was not quite fifteen when I started the tenth grade and met a boy. And even though I was terrified of Jocko’s scrutiny and avoided inviting anyone to my house, miraculously this boy walked right in, mowing the lawn for Jocko, doing the dishes for Baa, making everything seem easy. So, two days before my birthday, when I hit fourteen years and 363 days, before we moved from the Libbit house and before he departed without a word, Jocko allowed me to go to the movies with Steve.
Steven Craig Bloomfield was born in Fargo, North Dakota, a year and a half before my birth. His father abandoned his family when Steve was only a few months old, never initiating any contact with his son again. Steve then grew up under the scrutinizing eye of his mother, Glory Rose, who was a hard-edged, exacting businesswoman, perhaps because she had to be. And maybe she placed her four-year-old son in a military boarding school because she felt she had to, felt it was the only option she had. Maybe that’s true. But at four?
When Steve was thirteen he no longer went to a military school but attended Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, which at that time was both junior and senior high. Finally free from scratchy wool uniforms, he joined up with a little band of Valley guys who got their kicks from pushing parked cars over whatever cliff was available, occasionally getting lucky when the car landed in someone’s swimming pool. On a smaller scale, they’d fold wads of dog shit into the daily newspaper, set it on fire, then leave it on a stranger’s doorstep after repeatedly ringing the bell. You can imagine what happened when the victim answered the door and began stomping on the package hoping to extinguish the flames.
Never comfortable being one of the gang, Steve split off from that band of merrymakers and started breaking into houses. But not to do any harm. He would find an unlocked window or crawl through the dog door and walk around the home, never actually stealing anything but looking in people’s drawers and closets, or rearranging the furniture the way he thought it should be, then sitting in the house for a while, as if he lived there, always departing through the front door. It was a home, with a family, something Steve didn’t have.
When he was finally caught, Glory found a way to keep her son from being sent to Juvie Hall (a juvenile correctional facility) by agreeing to have him imprisoned in a different institution for a year: a boarding school for children with learning disabilities. Maybe that too was the only option she had, I don’t know. But at the time, the term learning disability could include a whole range of things, so among the students were kids with varying forms of autism and borderline mental health issues, like the overweight fourteen-year-old boy who felt compelled to save all his bodily fluids. There were kids with different degrees of brain damage along with a few whose parents were simply too busy to deal with them.