Luckily, one of the counselors at the facility recognized Steve’s bright mind—which must have been like spotting an orange jellybean in a bowl of green ones. He ordered Steve to go to the small library every morning, find a book, then take it outside and sit under a tree on the big lawn the rest of the day. For one solid year, day in and day out, Steve sat under that tree and read. From Dickens to Hemingway, Steinbeck to Twain and Tolstoy. Devouring book after book.
Steve had spent much of his childhood in institutions, not unlike my grandmother. And whether in a military school or a facility for the mentally challenged, there was always a list of rules, a strict set of enforced boundaries, walls that held him in and doors that locked him out. Steve refused to surrender, refused to play by those rules wherever they were. He went in the door that said Exit and left through the door that said Enter. Forever in deep revolt against the world that tried to tell him in what tempo he had to march, starting when he was only four.
A year or so after being released from the facility, he intercepted me at a school football game, jumped right into step as I walked to the snack bar to get drinks for the girls, who were waving at me from the bleachers. Steve began the conversation by saying that his friend wanted to meet me, then pointed to a boy waiting in the stands, but since that sounded like the prelude to a humiliating prank, I shied away. He kept right on talking, and by the time we’d completed fifteen laps around the snack bar, he’d forgotten about his friend’s attributes altogether and focused entirely on his own. Long after halftime was over, I continued to sit on an empty bench—snackless—with persistent, determined, gentle Steve.
Steve’s grad night 1962.
I didn’t know any boys, other than my brother—had never been friends with a single one. There had been the awkward parties in the seventh and eighth grade, gatherings where everyone danced to Paul Anka singing “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” as the parents hovered in the kitchen. Times when we actually played “Spin the Bottle” and everyone smelled of Hershey’s Kisses, not human ones. Even the distanced flirtations in the ninth grade never included having an actual conversation. Every boy’s hand felt sweaty and sex was described using baseball terms, as though reaching home base was more for the bragging rights than anything else. But not Steve. We talked and talked because he wanted to know me and needed to tell me how filled with feeling he was. He seemed like someone who knew his way through the woods and whether he did or not, I felt safe to wander out beyond where I had been before. If my mother was my backup generator, then Steve was my flashlight, illuminating what was right in front of me.
He instantly became a member of my family—not because they invited him in; they weren’t like that. He simply made room for himself, forming a solid friendship with my brother, who also didn’t have many friends; performing athletic antics with my little sister; staying up late in the night to talk philosophy and literature with my mother—later on getting drunk right along with her. Jocko seemed to get a kick out of Steve, although he still tried to belittle him, like he did the rest of us. But to survive his complicated life, Steve had developed a wily, honest charm that even Jocko couldn’t penetrate. He was going to find a way into my life, no matter what. If the door was locked, he’d climb in my window or crawl through the dog door. He wanted a family and I was it.
And for the first time I heard myself verbalize my feelings, an endless stream of verbiage about Dick and Baa, Ricky, and slowly, bit by bit, about Jocko. Steve never backed away from emotion; to the contrary, he thrived on it, would push to find it—in everyone. He had an intuitive sense of anyone’s despair and like a hound dog on the trail of fugitive feelings, he’d root them out, lock his focus on the injury, then comfort and soothe. I had never told anyone anything, convincing myself my life wasn’t any different from any other little girl’s. But Steve’s concern told me it was different and since his own childhood had not been a skate in the park, I trusted his perspective. Because he was with me, I began to feel what I had been afraid to feel alone. And by helping me, he, in turn, felt stronger himself.
I was fifteen and a half when Jocko returned and saw the tract home we now owned, an obvious demotion in the world. The El Caballero house was compact, a one-story place that had very little yard in the front and even less in the back, but Jocko took one look at it and immediately started building a swimming pool. I mean, he literally started shoveling dirt, and only after many days of shirtless digging did he finally decide to hire a professional pool contractor to complete the job. When the dust settled, we had a swimming pool that practically butted up against the sliding glass doors to the backyard. You could almost jump into the pool from the living room, without ever stepping outside. But since I had my own bedroom—which was connected to my sister’s by a small bathroom—I thought it was perfect.
Not long after his return, when I was sound asleep in bed, lying on my side under the window I always kept open, I was suddenly pulled awake by the smell of booze oozing from someone’s pores. It was Jocko, trying to worm his body next to mine, fumbling with the blanket I had tightly wrapped around me. We were no longer in the Libbit house; the upstairs bedroom was gone (though it has never left my life), and I’d lived for months without the on-edge feeling of his presence. But now, instantly it was back and I couldn’t move. I gripped the covers, holding them in place while I played possum, and as I pretended to be asleep, he wiggled up close, whispering something I couldn’t understand. I held my breath—not only out of fear but to avoid the sickening smell of his drunkenness.
And then one night some piece of me that had been quietly, wordlessly growing in my brain finally ripped out of my self-imposed fog and took center stage. Rage. Jocko and I met nose-to-nose, just as we had when he swept me off my feet at the age of four.
It had all begun innocently when I’d asked permission to go out, something that by then hardly needed clearance, and as Steve waited for me in the small foyer off to the side, talking softly to my brother, Jocko began to flare.
“I have the ability,” he slurred at me. “I have the ability to see your Achilles’ heel, little lady, everyone’s Achilles’ heel. That one thing about people… about you… and if I told you, it would destroy you.”
“What are you talking about? What does that mean?” I tepidly threw back after enduring twenty minutes of his incoherent rant while sitting quietly on the sunken-in sectional. Across from me sat my mother, cross-legged on the floor with her swaying torso propped against the coffee table, barely able to keep her head up. I wanted to look at her, but I didn’t want to see how repulsive she was, so I didn’t.
“You little smart-ass, listen to me. You think I can’t tell you things you don’t want to hear? Things you can’t hear! Things that you could not bear to hear! You think you know anything? ANYTHING?!” He stood up over me in a familiar stance of power and intimidation as my mind frantically searched for what it was that could destroy me.
“I have the ability to tell you what you could not stand to know about yourself.”
Without thinking or even believing my words, I blurted, “That’s not true!” And then, said it louder: “That’s not true!” Suddenly, I felt like a cuckoo clock whose hands hit midnight and all the cogs and gears automatically fell into place.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I dared. “You don’t have any abilities… to do anything. You are a fool and a failure.”
The room turned red, bright blazing red. I rose from where I sat perched on the edge of my childhood, rose up through the years of fear, fury, and longing, of confusion and love. I stepped onto the coffee table and there we were again, eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose.