Some mornings after Saturday cartoons, Tom and I descend to the basement, still in our pajamas, and lace up the sixteen-ounce boxing gloves that Dad acquired in the army. We throw wild haymakers at each other, swinging as hard as we can, always aiming for the head, never the body. Dad films one of the bouts with his Super 8 camera. A single frame reveals my face collapsing sideways like an accordion as Tom’s roundhouse right connects in a furious blur.
For Dad, prizefighting is a welcome alternative to TV, which he assumes is more likely than the boxing gloves to deliver brain damage. In February of 1970, New York City mayor John Lindsay says that advertising nudges children toward drug addiction, even before they’ve reached school age. Lindsay tells a gathering of city school principals that the average child will see eight thousand hours of TV before he or she enrolls in school. That child, the mayor says, will be told “to relax minor tensions with a pill; to take off weight with a pill; to win status and sophistication with a cigarette; to wake up, be happy, relieve tension with pills.” Truth be told, everything on TV looks good and glamorous, be it Martini & Rossi on the rocks or the come-on “How about a nice Hawaiian Punch?” This question, like the offer of a Hertz Donut, is often met with a real punch on the playground. Even the dog food—the glistening Gaines-burgers, the moist Chuck Wagon in gravy—looks good enough to eat. “Schools,” Lindsay says, when he’s really blaming television, “are becoming the training ground for the next generation of addicts.”
My parents now know from these daily dire news reports that TV is conspiring against me, and against all the other kids in South Brook. Mine is not the only mom snapping off the TV in mid-program and shooing her children from the house.
And while the only pills I’m jonesing for right now are Flintstone vitamins and the only cigarettes I crave are of the candy variety, I am given to anxious crying jags (when I don’t get my way) and fits of pants wetting (even when I do). For a time I insist during long car rides that we stop for gas only at Gulf stations. Their blue-and-orange logo soothes me in a way that even the green brontosaurus logo of the Sinclair stations cannot.
It could hardly be otherwise. I was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 1966, the year Keebler moved its headquarters there, presumably to a hollow tree staffed by elves. It was a happy coincidence that this large purveyor of advertising aimed at children arrived at the same time I did, and in the same place, just when color television could fully convey to us the psychedelic, pharmaceutical beauty of Trix, Fruity Pebbles, Kool-Aid, and Kaboom.
By 1969, when we moved to Bloomington, television was already singing me to sleep with its moon-landing lullaby. TV is a security blanket, not altogether different from the Sears Orlon blanket on my bed—warm, fuzzy, narcotizing, vividly colored, and crackling with static electricity.
3.
When You Comin’ Home, Dad?
We settle into an easy domestic routine in Bloomington. Most evenings around six, we hear Dad’s car sighing in the driveway. Mom goes into the bathroom, opens the top drawer of the vanity, retrieves her lipstick, applies a fresh coat, looks in the mirror, and lightly presses her fingers to her hairdo. She kisses Dad when he walks through the door.
Dad sets down his briefcase in the same place every night, beneath the wall-mounted telephone in the kitchen. The phone is banana-yellow and the property of Northwestern Bell. It is literally a ringing endorsement of American engineering and ingenuity. Its receiver feels solid and purposeful in my hand, like a five-pound dumbbell. It’s tethered to the base unit by fifty feet of coiled cord, so that I can follow it like a miner’s lifeline around corners and down the hall to find who is tying up the line.
If I accidentally bump into it while running through the kitchen, the phone rings out with a single ding, like the bell in a boxing match that signals the start of a fight.
Mom carries the phone cord in her free hand as she talks, like a singer on TV strolling the stage while manipulating the microphone cord. She occasionally gets so wrapped up in these phone conversations with her “cronies,” as Dad calls them, that she finds herself tied up in the concertina wire of the phone cord, and a series of pirouettes is required to extricate herself. Once a week Dad takes the phone off the hook and lets the receiver dangle from the cord. That heavy receiver looks like an explorer caught in a vine trap, spinning this way and that, until the cord finally spins itself out and untangles.
Mom makes me commit our phone number to memory. “Eight-eight-eight, two-eight-seven-two,” she says. “Can you remember that? In case of emergency?”
I say it so fast it sounds like something else entirely: “Ay-day-date, too-weight-seven-two.”
“Again.”
“Ay-day-date, too-weight-seven-two.”
“Perfect.”
What kind of emergency she has in mind, I cannot say. Another seizure? I’ve heard her—through the kitchen door, after dinner, over the gentle thrum of the dishwasher, the soothing gurgle of the rinse cycle—say to Dad, “He could swallow his tongue.” I don’t want to swallow my tongue. And without a tongue, how can I call Mom—from a neighbor’s kitchen or while coming to consciousness in a hospital room—and tell her I’ve swallowed my tongue? I hold my tongue between my thumb and forefinger and try without success to say something.
At least I can dial the phone now and hand it off to a tongue doctor to deliver the terrible news. And so I drift off at night, repeating “Ay-day-date, too-weight-seven-two” until I can literally recite it in my sleep.
After Dad kisses Mom and relieves himself of his briefcase, he climbs the stairs to his bedroom to change out of his suit and tie, shedding the cares and work clothes of the day. Then we sit down to dinner, knee-to-knee and elbow-to-elbow, beneath a hanging light fixture. It’s a single bulb concealed in a white frosted globe wreathed by fruit slices, alternating wedges of lemon and lime and orange. The fruit appears to be in orbit around the sphere, like the birds that circle the heads of cartoon concussion victims.
We all make the sign of the cross and Dad calls on one of us to say a rote, robotic grace: “Bless us O Lord for these thy gifts…” One night, years from now, I’ll say after grace: “Shouldn’t it be ‘Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts’? Because ‘Bless us O Lord for these thy gifts’ doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re right,” Dad will say. “I never thought of it.” And then he’ll call me what he always does: “Our wordsmith.”
Regardless of what Mom has made tonight from her steel box filled with recipes on index cards—salmon patties, three-way chili, or chipped beef on toast, which Dad fondly recalls from his army days as SOS, or Shit on a Shingle—we’re expected to clean our plates. Dad leaves no trace of food on his. There is a glistening bone where a pork chop used to be. He eats potato skins and orange rinds. Apples are reduced to a stem and seeds.