And yet the solicitous manner of our host family’s father, and some offhand reference to his sales territory, gradually reveals that this guy works for Dad and not the other way around, as any ten-year-old would conclude from our respective homes in Southern California and South Brook.
For the rest of the trip, I persuade myself that California is and always has been my home. At the Big A, I cheer for the California Angels, whose roster (Bobby Bonds, Bruce Bochte, Dick Drago) appeals to my love of alliteration. At Disneyland, Mom and Dad let me get a Space Mountain T-shirt and a mesh-backed hat with Mickey Mouse on the front. I assume this is Orange County camouflage, and I want to pass for a local. A two-hour wait in line at Space Mountain yields two and a half minutes of space-age carsickness, a short, strange ride through an alternate reality that evidently leaves Dad wanting more vehicular madness and alien culture, given his impulsive decision to alter our itinerary.
And so, after a brief stop in San Diego to visit their world-famous zoo—Joan Embery is not in, dashing our last chance to see a celebrity—Dad announces that we’re all going to Mexico. As with Space Mountain, there is another epic wait in an endless line. We present our documents (an E ticket at Disneyland, a driver’s license at border control), and for the first time in my life I am on what TV newscasters always call “foreign soil.” Mom is not pleased to be in Tijuana, but then she has never liked crowds or chaos, both of which are abundant here. When she joined Dad on a Mickey Mining trip to Rome, her fierce devotion to Catholicism was defeated by her aversion to mobs at Vatican City. She loathes Las Vegas and will never join Dad on his annual January pilgrimage to the Consumer Electronics Show there. A decade from now, Mom will attend the Summer Olympics in Seoul on a Mickey Mining boondoggle and tell Dad, “If the Olympics are held in Bloomington, I won’t attend them again.”
So Tijuana is a tough sell, made all the more difficult by our mode of transport there—“a Tijuana taxi,” Dad says with delight as the seven of us pile in, Dad riding shotgun, a rosary swinging from the rearview mirror as we rocket through the streets, Mexican pop blaring on the radio and white-knuckled Mom frantically searching her purse for her own rosary beads to clutch.
Careening through North America’s largest red-light district, Mom and Dad have an urgent conversation, and Dad—suddenly chastened—asks the driver to return us to our rental car, ringing the curtain down on my forty-five minutes abroad.
The next day, at LAX, the fever dream of this vacation about to break, I spot in our terminal a group of men with identical haircuts and identical facial hair, wearing identical satin tour jackets that identify them as members of Al Stewart’s band. And at the center of this entourage is Al Stewart himself, giving us a certifiable celebrity sighting in the final seconds of our vacation, in the tail end of summer, in the Year of the Cat, though to me it will forever be the Year of California.
Back in Bloomington, Mom gets the vacation photos developed. Dad travels with a Kodak Instamatic, just as he travels the world with his Super 8 movie camera. If he had a baseball card, the back of it would read “Don enjoys photography.” It will be years before I discover how long he has nurtured this compulsion.
After his trip to San Francisco as a five-year-old, Dad saw his father a second time, in Chicago, where Jack Rushin was again hawking his old wares at the Chicago Railroad Fair of 1948. Jack asked his son what he wanted to be when he grew up. Dad, now a seventh-grade boy—only a year older then than I am right now—thought for a moment and said, “A promoter.”
So powerful is a boy’s urge to be like his father that it doesn’t even require the presence of the father.
The camera is Dad’s Rosebud, though he’ll never say so explicitly. All he says is this: “In seventh grade, when I was living in a trailer in Fort Wayne, after my mother’s second marriage to Ted Dixon, she said to me, ‘Your father is in town. Do you want to go with him to Chicago?’ Well, hell, I’d never been anywhere, so I said, ‘Sure.’ We stayed downtown at the Maxwell House, I think. In those days they had these big boxy cameras, and I saw a used camera in a secondhand store window and my father saw that I was admiring it. And he bought me that camera. I don’t know if I ever took a single picture with it. We spent a couple days in Chicago, he drove me back to Fort Wayne, and that’s the last I ever saw of him.”
Dad is in hardly any of our California pictures or any of our other family photos, because he’s always the one taking them. It’s his effort to preserve in amber these moments with his children, as if he’s pinning a butterfly to a page.
10.
Play That Funky Music, White Boy
As California expatriates now living in Bloomington, Tom and I split the twenty-seven-dollar cost of a lime-green skateboard with space-age polyurethane wheels that can roll over any sidewalk debris like a panzer tank. Thirty minutes after we walk out of Westwood Skate and Bike, I’m standing at the top of the tallest hill in Bloomington, watching Tom go bombing down the sidewalk, a vertical descent of concrete, high above the parking lot of Normandale Community College, whose various disparaging nicknames include Harvard on the Hill, Cornell by the Creek, and Thirteenth Grade.
“I’m going to UCLA,” seniors at Lincoln High School like to say. “University Closest to Lincoln Area.”
Tom is halfway down the hill, leaning into the breeze at a ski jumper’s angle, when a polyurethane wheel meets a moderate-sized pebble and the wheel stops instantly. The skateboard skids but Tom continues headlong down the hill at forty-five miles an hour, now without a skateboard beneath him. He breaks his fall with his right forearm, which snaps in half like a piece of chalk. Tom lies in the grassy median between the sidewalk of West 98th Street and the campus of Normandale Community College, a.k.a. Princeton on the Prairie, attempting (with the fingers at the end of his unbroken arm) to gingerly probe his brand-new wounds. And those wounds are manifold. Angry and red. He looks like one of the lepers that Saint Damien of Molokai tended to in my Book of Saints, except that Tom is floridly issuing all the swear words I have ever heard and many that I have not.