Galleons laden with jewelry and threatened by pirates sailed through treacherous seas in the gold-on-blue design of Walt's rabbit-feet pajamas. He would hold the strap attached to his rocking horse's ears and mouth, lifting himself onto the little leather saddle. One cracked green glass eye shone out of the right side of Silver's head. His mouth, once bright red and smiling, had chipped away to a tight-lipped, unpainted pout. His nose, too, was bruised, with gashes for nostrils. Silver had a brown mane, which, extending from the crown of his head nearly to his waist, was made up of Walt's grandmother's discarded wigs glued to the wood. Wrapping the reins around his fist, Walt would slip his feet into the square stirrups that hung from the horse's waist. Walt would bounce up and down to set Silver in motion, lean forward, press his lips to the back of his horse's rough neck, and exhort him to charge. When Silver pitched forward, Walt would scoot up toward the base of the horse's spine, and when Silver swung back, Walt would let go of the leather strap and lean back as far as he could. Walt would make the rocking horse lurch crazily toward the far wall by squeezing his knees into wood and jerking his legs forward. Then he'd twist his hips and bounce until it felt warm under him, bump up against the smooth surface of the seat until his whole body tingled. He'd buck back and forth so it hurt, in a way, and he wouldn't know what to do with this ache.
From age eleven until age fifteen Walt did little else but play basketball all afternoon and evening, and when it grew too dark to see the rim, he played by the light of the street lamp. He played on school teams, on temple teams, in pickup games, for hours alone, with friends, against friends, with people he'd never seen before and never saw again, with middle-aged men wearing college sweatshirts who liked to keep their hands on his ass as they guarded him, with friends' younger brothers who couldn't believe how good he was, with UCLA Bruins keeping in shape during the summer who told him he might make it, with coaches who told him the future of their jobs rested on his performance, with the owners of a pornographic bookstore who asked him if he wanted to appear in an art film, with his father, who asked him whatever happened to the concept of teamwork. He wore leather weights around his ankles, taking them off only in bed, so his legs would be strong and he would be able to jump as high as his black teammates could. He read every available book on technique, every biography of the stars. He jumped rope: inside, around the block, up stairs, walking the dog. He played on asphalt, in playgrounds, in gyms, in the street, in the backyard, in his mind, in rain, in winds that ruled the ball, beneath the dead dry heat of burning sun.
Walt ascended two flights of cement stairs, then knocked on the door, which had an engraving of Venus straddling an aqueduct. A large blonde lady, wearing high heels made of glass, opened the door. "Hello," she said, aspirating heavily, "and welcome to A Touch of Venus." She handed him a glass of white wine and a poorly typed page, which was encased in plastic and which said:
Walt was astonished that so many of the details with which he had conjured up this scenario proved to be accurate: black leather couches, thick red carpet, low lighting, disco music, shiny wood paneling, coffee tables on which were spread recent copies of Penthouse. "So," his hostess said, "what'll it be—Ecstasy, A Little Bit of Heaven, Total Massage..." Her voice trailed off. It seemed clear that anything short of ecstasy was mere flirtation. "Ecstasy," Walt said. He paid her with money he'd saved from his job as a stock boy at a clothing store, and she took him on a tour of the building, which used to be the fire department, she said, before it was converted. Walt thought back to a time when big, happy men were polishing trucks and waiting around to be heroes. She held him by the arm and told him to relax as they walked through the lounge, in which the other masseuses were watching a faded color film of four people fucking, then gave him a white bathrobe and a key to a locker and told him to change into—the phrase was meant to be excruciatingly erotic, and it was—"something more comfortable." The sauna, the whirlpool, the shower massage (whatever that was), the Jacuzzi, the champagne bubble bath, all this stuff was in the basement of the ex-firehouse; Walt was instructed to slide down the golden pole and amuse himself for a while and come upstairs when he was ready. He was ready right then, of course; he hadn't paid a hundred dollars to take a bath by himself, and as he climbed into the sauna and sat on the wooden bench, he tried and failed to imagine anything worse than being in the basement of a converted fire station on Sunday morning. He consoled himself with the thought that, before he left, at least he would have sinned. When he went upstairs, he sat in a director's chair, watching the movie and thumbing through magazines, and one by one the employees offered themselves to him. His hostess asked him to play pool with her, a short redhead sat next to him and watched the movie for a couple of minutes, and a skinny woman with black hair wrapped high around her head like tangled snakes brought him a drink. He was supposed to give a little ticket that he held in his hand to the woman of his dreams, but instead he got up and gave the ticket to the only masseuse who was not in any way appealing or exciting or terrifying. She was shy and Walt had to force the ticket into her hand to get her to look up. She led him into a room and told him to take off his bathrobe. He lay face down on a table in the middle of the room and she rubbed him from head to toe. He stared at a large square mirror positioned on the floor in such a way that he could see her. Most of what she did tickled, so he thought about other things to keep from laughing. It wasn't arousing and after a while he flipped over on his back, sat up, and complained. She said this was a legitimate massage parlor and they didn't do that kind of thing here. "We'll be quiet," he assured her and offered her a fifty-dollar tip, but she said she wasn't for sale. He lunged toward her; she stepped back and hurried out the door before he could stop her. He ran out of the room and down the stairs to the locker room, changed into his clothes, then left by the back exit. The rest of the money in his wallet was gone. When he got outside and into the sunlight, Walt felt the way he had felt the year before upon leaving the theater after seeing a pornographic movie for the first time: sentimental, thrilled by the mundanity of cracks in the sidewalk and flowers, and repelled by the prospect of physical love.
Walter and Nina had remained in bed until three o'clock in the afternoon, which was twenty minutes after he was supposed to have boarded a Bonanza bus to Logan Airport, because Nina, wearing only a pair of warm socks and very warm mittens, wanted to squeeze the fat in his back with her wool hands and dig into his legs with her warm wool feet so that he would feel like he was being devoured by a ferocious little lion and return as quickly as possible and think of no one and nothing else while he was away. Every time Nina got even near him, he started sneezing, and he was one of those people who, rather than make a quick little ka-choo into a handkerchief, not only neglect to carry a handkerchief but feel compelled to blow coagulations of snot into the atmosphere, into their hands, drippy and yellow, onto whatever is around them at the moment. What was around Walter at the moment was Nina's bed sheet, which she had just washed and dried so that she and Walter would have a clean, white surface to slide around on their last night together. She was so disgusted by the way he shook the snot off his hands into the wastebasket and blew his nose with the cord to his bathrobe that she got out of bed, standing with her mittens on her hips and her socked feet on the floor next to the electric heater, and quoted back to him the analogy he always liked to make between the itch in the nose and desire, between phlegm on the floor and fulfillment. "It really empties you out, right?" she said. "Tell me, sweetheart, does it also make you feel sad?" Walter thought he was sneezing because he'd finally developed an allergy to Nina, whereas Nina, who had learned all about psychosomatic disorders when she was in analysis, assumed he was sneezing because he'd developed an allergy to his family, whereas the truth was that he had developed an allergy to the dust he'd encountered the night before, searching for his suitcase in the basement. While he stuffed the suitcase with what few articles of light clothing he still owned, she started the car, an old Peugeot the color of pool water, which her father had given her after the mechanic said he'd never be able to stop the ping in the motor; she drove ten miles faster than anyone else on cleared and sanded 95 North all the way to the airport. They made it in plenty of time. "I'll miss you. I love you," he said to reassure Nina, who had started glowering when he glanced at the cover of Club International magazine in the gift shop before doing whatever was the opposite of deplaning. "You love your free detachable calendar of Miss Cunt of the Month," she said and kissed him good-bye until he started sneezing again.
"I can see why you're a Miss Nude USA regional finalist," Walter imagined writing the woman whose ad was placed in the back of Club. "You have beautiful long silky blue-black hair, a perfect pout, and a gorgeous body. Please send me the color photos you mentioned of yourself in fur, leather, lingerie, garter belt, and heels. Thank you. Payment enclosed."
The ending of James Joyce's story "The Dead" was usually interpreted as Gabriel Conroy's unambiguous, transcendental identification with universal love and human mortality, but to Walter it seemed more plausible to read the last page or so as an overwritten passage that conveyed emotional deadness taking refuge in sentimentality. "Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. Gabriel was thinking about the passion of his wife's ex-suitor, but the word "generous" appeared—to Walter, at least—to suggest Gabriel's confusion of self-pity with selfless love. Walter figured that, if Joyce had meant the last sentence of the story to be truly beautiful, he certainly wouldn't have used "falling faintly" and "faintly falling" within four words of each other. This repetition created discord at the very climax of the rising hymn so that, even as Gabriel believed he was liberating himself from egotism, his language for compassion was self-conscious and solipsistic. Neither in memory nor fantasy was he capable of imagining union, completion, or even shared intimacy. That was Walter's interpretation.
The sixties—which, as everybody knows, began in 1963 and ended in 1974—happened, like a sitcom, in the middle of my living room.
I was student-body president of one of the first desegregated elementary schools in California, and when the BBC came to interview me, I spoke so passionately that they had to stop the film because the cameraman was crying.
By the end of seventh grade it was a profound social embarrassment if you hadn't "gotten married," which meant lost your virginity.
The third-floor roof of our high school overlooked the pool in the middle of the courtyard. People who were tripping would jump off the top of the roof into the pool on Saturday nights. Occasionally the pool would have been drained. If someone dove into the empty pool, it was called a "header."
Yvonne, who wore miniskirts and leather jackets and was by far the school's best girl swimmer, drowned when she tried to swim from Lido Isle all the way out to Catalina immediately after a huge lunch of hash brownies.
A married couple who worked for the McGovern campaign, Janice and Michael, came down from Seattle and stayed in our house from the California primary until the general election. I had such a bad crush on Janice that, on the night of Nixon's landslide, I disconnected the car radio so she'd still be in a good enough mood to come with me as I took old people around to the polls until closing.
I wrote so many satires about capital punishment for the high school newspaper that students who didn't read carefully started calling me "The Beheader."
I heard a rumor that Smith-Corona also made munitions and immediately switched to Olivetti.
As the editor of the Observer, the newspaper of the California Democratic Council, my father was at times caught in the middle between opponents and defenders of the Vietnam War. He finally ran a cartoon that showed LBJ surfing off the coast of Cambodia, which made the point about American imperialism. The caption my father wrote was "Up Surf." He was fired within the month, not because of the content of the cartoon but because he didn't know the idiom.
The majority of my nieces and nephews on both sides of my family have first names that are either colors, animals, or trees, or some combination of colors, animals, or trees.
Freshman year of high school we all had to take World Geography, and the first day of class we all had to come up on stage and tell "Glen" what kind of animal we were, then portray this animal for a few seconds. The entire semester there was no mention of anything even remotely related to world geography.
The ecology club held a massive demonstration and littered the courtyard with so many placards that for once I abandoned my capital punishment theme and wrote a satire about the event. The ecology club retaliated by toilet-papering my house.
My cousin had a phrase, "Tain't no big thang." No one knew where he got it, whether or when it was meant sincerely or ironically, but he said it in response to almost every possible development.
Just before graduating college, he and his girlfriend were arrested for possession of a thousand tabs of acid. His girlfriend told the cops she was going to use them to decorate a Christmas tree. "In June?" one cop asked. "Tain't no big thang," my cousin said.
For sociology class I interviewed sixteen different cliques in our high school and found that precisely three-quarters of the groups made "insider/outcast" distinctions not on the basis of money, appearance, academics, after-school job, or sports. Precisely three-quarters of the groups made "insider/outcast" distinctions on the basis of what kind of drugs you used.
In an article in Newsweek, our high school was reported to have the highest drug use per capita of any high school in the United States, and people threw parties for a month straight to protect our number-one ranking.
A friend of my sister's had a life-threatening case of colitis and traveled all over India, looking for a holistic cure, and finally settled for Transcendental Meditation, which seemed to do the trick. Now, if you ask her if she wants to do almost anything, she'll say, "Gotta have time to smell the roses," which is, of course, just another version of "Tain't no big thang."
My sister and her best friend had a bitter fight, from which the relationship never fully recovered, over who was the cutest Monkee, Davy or Mickey.
I broke up with my girlfriend when one day she decided she couldn't stand it any longer and went ahead and shaved her legs.
A friend of my father's lived less than a block from where the Symbionese Liberation Army was being busted on live TV, so we all hurried over to this friend's house, with one eye on the television and the other eye out the window. "It's so real I feel like I can almost smell the smoke," someone said. "You can smell the smoke," my father said. The SLA was burning to death and smoke was pouring in an open window.
In the fall of 1974 I left Los Angeles to go to college in Providence, Rhode Island, which I imagined as, quite literally, Providence, a heavenly city populated by seraphic souls. I imagined Rhode Island as an actual island, the exotic edge of the eastern coast. And I saw Brown as enclosed, paradisal space in which strong boys played rugby on fields of snow and then perused Ruskin by gas lamps in marble libraries too old to close; and girls, with thick black hair, good bodies, and great minds, talked about Turgenev at breakfast. The first month of my first semester, black students occupied the administration building and demanded increases in black student enrollment and financial aid. These seemed to me laudable goals, so I went over to become part of the picket line outside the administration building and marched in a circle, chanting, for a few minutes, but the whole event seemed like a really weak imitation of all the demonstrations I'd been going to since I was six years old, and I wanted to get away from groups and the West Coast and my former milieu for a while. A few people from my dormitory hall were tossing around a Frisbee on the back side of the green, and I left the picket line to go join them. That, for me, was the end of the sixties.