I grew up on the doorstep of wild dichotomies, yet my parent's never really tried to help us come to terms with the divergent world all around us. There were my four sisters and -- me -- the lone brother, the oldest -- but not by much. My parents went into a kind of reproductive frenzy in 1945 and didn't stop for seven years, and I think my father paused then only because he was trying to figure out how was going to pay for all those yearning mouths. The picture I had of my mother, by 1952, was of a terrified woman who lived in fear that her husband might come home from work -- in the mood. The thought of one more childbirth sent her into paroxysms of scissor-wielding rage -- as if my father had even remotely expressed interest in doing the hunka-chunka, scissors would magically appear from behind her back -- and she would begin snipping away at his testicles.
"Get that thing away from me!" she'd shout, and those of us in the house old to know would have this vision of Van Helsing holding up a crucifix to ward off Count Dracula.
We lived in the shadow of Elysian Park, on Academy Road, on the east side of the park, an area just north of downtown Los Angeles -- and the seminal event of my childhood involved baseball. The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to LA just as I hit my teens, and a new stadium was being built for them hard by the park. In time, we each graduated from Cathedral High School, the Big Catholic School near the park, and we went to St Peter's every Sunday, too. And there was something weird about all that, too. In a city dedicated to the proposition that you needed to drive at least a half hour to find a quart of milk, we walked everywhere. To school, to church, to the local market -- everywhere. Dad drove to work out in Santa Monica in those days, to the Douglas Aircraft Company, where he was an engineer. He designed several parts of the old DC-3, but what I remember most growing up was his work on what would become the DC-8. He would bring these colossal drawings of the cockpit home and we would go over them, and we would daydream about the places you could go in such a machine. How fast! More than 3000 miles! As work progressed, we would drive out to Long Beach on weekends and look at the first working mockups, then the first pre-production airframes as they came down the line. I stood by his side and watched the first one take off, and later that day we went to our first Dodgers game together. Nirvana...
Anyway, I grew up wanting to be just like him. I wanted to draw airplanes and have kids, raise my family near the park and go to St Peter's, send my kids to Cathedral High, so I did just what dad did: I went to USC and started on my degree in aeronautical engineering.
But there was already talk about Vietnam. About how maybe they'd start drafting kids 'any day now.' Recruiters were all over campuses all over the country in those early days of the war, and that proved to be one of the earliest divergent dichotomies I ran into. Kids with crew cuts, like me, and the kids who were beginning to look more and more like John Lennon and the rest of the Beatle-haired acolytes invading the country. Kids with football posters on their dorm room walls, and kids with day-glow posters celebrating peace, drugs and rock 'n roll. And the poster above the bed in my dorm room was of a DC-8 main panel. Annotated. And I knew the function of every button and dial on that panel before I graduated -- from high school.
Need I say more?
Two days after graduating 'SC I swore an oath and got in a bus headed north, to Seattle, to OCS. Officer's Candidate School. The whole Officer and a Gentleman thing Richard Gere would make famous twenty years later...that was my life that summer. Then another year learning to fly. The the real deal. Getting shot off a pitching carrier's deck at three in the morning, in gales, dropping bombs all over Vietnam on multiple tours over the next three and half years. Then the arm twisting: please, re-enlist! No more combat, just training the next generation of pilots for combat -- and just like that two more years disappeared -- and I literally left the Navy as Richard Nixon waved good-bye that last morning, as he boarded Marine One in disgrace and fled to California.
I was never "anti-war" -- or anti-anything -- for that matter. I was for designing airplanes, then flying them, and that was about as far as my political engagement went. To say I didn't care about politics would have been an understatement. I voted Democratic because my parents voted that way, and so did everyone else we grew up around. I barely knew what "abortion" was all about because no one ever talked about it -- at least not in polite society, and I literally had no idea what homosexuality was until my third year of college. I never smoked anything growing up because my father didn't, and the first time I smelled pot I thought someone was burning manure in the dormitory bathroom. My father drank one or two beers on Saturday afternoon, usually listening to a game on the radio while he worked on the yard or stuff in the garage, and so later, if I drank anything at all it was beer, and always in moderation. My father's college grade point average on graduation was 3.88; mine was 3.89, and I tried not to gloat. He was very proud, however.
We were Irish Catholics, and we hung out with other Irish Catholics; blue collar, hard working men and women who either built LA or patrolled her streets. Tons of cops, in other words, and with the LAPD's academy just up the street from our house, ours was arguably the safest neighborhood in LA County. It also had the most well behaved kids.
The extent of the 'diversity' I knew of growing up was simply this: in my world there were Irish Catholics, and there were Italian Catholics. If we had a common language it was Latin, and maybe English. And that English would be replete with old world accents. The only thing I knew for sure was that Italians were different because their last names ended with vowels.
My reality changed little in the Navy. I was a serious pilot and I took the meaning of the oath I swore to the Constitution seriously. I held the words "we, the people" to mean just that. Not we the white people, but all us, as in: we're all in this together. I thought that way because, by and large, my father did. Because the people in our church did. My teachers did, and even the cops who came over for my mother's corned beef did. Well, most of them did. I think the first racism I experienced came in the form of scorching expletives a few of those cops would let slip when talking about the negroes down in South Central, or around the Rampart Division.
The only negro I knew growing up was the old man who came by twice a week to mow lawns in our neighborhood. If there was a family that had only daughters, or no kids at all, they got their lawns mown by Mr Thomas. I'd hear his push mower spitting away, cutting across those little patches of grass on those infrequent afternoons, and sometimes I'd watch him work. He'd have to stop every now and sharpen those turbine like swirls of blade, or pump some grease into the single axle, then off he'd go, pushing his mower across the grass. Fifty cents a lawn in those days, and he was as regular as clockwork. Always smiling, always whistling some tune or another. I think for a dime or two he pruned bushes or weed gardens, so he kept busy.
When I came home in '74 I went to work for United Air Lines, moved to San Francisco for a few years, then to New York City, and I flew DC-8s for a couple of years, which was a blast for both me and my father, but we grew apart, finally, and that was something new for all of us. And I know I haven't talked much about my sisters, and that's because I think their lives were almost peripheral to both my father and I. All but my youngest sister, Patricia, that is. PJ. I barely knew her at all back then; she was not yet ten years old when I went to USC, and she grew up in the height of the counter-culture wars that defined the second half of the 60s. She was in trouble all the time, doing drugs, pregnant -- twice -- before she got out of high school. She was this red-headed lust bomb that wanted a father's attention and never got enough, so she went looking elsewhere. Everywhere else, and so, of course, in due course she broke my father's heart and he did exactly what he shouldn't have and threw her out of the house.
When I moved to San Francisco after the war, into an apartment on a hill overlooking the airport, I'd not seen her since '68. My parent's had neither seen nor heard from her in two years, yet one morning, very early on a Saturday morning, I was coming in after an overnighter from JFK and there she was, curled up on an olive green army surplus duffel bag -- on my doorstep. I'd have never recognized her but for the shocking head of wavy red hair she had, and those freckles.
I knelt down and lightly brushed her hair aside, saw her face and wanted to laugh and cry, all in the same breath. She weighed maybe ninety pounds and the insides of her arms were covered with tracks; she smelled of beer and urine, and -- of all things -- patchouli. I opened my door and dropped my bag on the floor, then went out to rouse her.
Which turned out to not be the easiest thing I'd ever tried, so I picked her up and carried her to my bedroom, laid her out -- and after I carried her duffel inside I called father.
"PJs here," I remember saying before I'd even said hello and, as he'd been most upset about her behavior -- and his own -- I think he started crying. My mother was on the phone in an instant and I told her what I'd just found, and she wanted to know what they should do. "I think consciousness and coffee first, Mom. Let me talk to her, see what's up. As soon as I know something I'll call."
I figured if coffee and bacon didn't wake her nothing would, so I went to the kitchen and started in on breakfast, making more than enough noise to wake the dead, and sure enough, about ten minutes later in she came. Even looking half dead she was as seriously gorgeous as ever, and she walked over to my breakfast table and sat, rubbing her eyes first, then looking at me --
I was still in uniform, of course, looking every inch the figure of upright moral propriety -- which, ahem, of course I was -- and she grinned when I looked at her and said: "Well, there he is, ladies and gentlemen, Roger Ramjet!"
To which I replied: "Two eggs, or three?"
"You know, I could eat three, maybe more."
"How long since you had something solid?"
She shrugged. "I passed out with some guys cock in my mouth last night. When I came-to he was passed out and his dick was still right where he'd left it."
I was aware of staring at her, at the extremity of her behavior, and her need, and that until this very moment the contours of her existence had been a mystery to me. I remember thinking how shocked I was, how almost outraged I was, then how scared I was. In two years no contact with any of us, and now here she was. Of all the people in the world she could have gone to, she chose the man most like the father who had cast her aside, adrift...to wander in the wilderness.
Why? I mean, really? Why?
To perpetuate a cycle that would put her right back on the street? To make my life a living hell, if only to validate her own low opinion of herself?
"So, what else have you been up to?"
"Taking classes, at Berkeley," she said.
That figures, I wanted to say. "Oh? What in?"
"Physics and cosmology."
And I looked at her again, really more of a double take. "Really?"
