King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography Read online

  After graduation I traveled with my college roommate and boyhood friend, Ron Nakatani, doing odd jobs, playing Route 66, and discovering my bachelor of arts degree plus a quarter was enough to get me a bad cup of coffee, so I scampered back to Eastern to get a teaching certificate, thinking that as much trouble as I had caused for teachers over the years, I could help teachers in general retaliate by causing the same amount of trouble for students. My student-teaching placement during the last quarter of that year took me to a high school in a small town outside Seattle where I would apprentice in English, psychology, sociology, and history.

  About four weeks into my student-teaching term, a popular renegade point guard on the basketball team drowned while lake fishing in a boat when a quick, violent storm blew in. Charlie was a strong swimmer, but he had been fishing the lakeshore earlier in hip boots and had not bothered to take them off. A note posted on the teachers’ bulletin board the next morning requested all teachers to report to the teacher’s lounge before going to first period. There, the principal and counselors asked us to help the kids with their grief, help them understand. No one thought to help us understand. Most of the teachers walked out of the lounge like zombies, and the pall that fell over the school for the rest of the day was so thick you could almost taste it.

  My master teacher was substituting for another teacher who had called in sick, and I was left alone with the class. I had no idea what to say. I didn’t know Charlie well, but his edginess and quick smile were infectious, and I had only to think back to my college friend to imagine their loss. I told the kids to work on whatever they liked, or sit, or come up and talk. I placed a chair beside my desk and began grading papers and reading. Throughout the day several students sat in the chair and simply started talking. It scared me, so I didn’t say much back, only nodded or shook my head in the appropriate places. Later many of them would say I had been a lot of help. It turned out to be my first clue to the nature of good therapy when I started working with people nearly ten years later: Shut the hell up; the person across from you is the expert on his or her feelings.

  But this time death handed me a twist. At the end of the day another student, a heavy, uncoordinated freshman with thick glasses and bad teeth named Martin Korf (that’s almost as appropriate as the name I gave Sarah Byrnes), walked across the school lawn headed for home, by himself as usual, bugging anyone within earshot with stupid songs and bad jokes. That was business as usual for Martin, but on this day it got him a number of mean, sometimes malicious, retorts. Martin looked confused and a little bit pleased; usually his weak attempts for attention didn’t put a blip on anyone’s radar, so today, of course, he got louder and stupider until someone knocked him down. He was still sitting on the ground yelling epithets at his assailant when the teacher I was with trotted over to help him up.

  “That guy’s a son of a bitchin’ bastard,” Martin said, brushing himself off.

  “People are a little edgy today, Martin,” the teacher said.

  “Yeah? How come?”

  “Well, because Charlie Post died.”

  “So?”

  “A lot of people liked Charlie,” the teacher said. “They’ll miss him.”

  “I bet if I got drowned, everybody wouldn’t get to sit around all day and not do work,” Martin said. He picked up his books and walked off in his ungainly gait, and I realized that this day was not much different from any other day in the life of Martin Korf, other than that he could irritate people more easily. He was right. We wouldn’t have suspended our regular schedules to let people grieve for him, because few people, teachers included, would have felt the need. It occurred to me that a lot of people in that school, allowed a secret ballot, would have voted Martin off the island long before Charlie.

  The reverend in charge of Charlie’s funeral asked God that same rhetorical question: Why do bad things happen to good people? and in keeping with the “Strange and Mysterious Ways” stance that was becoming all too familiar, he didn’t give us an answer. I wondered if he’d have stated the question the same way had it been Martin Korf’s funeral.

  A student asked me recently why somebody always dies in my books. I said, because somebody is always dying in my life. As they say, without death there is no story. Probably a better way to say that is, without loss there is no story, and death is simply the trump card of loss.

  At fifty-five, death is no longer a stranger to me. I have seen it heartless and I have seen it merciful. Because of my work in child abuse and neglect, I have seen, from up close and at a distance, babies and infants killed, survivors of drive-by shootings, attempted and realized suicides. Death lurks everywhere, every bit as much a part of life as birth.

  In the spring of 1985, I was back in Cascade, Idaho, visiting my parents. I’d brought the manuscript of Stotan! for them to read. At five o’clock on Easter morning, I felt a presence in the blackness of my room, flipped on the light to see my father standing in the doorway. For the first time ever in my life he said, “Buddy, I think I need your help.” He was having a heart attack. I got him into the car and drove the few blocks to the hospital, where they stabilized him temporarily. We had a long talk that evening about what it felt like for him to believe it was probably over. He said it “scared me a little.” He went to sleep, and I went back to my parents’ house, talked with my mother until she fell asleep, and wondered what it might be like to be at that spot where you were forced to consider the value of your existence. It scared me a little.

  The following morning I got up early to go see him, and as I approached the entrance, heard loud voices and scrambling in his room. I walked in to see two doctors pounding on his chest while a nurse ran for the electronics. I was situated just inside the doorway where I could see the action and also see the heart monitor placed outside the room. In the midst of the chaos, the man who was my father’s chief political and personal rival in town coincidentally walked in to pick up a prescription. He looked over at the room, where everyone in town knew my father was, turned around with no expression, and walked out. Within minutes I watched the monitor flat line.

  There and gone.

  Later that day, after I had delivered the heartbreaking news to my mother and contacted relatives, I walked into my parents’ bedroom and saw the manuscript of Stotan! lying on the headboard just above my father’s side of the bed, open to the last page he had read. I gazed at the manuscript and thought how fortunate I was to have evidence of just exactly, to the page, how far my father knew me. I leafed through it, grateful for every word he’d read, anguished for every word he’d missed. I wondered if he’d liked it.

  There and gone.

  Because my brother, who is still fifty pounds heavier and infinitely stronger than I, would shoot me in the head with a BB gun right after he broke my collection of ESUS SAVES memorabilia, I won’t tell you what I did with my father’s ashes, but you can use your imagination. My dad was a bomber pilot, trained to identify his enemy, and to never give the enemy the last laugh. Like father, like son.

  My mother lived another seven or eight years. Free now of the bonds of alcohol but not of the tight grip of nicotine, she developed early signs of emphysema. She stopped smoking the day they brought the oxygen machine and was able to stay several more years at home before losing so much lung capacity she chose to finish up at the extended care unit of Valley County Hospital, three blocks from the house in which she was born, rather than move in with one of her children. We traded off going down to visit, and I would make the 325-mile trip about once a month, understanding as I witnessed her desperate struggle to breathe that there truly are fates far worse than death. Toward the end of her life, coughing up a little bit of phlegm seemed Olympic. I remember the last time I visited, crawling up onto the hospital bed and holding her frail body, telling her it was all right to go between the sounds of her terrified wails. She couldn’t die, and I wanted to know why bad things happen to good people. The bad thing in this instance was not dying.

 
; I’ve seen death from many angles. Like I said, I’m fifty-five; I’ll see it from more. I’ve seen it as an enemy and as a friend, as a curiosity. There is much more to learn, but it is clear that the best lessons about death come from the best lessons of life.

  I know the answer to the question now, by the way: why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It came from my inner editor, that part of me that forces the wordy writer in me to dump ninety percent of all modifiers: Ask both questions again, minus the adjectives.

  “Why do things happen to people?”

  Just because.

  King of the Wild Frontier

  11

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1959 my father started letting me wait on customers by myself at the service station. Crutch believed in protocol, which means any employee who set foot on the pump island was in full Phillips 66 dress: clean, starched shirts with the Phillips 66 insignia above the left breast pocket; heavy, charcoal, pleated pants, cuffed at the bottom, with enough extra room in the butt and legs to shoplift a Volkswagen Beetle. That was not the style of the day. In fact we wore our jeans and cutoffs so tight you put them on with an airbrush gun. Not only could you count the change in our pockets from twenty-five feet, you could determine which coins were heads and which were tails. So it wasn’t cool toolin’ around as a Phillips 66 fashion plate, but as I said before, my dad was a World War II bomber pilot and he liked uniforms.

  The uniform had utility, however. You had to be wearing it to catch the Mystery Motorist. As an incentive for employees in their service stations to be lookin’ good and on their very best behavior, the Phillips Petroleum Company designated at random, each month, a number of its most loyal credit card customers as Mystery Motorists. If that Mystery Motorist were to receive Super Service from any pump jockey, the Motorist was to hand over, on the spot, a certificate redeemable for fifty dollars. Now, I started working there at age nine for twenty-five cents an hour (ten of which were earmarked for my savings account so I could put myself through college and not have to be limping out onto the pump island wearing that ridiculous getup trying to catch a Mystery Motorist when I was sixty). Though I received raises every year (up until I was a junior in college), I never made more than a buck and a quarter an hour. Given that, fifty bucks, translated into the currency of today, was equal to four million.

  So in the summer of my twelfth year I pulled on that uniform daily, complete with Velcro no-buckle, no-scratch leather belt and very ugly ripple-soled shoes, and set out to catch me a Mystery Motorist.

  One problem was that in a county as small as ours, the Mystery Motorist was likely someone you knew, someone like Bob Miles from Miles Construction, who did business with us exclusively. Proper Super Service included being at the driver’s window as the car pulled to a stop. “Good morning/afternoon/evening, sir/ma’am. May I fill ’er up with Flite Fuel?” If they wanted a fill-up, you were to start the gas pumping, check the oil, water, battery level, and fan belt without being asked, wash front, back, and side windows, offer to check the tire pressure, and offer to vacuum out the car. You felt like Eddie Haskell in a baggy monkey suit.

  So one morning around eight thirty Bob Miles drives up in the company pickup and I am standing by the driver’s window as he rolls it down. “Good morning, sir. May I fill ’er up with Flite Fuel?”

  Bob Miles says, “You’ve been jacking off.”

  My response would not earn me CIA Employee of the Month award. “I have not!” I yell. “No, sir! I haven’t either! You can’t prove it!”

  Bob smiles and says, “Look at all those pimples. Fill ’er up with Flite Fuel. Hell, what am I saying? Make it regular.”

  I know he isn’t the Mystery Motorist now, because Mystery Motorists always let you fill ’er up with Flite Fuel, so I just want his damned pickup gassed and out of here so I can run into the restroom and survey in the mirror the damage from the fruits of my obsession with friction. Man, who knew that was the handle you used to pump out all these zits?

  That night I prayed beside the bed on my hands and knees, fingers intertwined and locked in a dead man’s grip. Without releasing that grip, I crawled under the covers with the resolve to reach some never-before-imagined level of celibacy, clear that the God of my fathers truly was the Old Testament God, one who would create such a gloriously spiritual-yet-forbidden feeling and then count on your face the number of times you achieved it. This had Ark of the Covenant written all over it. I brought to bear the willpower of my ancestors: Crutchers, Morrises, Pattersons, and Aherns alike. For almost ten minutes I clung to their legacy—before realizing eight out of ten of them couldn’t resist the temptation of a third dessert. I untangled my fingers and said, “What the hell, what’s one more pimple?”

  So I figure if I’m going to spend my teenage years pockmarked, I’ll turn it in my favor. What I need is that out-doorsy look. A rugged dude can accommodate a zit or two.

  Enter Chuck Spence. Chuck Spence was the Valley County prosecutor who had spent eight years as a marine and would later return to active duty. Chuck Spence was a cross between Charlton Heston (the young, rugged, cowboy-Moses Charlton Heston) and Davy Crockett—a strong, handsome, physically fit man with a jawline you’d send away for. He was known to take a horse and a pack mule and disappear into the hills for days, fishing and hunting for food, totally comfortable in the wilderness. At about the same time I discovered my midnight (and midday and morning and afternoon) shenanigans were causing a National Geographic lesson on my face, Chuck was in the process of forming a Boy Scout troop. I would join the Boy Scouts and let Chuck toughen my body and my spirit to match my new ruddy complexion. There was an extra added attraction. Chuck’s wife was Barbara Spence, a willowy dark beauty who taught dance and piano lessons. A year or so earlier I had signed up to take piano lessons after stumbling onto the information that she had an opening the half-hour before Paula Whitson’s lesson every Wednesday after school. Suddenly I had discovered a deep yearning to become the next Liberace and begged my mother to sign me up.

  Among Barbara Spence’s piano prodigies, I was not. The maddeningly repetitive key stroking did not fit the temperament of a boy who had not, in his infancy, been allowed to launch his body onto the hardwood floor or bang his head against the bathtub at will, and my mother routinely ended my practice sessions within fifteen minutes of their onslaught when I began hammering the keys mercilessly with each mistake, breaking at least one commandment in the process. Each Wednesday afternoon, as I was finishing my lesson and Paula Whitson was showing up for hers, our conversations went like this:

  PW: Weren’t you working on that piece last week?

  CC: I’m performing it at my recital.

  PW: Weren’t you working on it the week before, too?

  CC: I don’t remember, was I?

  PW (taking the music book from me): Yeah, see? It says “Review” here. Five times.

  CC: Yeah, it’s a tough one. Bach, I think.

  PW: Bach wrote “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”?

  CC: Yeah, I think he called it something else back then. Oops, look, there’s my mom. Gotta go.

  The point is, not many upbeat Chris Crutcher stories were passing through the Spence household to Paula Whitson’s ears, but I was about to change all that. I would join Boy Scouts and turn my mind and body over to Chuck Spence and become the very embodiment of the craggy, ruddy-faced frontiersman, as well as the centerpiece of the Spences’ evening dinner conversations. My imagination knew no bounds.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” my mother asked as I pulled on my coat to walk to the Legion Hall for my first meeting. “You didn’t fare so well in Cub Scouts.”

  “That was just because I couldn’t learn to tie that stupid necktie,” I said. “Where we’re going, people don’t wear neckties.”

  “No,” she said, “but they have to learn to tie knots. In ropes.”

  “And learn to tie knots in ropes I will,” I said back. “Trust me, I was made for the outdo
ors.”

  “Are you sure they’ll let you wear that coonskin cap?” she asked. “I think Boy Scouts have uniforms.”

  “They’ll let me wear it,” I said. “It’s a coonskin cap, for crying out loud. Davy Crockett wore one. Daniel Boone. Those guys had to be the original Boy Scouts, if you think about it.”

  “Lose the coonskin cap, Crutcher,” Chuck Spence said as I passed through the entrance to the Legion Hall. “This isn’t play. We’ll order uniforms tonight, and when they come each of you will be required to attend every meeting in full Boy Scout dress. Until then, slacks, collared shirts. Understood?”

  Understood. Geez, this guy was a Stotan before there were Stotans. Besides, they couldn’t be as ugly as my Phillips 66 uniforms. (My dad wouldn’t let me wear the coonskin cap down there, either.)

  I realized my Boy Scout career was following a familiar path the next summer at Camp Billy Rice, a summer scout camp near Warm Lake, about thirty miles into the hills over one-lane logging roads. Troop 235, made up of three patrols of eight scouts each and under the tutelage of former U.S. Marine Captain Charles Spence, showed up en masse for the last weeklong session of camp that year. Chuck had demanded that we be the most highly decorated troop of the entire summer. We would conduct ourselves as gentlemen at all times, spending twenty-four hours of each day being trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent, or we would walk—I mean, march—back home from Warm Lake. He mentioned something about Bataan. There’s a reason I still don’t like Charlton Heston.

  It’s too late to make a long story short, but suffice it to say that by the end of camp I had risen to my usual level of competence, just above those scouts whose parents had forced them into scoutdom to give themselves free Wednesday evenings. The final day was to be spent taking on challenges in archery, knot tying, rifle shooting, tracking, water sports, and safety, and proving once and for all that Chris Crutcher should have stayed with the piano. At each station the one or two scouts best at that particular activity would step up to take on the challenge. The full event was called the Gold Rush, and a patrol could earn up to eight gold nuggets at each station, depending on the competence of the participants.