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

  He stood quiet.

  “I’ve been running this group for seven years,” I said. “I guess I know what I’m doing. I’d like a little more respect. Maybe you can tell me what got you in this corner.” (If you haven’t seen me, you need to know I’m way too skinny to be doing this.)

  Ray’s fists opened and closed, either of them bigger than my head.

  “Listen, man, you can get out of this corner anytime you want. All you have to do is tell me what got you here. And I think an apology to the group might be in order. We’ve wasted a lot of time.” My back was to the rest of the group, but it was so quiet I could almost hear their heads shaking: No, no. No apology needed here.

  Sweat broke out on the back of Ray’s neck and he started to twitch, and even I knew one more step was beyond his tolerance. Very gently I said, “Take a deep breath, Ray. I was messin’ with you. We’re done. No way in the world am I really going into court and tell them you aren’t cooperating on the basis of one exercise.”

  He stood stone still.

  “I’m backing away. If you need to take a little time, go ahead outside and walk around a little. Have a cigarette. Come back when you’re ready.”

  No movement.

  “Breathe.”

  I watched his shoulders slowly raise, then drop.

  “One more.”

  Again.

  “Wanna take a little break?”

  “And let you assholes talk about me? Hell, no.” He stalked back to his chair and sat.

  “Ray, what’d I do there?”

  “Almost got your skinny ass killed.”

  “Besides that.”

  He thought a minute, but I could see he was just getting madder. “I don’t know what the hell you did. You’re so smart, counselor, you tell me.”

  “I humiliated you. I took the thing you’re afraid of and rubbed it in your face.”

  “I wasn’t afraid of nothin’. Afraid of what?”

  “Not being able to control your temper. Being a bad dad.”

  “I ain’t afraid of any of those things.”

  “Okay, I took the thing you’re maddest at and rubbed it in your face.” Same thing.

  “That’s closer.”

  “Did I teach you any respect?”

  He looked at me like I was a booger on his plate.

  “It feels exactly the same to your girlfriend’s kids. You can get them to say what you want because you’re a giant and they know you’ll hurt them. But you can’t control what they think, so while they’re making the apology, what do you think they’re thinking? And how mad do you think they’re getting?”

  “They’re kids. They got to learn.”

  “And what do you think they’re going to do someday when they’re big enough to act on that anger?”

  “Neither one of them little turds ever goin’ to be as big as me.”

  “So they’ll take it out on some girl or some kid or some boss.” There are a million ways to screw up your life with rage. “Do you see what your temper almost did to you? Cheated you out of the very thing you want. You were just about ready to say ‘I don’t give a damn,’ and take me out, and destroy any chance of getting what you want.”

  I don’t know how much of the Lesson of the Night was lost on Ray, but some of the other guys got it. The lesson for me was simple. Having experienced my own temper over and over, watching myself destroy things I loved and cared about all my life, gave me just enough knowledge to know when to stop, thereby keeping all my body parts attached.

  So maybe it’s a good thing my mother didn’t actually get my temper cured. Though it wasn’t her intention, she gave me a tool. That apparent contradiction validates something I’ve come to believe over my adult life: You can’t tell the good stuff from the bad stuff when it’s happening. In fact, it isn’t good or bad. It’s just stuff.

  Bawlbaby

  2

  UNTIL ABOUT THE AGE OF TWELVE, the best use I found for my temper was to keep me from being a bawlbaby. One of the few things I could do better than almost all my peers was cry. I cried when anybody hit me. I cried when I was down to my last—second—cookie; when it was my brother John’s turn to ride with my dad or my granddad in the gas truck; when my mother gave the second half of my Popsicle to someone else (that fell into the second-cookie category); when the New York Yankees lost a World Series game; anytime I had to share and anytime someone wouldn’t share with me. Any event that could light up my temper could also reduce me to tears. Sometimes there was a choice, but often I just went for both. Physical pain, or the threat of it, could crank me up pretty good, but emotional pain took me out. The moment I considered myself either the cause or the focus of disappointment, my eyes would squint, my lips would spread wide over my buckteeth, and it was a race to my chin between tears and snot.

  Faced with that, my dad would simply grimace and shake his head, or if he was feeling particularly irritated, ask another of those famous questions to which he didn’t want the correct answer: “Do you want me to give you something to cry about?” (No, Crutch, I do not want you to give me something to cry about. I already have something to cry about, thank you. Why don’t you give your something to cry about to John or Candy?) My mother, on the other hand, when she wasn’t suckered in by my dramatic despair, hated it. Her question was more taunting: “What are you going to do now, be a big bawlbaby?” That made it worse because the answer was yes, but the response had to be no. And the river would run.

  Shortly after the end of World War II, my father opted out of the army air corps and came to Cascade, my mother’s home and birthplace. Stories in my family were told without much emotion, but my imagination says there were wounds to heal. My grandfather Glen had lost his parents at an early age, then lost his son, my mother’s brother, in the war. My father lost his own dad in the months just following his return from overseas duty.

  The idea of owning his own business appealed to Crutch, and when he gave up his lifelong dream of flying to settle down, he decided to go into the wholesale oil and gas business with Glen. From my earliest memories to the time I was out of college, I’ll bet I didn’t see my father dressed in anything other than a Mobil Gas or Phillips 66 uniform more than a dozen times. He became the Valley County clerk of the court in the years after I graduated from college, and each time I’d come home I’d barely recognize him in street clothes. At any rate, when he came to be a gas dude, Crutch got a new dad, May and Glen got a new son, two grandsons and a granddaughter, and the pain of loss eased up a little all around.

  What all that meant to me is that I would receive a lot of my early lessons staring out the passenger-side window of a gas truck, looking for deer or bear, as my father or Glen drove me into the Idaho backcountry, or sitting on their laps, my hands gripping the steering wheel, believing I was a gas-truck driver. I loved those trips and hated when it wasn’t my turn, or worse, when my brother tricked me out of my turn.

  As was often the case, it came down to cookies.

  I’m five years old, sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch; my older brother, John, is across from me, and my sister, Candy, is locked into her high chair. My granddad is taking a load of gas to Garden Valley in the big truck, and he has invited both my brother and me to go. It is not normally considered a smart idea by the elders in my family to put my brother and me in the same truck for a long trip because, though I have a seriously misguided case of hero-worship, John does not hold me in that same regard and before we’re back one of us will be bawling and it will be me. But my grandfather is deemed nicer than he is smart, and today he’s taking us both.

  I’m so excited I can barely hold water, scarfing down my tomato soup and tuna sandwich, anticipating eating my Oreos frosting first (a frivolous act that would cause immediate loss of those Oreos were my dad present at the table) and then the great ride with my brother and my granddad in the big truck with the flying red horse painted on the tank. For life to get better than this, I would have to wait until the day in the
middle of my thirty-seventh year when my agent called and said we had done pulled the wool over the eyes of the Greenwillow Books people and they were going to publish my novel.

  My mother opens the package of Oreos and places two each on our plates. My brother watches as I twist the first one open, revealing the cool white frosting, and lick it clean. I eat the chocolate cookie outsides slowly; one more whole cookie to go. That was a little fast, I’ll slow down on the second one. Even at five years old, I am aware of the need to stretch out my enjoyment.

  As I twist the second Oreo, John says, “You want my cookies?”

  For a second I think he asked if I wanted his cookies. I lick my frosting, daring not to dream.

  “Hey, Chris. You want my cookies?”

  I look up. They sit on his plate, untouched. “Yeah! You’re not gonna eat ’em?”

  “Not if you want them,” he says.

  I glance over at my mother. She raises her eyebrows and shrugs.

  I reach across the table for them (another act that would result in surefire cookie loss if my dad were in the room). John pulls the plate out of my reach. “You gotta let Joe go with me to Garden Valley.” Joe Boyd is our next-door neighbor and my brother’s best friend.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Joe’s never been on the truck, so I wanted to take him with me. You can have my cookies if you’ll let him go.”

  I look at my mom again, and she again raises her eyebrows and shrugs, which should be a sign to me, but I’m five years old, for Chrissake, and there are two extra cookies in my immediate future. John sees the hesitation in my eyes. “Crutch is going to McCall tomorrow, and it’s your turn in the little truck, so you only have to wait one day.”

  Those Oreos are actually staring from his plate right at me. They can talk. They can sing. You only have to wait one day…you only have to wait one day…hi ho the Derry-o, you only have to wait one day.

  “I don’t know…”

  “Joe’s never been on the truck,” he says again. “Come on.” He pushes the cookies toward me.

  The cookies twist themselves open, taunting me with the cool creamy frosting. They are getting naked for me.

  “You’ll get to go tomorrow.”

  “Boy…”

  “And next time my turn comes for Tommy Davis’s you can have it.” Tommy Davis lives about three miles outside of town…but the cookies are dancing now, slowly dropping their outer layers. They have frosting underpants.

  “Joe really wants to go. He said he’d let you be Roy Rogers the next time we play cowboys.” Even I know that’s a lie; Joe Boyd is known to have beaten people up for playing Roy Rogers even when he wasn’t there, but cookies are singing “Happy Trails” to me and suddenly they are in my sweaty little hand. My brother looks at my mom. In the distance, through the sugary cloud that has shrouded my mind, I hear him say, “He touched ’em. He has to eat ’em now. Can I go call Joe?”

  Jewell looks at me with pity and nods, and my brother is excused from the lunch table to finish turning my afternoon into hell. But for this moment I’m in Heaven. Extra cookies only happen on birthdays. I take my time with the first one, twisting it slowly, licking each molecule of frosting before nibbling the dark chocolate. Still, it lasts less than a minute. By the time I have cleared the frosting from half of the second cookie, deep depression rolls in. The second cookie of two or the last cookie in the package carries the same sad emotional weight of loss. No more cookies, and Joe Boyd is going to Garden Valley. My mom watches as my eyes squint, my mouth opens, tears squirt, and I don’t even finish the second cookie.

  She doesn’t have to ask if I’m going to be a bawlbaby, but how long I’m going to be a bawlbaby. I think probably until they get back.

  When my granddad comes to pick us up and gets Joe instead of me, he comes into the house. I’m still sitting at the table blubbering. “Why did you do it?” he asks, ruffling my hair. “Why’d you let your brother trick you?”

  I sniff back the tears, convulse a couple of times, and blurt, “Because I like cookies.”

  Until his death, my granddad would consider that one of my best lines.

  My mom threw up her arms. “I knew this would happen,” she told him. “He’s going to be mad the rest of the afternoon, but maybe it will help him learn.”

  The capacity to delay gratification came in my thirties.

  I think a significant fraction of my personality structure resulted from my father and grandfather working together in the wholesale/retail gas and oil business. Not only did the delivery trips provide great sources for anticipation, but just hanging out down at the service station with the two of them was pretty neat. They were personality opposites, my grandfather an impulsive extrovert, my father more thoughtful and quiet and maddeningly rational.

  A beautiful young woman with Ada County (Boise) license plates pulled into the station one day, and my granddad hustled out onto the island to wait on her. Now, I don’t know the whole story on my granddad, but I know his preteen and teenage years were spent as an orphan, finding a home in the sheds and outbuildings of relatives, hugely thankful to be allowed to work for food and shelter. In his early twenties he was considered the most helpful man in town; if your truck stalled or was stuck in the hills, call Glen Morris. If your car was out of gas or you didn’t have a car and needed a lift in an emergency, call Glen Morris. If you were a stranger traveling through Cascade in the middle of the night and you needed aid of any kind, the night cop would get you in touch with Glen Morris.

  I remember one day in late spring when I was about five, walking across the dirt street to my grandparents’ house to see the nest of robins atop the wooden pillar holding up the roof of the open-air porch. Glen had pointed them out to me a couple of weeks earlier, and we were even present for the hatching of the eggs. It was hard to see everything over the edge at the top of the pillar, but I was fascinated watching the mother cramming worms halfway down the babies’ skinny throats. It made me appreciate the fact that my mother only made me sit at the table until I ate my vegetables.

  On this particular day I couldn’t see anything over the edge of the pillar no matter how far I stretched, and I finally crawled onto the railing to get a better look. Still no birds, but there was muffled peeping from inside the pillar. When I realized the nest had become a fast elevator down into the hollow of the pillar, I panicked and ran screaming into the house. May was in the backyard hanging up clothes, and Glen stopped eating his Cream of Wheat and toast long enough to calm me down so I could tell him oh no oh no oh no the babies were buried alive and would certainly die a slow miserable death. He brought me back outside, put his ear to the pillar, and smiled. “Easy,” he said, and disappeared into the house, returning with a hand jigsaw. He cut a little arched doorway at the base of the pillar, and we peeked in. Sure enough the babies were all there, squawking and appearing as if they actually wanted worms. The mother bird returned with one right on cue, flew to the top of the pillar, and seemed for a moment to panic. Glen moved me away from the new archway, and within minutes she discovered it, disappeared inside, and the squawking stopped. My granddad had turned a tomb into a castle in a matter of moments.

  He looked at the piece he’d cut out. “Your grandmother isn’t going to be happy about this,” he said.

  “I’ll tell her you saved the birds.”

  “You do that,” he said, his expression revealing not one iota of relief.

  “You saved the birds,” I said again.

  “I cut a hole in your grandmother’s porch,” he said back.

  I wasn’t present for the conversation they must have had, but Glen prevailed, because the mother bird fed those babies through that golden arch every day until they were ready to venture out. When they were all gone, Glen removed the nest and replaced the missing piece using some kind of wood glue and small nails. You have to look close, but you can see it today.

  Because of his lonely upbringing Glen longed for a family, and it was under
stood that he thought of himself as the luckiest man in the world for hooking up with my grandmother May, and, hole in the porch or no, he lived to serve her. May might have seemed like a sweet southern belle to the townspeople, but she ruled her world based on a rigid sense of right and wrong, and her principal weapon was guilt. My granddad didn’t drink, didn’t smoke or tell bawdy jokes, and he did his best not to cuss around her, if only to avoid her icy glare.

  Let me back up a little further and say that when you’re a kid with puberty in the distance, and Ronny Cooper catches you and a couple of your buddies by the swings over at the school playground and delivers the hot poop on human reproduction in terms that would be edited by Hustler magazine, your life changes. He speaks of body fluids you know nothing about and predicts that someday you’ll be mixing yours with a girl’s. He even uses the names of possible candidates. You’re embarrassed and even repulsed, but neither as much as you are intrigued. Then he tells you that your parents have done it at least as many times as they have kids, and gets specific about the source and destination of those body fluids. You’re almost in a rage, and scream no way not my parents and you’d like to kick his butt, but Ronny Cooper is two years older than you are (though only one grade ahead) and crazier and meaner than an outhouse rat. It is far smarter to let him besmirch the reputations of your naked parents than to tell him he’s full of shit. You walk away in complete and utter disbelief, but the truth has a ring of truth to it, and pretty soon you’re admitting that no way is Ronny Cooper smart enough to make up something like that, and all of a sudden your mind is filled with very distasteful visions of your parents. If you’re intellectually curious, you extrapolate: from your parents to your friends’ parents, even to your grandparents. Reluctant as your mind is, it all falls into place.

  But not for May Morris. I’m fifty-five as I write this, and I still believe my mother and her brother were products of divine conception, not because their behavior was in any way elevated, but because there is simply no way, even today, that my imagination will wrap around the vision of my grandmother having sex. May Morris was one chilly lady.