I Will Be Complete Page 10

  I might have been the only person on the plane not worried. If he’d meant “ambulances and fire engines,” he would have said it, I thought, and that “trucks with red lights” must be some term of aviation art with which I was unfamiliar.

  My ignorance read as calm, I think. A stewardess with a pageboy haircut rushed by my seat a few times, first to see if I was okay, then to note I was traveling by myself, then to double-check—if I was okay, why was I okay?

  When we came in for our final approach, I looked out the window and saw streaking down the runway what the captain had promised wouldn’t be there—fire engines and ambulances—and instead of being frightened, I was angry at having been lied to. The landing was a little bumpy, but nothing more.

  We got off the plane. I had a story to tell, obviously, and as I waited for my mother, the story in my mind got larger and larger and then I worried.

  The plane was empty. The crew left with their suitcases, including the stewardess with the pageboy. I had never been at a completely empty airplane gate before—it was like being backstage at a theater.

  The stewardess returned. She took me behind the counter and let me use the airline phone to call home. Mom didn’t answer.

  I tried Peter’s house. He wasn’t sure where my mom was either, but I was welcome to come to his place. He asked to speak to the stewardess, and then she handed the phone back to me. “One question—is that stewardess cute?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Put her back on the phone.”

  I did. In a moment, it was resolved. She would come with me in a cab to Peter’s. As I recall, things went lightly and rapidly, with much good humor—the stewardess accepted a glass of wine from Sue. While Peter was on the phone, I tried to entertain her. She had seemed to be impressed at first with how mature I was, and she was interested in how that had happened, and yet the longer she was here the less impressed she seemed. She was having trouble understanding who exactly Peter was to me and to my mother, which I didn’t think was relevant.

  Peter came back with a report. My mother had been at a rock concert and forgotten my arrival time, but she was on her way over. She wanted to thank my savior, which was not going to happen—she caught a cab even though we all wanted her to stay.

  When my mother came, I wasn’t really angry she’d forgotten me. I liked proving I could survive without her. I was mostly mad she hadn’t gotten to hear about the ambulances and fire engines. But something about the stewardess bothered me. Peter had some harsh words for her—she was cold, she was a bitch, fuck her, she’s not invited back. But I kept remembering how she looked as she was trying to assess my environment, and I wanted her to understand that everyone here loved each other, we are all aristocracy at rest and at play. But I could see she had not been charmed.

  When Mom asked about my trip, I didn’t tell her that Dad had called her flaky, and I didn’t tell him she hadn’t shown up. He would have misunderstood. It wasn’t evidence, it was an accident.

  * * *

  * * *

  —

  Some private schools in Pacific Heights were contained in stone Gothic Revival mansions, as if to assure parents that even though we were in San Francisco, their children would be educated as strictly as if it were the sixteenth century. Town School for Boys, however, had been designed in the 1950s and it looked like a Madison Avenue office building, which perhaps reflected the idea that school, like fear, would be a civilizing influence. But it didn’t quite take. When I arrived the first day, the silence in the classroom was like that of Barbary apes interrupted in their dens by the appearance of a goat smeared in candy.

  Seventh graders shouldn’t go to school. They should be shipped to camp. I was being parachuted into territory that was hostile simply for hostility’s sake. By the end of my first day, the next-most-junior boy, who’d only been there since second grade, was overwhelmed with relief that he was no longer the newcomer.

  Nothing bad happened at first. There is a base politeness when bullies are experienced enough to be patient. Was I new to the neighborhood? I’d been there a whole year? Where was I before? Public school, well, that must have been interesting. And before that? Southern California? The beach? Did you surf? Oh, just joking, you don’t look like a surfer. You’ve been to Young Man’s Fancy—nice sweater. I can almost imagine them lined up on the curb as I left, waving, telling me they were looking forward to me coming back the next day.

  It was difficult to explain this to my mother. She thought she’d seen me outwit some bullies when I was younger, and she was positive that a good lesson and my enormous brain would get me through this.

  Peter brought her to parties and introduced her to friends who had interesting financial propositions. I wasn’t invited to those parties. I don’t know what most of the opportunities were. She met the guy who invented the Pet Rock. (“A schmuck,” Peter said. “No grace, no dignity, just looking around like a big dope at all the women at the party,” probably meaning Peter was unable to sell him anything.) A cabaret owner needed money to put on a show called Beach Blanket Babylon, with original songs about San Francisco. It was campy and gay, inherently ridiculous and risky and my mom passed on it. Another time, Peter invited her over late one night to meet a financial person, but when she arrived, there were already two women there, and it was obvious that she’d been invited so he could choose among them. She left and didn’t talk to Peter until the next set of apologies.

  One investment took a while to evaluate because it was so far-fetched. She studied brochures. She had meetings. She wrote a check and with that, my mother bought thirty-five Pong machines.

  I’ll never know how much she paid for them—first, she told me ten thousand dollars; I later heard fifty thousand. I used to know everything about Pong machines, the way I knew how many silver dollars were made in Denver in 1883 or who penciled Defenders 14. But I’ve forgotten who made them, or if you played to eleven or thirteen or twenty-one points. I just remember the feeling when I first saw a Pong machine: it was like the Space Shuttle strapped to the back of a 747.

  My mother’s machines were tabletop models, black-and-white monitors set flat in particle board with wood-grain laminate. They were a knock-off of the original design. You could play with one or two players. Each player had a single knob, like the dimmer on a light switch, that moved the blip left or right.

  The machines were state-of-the-art, meaning you could play three different games: tennis, hockey (which looked just like tennis, except with more lines on the screen), and knockout, where you tried to eliminate the other player’s big white Xs, eight stationary, sitting ducks.

  The graphics were as simple as cave paintings. The black of the screen was a fuzzy gray, the white was bluish and veined with horizontal lines from the cathode-ray tube. The software allowed you to hit the ball straight on or at a forty-five-degree angle. No English, no rushing the net. The sounds the machine made were as primitive as a baby robot’s, different inflections of “beep” or “boop” depending on what the ball hit, and a more sour “baap” when the ball went out of bounds. Then, GAME OVER, capital letters, with a mock game playing in the background to entice new players.

  I don’t like the inclination toward camp when people dwell on the technology of the time. No colors? No sound effects? No levels of difficulty? Just one knob? People played a game that even Samuel Beckett would have to admit had no story line. It sounds like we all must have been very stupid in the 1970s.

  Pong was serious business. I was proud of my mom. This was the coolest investment she could have made. I brought the pamphlet to school. I showed it to my economics teacher. I showed it to the bullies, an attempt to dazzle them with something sparkly, and they all nodded, that was cool. Also, it changed nothing for me.

  Mom had bought me a fitted T-shirt, French cut, powder blue and I made the wince-inducing decision to wear this mistake to school one
day. The word went out in a whisper: Glen has tits. That went from an exclamation to a nickname to what I was expected to answer to. My name was now Tits.

  I told my mother about it, and she got me a book on my changing body, a book with drawings of hairy, unself-conscious adults and curious prepubescents, probably translated from some Scandinavian language. Nothing here explained my growing breasts, which had weird, hard tissue in them. I concluded I had breast cancer and was going to die.

  My father called me once a week. If my mother was home, I closed the door, listening for distant sounds and wishing I could feel things. He and Ann had gotten married, and I felt nothing about that, for instance. When I told him about school, or the things I briefly loved, no matter where I started, I ended up beginning sentences that had no exit plan, like I was guarding bad decisions. We had tried to get Leo a girlfriend, but they’d only hissed and fought. After she left, he started peeing on the carpets. Leo was sad. Pause. Pause. Pause.

  “These kids are teasing me.”

  He’d heard that most of my life. “You shouldn’t provoke them,” he said. Pause. Swallow. It was like there were three-by-five cards with subjects written on them. I had run out of things to talk about. There was a new bend in my sentences, a place where I separated subject and predicate, “Did I tell you about”—and then me wondering why I was going to say this—“this cool investment mom is making?”

  “Investment?”

  Maybe I thought he’d see a link between cassette tapes and video games. Mom was visualizing the future. But he disagreed, he thought the Pong machines were a terrible investment. They were a fad. There was competition from jukeboxes and pinball machines. Had my mother researched any of this? What was wrong with corporate bonds? They were boring but my mother was a single parent—she shouldn’t be trying something so risky. She was being a flake.

  There was more like that, an avalanche of it.

  When I got off the phone, I opened the door. Mom was in the living room. How was my father, she asked. I told her that Dad thought she was a flake.

  Why did I say that? What did I think was going to happen? She explained that my father was threatened by the possibility that she might have good business ideas. “You don’t think I’m a flake, do you?”

  “Of course you’re a flake,” I joked and I felt like I’d slapped her.

  “You and your father,” my mother whispered. “You’re both real put-down artists,” she said.

  “I mean, you know,” I said. What did I say? Something like: It had come out wrong. “Flake” was a good thing, I meant that she wasn’t beholden to conservative thought. No, really, it’s just that you don’t behave the way you used to, in Corona del Mar, when you weren’t free. “Flake” means freedom, and you are free, Mom. Something like that. Whatever I tried to change, it didn’t matter. She was done.

  * * *

  —

  It’s not like I was a normal kid who was being teased for no reason. I was a smartass. I was beginning to learn what it meant when no help was coming. One day in Latin class, when the teacher was out of the room, another kid passed me a note.

  Q: What does Glen say when he looks at his chest?

  A: I love my Mounds.

  Catchy. A slogan for a candy bar turned against me. There were hisses of “Tits” now. Rising catcalls and jokes I was too upset to understand. I did nothing, and so it got louder. Tits! Tits! I stood up with tears in my eyes and I said, “You guys are making fun of something you don’t even understand. I have cancer.”

  There was a pause in the hazing. It was like a question mark hung in the air, and then an exclamation point. I was claiming I had breast cancer? Holy shit, that was fantastic! It was like I had bought Christmas presents for each and every one of them.

  Our desks were solid, heavy frames like something out of an ironmonger’s shop, with a writing board fastened in place and slats below to store textbooks during exams. Hey, Tits. Hey, Tits. Hey, Tits.

  I stood, picked up my desk over my head and threw it. It hit the wall.

  A few minutes later, in the principal’s office, I ratted no one out. There is a code of the Old West that I would not break. I was seething, and not because of the teasing so much as at how I’d behaved like a seventh grader. I wanted revenge but I wanted it to be smart, with élan. I’d let myself down. Mom had been right to not read me fairy tales.

  * * *

  —

  I told Peter about this. He asked for the names of the kids who were teasing me. I told him.

  “And what time does school end?”

  I wasn’t sure I should answer that—it seemed like an oddly specific question. “Three o’clock.”

  “And afterward, are there a bunch of kids milling around on the sidewalk? Okay, kid, this is what’s going to happen. Not today, not tomorrow, but one day when you’re not expecting it, at three-oh-five p.m., a black limousine is going to pull up in front of Town School and a pair of guys with leather jackets and sunglasses are going to spring out, grab those kids, throw them in the back of the car, and the car is going to speed away with great alacrity, and vanish. While everyone is freaking out, you’ll be totally calm and waiting because you’ll know what’s going to happen next—five minutes later, the car will show up again and those bullies will be shoved out to the pavement dressed in ballet tutus, with lipstick, full mascara, and wigs on. That’s it, bullying stops right there.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “As God is my witness, when that happens, I want you to make one deal with me, just one—when that happens, you’re never going to ask me for anything else again. You’re on your own after that, endgame.”

  I agreed with him. We shook on it.

  He said thoughtfully, “If that doesn’t work, you should just buy their souls and let them stew about it.”

  * * *

  —

  It turned out that until the Pong investment paid off, we would have to tighten our belts. I said all I needed was fifteen dollars a month for comic books, and when my mom was startled by that figure, I said, “I meant seven-fifty.”

  We couldn’t paint the town with Peter anymore. We would need to move, too. We had too much overhead. It was just temporary, until our ship came in. The Pong machines needed a few months until they’d paid themselves off and soon we’d have a return on our investment.

  My mother had been poor before. It built character. Besides, this wasn’t actually poor—it would be good for me.

  I could handle a tighter money flow. I could handle being bullied. I didn’t really need anything. Once, twice, maybe more, I went up to our rooftop, where it always felt like a Sunday afternoon, and every echo of every sound seemed magnified to match the pang of long shadows. I couldn’t see the Bridge, but I could see nearby hills and the mossy bricks of neighbors’ houses, their kitchen counters, the strange angles of sunlight falling on their hardwood floors. I was a jewel thief or a ghost. I was hardly even a body. I could handle anything. The rooftops of San Francisco were quiet and they would be here long after my thoughts were gone. It was almost like I was calm.

  Moving into our new apartment would require a change, my mother told me. I don’t remember if I fought when she explained what needed to happen. I think I didn’t.

  It was six o’clock on a winter evening when the doorbell rang. I was watching Star Trek. My mother answered. A man came in. I remember him having gray hair and a combed mustache and perhaps he was a little chubby. He was from Pacifica.

  I have thought so much about the twenty minutes he spent in our apartment that I no longer remember what I actually saw and what I have imagined. My mother wanted me to come meet him. I preferred to watch Star Trek. I might not have come out at all.

  The man got on his knees on the carpet and he wriggled his fingers. He brought out treats for Leo. Leo hid under a couch until the treats an
d the play started to seem like fun—he was a social cat—and then he came out and smelled the man’s fingertips. But he was aloof, too, not letting himself be scratched. Staying out of reach until, Oh bother, Leo collapsed on his side to let himself be rubbed accordingly.

  “What’s his name?” the man asked.

  “Leo,” my mother said. “He’s a rare seal point Siamese.” And Leo talked happily, his Siamese voice loud as a baby’s. I could hear that even when I turned the television up.

  The man had a carrier. It was easy to coax Leo in. My mother grew up on a farm during the war. She’d been sent there to escape the bombs. There were cats and they were interchangeable. Also, she knew it was different for me. Leo was my best friend and I talked to him every night when the lights were out. But we were simplifying. We were moving to another apartment that didn’t take pets. He had peed on the rug, so it was time for him to go.

  She knocked on my door, and she asked if I wanted to say goodbye to Leo. I said I didn’t. She encouraged me. Finally, I put down my fork—I was eating something—and went downstairs.

  The man was parked in front of the house. Leo was in a carrier in his hand.

  I remember nothing else, except that I was missing the part of Star Trek when Spock put his hands on the alien Horta and performed the Vulcan mind meld, and I was mildly, distantly, vaguely annoyed at being taken away from that. I would not say I felt hollow or empty. I would have told you then that I knew exactly what it meant, giving away Leo. A child’s pet is being given away and that is sad. But don’t insult me by assuming I’ll be broken by this. When I was little, in my tests to get into that gifted school, they found I had eidetic imagery. A lot of kids have this, and it’s not well understood, except that it’s a little like taking a snapshot of a moment. And it fades around the age of twelve.