A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (8 page)

Who can really know the exact moment when something begins, but my mother's opinion is that the real trouble with my father had started months before when Milo de Rossi's car drove up, dust flying, the horn honking, two girls in the back seat tangled up with de Rossi in a way that was still illegal in this state. He introduced the girls as actresses.

Later my mother looked at my father and scowled and, because her hands were full of wet laundry, blew a piece of hair tiredly away from her forehead. “Warren,” she said, “let me ask you this. How many movies do you think those girls have been in?”

He stuck his hand in his back pocket, as if to get more room for thinking, and before he could answer she continued. “Looks like they got the auditioning down.”

Milo de Rossi had been looking for a place to film his next movie and he'd heard about our ranch and the land it sat on: red cliffs, deep canyons, and the stark Bull Mountains in the distance. He found our land to be a cheap and ready-made set, just as other producers discovered it and made it fit their needs. With a few props and the right camera angles, our ranch was alternately transformed during the early 50's into the Sahara, the moon, the Apache nation, and a hidden Mexican outpost filled with copper-faced desperados. In one
of the lowest budget films ever, my father watched cavemen battle dinosaurs in the mock prehistoric valley just below our house, and everything in those ten days of filming would have been perfect had my father not got into a shoving match with a caveman who, during a break, flirtingly lifted the edge of my mother's skirt with his spear and then grunted.

Milo de Rossi was not the first director to visit us, to shake my father's hand and make a deal, but he was the first to tempt him. “And by the way,” he had said to him casually, “we might be able to use you in a few scenes that haven't been fully written yet.” De Rossi backed up, squared his hands out in front of his face to make a fleshy lens through which to look my father over. “Turn to the left, Warren, and lift your chin a little.” My father complied, looking straight into the sun, squinting in a way that would later become Clint Eastwood's seering trademark.

They say that acting is a bug that bites, and if that's true, then my mother could tell you how that bite makes a person sick. My father didn't run a fever after de Rossi left, but he was as hot and irrational as a child with the flu.

“Honey,” my mother tried to tell him, “the movies are a long shot. And you can't trust those people.”

But my father had taken up staring at the horizon. He rode his horse and irrigated and cut hay and worked hard like he always did, though de Rossi had planted a tantalizing idea out in front of him. And around that time my mother noticed how often he was combing his hair. Any reflective surface would do: a fender, a piece of glass, the still surface of water. By then de Rossi and his crew were due back in three weeks.

We didn't wait for bad news to collapse around us. When my father had turned ice cold that morning and said that his mind was made up, that he'd take whatever de Rossi would give him and that he'd work his way up from there, my mother set her shoulders, let him have one last look at us, and headed out.

The sun was warm and she had stopped to give me a bottle of water. “Hey sweet meat, we're doing fine,” she said, kissed both my arms, tickled the warm wet spot under my chin, and pushed the stroller on. The breeze quickened and the cedars waved. A sugar-fine pelting of dust blew over my mother's ankles and between the stroller wheels, and from some indeterminate distance we heard a cow bellowing, low and sorrowful, then echoing back to itself off the high sandstone cliffs.

Some said the sky turned liquid; others, that it flexed and burned like at the beginning of time, but what we had seen from our ranch many times before were sudden long flashes as if a huge brilliant light had been turned on and then off in the distance. Ninety-eight miles away as the birds fly was the Nevada Test Site and in the middle of that was Yucca Flat, ground zero. From hillsides on our property we had watched the explosions of test bombs Ruth, Dixie, Ray, Badger, and Simon. Sometimes we packed fruit or a small picnic to take along, we threw an old blanket on the ground, stretched out and waited, but we had grown bored with those events, stopped watching, and accepted the bulletins which said everything was safe.

That morning, predawn, 1953, as part of the series of bombs code-named Upshot-Knothole, Harry had been detonated, a shot that was named to sound as if you were talking about a friendly next-door neighbor. It hung from a 300-foot steel tower out there on Yucca Flat. At the end of the countdown, soldiers positioned three miles away as firsthand observers heard a loud click and then felt the raving heat of a new sun. They had been ordered down on one knee, left arms tight over their closed eyes, heads tucked. In those first two seconds of Harry, some of them saw the bones in their own arms—everywhere a huge luminous X-ray spreading outward. The ground shook and then the shock wave hit, knocking some of the men back, a wave that they
eerily felt pass right through their bodies, front to back. And then the sound.

Some soldiers put their hands over their ears, though they had been instructed to keep their eyes covered. Others held their heads against the intense pressure of the blast. They felt a sudden heat in places like their kneecaps and the backs of their hands, and a slow—almost pleasant—tingling in their crotches that shortly, however, turned to painful needling. A private first class jumped up, hollering, holding himself between his legs, but a buddy pulled him back down where he crouched and covered his head and moaned.

Little by little the roaring diminished and the soldiers' heads came up. They uncovered their ears and were ordered to stand. By that time darkness was ebbing and against the mauve sky they saw a swirling golden fireball, alive, kinetic. The gaseous ring around it shimmered red, green, and blue and even the most nervous and frightened soldiers saw it as beautiful, mesmerizing. They watched as the fireball was lifted higher and higher in a mass of roiling gray-black clouds, which didn't mushroom as they usually did, but spread and then drifted.

A sergeant yelled for the men to double-time it into nearby assault vehicles, and when loaded, they headed for ground zero. They drove past a line of mannequins that had been planted upright on metal poles. The mannequins had been suited up in utility jackets and helmets and then placed in formation like a scraggly half-wit battalion. The helmets had been blown off, the jackets were burning, and the mannequin faces had melted into flesh-colored pools onto the desert floor. The vehicles slowed. Some of the soldiers laughed as they went by, but most were quiet.

Not far from there they passed a small reconnaissance team already at work herding pigs out of an experimental trench. These were important pigs. They wore specially tailored uniforms that were made from a new synthetic fabric that the Army was testing, supposedly durable and lightweight, a promise for all future soldiers. The scientists
had been disappointed when they failed to train the pigs to stand on their hind legs—more closely simulating humans—but the moment that Harry went off, the pigs were suddenly upright, standing, squealing, urinating, front hooves pawing the air. Dogs, monkeys, and burros were also somewhere out there being monitored in dry underground bunkers.

Closing in on ground zero—less than half a mile—the sparse landscape turned empty. Trucks and equipment that had been left there were gone, everything flash-burned into the minute particles that fell, ashlike, here and there as a strange rain. Five hundred yards out, the assault vehicles stopped, the rear ramps lowered, the soldiers disembarked and began to move in formation up the incline where the detonation tower, now vaporized, had stood. The ground everywhere was winter white, but hot. Above them, the desert dawn had been erased by heavy black clouds, smoke, floating debris.

Two hundred yards from center they stopped, and having fulfilled their orders and not knowing now exactly what to do, the sergeant stepped out front, smartly saluted ground zero, turned, and ordered the men to head back. With each heavy-booted step, the snowy dust and ash floated up so that from a distance the men looked as if they were moving, knee-deep, through clouds.

Elly and Lewis Barlow, our neighbors, were card players—experts at Hearts and No Knock Rummy, tender for a game that they taught my parents called Michigan. Winter nights the four of them would be hunched over a kitchen table, moaning about what they'd been dealt. My mother never held her cards in close enough and oftentimes my father got a peek at the queen of spades or at a run or he'd push her hand toward her chest and give her a warning. “Lorraine, you're showing us everything.”

“Well, not everything,” she'd say, putting her cards down and starting to unbutton her blouse. Lewis smacked his cards face down and clapped. Elly squealed and took the time to roll a cigarette—Prince Albert in a can. My father got up from the table, stood behind my mother, and wrapped his arms around her, as if that was the only way she could be stopped. “Okay, okay,” he said, “I'm sorry.”

Actually my parents were wrapped around each other like that almost half the time—embracing, clutching, hugging, pawing. With other men, my mother said she would have felt mauled, but with my father she felt her heart race, she felt her shoes suddenly wanting to be thrown off. They had sex like animals and she was not ashamed to say so: on a living room chair, in the root cellar, in the orchard during spring when the ribbon grass was still soft enough to make a bed. Nearby, I dozed or chewed my fist and waited.

My mother knew that leaving wouldn't be easy, and maybe that's another reason we headed for the Barlows that morning: comfort and an understanding shoulder. Elly and Lewis had lived a fairly bumpy life themselves—fast times and booze in Vegas casinos—and they looked on other people's trouble with gentle eyes.

My mother gauged that we had gone over two miles and were more than halfway there. We had passed the S curve in the road a while back and she thought we must be close to Carpenter Wash, but time and long brown vistas mingled and distorted both. She prodded the stroller to the side of the road, found a flat rock, and we sat facing each other.

“Huh, movies,” she said. “What baloney. What trash.”

Months before at a nearby filming site where my father was caring for the horses used in breakneck cavalry scenes, my mother had met a brawny blonde named Jeff Cantrell, an in-demand lead for B movies, and she was thoroughly unimpressed. Brusque and egotistical, he spent too much time dabbing perspiration from his face and yelling for someone to bring him iced tea, and when she learned that his real
name was Ira Kaufmann, she was even more disgusted. “What, is he ashamed to use his real name?” she wanted to know. All the hubbub and shouting around the set didn't seem to foster any character in those people as far as she was concerned. Everyone was either whining or cussing or laughing with the fake high-pitched laughter that she identified as Hollywood.

Milo de Rossi hadn't shown her anything different. My father had escorted him around our ranch for several days, pointing out box canyons and high rocky fortresses, and by the second day de Rossi was convinced that this was the place for his movie,
Apache Sunset
. He already had Audie Murphy lined up, he said. He hoped for Anthony Quinn or Lee Marvin as the sad-eyed Apache leader who would glimpse the future and see the pain for which his people were bound. De Rossi was still new enough in the business to be regarded with hope, but his lack of financial foresight and his thudding story lines would finally catch up with him, and in the years ahead he was destined for junk.

Smoking fat Havana Cristo's, he took pleasure in confiding in everyone at dinner each night: William Holden had a drinking problem; sometimes had to be thrown in a shower before he could complete his scenes.

My mother shook her head as she served the venison or roast she had carefully prepared. Everyone ate as if they'd been deprived for months.