No matter how we shuf
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ed and displaced ourselves, whatever arrangement we wound up in, the Pico house always felt like the same old house at the end of the day. Willow and Big Bill moved into the master bedroom, while Lulu took residence directly across the hall from me, in what used to be the of
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ce. My heart thrilled watching Big Bill heft her daisy-dappled yellow footlocker out of the van and carry it up the stairs on his shoulder. The original trophy room became a storage room for everything that used to be in the master bedroom and the of
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ce. And in the spirit of migration, Doug and Ross switched bunks again.
I, of course, stayed in the same room as always. But it was different. The whole world changed. My universe was right-side-out, and my regular senses returned with a sharpness like never before. A new sense developed down in the very center of me—possibility. And, miraculously, even my voice changed. I no longer sounded like an emphysemic blackjack dealer from Sparks. The sound that came out of my throat was like velvet thunder riding on Caribbean breezes.
My words came from a different place. They weren’t words anymore; they were positively charged ions crackling out of my mouth like fairy dust. And I was a poet every time I spoke the name Lulu.
At ten years and eleven months, I began the Book of Lulu, and the Book of Lulu was all about Lulu, nothing less than a catalogue of everything even remotely Lulu: what she wore, things she said, things she liked, things she hated—a Farmer’s Almanac of Lulu.
August 29, 1979
She wore her yellow socks again. She’s getting a hole in one of them. I smelled her pajamas in the laundry room today, and I’m pretty sure that’s weird. They smelled like frozen waf
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es.
September 3, 1979
When I ask her about her dad, she says she doesn’t have one. She says it doesn’t matter, but I think it does. I think everybody should have a father, even if it’s just Big Bill.
September 12, 1979
Big Bill was polishing the fender on the van today with a yellow sock. I didn’t say anything.
By Thanksgiving, the Book of Lulu had grown to two volumes. I kept them rubber-banded together in the big drawer of my desk. But the truth is, Lulu’s discovery of my secret would likely have come as a relief at that point, because if I got any fuller of Lulu I was sure to explode. And the only way to stand it was to grant myself the luxury of imagining that Lulu actually had a Book of William: an everything-for-and-about-me book. But I doubt it. I really don’t think Lulu had the patience for a book about anybody.
Christmas of 1979 saw my new family in full blossom. It was the
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rst holiday in three years not eclipsed by the shadow of my mother. No chestnuts, no sleigh bells, no snow, but a six-foot silver electric tree festooned with popcorn chains, a variegated mountain of wrapping paper, and enough meat to feed a small battalion: turkeys (yes, plural), hams, meatballs, shepherd’s pie, mincemeat (the real deal), you name it. Three days before Christmas, even as the feast was being cured, soaked, thawed, and generally prepared, Lulu proclaimed herself a vegetarian, and for once in my life I had an ally in the meat resistance. While the Millers gorged themselves on all manner of fauna, hoofed, winged, or otherwise, Lulu and I ate baked beans and banana pudding for Christmas dinner.
As was the custom, Doug and Ross received identical gifts, but fought over them anyway. Big Bill got them football helmets in the largest size. They still didn’t
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t. Providence had blessed my brothers with enormous heads—one might even say presidential—though nothing to
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ll them but glands.
Christmas of ’79 marked another milestone of sorts in that it was the
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rst Christmas I ever looked forward to giving a gift more than receiving one—that is, the
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rst year I understood “the true spirit of Christmas.” The gift, of course, was for Lulu, and was not one gift, but two: a small, trim, leather-bound diary (which I prayed she would
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ll with private thoughts of me), and a new pair of yellow socks.
We did a covert exchange after breakfast in the trophy room, a small wainscoted den cluttered with little bronzed men in bronzed Speedos striking various poses. The walls were adorned with framed posters of Big Bill Miller’s rippling personage in various states of contortion, but smiling, always smiling, the smile of a man rushing to deliver a painful bowel movement at the frantic behest of Turk-ish customs agents. And for whatever reason, the posters were autographed, though it never occurred to me then to ask
who autographs
a picture to themselves?
We sat Indian style in the middle of the room, a circle of two.
“You
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rst,” I said.
“No, you.”
“Please.”
She unwrapped the diary
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rst. Her blue eyes smiled as she caressed the leather and turned the book over in her hands. “Oh, William, thank you, thank you. It’s lovely. I can use it for my birds.”
She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. My face went hot in a
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ash. I could’ve given her gifts forever, could’ve made it my life’s work, if only to look upon those smiling eyes.
“Open the other one,” I said.
Deliberately, careful not to tear the already hopelessly maligned wrapping paper, she
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nally reached the socks, and her eyes were a circus of light.
“Yay, they have toes!” she said. “I’ve always wanted socks with toes!”
“I know.”
“You’re so sweet, William Miller.” And she leaned over and gave me a second kiss, which loosed a cloud of butter
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ies in my chest.
“Now you,” she said.
Lulu presented me with a
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awlessly wrapped package the size of a Happy Meal. All I could do was look at it: the crisp folds, the carefully taped edges, the way the paper was pulled tight and shiny as a skin around the box. I felt unworthy of such fastidious wrapping, as though such delicacy were wasted on a boy made of mashed potatoes. It didn’t matter what was in the box.
“Open it!”
I began to unwrap it carefully with clumsy
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ngers.
“Oh, just open it!”
The box said Tandy, so I knew it was from Radio Shack. I tore the
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ap open and liberated two squeaky Styrofoam bookends and pulled them apart to reveal a transistor radio.
“I already put the batteries in,” she said. “It’s AM
and
FM.” Then, with a slight air of disappointment, she added: “I wanted to get you Bone Phones but they cost sixty-four dollars.”
I
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ipped the radio on and it hissed like a theremin in hot oil.
“I like radio better than TV,” she announced. “Everything’s too planned out on TV. In radio, everything is
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oating in space and you get to choose. A radio is like a spaceship and you can land it in whatever world you want.”
Navigating around the FM band, I grabbed little
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ts and blossoms of music and patter.
“See what I mean? On TV everything would have straight lines.
On TV you don’t do any work, you just watch. Radio is different.”
I was soon in orbit around a voice on the low end of the AM band. I
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nely tuned the static out and narrowed in until the voice surrounded me with the warm deep clarity of bathwater. And the voice (which I would later learn belonged to Gary Owens), struck me as an awfully big voice to be coming out of such a little box, and awakened a possibility in me that would one day be the instrument of my destiny.
“I hope you like it,” she said.
Can you fathom my fullness? Can you understand my gratitude?
Can you see all that Lulu gave me?
Shortly after the main event—the general gift exchange, which saw the twins wrestling in a wilderness of wrapping paper while Big Bill continually bellowed “settle down”—we were instructed by Big Bill (who I can only assume was instructed by Willow) to select three of our own gifts to give to Friends Outside.
“Well, if they’re our friends why don’t we let ’em inside,” said Doug. “That’ll be my gift.”
In the car, Doug cried at the prospect of giving up his Super Jock.
He threatened to break the kicking leg so they wouldn’t want it.
“Don’t you dare,” said Big Bill.
But within
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ve minutes the leg was broken anyway when Ross tried to wrest the helmeted hero out of Doug’s grip.
Friends Outside was not far from the airport. It was a big two-story wood house in a stucco neighborhood, with chipping paint and a sagging porch. Every three minutes or so the shutters rattled on their hinges as airliners thundered overhead. There was a sick willow tree out front, a giant, long past the weeping stage, which only served to make the house darker.
A hard little woman who looked nothing like Mother Hubbard greeted us on the porch. She led us inside through the foyer to a huge living room, where eight or nine kids of various ages and colors were lounging on ancient sofas or seated on the
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oor around a game of
Monopoly. A huge old television was on in the corner. The picture was squiggly. A few of the older kids looked up when we entered.
“These people have been thoughtful enough to bring gifts,” the woman announced.
I’ll never forget the terrible awkwardness of my new family bunched together in the middle of that living room like a wagon train, dispensing gifts. How desperately I wanted to run from that place: the sad crepe paper ornamentation, the joyless light, those old dusty couches. Everything about the
place spoke of strained circum
stances, of our casserole days.
Lulu surrendered every gift she received, including the yellow toe socks. I’m not proud of the fact that this gesture wounded me, that behind my lame smile I was gritting my teeth as she presented my socks to a black girl in pink barrettes roughly her own age. I knew better, but I couldn’t help myself, because no conceivable cir
cum
stance, not even the threat of physical violence, could have compelled me to part with my transistor radio.
On the drive back home, Lulu pressed her face to the tinted window. She didn’t say a word about it, nor should she have. I should have known how hard it was for her to give up those things. But in spite of all I’d lost in my short life, I still knew nothing of sacri
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ce.
My father was no emissary of American sophistication, a fact that became painfully clear within eight minutes of our arrival in Sydney, Australia, for the 1980 Mr. Olympia. I realize it’s not a unique or un-usual condition to be embarrassed by your father, but when, at every photo op, your father persists in peeling off his T-shirt and setting his hairless pectorals to dancing like a chorus line for gathering crowds, embarrassment threatens to become a lingering condition.
Big Bill was optimistic going into Sydney, and he had every reason to be. His back was ripped. His lower-body de
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nition was better than ever, and while his proportions may have been slightly off (maybe a little top-heavy, though that’s debatable), he looked better than in ’79, when he
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nished fourth. His biggest improvement had nothing to do with musculature, but with his posing, which had come light-years under the tutelage of Willow. Having endured seven strictly enforced years of ballet growing up in Vermont, Willow managed to thoroughly transform Big Bill. In the past, he had simply lumbered onto the stage and bungled through a rapid succession of herky-jerky contortions, beaming like a jack-o’-lantern in heat.
But Willow infused Big Bill with a sort of poetry, perhaps the same poetry that inspired her at seventeen to leave behind Mary Margaret and the pleated skirts of prep school in Vermont and head west for Big Sur with the wind in her hair.
I think I was more nervous than Big Bill. I knew the Olympia had become a
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ve hundred–pound gorilla on my father’s back, and I desperately wanted him to win it. Along with Mentzer, he was probably the favorite up until Arnold’s controversial late entry.
After a
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ve-year absence, with a movie deal pending, Arnold returned to Sydney in search of his seventh Olympia. His appearance made everybody uneasy, and even before the competition began there were whispers of conspiracy, fears that the Olympia might be compromised in the name of boosting the sport’s popularity. But Big Bill kept his eyes on the prize. He didn’t let the Arnold circus distract him.
In what I can only view as a rite of passage, my father asked me to oil him up before prejudging. I’d oiled up Big Bill before: at Mr. South-west, Mr. Natural California, a couple of promotional appearances at Lee Dobbs Chevrolet. But this was Olympia, and even the ninety-eight-pound weakling in me was wowed by such dizzying heights.
In my hotel room, hours before weigh-in, I was presented with a blue poly-
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ber sweat suit to match Big Bill’s. I would be lying if I told you I was not proud of that sweat suit. That sweat suit distinguished me.