In 1961, my grandmother lost her mind and began soon after to smell strong. She cared for herself with less than her usual enthusiasm, drooled, and took up swearing; but what affected my mother most was my grandmother’s refusal (inability) to recognize her own daughter. Finally the odor and the heartache grew to be too much to bear, and my mother committed my grandmother to Wheatland, a nursing care facility.
Somewhat distraught, my mother agreed to make a trip to Arizona with two of her girlfriends from school, “for her own good.” They left shortly after her graduation from the University of Minnesota, where she had taken a degree in linguistics and art history, and where her grade-point average was three point nine.
The rest is about me.
In the only impulsive act of her young life (she was barely twenty-two), she dated and fell in love with an extremely handsome young lifeguard at their hotel, and upon returning to Minneapolis and a summer job at the museum, she found herself alone with me, pregnant.
Gordon Elder, son of a baker from Bakersfield, California, was nineteen when he married my mother. He was a lucky, pretty boy who had migrated originally to Arizona as a model for Goldwater’s department stores. He appeared in their live shows and in several of their catalogues. He is on the cover of the Fall 1960 catalogue, wearing chocolate corduroy slacks and an expensive gold plaid shirt, leading a burro into what appears to be the Grand Canyon. It was fortunate for my father that he learned he could trade on his good looks, because (given his decision not to work for a living) it saved him from a life as a professional bowler for which he had previously been preparing.
That all models want to act
is the axiom which dictated his move into acting as an avocation, and
that children need attention
may have been the one that alienated us. I’m not sure about that. I have every reason to believe that he was a sincere person and not a dirty rotten bastard. He could not help his gleaned charm and his shiny hair, neither of which I inherited.
So, nearly seventeen years ago, in March, I was born at Phoenix Baptist Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, to these two children. I was not a Baptist, and I have not been baptized, exactly. At that time, my father had extended a summer job in a real estate office (which he’d managed to obtain through a connection) into a career he was a natural at, but had little affection for. We lived one year in the tragic Harvard Court on East Van Buren, and then we moved into a modest, but well-placed house on the lowest gradient north of Camelback Mountain. We could see where the rich lived from our yard.
My mother, of whom I have this record, two distinct memories, and one photograph, was killed in a freak accident in the Phoenix Museum where she worked. A weld snapped on a four-ton stabile and she was crushed. I was four. Since then, they have reconstructed the sculpture and repainted it; I have been to see it only once. You can see it in the terrace, green and gray, entitled
Morning Flight
.
From my mother I inherited a doggedness known only at times as determination, and her library of fiction and art books. The latter I relinquished when I was banished from my own house, as you shall soon see.
After my mother’s death, my father, who had loved her I guess, started what I later came to see and consider as questionable behavior. And I began, in a sense, asking the questions.
For example, when I was just ten, my father changed his name from Elder to Ardor to further his stage career. I didn’t mind this terribly at the time (even though it left me alone with a name), because I understood that Edgar Allen Poe’s father had been an actor given to that form of behavior. At the time, however, I hadn’t fully understood how Edgar had ended up.
The trouble commenced, as I’ve hinted, when, inflamed by the nine hundred novels I chose to read instead of going to school, I attempted to keep dad on my version of the straight and narrow.
Why?
I’ll take questions later.
He was selling bungalows all morning and rehearsing and playing in various theaters in the afternoons and evenings. His associates at the time, girls, actresses, would many times arrive at our door before him to be met by my “Glad to meet you.” And then the “
My mother should be home at any minute
.” It was a routine, and it achieved routine success, especially with the younger and more vulnerable women.
I remember one of these young women. She was obviously working hard at perfecting a Sandra Dee sense of self, and her eyes spooned widely on the fragile edge of diet pills.
When I indicated that my mother would be home soon, the girl said, “I thought your mother was …”
“At the market?” I held the ruse, straight out of “The Open Window.”
“Dead.”
“Dead!” I laughed, as her pupils spread. Then Mrs. Magan walked into the yard, looking for her son. It was not planned. I had no idea this coincidence might unmoor my visitor. She left, but not before it was abundantly clear that she had nearly had a stroke and should go somewhere very fast and change her knickers. That’s my father’s word,
knickers
. He’s affected in a small way, sometimes; being in the theater does that to people.
Anyway, that trick worked only on the vulnerable. For the others, I did the rest: salad dressing in the bed, lipstick messages everywhere (you should have seen me buying that lipstick!), short sheets, and finally the fires. They were small fires really,
arsonettes
, engineered to keep occupants of our house alert late at night and out of bed.
My father talked to me about these activities. He closed his talks, which were primarily pleas, with what I considered a rhetorical question:
What am I going to do with you?
I was eleven and hopeful and even as he reasoned with me, I was cooking up new remedies for his lifestyle. I did not think he would do anything with me, except take me down to the theater from time to time to see him in
Barefoot in the Park
, which he looked already too old for, or some other entertainment from the stage.
I didn’t mind it there. I did some of my best acting in the theater. Sitting by his most recent acquisition in the dark, I would lean to her sympathetically and offer extended descriptions of my father’s contagious diseases, memorized from the thickest book in our house:
Alper’s Medical Encyclopedia
. Twice I inked lesions onto my own arms to flash in her face in the near dark. It was theater, wasn’t it?
No. My father considered it mayhem. I was eleven and blind to his growing despair. I was lost in my reading and word games all day long, playing anagrams, writing ads and bumper sticker slogans, reciting sections of the dictionary aloud as if it were German (then French), playing a game I called “synonyms” while looking in the mirror. When my father found out about school (I had called the school, and speaking in an accent, told them poor Collin Elder had Black Lung disease complicated by amnesia), it was too much. He was ready to have a life of his own.
So, the answer to
what am I going to do with you
became: divorce. I was driven in a Chevy stationwagon, with which I have since become too familiar, to the Home.
The Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls
. Even when I arrived four years ago there were more boys than girls, but they refused or forgot to change the name.
Wayward:
another lovely word.
You’ve driven by the place. It lies west of the highway like a compound, a mission-style kennel, the fences looking new all the time. The desert flat and the mountains spaced oddly, perfectly, looking like a hundred breasts come to peek at the wayward and incarcerated teenagers of America, etcetera. The final jungle of the desert rages aridly right outside the fences, summer-fall-winter-spring, changing only subtly the way smoke disappears, green as sand in March, as bone in August. And always the black mountain, a crumbling pseudo-volcanic wayward irregularity spilling its black self from cliffs to boulders into black alluvial fans, in fact, into the very sand that sifted through the chain-link fences, black. There is no real canyon to speak of, yet this is the Noble
Canyon
. Things are misnamed in this world; expect it. As you drive by the place, you will see the signs along the Noble Canyon Highway, and this is the truth:
DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS IN THIS AREA
.
The Noble Canyon was a broken home where we were to be kept and corrected. I would have much preferred their calling it “Reform School” even though that would have been a bigger lie. We were, in a sense, formed there, and no one was
re
formed. Apprentice rapists honed their style, children practiced the delivery of insult and injury, people developed a television way of responding to one another which I called
sarcastic modern
. It was the home where Steele and Rawlins and I enacted a shoddy and broken version of growing up, reveling only in mistreating our teachers, not thinking about tomorrow, next week, or a time when we might be men in a world, men expected to hold other homes up and together. Simply: we’d been rejected, and our actions, stemming as they did from this vast shared humiliation that bordered hatred, were almost understandable. Almost.
My father sent me a postcard when I was fourteen, indicating that he was sorry, that he had a new car, and that he was moving to California. The postal system, being what it is, delivered his second letter to me two years later, and it caused me to leave Noble Canyon, or so I’ll say.
So ends a general version of the socio-medical-geographical theatrical-geological-postal record. Or begins it. I’m uncertain because it plays through my forehead like a continuous videotape. I spent four years at Noble Canyon thinking about the future all day and the past all night. I am certain that my father had not meant or intended me to spend that much time at that place and I was poised for flight. And then pushed. As I said: at the right moment, I was the recipient of a ride.
*********
There are only two sorts of summer help hired at the Arizona State Fair: the governor’s children and a few residents from Noble Canyon. When we had arrived in June, some blond kid in a Lacoste tennis shirt had sidled over to Steele and me and asked, through the whitest teeth I have ever seen, “What are you in for?”
Steele had his lie ready and whispered, “Homosexual rape.”
The blond boy backed a step and looked at me.
“I’m ungovernable,” I said, selecting my shovel and heading for the barns, Steele behind me, laughing all the way. The governor’s son was assigned a typing job in the air-conditioned Administration Building.
That summer, while Steele cleaned his aisle and I shoveled mine, I’d watch him measuring his strokes or bullshitting with one of the owners about what a fine cow it really was, and frankly, it depressed me violently. He was one year ahead of me, on the same track.
During lunch, Steele would talk about how little work he was able to get away with and what an asshole every other person on earth was, including Captain Fowler, the fair director, and about how slick a thing it was to be graduating. He had a future on the state road crew in the fall after the fair shut down. He stated his credo simply: “Get a little apartment, deal a little dope, and screw around.”
After lunch, Steele liked to climb into the huge loft of our barn and smoke “chunga” as he called it, which no one could detect because of the manure. I sat on a bale of hay and smoked with him the first few days, but it made the afternoon into a horror movie with all the soggy shoveling and huge slow cows. Stoned, and gesturing with the joint, Steele would ask me what I planned to do after the fair, and then he would laugh, knowing I had another year to graduate and be legally free.
There were times at the fair that fall when I tried not to think, to simply work and enjoy it: the clean barn, the clean smell. I like the heat of Phoenix in September and sweating through my shirt two or three times every day. Both Steele and I worked twelve-hour shifts, noon to midnight, and there was a sense being there, while the light changed so terrifically though the temperature remained even, that we had something to do with it all.
And it was much better than being stuck out at the Home doing work like some of the girls had to, in the kitchen or the yard. I liked getting back when everyone else was asleep, showering hard for half an hour, and then playing cards and dominoes and smoking cigarettes with Steele and Rawlins.
Steele only taught me two things in the time we worked at the fair. One, if Captain Fowler came by in his golf cart and you were sitting down, tie your shoe without looking at him then get up and start shoveling. Though the Home got us the jobs, and we were supposed to be somewhere on the state payroll, guys like Captain Fowler looked for any reason to fire the delinquents. Secondly, he showed me three places to take any girls I might pick up.
Steele had a girl in the loft at least once a week. At six, when the other maintenance shifts changed, I’d see some girl on the ladder, the pockets showing beneath her extremely cutoff Levis, and then two minutes by my watch, up would go Steele. He’d worked the fair three years in a row and his motto was, “Any job has its fringe benefits, but it’s you gotta pick ’em up.”
I took my pleasures otherwise, because I didn’t want Steele to be my teacher, and besides, I was afraid of him the way I am afraid of myself. Like I said, we were on one path, and it would take some effort to get off it. I could withstand the depressing series of acute alcoholic insults to the brain my life had become, but I could not weather myself becoming him.
Throughout the grounds there were spread the other usuals: the vegetables near Horticultural Square, the copper and geodes in the Mineralogy Building, the ducks and deer in the Game and Fish Building, the exotic animals in an open area behind the Horticultural Square, camels, donkeys, bears, and a shopworn lion.
The local high schools had illustrated each square with monstrous papier-mâché sculptures which signaled the various motifs. Outside the Mineralogy Building, for example, stood an eight-foot gold nugget, sprinkled liberally with a million tiny cake sparkles. Being frank, I’ll admit it resembled the largest turd on earth. The best paper monument was in Horticultural Square: a rambling, multicolored cornucopia, spilling its pulpy plenty out like an overturned melon truck. Despite a natural aversion to sculpture of any kind, I enjoyed these tributes to art for its own sake, but there were crafts as well: the knitting, the baking, and the painting. Someone had done a series of paintings in relief using nails. Someone else had knit a bedspread out of pop tops from cans. Someone else had prepared an entire week’s menu using worms. Honest. There was a range.