When my mother, Mim, was a freshman at the University of Wyoming in 1924, she was diagnosed with Pott’s Disease, which was then called tuberculosis of the bones. She went to a quack doctor who had just gotten into the wonders of this new X-ray process, and he turned his X-ray beam on her hip for forty-five minutes.
The result was that she almost died of radiation sickness. She threw up for days, all of her hair fell out, and much of the skin on her hip was sloughed off. She was then informed that, regrettably, they had sterilized her. This was the Roaring Twenties, and my mother, who was a wild thing, believed she was now sterile, which made her even wilder when she recovered.
She kept a smoking-hot date book that included the night she met my father at the University of Utah in 1928. My mother was somewhat Victorian about it, but it was pretty clear that she and Norman just did it all night long. At various points in their lives, they both confessed to me that the reason they had stayed together for all those years was because they had never had better sex with anybody else.
Unlike my mother, my father was raised under oppressive Mormon circumstances. His father was a farmer in Bountiful, Utah, but the family didn’t have a lot of money and they were always struggling. In the summertime, my father had to drive the family vegetable truck to the farmers market at four o’clock every morning.
Norman did, however, come from what amounted to Mormon royalty. On his side of the family, I have an ancestor I don’t know how many times removed who signed the affidavit attesting to the reality of the golden tablets. That put my father pretty high up on the scale of credibility within the Mormon community. His entire family had been devout all the way down the line until my mother came along and snagged him.
By the time he graduated from the University of Utah in 1928, my father was not nearly so serious about being a Mormon. He still wanted to be regarded as a religious person but in the way that one is as a member of the burgher class. His goal in life was to become a banker.
Physically, my father didn’t look much like me at all. He stood about six foot two and was well proportioned, a fine-looking man who could charm the scales off a chicken foot. He was also a great hand with the women. I would sit down with him and my mother for dinner in a restaurant and by the time we left, we would know all there was to know about the waitress.
My mother and father had an explosive connection that neither of them could exactly explain, and so when they decided to get married in 1929, my mother said, “All right, Norman, if you want to get married in the Mormon Temple for time and eternity, I’ll do that.” And he said, “No, I’d rather not.” So they got married in the lobby of the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City, right across the street from the temple.
With the beginning of the Depression, my father began to wonder about the wisdom of becoming a banker in Salt Lake City. Instead, he became the salvation of P.W., because my grandfather realized he was not smart enough about business to hold on to this large, kind of ungainly ranch he had assembled. And so P.W. happily turned the ranch over to my father.
For many years, my parents were kind of like the right-wing Wyoming version of John and Jackie Kennedy before they ever had kids, a glamorous couple who were both really attractive and well known for being able to have a real good time.
Then my father decided to run for state senate. During his first tour of duty in Cheyenne, he and Mim were having it off, as they were inclined to do, at the Plains Hotel, and it turned out that there was one egg left in my mother’s ovaries. Much to her surprise and their mutual consternation, she got pregnant with me. At the time, she was forty-two years old. They had been fucking like minks for twenty years and had no expectations that this would ever happen.
She had to go to Jackson Hole to give birth because there was no hospital in Sublette County, and it turned out she was actually carrying twins, which they didn’t know because this was in the days before ultrasound. When my identical twin brother looked out into the physical world on October 3, 1947, he decided that he was not interested and gave up right at the moment of birth. As I later learned, Elvis Presley’s twin brother had done the same thing.
My mother never told me about any of this until I was about thirteen or fourteen. Other kids had imaginary friends who mysteriously disappeared as soon as they entered puberty, but mine stuck around. I never thought of him as having a name because he was too completely integrated into my life.
One day I said to my mother, “I feel this presence surrounding me all the time and it feels a lot like me. Do you have any idea what could cause that?” And she said, “I have an idea.” She told me about my twin brother, and since then I’ve always been living for the two of us, which has made my own life immeasurably larger.
One of the best things about being an interruption in my parents’ meteoric political career was that they both felt like I was this kid who had come to dinner and would leave just as mysteriously as I had arrived. So they spared me any set of expectations. They asked nothing of me and only ever disciplined me periodically.
My mother was incredibly cruel in a way, because she liked to make me her Little Lord Fauntleroy, which was unwelcome even when I was six years old. I was a boy in blue knee pants, and when she held bridge games with women of a certain age, she would put me on display. I would go around pouring Constant Comment tea for them all while making light conversation.
Although I was definitely the miracle child and the gift from God, both of my parents were raging narcissists, and so I was the miracle child because it suited their narcissism. But it did not suit their narcissism that there was now a third candidate vying for attention, and so they didn’t always keep me around.
I never had a nanny, but I did have a bunch of broke-down alcoholic cowboys who were like nannies to me. They came and went, but some were long-term. There was a guy named Red Riniger who was a true cowboy and had an amusing way of approaching everything. Red was built out of beef jerky, and I spent an awful lot of time with him. There was a machine shop on the ranch because whenever anything broke down, we had to fix it. Red figured I would go down to the shop and start dicking around with stuff anyway, and so he taught me how to weld when I was four years old so I wouldn’t blind myself. Most of our rolling stock was a lot older than me, and so we were constantly taking apart engines and repairing them because we couldn’t afford to have someone come in from town to do it. When I got older, I turned out to be pretty good at it.
The ranch hands were all different than my mother and father, which was an asset as far as I was concerned. I once told my father I wanted to be a cowboy, and he said, “John Perry, a cowboy works for a salary. A cow man is someone who owns a ranch. That is what you want to be.” And so I didn’t learn how to brand cattle until the herd on the ranch was mine, and I formally became the cow man.
I like to say that I was raised largely by drunken cowboys and farm animals, and that is not as outrageous a statement as you might think. The Bar Cross was kind of a self-contained world, and it does take a ranch to fuck up a child.