SECRET SAM
“All of you kids. The lot of you. Come here. Front and center.”
My father was doing what he occasionally did on a Saturday afternoon at home. He was summoning the runny-nosed children of the neighborhood, any within range, and telling them to stand in a line on our front lawn. He was producing a stack of Kleenex, neatly folded over, from the back pocket of his blue jeans and he was moving down the ranks, swiping away mucus with an impatience that made little heads bob. He was clamping the Kleenex around the nose of each child and ordering him or her to “blow.”
“And blow.”
“And blow.”
“C’mon, really blow.”
The neighborhood kids, who could not know my father as I did, would stare back at him bewildered at his gruff attention. But that was my father, fully in character. With every “blow!” he was establishing a new and tidy order, carrying out a hands-on job he’d invented for himself, inventing purpose where there had been nothing but the lazy aimlessness of a Saturday in the suburbs.
The nose blowing was a minor flash of impulse for my father. Most of his self-assigned tasks had about them (it seemed to me as a child) a grandeur of scope and motion and noise. Every weekend it seemed he brought home some new power tool—drill, skilsaw, saber saw, belt sander—all of them deadly serious in their gray metal boxes and, when brought to life, all the more serious for their loudness and potency. These tools made “the impossible doable,” my father would say to me. Also, they would “slice through skin and bone like butter” if you didn’t know how to use them properly. I had seen my father use his power tools to build a set of sawhorses and then, using those sawhorses, build all the other things he found necessary to build: his work bench where all his tools were neatly hung and stowed; a loft high in the garage rafters where the Christmas decorations were stored; a lidded toy box in the family room; a drying rack for the walnuts that grew in our backyard; the redwood deck shaded by its bamboo covering; a brick walkway around the deck with a crosshatched pattern taken from a do-it-yourself booklet.
There was nothing my father could not do himself, apparently, though rarely did he make much of an announcement about his day’s plans. You knew they were underway because you woke up to hear, say, the creak of shingles overhead as my father erected a new TV aerial or cleaned the drain gutters. Or you would hear the big Dodge 440 station wagon vrooming to a stop in the driveway, my father back from an errand you didn’t even know he was on, a load of planks sticking out far beyond the dropped tailgate, red flags flapping from their ends.
I surely wanted to be near the red flags and raw lumber, the loud drills and saws, whatever thing, whatever day, my father would make of them. But I also knew instinctively that all my father’s relentless motion, like his blowing of the neighborhood’s runny noses, was born of a mysterious impatience, an impatience always there within him. I could sense it as I stood by the bathroom door watching him flick clean his shaving brush, a sudden eruption of wrist snaps ricocheting water and soap against the mirror. I saw it from my seat at the dinner table as I observed him shake up a bottle of Wishbone Italian, another overkill of wrist snaps turning oil and vinegar to froth in a second. I could see it in the briskness and tight focus he brought to any chore, as if he were racing to meet a crucial deadline.
The trick for me was to probe this impatience continually, to make some estimate of it and to guess whether, at any given moment, it might become my enemy. I always needed to know whether the impatience was now very close to the surface, verging on anger, seeking a target, seeking a target in me. I did best to watch and listen from a discrete distance. I listened for certain words that signaled the all clear. I listened, for example, for the word “copacetic,” slang from black jazz culture meaning “all right,” a word that had found its way into my father’s vocabulary by way of the Navy. “Everything here,” my father might announce while hooking my bicycle chain back onto its sprocket, “now appears copacetic.” And so it was.
I listened for sounds my father would make. The click of his tongue, for example, against the roof of his mouth, a crisp, hollow shtok of satisfaction that things were going according to plan. Shtok, shtok, shtok, he would say as he dropped ball bearings into the grooved race he had cleaned and greased. Annnnnd shtok as he dropped maraschino cherries onto a row of ice-cream sundaes.
I listened for the most welcome signals of all, the bad puns and jokey routines he invented for just the two of us to tell each other again and again. When he wanted to share a laugh with me, my father might borrow the cartoon voice of Yogi Bear and pronounce the two of us Saaaamarter than the average Beers. If he was in a particularly good mood, he might go into one of his Maxwell Smart riffs. Sorry about that, Chief! he’d say as he tickled my legs with a spray of the garden hose. My father found Get Smart hilarious: the Cone of Silence, the phone in the shoe, the spy in the file drawer, the way Don Adams passed through one secret door after another until the last one, clanging shut, caught him by the nose. Watching Max suck up to his superiors while bumbling his way to another victory over evil KAOS, my father laughed often and hard.
The impatience in him had made my father leave the Navy to test jet engines for General Electric in Ohio. “I hated life aboard ship. No sense being a sailor if you can’t stand sailing.” Impatience again had caused him to leave GE for California and Lockheed. “I had stars in my eyes for the technology. Dreams of the cutting edge.” The jet engine, after all, was a creation of World War II, its future at best one of endless refinement. But the technology of the space race was fresh and without clear limits, the sort of blue sky work done in LMSC Building 104, massive and windowless, where my father reported for the first time in August of 1960.
He was put to work on a spy satellite project called Samos. Already well into development, Samos was to be many elements brought together. Samos was a powerful Atlas booster that lofted the satellite into space and then fell away. Samos was the orbiting space vehicle called Agena, a twenty-five-foot-long, five-foot-wide cylinder stuffed with guidance, tracking, and propulsion apparatus. Lockheed built Agenas assembly-line style for a variety of satellite projects. My father remembers his first glimpse at one as it lay in a work bay stripped of its outer skin, technicians buzzing around it. As his eyes played over the “accelerometers, gyroguidance package, electronics for radio links, spherical tanks, hoses and tubes, rocket motor,” he found Agena “a gorgeous little thing. Everything shiny, bright and clean. It just looked good.”
Samos, too, was the spying payload mounted onto Agena. This payload was a kind of flying Polaroid camera plus fax machine. According to plan, once in orbit Samos was to shoot pictures of Earth’s surface, develop its own film, convert the negatives into radio signals, then beam those signals down to the Valley of Heart’s Delight, where rooms full of workers at consoles would unscramble them back into pictures.
Samos, in short, was to be a complex system made up of many different systems, and this made Samos a perfect example of what aerospace engineering was getting to be wholly about in the early 1960s. My father had understood this when he leaped at Lockheed’s invitation to come join. He was eager to be among people who were pushing forward “systems theory,” people who were practicing and perfecting the promise of “systems analysis.” Now that the government was in the business of commanding into being grandly ambitious technological goals—nuclear arsenals, moon rockets, spy satellites—the need had arisen for a new approach to invention, a science that concerned itself with the breaking down of any such blue sky goal into myriad smaller ones. And, then: figuring out how to mesh all those discrete goals, once achieved, back into a functioning whole. Systems engineering was that science, and my father saw his future within it.
My father, as it turned out, was not to spend any more time in the corporeal presence of the gorgeous Agena. Nor would he be allowed any access to the camera payload that made Samos truly cutting edge, nor would he be invited into the rooms where the spy pictures were eventually received and processed. Within the system of Samos, it fell to others to lay hands and eyes on the actual machinery and to handle the true final product, the images collected.
My father’s function on this, his first Lockheed project, was to be an Orbital Test Planner. This meant that my father’s precise duty within the whole was to sit at his desk and imagine the satellite, whirling in space, as a mathematical abstraction. Lockheed needed to program the flight of Samos in such a way as to best conserve power and film aboard. This involved finding the optimal times to turn certain switches on or off, and this could be expressed as an equation on paper. My father was paid to make numbers slide off his slide rule, numbers which would eventually be placed in the hands of other men whose duty was to sit at the controls that guided the actual Samos satellite through space. By that point in the process, some little change in protocol could easily have made my father’s numbers irrelevant, and so he never knew whether they were used or not. By that point in the process, however, Lockheed had already moved him to another desk where he was asked to imagine a different satellite, whirling in space, as a mathematical abstraction.
After some years of this Lockheed would grant my father a new phase in his early career, naming him a Systems Test Engineer. The work proved no less abstract and still the gorgeous Agena remained shrouded from view. “Most of my day,” my father remembers, “was spent looking at columns of numbers, data sheets, comparing specs with hardware and deciding whether numbers were good or bad.” His work was not done until the bad numbers had been defeated and replaced by good ones, until he could explain why the good numbers had come to appear to him shiny, bright, and clean, gorgeous little things in their own way. He would write all these good test results into thick binders full of graphs and tables. When enough such documentation had been accumulated, when the equation had been sufficiently solved, the Systems Test Engineer was to play salesman. He was to present his test results, well before the actual launch of the satellite, to help try to convince the government that Lockheed had fulfilled its contract to date and that payment therefore was due. This “DD250 Sell-Off,” as such meetings are called in the aerospace business, went well enough my father’s first time out. The officials of the Air Force who were buying on behalf of the American people were impressed by the sparkle in my father’s numbers. They authorized the release of some millions of the hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted in total. And then, under the harsh light of fluorescence, my father returned to poring over other data sheets in search of new numbers good and bad.
If such a life seems an unlikely choice for an impatient young man, my father embraced it without reservations. A few weeks on the job convinced him that a successful blue sky career, which he surely wanted, meant tackling abstractions with the same can-do spirit he would bring to flying a jet or fixing a car. He understood, too, that for reasons of national security (and what could be a more excitingly important reason than that?), his work must be, in Lockheed language, “highly compartmentalized.” Whenever the upper reaches of the corporation handed down to him a new, cleanly circumscribed task, he would be told only what he needed to know to do his job and nothing more. By the same token, he was to tell fellow workers only what they needed to know. Compartmentalization ensured that each worker was allowed to feel his part of the elephant but never to see the entire beast in the light of day. This made it possible to harness the skills of thousands in order to achieve a single blue-sky goal while reserving for the very few—those who conceived and controlled the overall project—answers to the big questions: How will this ultimately work? What is this ultimately for?
My father accepted this culture of compartmentalization on terms an aspiring systems engineer could understand. Secret information was like any other volatile substance, he reasoned. A system built to manage its flow must be designed for maximum control and safety. What my father liked about this system was that he could imagine a path of progress for himself within it. He understood that the honeycomb of compartments was organized by a hierarchy of security clearances, at bottom Confidential, then Secret, and, highest, Top Secret. Clearances were known as “tickets” at Lockheed. To get his first ticket, a Secret-level clearance, my father had told the government investigators all they wanted to know. He had listed every place he had lived over the past ten years and he had sworn to them that his family was clean of foreign nationals. My father was only too happy to oblige. What had he to hide? Nothing, and everything to gain.
The vetting finished, my father had been given papers to read and sign, understandings that if he spilled certain details to the wrong person, if he breached the walls of his information compartment, he would land in Leavenworth prison. He signed the papers and thought to himself, “I’ve been admitted into the inner sanctum.” Of course the innermost sanctums required a Top Secret clearance, but my father had no doubt that if he proved himself, he would eventually earn one. My father was impatient to prove his competence within Building 104, where competence proven won this reward: further progress into a realm of hidden work, a career track leading to the heart of, as Lockheed language termed it, the Black World.
I learned early to study my father’s face as he came through the door after his Lockheed workday. If his eyebrows were where they should be—at rest on a line-free forehead—there was every chance of the usual Dad, the wisecracking Dad, who would want to know all about how “life around here” had gone that day. If he gathered up my mother in a languorous kiss and called her one of his nicknames, if he said to her What’s new, Scrappy? as he pulled from the cupboard the glass bubble for mixing martinis, if he filled the mixer with ice and liquor and stirred this all around with the glass wand, if he lifted a child into one arm while he loosened his tie with the other hand and then took a lip-smacking sip of his drink, if he did such things, then prospects for the night ahead were excellent. He might even be coaxed after dinner to transform himself into the Hairy Umgawa, the monster who wrestled all comers on the shag carpet of the living room until, inevitably, he lay panting and defeated under a pile of children.
But what if, when my father came through the door, the eyebrows were not where they should be? What if a critical mass of lines had gathered on his forehead and pressed the eyebrows together and down? What if he stepped through the door to the commonplace sound of a pot clattering or a baby crying and those eyebrows darted low even as the eyes seemed to widen and show too much white? These were indicators that my father was this night, at some point, likely to erupt in rage. I remember many dinners that went from happy chatter to grim conflagration in the instant it took a child to knock over a small glass of milk. Cripes sake! my father would yelp, shoving himself off his chair, grabbing for a dishrag at the kitchen sink, flinging the rag at the table, at all of us, it seemed, just for being at the same table where a glass of milk accidentally had been spilled. He’d sop up the mess in a matter of seconds, but the acrid mood he’d created would settle over everything, saddening my mother, who had expected a better reward for her dinner making.
Whenever my father’s impatient anger would find a target in me, my day would disintegrate, laid flat by a blast of browbeating. The touch-off might be the skid mark I made on the driveway with my bike tire, or the screwdriver I had forgotten to return to its hook on the wall, or the grass clumps I had unwittingly tracked into the house from the backyard. It might be the unmade bed that caught his eye at eleven A.M. on a Saturday morning or the noisy tussle I was having with my little brother on the same shag carpet where the Hairy Umgawa had been last night. Whatever did set him off was likely some bit of disorder that hadn’t much bothered him the day before, but this day his impatience had the better of him and I hadn’t taken proper precautions and therefore he now was standing over me, his eyes with far too much white in them, his face inches from my own. Useless ninny! he was shouting. Giiiyaaad!—a yell that trailed off into a gagging sound. That I did not think clearly, that I did not make myself useful, that I was a whiner in the face of duty, these were the contemptuous accusations my father the engineer would level at me when he was really worked up. Giiiyaaaad you’re useless! Useless! Have you a brain in your skull?! I would find it impossible not to cower, not to cry, so I would cry and that only ever redoubled the onslaught—Stop your pathetic blubbering!—until my head ached and the world was red-tinged by tears and everyone within range was utterly miserable.
And so to prevent any such scene from suddenly happening, I watched, I listened, I fine-tuned my powers of surveillance whenever possible. If I had a clear view of my father’s face, I studied the forehead, the eyes, the corners of the mouth that might tighten and dip. If I was coming upon my father from behind, I observed the neck. Was it rigid? Did the neck seem to retract at the sound of my feet and my voice, cock just a bit to one side, making it easy to believe that the eyes I could not see were now clenched shut against my very presence? If his legs were all I could see, sticking out (as they often were) from beneath an automobile in the garage, the thing to do was to listen for his grunts, the tone of them as my father grappled with the repair job. Some grunts, the favorable ones, were rounded, open uhhhs resonating with satisfaction at progress made. As often, though, they were bitten off growls of frustration, the surest sign that I should not say whatever I had come to say, that I should move on and not let my father know I had ever been there.
Sometimes, that option was denied me. “Dave! I need your help here!” my father would call out. Perhaps he had dived, fearless, into a jumble of wires inside the living room wall, or he had winched the car’s impossibly complicated guts straight out of its engine compartment, or he had opened the back of a television set and was probing that inscrutable landscape with yet another strange and new tool. At times like this my father who could do anything would tell me to stand by him and hold a flashlight beam on the exact spot where he was performing his mysterious manipulations. At these moments, when I was granted so close a view of my father’s secret powers, their source remained tantalizingly beyond my understanding all the same. My father was not one to teach as he worked; impatience prevented that. “Damnit, Dave, put the light right here,” he would say as my attention inevitably atrophied and my aim relaxed. I could have tried to learn what he was doing by asking questions, of course, though I knew that if I asked one too many at the wrong time, there was always the chance that my father’s impatience might jump like electricity from the task that frustrated him and over to me. And so, at times like those, I watched the lines on his forehead and listened to the tone of his grunts while asking little, my father offering little, father and son collaborating on the day’s important project, each of us operating strictly on a need-to-know basis.
Samos not only worked as intended, the satellite became America’s most famous spy for a time. As any layperson could read in the Los Angeles Times in October of 1960, Samos was meant to keep “this Nation informed of vital military installations and build-ups behind the Iron Curtain.” There was no attempt to hide the project’s Cold War nature. All the world knew that the Soviets had in May of 1960 shot down the U.S. pilot Gary Powers in his high-flying U-2 reconnaissance airplane. Now it was publicly understood that Samos satellites would carry on the espionage from a height truly out of reach, flying through what Eisenhower had declared the “Open Skies” of outer space.
By summer of 1961 a Samos satellite had made some five hundred passes over the Soviet Union. The pictures Samos 2 took helped give a lie to supposedly “superior” numbers of Soviet nuclear missiles, a superior strength that the Kremlin and the Pentagon alike had been proclaiming, a “missile gap” that Kennedy had sounded alarms about in his presidential campaign. When Kennedy and his brass got their pictures back from space, such scare talk immediately cooled, and Americans breathed easier. Samos, it seemed, had pulled off the gambit that good spy stories turn on, the unmasking of the enemy’s bluff, the stealing of secrets to shift the balance of power back to the good guys.
My father felt glad, his first year at Lockheed, to know he was part of this high drama with a national pride ending. This seemed a more romantic start to a career than had he been assigned to, say, Discoverer, a Lockheed satellite project underway literally next door to Samos. Discoverer, which had been fraught with fizzles for years, was said to carry into orbit capsules containing mechanical “mice” wired for biomedical data or sensors for measuring space radiation, the sorts of Science for Peace experiments that Ike and JFK and Khrushchev all declared they wanted of their space programs. After a time in orbit, Discoverer would drop its capsule back toward Earth, an airplane trailing a scoop would catch it out of the air, and humanity would have gained some new bit of knowledge about ourselves or the cosmos. That was how Discoverer workers would explain it to my father if he happened to chat with them on the way to the doughnut wagon. They told him just what America had been told, that Discoverer, for all its troubles, was the friendly, civilian face of America’s space effort.
What my father found out some years later—and America many more years afterward—is that he had been lied to on the way to the doughnut wagon. Samos had not been America’s premier spy satellite after all. Just a few months after Samos’s first success, friendly Discoverer, its bugs ironed out, began dropping spools of exposed film, spy photos with sweep and resolution far better than Samos could ever achieve. While Samos certainly made a contribution, it was Discoverer that decisively debunked the missile gap, and while the Samos program was curtailed in 1962, Discoverer spy missions, under the code name CORONA, continued on in Black World secrecy until 1972. Looking back to his very first months at Lockheed, my father remembers strangers coming and going in the halls of the Discoverer project, officious men he might have guessed were intelligence officials from Washington. There were enough clues at the time, my father now sees, that he probably could have guessed that Discoverer was for spying, and that his coworkers on the project next door were lying to him as they were required to do. The reason he did not guess this is that he would not allow his mind to wander beyond the compartment Lockheed had assigned it. My father knew that he did not need to know.
All this about Samos and CORONA and my father’s relationship to the projects I say because my father has spoken freely about it, a luxury allowed him because Samos was so well publicized, and CORONA, just recently, has been declassified. There is very little else I know about my father’s projects during his thirty years at Lockheed. I know that he continued to punch a time card at the Satellite Test Center for at least seven years after Lockheed hired him, and that after Samos he worked for a while on Vela, an unclassified satellite capable of detecting a Soviet nuclear detonation. I know that one day in the early years of his career my father announced to us that he had managed to wangle a transfer to a particularly exciting Lockheed project, a nuclear-powered rocket to the moon called RIFT. I know he and my mother attended a big going-away party for him on Friday, and that the headlines in Saturday’s newspaper announced that the nuclear rocket program had been canceled, which meant that my father resumed his job, on Monday, at the STC.
I know that my father eventually did receive a Top Secret ticket allowing him to pursue, in some form, the more interesting work he coveted. I know that some years after that he was taken aside and told that Top Secret was not, in fact, the highest security clearance in the company after all, that Lockheed had long awarded Special Access clearances for higher level work on projects so secret, they were funded from an unlisted “black budget.” The very existence of this system of secrecy had been kept secret from my father until he was deemed worthy to join it. I know that my father, having been invited into this innermost sanctum, was given a yellow checkerboard badge imprinted with several numbers, each of them signifying a different Special Access granted. I know that over the years the numbers on the yellow badge accumulated, and as they did there was less and less that my father could tell his family about what he did for a living.
The system of compartmentalized secrecy at Lockheed was self-regulating in more than one sense. Workers were expected to check each other’s badges and to turn in any fellow worker who spoke too freely or handled secret documents improperly. As well, any ticketed worker at any time might be administered a polygraph test by the company’s security people. “If you found yourself flunking polygraph tests, your clearances were rescinded,” my father explains. “Your ticket was pulled, which made you an unemployable engineer at Lockheed. You’d go to NASA where the work was completely unclassified and deadly dull. You wouldn’t get money and promotions; the money and promotions were in the highly classified jobs. Security clearances were precious commodities. They were merit badges that opened all kinds of doors for you.”
Whenever my father was polygraphed by his employer, he naturally would submit willingly, having nothing to hide and everything to gain. Had he revealed details of his work to anyone outside the proper compartments? No, my father could always answer truthfully.
At the dinner table, his young son would also ask him questions. “What do you do, Dad?”
“Welllll …” A question like that always invited a long pause. “At times in the past my work has involved me with satellites.”
“I know, but are you working on a satellite now?”
“Hmmmmm.” A pause. “I am not able to give you a yes or no on that one.” Another pause. “Let’s just say that I’m helping to troubleshoot a very complicated piece of equipment for the government.”
“Is it something that goes into space, Dad?”
My father would chuckle and he’d cock an eye at the ceiling for a bit. He would be weighing just what he could say and what he could not, what he might tell his nine-year-old son that might not show up later as a damning twitch of the polygraph’s needle. At my family’s dinner table, Lockheed was always listening in.
“I’m not really at liberty to go into the specifics,” was the answer my father often gave when my questions about his work invited the least bit of specificity. I soon learned to stop asking.
To have a father who worked on secret projects, to have a father who was himself a secret project in our midst, did not seem to us a deprivation. It meant to us that we were a promisingly modern family. The old notion of father as civic actor, the man who displays his competence in the public realm, the doctor or deacon or grocer on the corner, had, as everyone knew, given way to Dad as Organization Man. Now that fathers no longer lent their competence directly to the community, now that they honed and displayed their competence within the closed system of the corporation, how natural it was that our father, a most modern Dad, worked within the most closed of systems. We did not think it strange that we never saw my father’s desk. Whenever we asked about it, my father would shrug and tell us he worked in various cubicles he purposely kept bare of pictures or knickknacks. “I don’t believe in making my place of work homey,” he would say, and so we never gave him presents for the office.
Where we lived, there were many other fathers like ours, men who disappeared into windowless buildings every morning and who, when they returned home, spoke vaguely about what they had done that day. When they gathered together on the weekends, they stuck close to whichever topic had drawn them together, the car being fixed or the fence being built or the cement pathway being poured. It was obvious even to a young boy like me that these men shared something, a sensibility owing to technical training and very much prone to creating purpose in the midst of an otherwise lazy, aimless Saturday in the suburbs. And I believed that whatever it was they had in common in their jobs, whatever it was they preferred not to discuss much with each other, it must be important in a way that the work of a grocer or deacon or even a doctor could not be. “If and when the Soviets ever launch their missiles,” I can remember my father telling me more than once when I was quite young, “you had better believe that Lockheed’s right at the top of their list. We’ll be the first to go. Lockheed, this house, everything in a fifty-mile radius. Kablooey.” Because my father always looked more winking than sad as he said this, I inferred that beyond the horror of his statement there lay reason to feel good, even proud about it. If we lived at ground zero, it must be because we were special. Perhaps I would never know what my father did at Lockheed, but I could rest assured it was important. That meant (should the enemy missiles not come) a bright future for me and every member of my family.
Did I imagine myself, then, in that future, taking up the important work of my father? I have no memory of ever expecting that. After all, how does a young boy imagine himself following in his father’s footsteps if those footsteps lead into blackness? How can a secret systems engineer pass onto his son the tenets of his profession? With no picture in mind of what my father did at Lockheed, I turned my gaze toward what he did at home. But even at home, my father managed to make his projects secret ones, hidden behind his wall of impatience. I wonder now how my formation would have been different had I been a less cautious child, had I bulled away at my father until he swallowed his impatience and slowed his work and included me in the thinking behind it. I know there were times when he was a great explainer of the Whys and Hows of the world. Next to a bonfire at the beach, he would explain why flames crackled. Between innings of a baseball game on television, he would explain how a curveball curved. When we were together in the cockpit of an airplane, he would spend all the time it took to help me to understand what made the wings lift us into the air. But those were times when he was relaxed and inviting of questions. Those were not the times around the house when he was all action, seeming to move among his family rather than in any way with us. Those were not the times when my father wielded his can-do-anything competence with an urgency that drew me toward him, but with a fierceness, too, that kept me at bay.
At some point when I was ten or eleven or maybe twelve, my father and I settled into an unspoken agreement that I was not “handy.” I had not demonstrated an appetite for the technical, the making of purpose in an empty day. I had not done much with my Erector set, had never finished my plastic model of the U.S.S. Constitution, did not seem to want to do more than hold the flashlight for my father whenever he was in action. I was not a handy boy, and so I filled up the lazy aimlessness of a Saturday with dreamy play. Most often, I constructed my fantasies around the theme that obsessed American popular culture at the time: secrecy and spying. James Bond was too racy for us kids to see, but his appeal had been well commodified and kiddified by the mass marketers. Between the Saturday morning cartoons there were ads for spy toys. “Six Finger! Six Finger! Man alive! How did I ever get along with five!” went the jingle for a toy gun that looked like an extra finger in your hand, the very sort of weapon a secret agent on TV might use. I got one of my own and, as well, one of those gizmo-stuffed attaché cases that every spy carries. The Secret Sam case, as it was called, contained among other things a breakdown rifle with a scope and a hidden camera that allowed me to take pictures of playmates without them knowing it.
I took as my models the dashing men of cool competence and action I saw on Secret Agent and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission Impossible. These television shows seemed to grab my imagination far more than they did my father’s. But then, my father was intimate with the evolving nature of Cold War espionage. He knew that by then the ones who guarded and stole the nations’ secrets were those who spent their days studying data sheets looking for numbers good and bad. He knew that from here on out, the most successful secret agents would be robots in space, built by compartmentalized workers who lived in the suburbs. Perhaps that is why my father preferred to watch Get Smart, to laugh as silly Max passed through one secret door after another until the last one, clanging shut, caught him by the nose.
Saturday would come and my father would be off in the Dodge 440 on an errand to pick up what he needed to stop the washing machine from leaking or to run a gas jet into the family room fireplace or to install a new sprinkler in that area of the backyard lawn that was turning brown. He would be away from the house, and so I would climb from one of his sawhorses onto a niche in the chimney and from there I’d pull myself onto the roof. I’d be playing the theme song to Mission Impossible in my head—dun ta dun DA da, dun ta dun DA da, na na NAAA, na na NAAA—as I stole across the shake shingles, making my way to the other side of the roof, below which there lay a neat mound of grass clippings from the morning’s mowing.
From this high vantage I would look across the site of all my father’s projects, taking in our house and yard and garage and driveway, imagining this to be an enemy compound I had been sent to infiltrate. Below me, where the clipped grass was piled, I would imagine two Soviet sentries standing guard over the compound. A man had to be certain and quick, a man had to know exactly what he was doing to take out two Soviet sentries at once. I would leap off the roof into the grass and slice the throats of my enemies, both of them with one smooth, expert stroke. And then I would lie in the fresh-smelling grass for a moment, letting the spy music play through my head. I would lie there drifting on the edge of my father’s Black World.
