Usually I felt a murky mix of pride, guilt, and defensiveness when I told people I wrote for a living. Curious and/or dubious, they’d ask, “What do you, like, write?” I’d explain that I wrote nonfiction books and magazine articles. “And you get paid to do that?” To some, it sounded like I played video games or scrapbooked for a living.
Lately, my writing had indeed begun to feel more speculative, like panning for gold each day. My first book was published in 2004, followed by two more over the next three years, but the third book sold poorly, a trajectory interrupter, like being sent back three spaces. I wasn’t a household name or a bestseller. I’d been scrambling to finish my Robert Ripley biography and racing to find a new project, my up-and-down income trending downward. I began fretting that I was letting my family down, that I’d deluded myself into believing my passion for storytelling would pay all the bills.
So. On the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death, I dug out an oversize suit jacket and drove to downtown Seattle for a day of back-to-back interviews at Amazon.com. Before the road trip, I had applied for a job as an editor on Amazon’s books team, where I’d curate best-of lists, review books, interview authors, write stories for a books blog. It seemed like an author’s dream gig—and, given the slowdown in my writing income, after a decade of self-employment, a timely lifeline.
I doubted that Amazon would hire a writer who worked in his basement, but I felt I had to give it a shot. Afterward, exhausted from so much adult-human contact, I bought a six-pack and a bottle of Dickel, bags of candy for the boys, then sat drinking in the backyard, taking photos of Sean and Leo skating, waiting for Mary to get home, and wondering . . . What the hell did I just do? What if they actually want to hire me? Who’ll be here for the boys? Who’ll chauffeur them to skate parks? Fears of getting pulled back into the mainstream workforce and losing a connection with my kids had contributed to the inspiration for the road trip, but now it was over, and my skate dad days were truly ending.
When Amazon offered me the job, just a week before the road trip, Leo wanted to know all the details. What are the perks? Do I get Amazon discounts? What’s my office like? I found it impressive and unnerving that he wanted to know the financials—How much would I make? What’s the retirement plan? I think the real question was, Is this going to take us up a notch? “I’m excited about your new job,” he said, adding (wisely) that it’d be good for me to get out of the basement and meet people. “I’m excited for you!”
Sean was excited that I’d be working at a new corporate campus whose plazas he’d skated during construction, the scene of numerous security guard confrontations. I wanted to be psyched, too, but as the moment neared, I felt conflicted. Did accepting a corporate job make me a quitter? Or a realist? Was I turning my back on everything I’d tried to build over the past ten years? Or was I kidding myself down there in the basement? Mainly I worried: Had my experiment as a creator failed? Would I ever write again?
Mary, who had been ridiculously patient and supportive during my years of writing, was as thrilled as Leo, in a way that made me worry that a day job was overdue.
I’d once read a news story about Seattle’s new breed of seed investors, VC funders, incubators, and told Mary, “They should have angel investors for writers.”
“They already do,” she said. “They’re called wives.”
With our income stabilized, Mary and I decided it was time to find a real home, and our weekend neighborhood walks became epic house-hunting ventures.
Eight months after starting my new job, we made a lowball “short sale” offer to an owner who’d overborrowed. It had been four years since our move to Seattle, years that coincided with the collapse of the housing market. The hoops we had to jump through with banks and mortgage companies were like a combination obstacle course and minefield. Our closing kept getting postponed, then we ran into delays selling our property back in North Carolina. For months, Mary and I were crabby and snippy with each other. My workdays would end with the weak hope of a jog or a yoga class but usually led to a drink or two, and a tense wait for the boys to come home from skating.
I was convinced that a new home—in a nicer part of town, with a bedroom for each boy, and a large family room to replace the leaky concrete-floor basement—would solve a bunch of problems, give the boys a secure base as they tried to figure out how to be teenagers and high schoolers. A new home would ground us all, I was sure of it.
While waiting for the sale to go through, Leo graduated from eighth grade and Sean wrapped up a bumpy freshman year of high school. Then, like coils that had been squeezed by the daily expectations of classes, homework, and curfews, the boys sprung loose that summer. It was the first summer in years that neither Mary nor I were available to drive them to day camps, skate parks, or on mini road trips. Which left them mostly unrooted and free, with their bus passes and plenty of time to skate and seek trouble.
Sean: Sitting on a park bench near his high school, eating a sandwich as a friend walks by. The friend pulls out a pipe, offers Sean a hit. The cop parked nearby in an unmarked car watches Sean take a deep drag, then swoops in as the other kid runs. Sean reluctantly gives the cop his name, initiating a case that will drag on for more than a year, beginning with the letter we receive stating, “The prosecutor’s office has reviewed this offense report and found it to be sufficient to file a criminal charge . . .”
Leo: I call to see when he’s coming home and . . . “Heyyy, dad-man! How are youuuu?” He’s bombed. He got separated from Sean and the others and isn’t sure where he is. I tell him to stay put and I call Sean, who tells me where he last saw Leo. I drive there and eventually find Leo stumbling down a dark sidewalk alone. I lead him to the car, buckle him in, then he gurgles, “Uh-oh.” I get him unbuckled and onto the grass just in time. We repeat the dance—buckle, “uh-oh,” unbuckle, hurl—two more times.
Sean and Leo: The two of them come home skunky and grinning, so blatant about it, as if they’d sealed themselves in a smoke-filled closet. Which they had: smoking inside a fast-food joint’s tiny restroom after worming their way into Seattle’s annual cannabis celebration, Hempfest.
Though we’d had a couple minor smoking incidents during middle school, seemingly overnight the smell of weed now began to accompany our family dinners. If we wanted a conflict-free meal, Mary and I would have to pretend Spicoli wasn’t at the table, snickering at us all. We tried to convince ourselves that with both boys, now fourteen and fifteen, set to attend the same high school come fall—followed soon after by our tenuously scheduled move into a new house—that they’d settle down. We all would.
Then again, looking back on me and my brother at that same precarious, midteens, early-high-school transition stage . . . well, that brought little comfort.
One of my finer high school moments: skipping class in the girls’ locker room with Janey, sipping from a plastic bottle of jungle juice—gin, whiskey, tequila, vermouth, schnapps, and some green shit called Midori, siphoned off from my parents’ liquor cabinet. I show up late to class, pick up a fire extinguisher, and pretend to aim it at my friend Blaise. Suddenly a stream of fire retardant is spewing from the nozzle, foaming against the blackboard. I can’t shut it off, so I drop the canister and try to run, but Father Daley shows up, grabs me by my plaid Catholic school tie, chews me out while dragging me to the office to face Father McHugh.
Daley and McHugh had come to our parish straight from Ireland, young, funny, and charming. When I was six or seven, McHugh came to our house for a first communion party, and I remember him laughing with my Irish nana, the two of them sloshing back glasses of red wine. Now he was my high school principal, and I was the drunk one, and he wasn’t laughing. In his office I apologized, as McHugh dialed my mom and asked her to come pick up her drunk son.
Weeks later, McHugh saw me in the hallway, late for class, and asked, “Mr. Thompson, shouldn’t you be in fourth period right now?”
“Relax, Father,” I said, followed by other poorly chosen words, and suddenly found myself shoved up against the lockers by a red-faced man of the cloth.
“That’s it, mister,” McHugh barked, then stepped back and swung a thumb-pointed arm like a ref ejecting a baseball player. “You’re outta here.”
My expulsion was thankfully temporary. After an Irish mafia–type consultation with my mom, McHugh agreed to reduce my punishment to a weeklong suspension.
During my suspension, I hitchhiked to a friend’s house, carrying a bong I’d made from a Popeye shampoo bottle. On the stoned hitchhike back home, the male driver said he’d take me all the way to my house if I let him blow me. I told him to stop, to drop me right there beside the highway, but he kept driving and smirking. “No, stop, now,” I yelled, opening my door and preparing to jump until he all-too-slowly pulled over. With the car still rolling I leaped, tumbled into the grass, and ran to a nearby bar, where I called my mom from a pay phone. While waiting, I reluctantly tossed the Popeye bong into the bushes.
My beleaguered mom usually had a “knock it off, knucklehead” attitude toward these and other antics, but even she was getting fed up.
“Better get it together, mister,” she said on the drive home.
And my dad? The way I remember it, he mostly just seemed so disappointed in me. Too many nights I’d be waiting for him to get home to inflict punishment—a scolding, a grounding, the threat of a belt-whooping. Many years later he told me his worst arguments with my mom were over controlling and corralling me and Jeff during high school.
“I always had to be the bad guy,” he recalled, then added: “But maybe we weren’t firm enough . . .”
The summer before my sophomore year of high school—a year after my check-forging incident—our family moved out to the country. Some may find it hard to imagine New Jersey “country,” but this was the real deal, nowhere near a turnpike exit. We lived across from a defunct mink farm, more cows and sheep than humans as neighbors. Our house, a mossy A-frame, sat atop a wooded hill, reached by a switchbacked dirt driveway. My top-of-the-“A” bedroom had western views of hills crawling with tractors and combines and the state’s highest hills beyond that. It felt off the grid, boreal, remote. We were North Jersey hillbillies—Jersey-billies? I think my dad wanted more breathing space.
Jeff and I complained about leaving behind our friends at our little beach-and-boat community, and I wondered what I’d do without my skateboards and water skis out in farmville. But our parents, rarely indulgent, offered a remarkable bribe: a motorcycle. Jeff reminded me that they actually gave us a choice: keep a boat on the lake, or get a dirt bike. We chose the latter, and my dad drove us to the seller that my mom had found in the want ads.
At first, we were supposed to ride our battered Hodaka Ace Super Rat only up and down the driveway. Of course, we were soon tearing down the street, across the jagged turf of the ex-mink farm, racing through pastures, exploring dairy farms and railroad beds. My dad would chew us out if he caught us riding in the street, but we pushed him and my mom, pushed our boundaries, inch by inch, day after day, ditching the helmets and venturing way out of bounds and wearing our poor parents down.
The Hodaka was the first in a series of motorcycles. Eventually Jeff and I each got our own, and one day I flipped mine and landed upside down on my helmetless head. Another day I gave a friend a ride and we veered off the road, flew up and over a stone wall, and landed in a tangled heap as Jeff looked on in terror. My friend—son of a local dentist—lost a tooth, and I twisted and scorched my ankle on the muffler. In time I began to slow things down a little, but Jeff sped up.
Jeff’s favorite bike was a frighteningly fast Yamaha MX 100, and I’ll always remember it as the vehicle that contributed to our divergence.
Convinced that the Catholic school wasn’t equipped to address my brother’s disinterest in school—and his dyslexia, which would go undiagnosed for way too long—my mom transferred Jeff to the public high school. I kept commuting back to our old town to attend the Catholic school, while Jeff made a new set of countrified motorcycle-riding friends. At our isolated new home, I skated less and water-skied less while Jeff thrived on his two-wheeled machine, his version of my boys’ four-wheeled boards.
At his new school, Jeff hung out with kids who could milk cows, fix cars, wield a hammer. Against our parents’ wishes, he got a dog—and, against school rules, brought his dog to class. Until that time, I’d reigned as the family fuckup. But Jeff, waiting on deck, would surpass me, a rapid escalation in motorcycle wrecks and alcohol-fueled antics.
Like the time he stole some kid’s dirt bike, T-boned a car at fifty miles an hour, flew over the hood, tore a chunk out of his thigh, and almost bled to death while running from the cops. And the time at the Action Park amusement park built at our local ski area, when he decided to climb hand over hand along a chairlift cable, from his chair to the one behind his. But Jeff’s timing was off, and just before losing his hands to the pulley wheels he let go and dropped forty feet, shattering both ankles and wrists.
When I went off to college in Pennsylvania, Jeff drank a few Bud “nips” one morning—the same eight-ouncers my mom’s mom used to drink—borrowed the car I’d left at home (my dad’s old Datsun 510), and on the way to school rounded a curve driving way too fast, suddenly in the path of an oncoming truck. He swerved off the road and flipped the car, bouncing it end over end into a field, barely missing a few trees and landing on its roof. He crawled out of the wreckage, miraculously unhurt.
For some reason, I kept a framed picture of that squashed orange Datsun for years. I think it reminded me that Jeff had grown more impressively, if dangerously, adventurous while I, with each passing year, played it safer and became more cautious.
Jeff and I inherited a mix of influences from our parents; Jeff got more Jughead genes, and I got more from our mom. My dad loved motorcycles, guns, sports cars, boats, airplanes—his “toys,” my mom called them. My mom, who grew up poor in a New Jersey housing project, collected paperback novels, cookbooks, and thrift store clothes as her toys. My dad’s included a BMW motorcycle, then a Suzuki, a wooden sailboat, VW bugs, a Lotus, the army ambulance, and an International Harvester tractor, which Jeff and I drove up and down the driveway and once almost flipped. After I’d left for college my dad started taking flying lessons, bought an airplane, and later started building a kit plane from scratch.
While my mom was happy to escape into a novel—a trait she passed on to me—my dad loved being on the road, on the water, in the air. Like Jeff, he loved speed and freedom, loved to soar. Well into his seventies, Jughead continued to ride a motorcycle (a Harley), drive a ragtop Mini Cooper, scuba dive, and fly his kit airplane.
For work, I read an E. L. Doctorow novel in which he described surfing, skiing, and other outdoor hobbies as “free rides of the planet . . . there for you to get on or get off or get killed.” My father and brother sought those free rides. They feared less. And what worried me: What if Leo and Sean were genetically predisposed to seek the rides that could kill them?
At a family wedding, in response to my griping about our risk-taking skate kids and their budding fondness for bud and Bud, my brother’s wife laughed, pointed at my brother, then at me, then at my dad—each of us with drinks in hand—and nearly shouted . . .
“What did you expect?”