In the summer of 1957, when I was nine years old, we moved house again. I don’t know where they got the money, or how they afforded it, but my father and Lou traded in the two-bedroom Hawthorne bungalow for a huge, seven-bedroom mansion, a one-hundred-year-old Queen Anne Victorian, at 762 Edgewood. It was only a couple of miles away from the house on Hawthorne, but it was as different as night and day. My father later remembered that he and Lou sold the Hawthorne house for about $12,000, and bought the Edgewood house for about $25,000—a lot of money for a guy who was making only $4,000 a year, with a wife who didn’t work.

The house had an interesting history. It had been built in 1840, when there was nothing but oak trees for hundreds of yards in every direction, and was owned by a member of the Winchester family. These Winchesters had built their fortune on the famous rifle made by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—the gun that won the West.

The Winchester house on Edgewood was miles away from that other Winchester house—the Winchester Mystery House, which had a strange history. It was owned by the widow of the original gun company owner, and she was construction-crazy. She started building the house in the 1880s, and kept workers going around the clock for more than forty years. The house, which turned into a big tourist attraction, was seven stories tall and was supposed to be haunted.

The Winchester house on Edgewood wasn’t haunted until we moved into it. It was just a big old house. It was two stories, not seven. The paint was peeling. Some of the woodwork was sagging. Some of the shingles were missing.

But to me the house was beautiful. It sat on an enormous piece of property and was hidden from the street by big pepper trees, oak trees, pine trees, and fig trees that were great for climbing and building tree houses and forts. It had a big front porch, a sun porch, and a sewing porch. There were oak floors and a huge oak front door, and a mahogany banister going up to the second floor. (You could really get in trouble if you got caught sliding down that banister.) There were six bedrooms upstairs—I had my own bedroom, next to Brian’s—and two bathrooms. There were five fireplaces, too. We always had a fire going in the living room and the dining room—partly because my dad liked fires, and partly to save on heating bills. I spent a lot of time out in the backyard chopping wood for those fireplaces.

There was a big bay window in the living room that looked out onto the front yard, and tall windows on the second floor, and two round port-hole windows on the side of the house near the garage. There was a spooky attic above that.

I slept upstairs, on the side of the house closest to the garage. For the first time since I was a little boy at Spartan Village, when I was still an only child, I had my own room. I had my own closet. I had some privacy.

But it was also creepy. Going to bed by myself was kind of scary. The house felt haunted. At night when it was windy or raining, the house felt like a ship rolling on the sea. The tree branches would scrape against the side of the house. On Hawthorne I had been bothered by fears of what was around me when I slept. I thought the floor was crawling with alligators, or snakes, or spiders, and they were coming to bite me. Now I’d lie awake at night and hear these noises and be sure something was coming to get me—monsters, vampires, kidnappers, you name it. Like I said before, I was a kid with a vivid imagination, and at night my imagination turned against me. My mind did a lot of scary things with that old house.

Television didn’t help. There were always creepy movies on TV, starring Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi. Things like that got inside my head and gave me terrible nightmares.

Other than being afraid, living in the new house was pretty good. The yard had all kinds of places to play. George and I made up games, and had lots of room for cowboys and Indians, or army. We spent a lot of time climbing those trees. Binky, who was into cars and had a hot rod that he liked to work on, dug a pit in the backyard, a kind of work bay like they have in gas stations where you can go under the car without having to lie down on your back. He’d do his lube jobs and oil changes and stuff down there. George and I used that as a fort when Binky wasn’t around.

The backyard was a home for our dog, Monster, a short-haired mutt that moved with us from Hawthorne. It was also a place for discipline. My dad had all kinds of plans for landscaping and gardening there, and we were his work crew. If we’d done something wrong, he’d sentence us to picking weeds. He’d take two stakes and drive them into the ground and stretch a string between them. He’d say, “I want you boys to clear out all the weeds from here to that string.”

It didn’t take me and George long to figure out the solution to that problem. You’d just wait until Dad wasn’t looking, then pull up the stakes and put them back into the ground closer to the house. You’d be done in no time! My dad always seemed surprised that we got finished so soon.

I was in the fifth grade when we moved to Edgewood. Soon after that, our family situation started changing. First Binky moved out. He went to live with his dad and his dad’s new wife. Around the same time, we found out Lou was pregnant. A short time later, she gave birth to a boy she and my father named Kirk, after a doctor of their acquaintance. He was a sweet-tempered little blond kid.

Now we were a proper Los Altos family, so we had to keep up appearances.

On Hawthorne, things had been a little loose. There was that homemade third bedroom, where Binky slept. There was that homemade swimming pool. When my dad decided to build that, he tore down the old split-rail fence and put the swimming pool right in the front yard. He hung a sign on it that said, WE DON’T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET, SO PLEASE DON’T PEE IN OUR POOL.

But now we were Los Altos people, living in a real Los Altos house. It had been owned by the Winchesters. There wasn’t going to be any pool in the front yard on Edgewood. We were hardly allowed to even play in the front yard. In fact, by order of Lou, we were not allowed to go out the front door at all. When we wanted to go outside to the front of the house, we had to use the service entrance.

Moving to Edgewood meant we had to dress differently, too. That was part of keeping up appearances. We lived among the rich people now. So Lou and my dad made me wear corduroy pants and a button-down shirt to school every day. Green corduroy pants and a green corduroy jacket! I was nine years old. What happened to blue jeans and a T-shirt? That’s what all the other kids were wearing. That’s what I wanted to wear. That’s what every kid in America wanted to wear. We wanted to look like James Dean, not Little Lord Fauntleroy.

But we were keeping up appearances.

Lou began to furnish the house nicely, too. She had a thing for cherrywood furniture, and she’d search antique stores and estate sales and barn sales looking for affordable pieces. Soon the downstairs part of our mansion really looked like a mansion. Needless to say, we were told to keep off the cherrywood furniture, never to touch the cherrywood furniture.

Lou was really obsessive about things like that. She had all kinds of rules about keeping the house clean. You could not go into the dining room at all. The furniture was special and expensive and you weren’t allowed to touch it. You could walk from the living room to the kitchen, or vice versa, but never through the dining room. We were also supposed to stay out of each other’s rooms, and we were never allowed into her sewing room.

The dinner table rules became stricter, too. You weren’t allowed to speak at the dinner table unless you were spoken to. You were supposed to keep your elbows off the table and your napkin in your lap. Mealtimes were tense.

If my dad was home for dinner, he’d demand a full report of your day: What happened at school? Did you do your homework? Otherwise, we ate dinner almost without speaking. Lou would dish it out and we’d sit, me and George and Brian and Lou, without talking. If we did something wrong, we’d get punished.

For me, moving to Edgewood, everything changed and nothing changed. I was still the same person. So, I did things wrong and I got punished. I spent a lot of time in my room. Lou didn’t like my table manners. She didn’t like how rambunctious I was—and being in the big fancy house on Edgewood, the Winchester house, with all that cherrywood furniture, made it worse. I think I was embarrassing to her. Like, a lady with a beautiful Victorian house on Edgewood should have children with beautiful manners.

I didn’t have beautiful manners. No one had ever taught me beautiful manners. I was a big kid, and I was a hungry kid, and when it was time to eat I got busy. I chowed down.

Lou didn’t like that. She didn’t like me goofing off with George, or picking on Brian, or making jokes at the dinner table.

So she started making me eat dinner alone. I’d eat in the breakfast nook, before the other kids ate. I’d be sent to my room while the rest of the kids had their dinner. Some nights we weren’t together at all. I’d get my supper in the kitchen. Then Lou would serve something to Brian and George. She’d feed the baby upstairs. Then my dad would come home late and eat in the living room, in front of the TV. By then I would usually have been sent to my room for something or other.

I remember feeling very sad a lot of the time, and left out. I could hear the TV going downstairs. I could hear Brian and George laughing, watching Disneyland or Father Knows Best. I could hear the theme music from Gunsmoke or Peter Gunn or Dragnet. I felt isolated, and lonely, and unhappy. And mad. It wasn’t fair.

I was always being punished for doing things that my brothers did. I didn’t get rewarded the way my brothers did, either—especially George. When my dad built the swimming pool on Hawthorne, George got swimming lessons. I had to learn on my own. When we moved to Edgewood, George got a new ten-speed bike. I got a bike that my father had bought used and then repainted himself.

What was so special about George? What was so bad about me? How come I didn’t deserve a new bike?

Years later I found out that George’s special stuff came from his dad—Red Cox. George spent a lot of weekends visiting with Red and his new wife, and for Christmas or his birthday he’d get things like that new bike, or a new baseball glove—from his dad. His dad had paid for his swimming lessons. If someone had explained that to me, I might have understood. But no one told me.

So naturally enough I imagined that I got treated like a second-class citizen because I was a second-class citizen. I thought they just didn’t love me as much as they loved George. I wasn’t good enough.

This wasn’t the whole story, of course. I found out years later that Red never paid much child support or alimony. The gifts he gave George might have been flashy, but there weren’t very many of them. George told me later that his dad wasn’t into Christmas, or birthdays, and sometimes didn’t get him anything at all. He also told me that his father was a real alcoholic, who would sometimes get drunk and stay drunk for days at a time. (Alcoholism ran all over that family. Red’s father was a drunk, too, George said. So was Lou’s father. George said he figured out in his early twenties that he’d better be careful with alcohol himself, or he’d wind up an alcoholic, too.)

I was jealous of George going off with his dad on the weekends. I shouldn’t have been. Sometimes he was afraid to even get in the car with Red. “I remember begging him not to take me anywhere,” George said. “He’d come over and he’d give me a hug and I could smell how much he’d been drinking. I’d say, ‘Please don’t get in the car.’ I was scared.”

If I had known any of that, I might have felt different. I might have understood that George’s life wasn’t as perfect as it looked.

But that would have left me with Brian to compare myself to, and that wouldn’t have worked out, either. For his eighth birthday, he got pony rides. My parents hired someone to come to the house with a pony for the little boys and a real horse for the bigger boys. I was so excited, because I was a big cowboy kind of guy and I thought horses were great. But Lou wouldn’t even let me go and see them. She said, “It’s Brian’s birthday, not yours, and you’re not invited.” I couldn’t even go and touch the horses. I had to stay upstairs, in my room, while Brian and his friends took rides around the backyard.

Maybe that’s part of why I behaved badly. I was being treated like a bad boy, so I acted like a bad boy. The rules weren’t fair, so I broke the rules.

The weird thing is, I don’t remember anyone ever sitting down and asking me what was going on. I got yelled at. I got called names. Lou called me “moron” or “idiot.” My dad would say, “Don’t be stupid,” or, “Stop acting like a jerk.” I got threatened. I got punished. But no one ever talked to me. No one ever asked me what was going on.

No one at school did, either. Maybe they didn’t have time. In those days, the population in our area was growing so fast that the schools couldn’t handle it. It was the beginning of the baby boom, and there wasn’t room for all the boomers. Hillview, like a lot of other elementary schools, was on a split schedule. Half the kids would start in the early morning and come home in the early afternoon. The other half would start in the late morning and come home in the late afternoon. There were six first-grade classes at Hillview at one time—three in the morning, three in the afternoon. So, even though my stepbrother George was only three months older than me, we were never in the same class together. I’d have to get up early and get out to the street to catch the school bus for the early session. He could get up later, and he got to walk to school. How come he got to walk to school, and walk home? I don’t know. But I had to take that dumb bus.

Just like at home, I think, the teachers and administrators were so overwhelmed that they never had time to single me out except for punishment. Nowadays there would be a school psychologist who specialized in kids like me. I’d probably be diagnosed as hyperactive, or having attention deficit disorder. In those days, it was just easier to punish me.

At home, no one ever played with me, either. In the evenings we’d watch TV shows like The Danny Thomas Show or The Donna Reed Show. I’d see those families and wonder what was wrong with ours, or what was wrong with me. My dad didn’t teach me how to ride a bike, or throw a ball. I don’t ever remember doing any of that stuff with him. He didn’t sit down for heart-to-heart talks with me. He was either away, at work, or he was at home and tired. In most of my memories of him from that time he was either mad at me, ignoring me, or sending me out to the backyard to chop wood.

Most of the time he sent me out there alone. But not always. Almost the only times I remember us spending time together were when we were working. Even though I was only nine or ten, I was big, and I was strong. So he’d make me do certain work projects with him that the other boys couldn’t do.

One year he decided to pave our long, curvy driveway with fresh asphalt. He rented a trailer and picked up a load of asphalt. When he got home, we’d shovel it out, smooth it out, and tamp it down. Then he’d go get another load. We spent a whole weekend paving the driveway out to the street.

Another time he decided to replace the sewer line from the house to the street. I spent forever out there with a shovel, digging the trench for the new sewer line, all the way from the house, across the yard, to the street. It was hard work, and I probably wasn’t big enough and strong enough to be doing it. I got blisters. I made mistakes. He yelled at me. I hated it. It wasn’t like some bonding experience where we worked together and talked about life and love and sports and politics. It wasn’t like that at all. It was hard, hot, sweaty work that we did without talking to each other.

Another time I remember we were cutting wood together. He was using a sledgehammer and a metal wedge to split a log. Suddenly a big chunk of the metal wedge broke off and hit me in the shoulder. I felt like I’d been shot by a bullet, and I looked like I’d been stabbed. It hurt a lot and it bled a lot. But I remember him saying, “Stop crying, you baby. It’s nothing.”

I wasn’t the only one he scared. My cousin Linda Pickering told me later that when she was young, her mother was mentally unstable. She was in and out of mental institutions. The kids—Linda was the oldest of six children—would be alone in the house. Sometimes my dad would come over on a weekend morning to take charge. He would start shouting at them, telling them it was wrong for them to sleep late on a Saturday, and yelling at them to get out of bed and do their chores. Linda said this happened more than once. She was sure her mother hadn’t asked Rod to do this. Maybe it was the only way he knew to try to be helpful to his struggling sister-in-law.

         

My dad was working hard, two or three jobs at a time, but it was still hard for him to support his family. One time he and Lou got behind on their payments on the Hawthorne house, and almost had it taken away from them. There was more than one letter to a creditor asking for patience, asking for relief, promising to keep up with the payments. In one I’ve seen, my dad says he is “financially embarrassed,” and writes in his steady schoolteacher hand, “If you will permit me to make smaller payments for the next month or two I will be able to make my tax payment on time and not further complicate my financial situation. I am enclosing a check for twenty-five dollars…”

That must have been hard for my dad. He grew up in the Depression, without a father, moving from town to town, being pushed off onto his relatives, while his mother tried to make enough to raise her sons. He had always been careful about money. He never drove a new car. He never bought fancy clothes. So that’s how we lived, too. We hardly ever ate out in restaurants. Nothing was ever bought new if it could be bought used, and nothing was ever paid for if it could be had for free. Even the lumber he used for his building projects was wood that he scavenged off the streets, out of trash bins or off construction sites.

Having my dad work a lot was bad for me. When he was gone, I was left alone with Lou. One time, when we were still living on Hawthorne, he went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for some National Guard training. I know it was November, because he was gone for my birthday. I remember having a birthday party. It was my eighth birthday. I had some friends from the neighborhood come over for cake and ice cream, with Hershey’s chocolate sauce.

I had also invited a little girl from the neighborhood. I liked her. But I was nervous to have her come to the party. George and some of the other boys had found out that she’d show you her underpants if you gave her a cookie. So George was always giving her cookies and fooling around with her. He tried to get me to do it, too, but I was too embarrassed. I wouldn’t play along.

I wanted her to come to the party, but I was afraid George and the other boys from the neighborhood would say bad things about her, or make fun of her.

I was also scared because Lou was in charge. But it seemed to go pretty well. Then after the cake and ice cream the boys started picking on the little girl. I was afraid they were going to start picking on me, too. So I got out of the way. I didn’t stick up for her. No one did. It ended up being an unhappy birthday for me.

My dad was gone for almost a month. Without him there, Lou was on top of me for everything. I couldn’t catch a break. It seemed like I spent the whole time getting yelled at and sent to my room and spanked or hit or punished. Lou would yell at me to get out of the kitchen, get out of the house, get out of her way, or stop doing this or that. Then, if I didn’t move quickly enough, or if I gave her any guff, I’d get punished. Half the time I didn’t even know what I was being punished for. I was just bad.

And all that punishing still didn’t satisfy her. When my dad got back from Fort Sill, she told him that she couldn’t handle me anymore, that he had to do something with me. So, to keep the peace in the family, my dad started sending me to spend the weekends with his uncle Orville and aunt Evelyn.

I didn’t know it at the time, but they weren’t really his uncle and aunt. They weren’t family at all. Evelyn was the former housekeeper who my dad and my uncle Kenny had lived with in that logging camp when they were in high school. Her husband, Orville, had been a lumber man. He had worked for Long Bell Logging, in Ryderwood, Washington.

By now, Orville and Evelyn were living in Mountain View, another suburb of San Jose, where they had a little one-bedroom apartment on Camille Court. Evelyn had a job on a ranch, sorting eggs. Orville was the custodian at Springer Elementary School in Mountain View, where he was very well liked by all the kids. I’d go over there on Saturday and spend the weekend helping him at Springer, and helping my aunt with Sunday school. They were nice people, and they were very nice to me.

My uncle Kenny said that Orville and Evelyn weren’t able to have children. But they loved kids, so they loved having me around. Orville, like my dad, had lost a parent early in life. His mother had died giving birth to him, and his father sort of disappeared. And so, like Lou, he was raised mostly by his grandparents.

I liked Orville and Evelyn a lot. They didn’t criticize me all the time. Orville and I could talk about men stuff—sports and camping and fishing—and he never talked down to me. He and Evelyn asked me to help out, and I helped out, and that made me feel useful and appreciated.

They belonged to the St. Paul Lutheran Church, and they were serious about religion, which was a new thing for me. My family went to church on Easter, and my grandmother had some ideas she got from Christian Science, but that was it. Religion didn’t enter our house at all. My dad used to make fun of it. He’d say, “The Bible—what’s the big deal? I could’ve written that.”

Orville would say, “Too bad, Rod—you’re missing out on a lot of royalties.”

I don’t know whose idea it was, but someone taught me how to pray and got me doing it when I was real young. There’s a picture of me dated July 1956. I’m lying on my back in a wood-paneled room, with my hands folded together, and I’m praying. There’s a crucifix on the wall. It looks like I’m in a cabin, which might mean I was on vacation up in the mountains. If the date on the picture is right, I was seven and a half years old.

When we weren’t doing church stuff, Orville and Evelyn took me to do things that were fun. We went to the rodeo over at Steven’s Creek, and we went miniature golfing. We went out to dinner and had hamburgers or pizza.

With my dad, we hardly went out for dinner at all, and we didn’t go to fun places too often. I remember once going to a place that served steak. I was pretty interested in that steak. Maybe my brothers were, too. But my dad said, “No, you wouldn’t like that. You’re getting hamburgers.” Then he had the steak.

He was strict about things like that. Sometimes we’d go down to Clint’s, the ice cream place, for an ice cream cone. But you couldn’t just get whatever flavor you wanted. It had to be vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. You couldn’t order another flavor. My dad wouldn’t let you. I wanted to try licorice ice cream. That sounded great! But he said no. Ice cream wasn’t supposed to taste like licorice. It wasn’t right, and he wasn’t buying it.

Every once in a while we’d go to a park, or to the beach—someplace free, because it had to be someplace free. There was a park over near Santa Cruz that we went to a lot. It had a rock you could slide down into the water.

The only big trip I remember us taking was a really big one. In 1955, the summer that it opened, we went to Disneyland.

I don’t remember many details about it, but my stepbrother George says we borrowed my uncle Kenny’s new Buick—Dad’s car wasn’t dependable enough for the long, hot drive—and hit the road. We stayed at the Figueroa Hotel in downtown Los Angeles because the hotels around Disneyland were too expensive. When we got to the park, we found out that we weren’t allowed to go on some of the rides because we were too small. Binky went on things like the Autopia ride, but me and George were too little for that. George mostly remembers going on the Rocket to the Moon ride. Bink convinced him during the takeoff that we really were going to the moon, and that we weren’t coming back. George got scared and started crying. I think we were both seven years old.

What I remember most is that we weren’t allowed to do a lot of the things we wanted to do. Some rides cost extra, so those were out—like the pirate-ship ride. We got our pictures taken on the dock, next to the pirate ship, but that was as close as we got. I remember having to stomp my feet to get on the rocket ride, too. At first my dad wasn’t going to let me go on it, probably because it cost extra.

In the snapshots I’ve seen of that day we all look unhappy—like we don’t want to stand around taking pictures, but we do want to get back on the rides—except my dad. He looks cheerful in every family photo I’ve ever seen. He’s smiling like he’s taken one of his famous “what-the-hell” pills. He used to joke about that. When something difficult was going to take place, he’d say, “I better take my what-the-hell pills.”

The only family vacation we took regularly was the one to Uncle Ross’s cabin in the mountains. Even after my dad married Lou, we were still welcome there. Each spring, Uncle Ross would mail us the key to the front door, and we’d drive up there the weekend before Easter. We’d usually stay a whole week in that giant cabin.

It was a paradise for kids. The walls were hung with moose heads, elk heads, and deer antlers. The snow outside was always deep enough for skiing, and sometimes so deep that we’d have to shovel our way in, just to get to the front door.

I remember playing in the snow for hours with George. We’d put on ski boots and strap them into the skis—that’s how long ago this was, before there were modern bindings—and ski for so long that we always wound up with blisters. When we were older, we’d sneak cigarettes and smoke them in the snow. We’d build snow forts.

George remembers this as the happiest time in our family. It probably wasn’t too much of a treat for Lou. The house had a wood-burning fireplace for heat and a wood-burning stove for cooking. Her job was probably twice as hard as it was at home. But for us kids, it was a great place to be.

At home, sometimes my dad would take me for an outing, but we wouldn’t go anywhere fun at all. He was just taking me out of the house to give Lou a break. Some evenings, for example, he’d take me with him to the National Guard Armory, on Hedding Street in San Jose. It was a big building with a wooden-floored gymnasium on the first floor and offices and meeting rooms on the second floor. He’d go up to the second floor to take care of his National Guard business, and leave me on my own down in the gym. Outside, it was a schoolboy’s dream—a gigantic parking lot full of army trucks and jeeps. But inside it was just a gym with a polished-wood floor. No balls. No games. No one to play games with. It wasn’t much fun for a kid. So, after a while I’d get whiny and start asking him to take me home. I’m sure he didn’t like that.

         

As I got older, things at home got worse.

It was probably my fault, because I was jealous of the good treatment he got, but I stopped getting along with George. It seemed like he and I were opposites now. He liked the Los Angeles Dodgers, and I liked the San Francisco Giants. He liked Elvis Presley, and I liked Ricky Nelson. He liked Father Knows Best, and I liked Bachelor Father. We didn’t play together that much anymore, and when we did, we argued.

One time at school, I said something he didn’t like and he jumped on me. We fell on the ground, wrestling like a couple of wildcats.

Lou had a weird way of dealing with fights. Instead of letting us work it out, she’d make us put on boxing gloves and go into the front yard. She’d referee the fight, and we’d go a few rounds until one of us had enough.

We did this more than once. It was stupid. I was much taller than George. I had a longer reach and I weighed more. Not that he wasn’t tough—he was plenty tough. He was strong, and he was stocky. But I had the reach. All I had to do was keep him away from me until I got a clear shot.

I was pretty good at fighting, but I didn’t like to fight. Some kids did. I knew guys who looked for fights. I wasn’t one of those guys. I didn’t like getting hurt, and I didn’t like hurting other people.

Once, when I was about ten, I was with some of my cousins and some of their friends at my uncle Gene’s house. We were in the yard, and we were wrestling, just like they did on TV. I picked up this kid and threw him—just like they did on TV. He got hurt, and I got in trouble. He went into the house crying. I was banned from wrestling.

Even now, it scares me. I could have hurt that kid bad. I could have broken his neck. It was a dangerous thing to do, and I sort of knew that at the time. But I didn’t care. I didn’t stop. I picked him up and threw him on the ground.

I still feel bad about that today. I could have been friends with that kid. Instead, I hurt him, and scared him, and got excluded from the rest of the games that day.

I got in trouble for that. I also got in trouble for lots of things I didn’t do, sometimes for things George did. One time, Lou was cleaning up Kirk’s baby toys. Some of them were wet, like someone had spit on them. She accused me of doing it, even though I told her I didn’t, and gave me a spanking and sent me to my room. Later that day George came home and she told him what had happened. He confessed: He had spit on the toys himself. By then, Lou wasn’t angry anymore. She had taken it out on me already. So she didn’t punish George at all, and she didn’t apologize to me.

I had suspected for a long time that I was getting the short end of the stick. When anything went wrong, I got blamed—and punished. But when George got caught red-handed, nothing happened. Now here was the proof. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t making things up. It was true. I couldn’t catch a break.

Sometimes, when I thought I did something good, it turned out I had done something bad.

For example, George and I were on Little League baseball teams. We were both obsessed with baseball. I idolized guys like Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, and Willie Mays. George later told me I was the better athlete of the two of us, even though he was more popular and usually got picked to play before I did when we were choosing up sides.

One time, my team played against George’s team. It was a good game, and my team won. But I wasn’t congratulated for playing well and winning the game. Instead, I was criticized for not cheering loud enough for George when he was up at bat. What kind of sportsmanship is that? Even if it is your brother, you don’t cheer for the other team during the game.

I don’t have only my own memory to rely on when it comes to my childhood. George would tell me, much later in my life, that it was just as bad as I remembered it.

He remembers Lou telling me, in front of the family, in front of my dad, things like, “You make me sick. You eat like a pig. Let me go get you a trough.” She’d say, “You eat like an animal. I’m going to get you a shovel.”

If I asked for a second helping of something, she’d get mad at me. George remembers me complaining about going to bed hungry—and getting caught if I did something about it. There was a big cookie jar in the kitchen, with a heavy screw-top lid on it. George would go and get a cookie if he wanted one, and nobody said a word. But if I went into the kitchen and Lou heard that screw-top lid being opened, she’d come screaming in there and tell me to leave the cookies alone.

I don’t remember Lou ever doing anything that seemed like fun. She didn’t enjoy herself much. She did have an accordion, though, a great big old-fashioned one that she kept locked in a box. Every once in a while she’d take it out and sit by herself, playing accordion music. I thought she played very well, and I liked listening to her. But she almost never played. She almost never had any fun.

Mostly, it seemed like, she worried and got angry. My cousin Linda remembers going to the beach at Santa Cruz with Lou and her sons. They’d spread a blanket on the sand. Linda would run down to the water. But as soon as Cleon or George would leave the blanket, Lou would start yelling at them to be careful, to not go near the water, to not get dirty.

George remembers her being neurotic about cleanliness, too, and also remembers her inspecting my underwear. If she found anything in there, any stains, I got a beating. George remembers Lou screaming her head off, dragging me up the stairs by one arm on the way to giving me a beating.

I got lots of beatings.

“Mom would start and Pop would finish it when he came home,” George said. “You had bruises on your body almost every day of your life. You had marks all over you.”

George felt guilty about it. Brian did, too. He said, “I was no threat to anyone, and no competition for anyone, and I was adored. No one had to punish me.” He and George never got hit. Especially George. My dad was not allowed to touch him, criticize him, or punish him in any way. Brian never did anything bad, and Lou refused to punish George, no matter what he got caught doing. So he felt bad when he saw me getting a beating for something he was probably doing himself.

“I knew they were hurting you and I knew it was wrong,” he told me later. “And I know that if it happened today, someone would be going to jail.”

         

Was it all bad? It couldn’t have been. Sometimes I wonder if I just remember the bad things. Brian says he doesn’t ever remember happy times, living in that house with me and George and Lou and Dad. Could we all have forgotten some of the stuff that was good?

My stepbrother George remembers some of the good things. He remembers Lou helping us build a tree fort. He remembers her buying us paint-by-numbers kits, and taking us to the library.

I don’t remember that. I don’t even remember celebrating most of my birthdays. George remembers one year I got three of the same gift, a board game called Calling All Cars. We kept one and took back two. Birthdays weren’t anything special. You’d get a gift, but it was usually clothes or a book. That was the one thing that my father and Lou weren’t cheap about. There were always books around. They would buy books, new books. You could always get a book. Lou would bake a cake. I didn’t like her cakes much, but it was nice to get a cake just the same.

Christmas wasn’t a big deal, either. There weren’t a bunch of presents. We didn’t have a giant Christmas tree with a mountain of gifts under it. It was almost like a regular day, except that you’d get a baseball mitt (used, always) or something like that.

I do remember that I was the only kid in the family who got new clothes that were really new. Everyone else got hand-me-downs. There was no one big enough whose hand-me-downs I could wear. So I usually got new clothes and new shoes.

I don’t remember hearing anything during that period about my little brother Bruce. He had survived and was adopted by my father’s uncle Frank and his wife Bea, who lived up in Centralia, Washington. But I do remember seeing him one time. He was at one of my uncles’ house—either Kenneth’s or Gene’s. He must have been seven or eight years old by then. He would stand and put his left foot in front of his right foot and rock back and forth and make a little noise. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t recognize his own name. He could walk if you helped him. Otherwise, he would just stand and rock back and forth. He didn’t seem unhappy, or happy, or anything. He was just sort of there.

Seeing him made me sad. It reminded me about my mother. It must have reminded my dad about her, too. Brian believed this was why Bruce never lived with us—because my father couldn’t bear to be reminded about the death of his wife. He later told me that he never saw Bruce again after that day at my uncle’s house.

With all of this trouble at home, it’s no surprise that I was starting to get into trouble away from home, too.