“You have to hear this!” I said excitedly. We went into his front room, where his folks had a hi-fi system similar to the one my folks had back home. Big, wood, and loud. We turned it on and placed the record on the spindle. The smoky groove filled the room and Feliciano sang, his voice quavering, “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher.” Jimmy and I stood there, eyes closed while we bobbed our heads in time to the beat like a couple of cool street-corner hipsters … or at least as close to that as a couple of third graders could gin up. We were lost in the sound when—scratch! “What do you boys think you’re doing?!?” Jimmy’s mom demanded, and shook us back to reality. She had ripped the needle off the record.
“B-but, Mom!” Jimmy stammered. He was embarrassed, but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was scared too. That’s when he pointed an accusatory finger at me and blurted out, “It’s Bob’s record, Mom!”
What a little sellout, I thought as Jimmy’s mom turned her fury on me. “Bob Forrest! What makes you think it’s okay to bring this trash into my home? I think it’s time for you to go home.” She shoved the record back in my hand and frog-marched me to the front door. She shoved me out onto the walkway and slammed the door behind me.
That was crazy, I thought, and walked home. I hoped she hadn’t scratched the record when she grabbed it off the turntable. When I got home, Helen was there to greet me at the door. She wasn’t happy. “Jimmy’s mother just called,” she said. “What were you thinking?” she demanded.
“It’s just a record, Mom!”
“It is not just a record, mister! There are grown-up … things in that song that little boys shouldn’t be hearing.” She paused for a moment and I searched my brain for what, exactly, those things might be. “And that Jim Morrison and those Doors of his are very bad people!” she added. Now I was totally confused. I had seen the Doors on TV and I thought they were cool. It wasn’t even a Doors record Jimmy and I had played. Not long after Jimmy’s mom had her little living-room freak-out, I watched the 1968 World Series with Idie on television. Feliciano played the national anthem. Like his records, his performance had a distinct Latin flair and was just … cool. Hip. Idie didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The world was changing all around him, and there was nothing he could do to bring things back to the way they used to be. It was pretty clear that things weren’t going to turn around in the neon advertising business. And so, after fighting against the tide, my dad realized the game was lost and decided to retire. He uprooted the clan and brought all of us back to Palm Desert for the country club life.
Although we still had the house, it was a weird situation and one I couldn’t quite figure out. We didn’t have money like we used to have and I was old enough to sense the change. We still managed to keep ourselves enrolled at the fancy Indian Wells Country Club, though. Idie had cooked some deal through which we kept our membership and could maintain the appearance of success, but I didn’t realize what kind of bargain he had made. I found out. One day, when I was twelve or thirteen, I was out near the golf course with my friends when one of them asked, “Man, is that your dad?” He sounded horrified.
Before I could figure out what he was talking about, another of my friends chimed in with, “That is your dad!”
I turned and saw Idie ride up on a big, industrial lawn mower. He was dressed like a gardener. The other kids kind of chuckled. “Hi, Bobby! You and your friends having fun?” And then he drove off, pushing the rattling contraption back toward the fairway. “Your dad’s the gardener, man!” teased one of my friends, and they all had a laugh. It was fucked up and I felt embarrassed. In one quick step, I went from being the son of the cool guy who ran his own business and had once owned car with a real lion’s head to the spawn of the stumblebum groundskeeper. I looked around at my friends as they hooted. What a bunch of spoiled brats, I thought as I watched these shallow young desert princes. In that crystal-clear moment, I realized that I was just like them: an insufferable, overindulged punk. It was time to get used to a new reality. If it was a rude awakening for me, it must have been even harder for Idie. His drinking increased and his genial moods were sometimes replaced by others that left us kids baffled. Where he had once been tolerant, even indulgent, of our love for rock and roll, he grew ever more impatient with the music we loved.
Jane had just gotten a copy of the newest release by the Beatles, Abbey Road. We decided to listen to it on the big hi-fi in the living room. We bounced and bobbed to the sinuous groove as John Lennon sang about flat-tops, Ono sideboards, and spinal crackers on the album’s opener, “Come Together.” We kicked our shoes off
