because it was one more thing that annoyed our big brother, who never missed an opportunity to cut me down to size. Weird little bastard, Tom liked calling me. I didn’t mind him saying so. I was a weird little bastard.
When first learning to read, I hoarded words just as I would shells, nests, butterflies. Like many an introvert, I went through a phase during which every waking hour was spent inside a library book. These I naturally collected, too, never paying my late dues, writing in a ragged notebook words which were used against Tom at opportune moments. He was seldom impressed when I told him he was
Father wasn’t a migrant laborer, as such, and all our moving had nothing to do with a fieldworker following seasons or harvests. He lived by his wits, so he told us and so we kids believed. But wits or not, every year brought the ritual pulling up of stakes and clearing out. His explanations were always curt, brief, like our residencies. He never failed to apologize, and I think he meant it when he told us that the next stop would be more permanent, that he was having a streak of bad luck bound to change for the better. Tom took these uprootings harder than I or my sister. He expressed his anger about being jerked around like circus animals, and complained that this was the old man’s fault and we should band together in revolt. It was never clear just how we were supposed to mutiny, and of course we never did. Molly and I wondered privately, whispering together at night, if our family wouldn’t be more settled had our mother still been around. But that road was a dead end even more than the one we seemed to be on already. She’d deserted our father and the rest of us and there was no bringing her back. We used to get cards at Christmas, but even that stopped some years ago. We seldom mentioned her name now. What was the point?
Like the sun, we traveled westward across the country all the way to the coast, though more circuitously and with much dimmer prospects. I’d made a practice of discarding my latest collection whenever we left one place for another, and not merely disposing of it but destroying the stuff. Taking a hammer to my stash of petrified wood and bleached bones plucked off the flats near Mojave, after the word came down to start packing, was my own private way of saying goodbye. Molly always cried until I gave her a keepsake — a sparrow nest or slug of quartz crystal. And my dad took me aside to ask why I was undoing all my hard work, unaware of the sharp irony of his question — who was he to talk? He told me that one day when I was grown up I’d look back and regret not treasuring these souvenirs from my youth. But he never stopped me. He couldn’t in fairness do that. These were my things, and just as I’d brought them together, I had every right to junk them and set my sights on the new. Besides, demolishing my collections didn’t mean I didn’t treasure them in my own way.
We found ourselves in a small, pleasant, nondescript oceanside town just south of the palm-lined promenades of Santa Barbara and the melodramatic Spanish villas of Montecito, where the Kennedys had spent their honeymoon a few years before. By this time I was old enough to find a job. Tom and I had both given up on school. Too many new faces, too many new curricula. Father couldn’t object to his eldest son dropping out of high school, since he himself had done the same. As for me, having turned fifteen, I’d more or less educated myself anyway. It was a testament to Molly’s resilient nature that she was never fazed entering all those unknown classrooms across this great land of ours. My responsibility was to make sure she got to summer school on time and to pick her up at day’s end, and so I did. This commitment I gladly undertook, since I always liked Molly, and she didn’t get in the way of my schedule at the miniature golf course where I was newly employed.
Just as California would mark a deviation in my father’s gypsy routine, it would be the great divide for me. Whether I knew it at the time is beside the point. I doubt I did. Tom noticed something different had dawned in me, a new confidence, and while he continued to taunt me, my responses became unpredictable. He might smirk, “Miniature golf …now, there’s a promising career, baby,” but rather than object, I would cross my arms, smile, and agree, “Just my speed, baby.” When we did fight, our battles were higher-pitched and more physical, and as often as not, he was the one who got the tooth knocked loose, the lip opened, the kidney punched. Molly gave up trying to be peacemaker and lived more and more in her own world. It was as if we moved into individual mental compartments, like different collectibles in different cabinets. I couldn’t even say for sure what kind of work my father did anymore, though it involved a commute over the mountains to a place called Ojai, which resulted in us seeing less of him than ever. The sun had turned him brown, so his work must have been outside. Probably a construction job — so much for his touted wits. Tom, on the other hand, remained as white as abalone, working in a convenience store. And Molly with her sweet round face covered in freckles and ringed by wildly wavy red hair, the birthright of her maternal Irish ancestry, marched forward with the patience and hope that would better befit a daughter of the king of Uz than a carpenter of Ojai — which our dear brother had by then, with all the cleverness he could muster, dubbed
The change was gradual but irrevocable, and would be difficult if not impossible to describe in abstract terms. To suggest that my compulsion to hoard shifted from objects to essences, from the external world’s cast-offs to the stuff of spirits, wouldn’t be quite right. It might even be false, since what began to arise within me during those long slow days and evenings at work had a manifest concreteness to it. Whether my discovery of glances, fragrances, gestures, voices, the various flavors of nascent sexuality, the potential for beautiful violence that hovers behind those qualities, came as the result of my new life at Bayside Park, or whether it would have happened no matter where I lived and breathed at that moment, I couldn’t say. I do know that Bayside — that perfect world of fantastical architecture and linked greens and strict rules — was where I came awake, felt more alive, as they say, than ever before. I who’d loved lifeless things was now reborn.
The first time I laid eyes on the place was early evening. Fog — which seasonally rolled in at dusk, settling over the coastal flats and canyons until early afternoon the next day—was drifting ashore like willowy, ghostly scarves. I wore my best flannel shirt and a pair of jeans to the interview. My head was all but bald, my old man having given me a fresh trim with his electric clippers, a memento filched from one of his many former employers. Even though it was late June and the day was warm, I wished I’d brought a sweater, since the heavy mist down by the ocean dampened me to the bone. I could hear the surf once I crossed the empty highway, and I started thinking about what questions I might be asked during my interview and what sorts of answers I’d be forced to make up to cover a complete lack of experience. There was a good chance I’d be turned down for the job. After all, I was just a kid who had done nothing with his life beyond collecting debris in forests and fields and reading novels and other worthless books. Weren’t I so bent on getting clear of our house, pulling together money toward one day having a place of my own, unaffected by my shiftless father and moron brother, I’d have talked myself out of even trying. Tom called me a loser so often that, despite the contrarian waters running deep in me, I knew he wasn’t altogether wrong.
As I approached the miniature golf park, I was mesmerized by a ball of brilliance, a white dome of light in the mist that reminded me of some monumental version of one of those snow shaker toys, what on earth are they called? Those water-filled globes of glass inside which are plastic world’s fairs, North Pole dioramas, Eiffel Towers that, when joggled, fall under the spell of a miraculous blizzard. What loomed inside this fluorescent bell jar was a wonderland, a fake dwarf-world populated by real people, reminiscent of snow globe toys in other ways, too. The fantastic impossible scenes housed in each, glass or light, were irresistible. I walked through a gate over which was a sign that read bay side — for all ages. What lay before me, smaller than the so-called real world but larger than life, was a village of whirling windmills and miniature cathedrals with spires, of stucco gargoyles and painted grottoes. A white brick castle with turrets ascended the low sky, its paint peeling in the watery weather. Calypso’s Cave, the sixth hole. A fanciful pirate ship coved by a waterfall at the seventh. And everywhere I looked, green synthetic alleys. All interconnected and, if a bit seedy, very alluring.
A result of lying about my age, background, and whatever else, I got the job. When asked at dinner to describe what kind of work was involved, I told my father I was the course steward. In fact, my responsibilities fell somewhere between janitor and errand boy. Absurd as it may sound, I was never happier. Vacuuming the putting lanes; scouring the acre park and adjacent beach for lost balls and abandoned golf clubs; tending the beds of bougainvillea and birds of paradise; spearing trash strewn on the trampled struggling real grass that lay between the perfect alleys; skimming crud out of water traps and ornamental lagoons; retouching paint where paint needed retouching. If Bayside were a museum — and it was, to my eyes — I was its curator. The owner, a lean, sallow, stagnant man named Gallagher, seemed gratified by my attentiveness and pleased that I didn’t have any friends to waste my time or his. Looking back, I realize he was quietly delighted that I hadn’t the least interest in playing.
