“Ow! Quit it, Bobby!” squealed Jane.
Just then our fun was interrupted when the room went dead quiet. Jane and I stood there staring at each other. “What just happened?” We turned and saw Idie, solemn as a prosecuting attorney, gently lift Abbey Road from the turntable deck and place it back in the paper sleeve and then slide that into the cover that showed the former mop-tops as they crossed an English street. Jane and I looked at our dad, perplexed. He put the record down on top of the hi-fi cabinet and addressed us. It felt like we were in court. He cleared his throat and said, very calmly, “Don’t listen to this goddamn jigaboo music in the living room, kids.” Then he walked out of the room.
Jane picked up her record. “What’s ‘jigaboo music’?” I asked her. Idie had never kicked about the Beatles before. This was something new. How was “Come Together” any different from “Michelle”? They were both Beatles songs. To me, it was all rock and roll … and I liked it.
Jane explained, “It’s not the Beatles, Bobby. It’s what they represent.” She took her record back into her room. I thought about what she said and fingered through my folks’ records. Pictures of various bandleaders and singers were on the jackets and all of them showed the men in suits and ties. Some of them even wore hats. The women were dolled up in haute couture, makeup perfect. The Beatles had ditched their matching suits several albums back. But Idie’s reaction was more than just a criticism of fashion.
I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but all the profound changes in American culture that had come in the wake of the Kennedy assassination—and more importantly, all the changes and reversals that had happened to Idie—were symbolized and crystallized by John, Paul, George, and Ringo and the band’s evolving image. If there was a focal point of the cultural war and his own personal misfortune, it was these four young men from Liverpool. I understood what my sister had said: “It’s not the Beatles, Bobby. It’s what they represent.”
I thought of the words of an earlier Beatles tune:
You say you want a revolution.
The battle lines had been drawn. My dad was on the side of what was old and in the way. I was a child foot soldier in the Army of Rock and Roll with all the changes it heralded. The new generation expressed its joys, outrages, and excesses through music. Its poets—Lennon, McCartney, Dylan—were saying things that mattered. And they were changing the culture; the signs were everywhere, in advertising jingles, television, and movies. It excited me, and that feeling only grew. Even the old guard fell under its sway. When Sammy Davis Jr., a member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack, showed up for the 1968 Academy Awards decked out in a velvet Nehru jacket and love beads, you knew who was winning the war. America had changed at its core and the Forrest family changed right along with it.
Now that I was in middle school, I reckoned if I could no longer be considered among the economically blessed, I could be among the reckless and dangerous. I could be an outlaw. It was no trouble to find other disaffected classmates. We were a bunch of little suburban troublemakers. Hoodlums in training. Our idea of fun was breaking into houses or gas stations. Not that theft was our thing. It was just fun to go where we weren’t supposed to be. In those days, there wasn’t the kind of security that you find now. It’s not like we were master burglars. We were just dumb kids with a crowbar. I was the ringleader. I think I got the position because they all saw me as this tough kid from Los Angeles, someone who had been around and who was on his own a lot. A typical ruse for nighttime trouble was the old sleepover gambit.
“Hey, Mom,” I’d say. “I’m going spend the night at Tommy Palletti’s tonight.”
“Okay, Bobby. Have fun,” she’d say, and I’d be gone. It was pretty easy to pull off. None of our group’s parents communicated much with each other, so nobody ever called to check. Besides Tommy Palletti, there was Scotty Simms and David Vaughan. We’d meet at the Indian Wells Country Club, the same place where Idie had his gardening gig, on the links after dark. Maybe there were some anger issues I subconsciously tried to work out, but the club was also a convenient and easy target. There were no security guards in those days. A golf course at night can be a great place to make mischief. We’d steal golf carts and hold demolition derbies. I learned that even if you’re involved in petty crime, there is no way on earth to ever look cool in a golf cart. Of course, our pranks started to draw some attention. After one late-night spree during which several carts were wrecked, the local paper, the Desert Sun, had a front-page story with a headline that screamed, “Vandals Cause $5,000 Damage at Course.”
I was at school when Tommy ran up to me holding a tattered copy of the Desert Sun in his hand. He shook with excitement. “Holy crap, man! Did you see this? They’re talking about us! This is so cool!”
“You idiot! Shut up about that. If we talk about it and wave newspapers around, we’re going to get caught. Do you want to go to juvie?”
“Juvie” was a place no kid wanted to go, even if it would validate that you were a genuine little teenage outlaw. I figured we had better cool our activities at Indian Wells. There’d be no more golf cart bumper cars at night for a while. But that was okay and didn’t
