Jimmy Neurosis Read online

  Dedication

  For my mom and dad

  Epigraph

  July 1977 to December 1980

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I

  1. Sorry, Charlie

  2. Hot Wheels

  3. Hotel California

  4. Schoolhouse Rock!

  5. And That’s the Way It Is

  6. The San Francisco Treat

  7. Don’t Leave Home Without It

  8. Sheena Is a Punk Rocker

  9. A Day Without Orange Juice Is Like a Day Without Sunshine

  10. It’s 9:00 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

  11. Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Water

  Part II

  12. Wessonality

  13. Breaker, Breaker, Over and Out

  14. Only Her Hairdresser Knows for Sure

  15. Who Loves Ya, Baby?

  16. Good Night, John-Boy

  17. Be All That You Can Be

  18. Making Our Dreams Come True

  19. Share the Moment . . . Share Life

  20. Come on Down!

  21. It Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking

  22. Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut, Sometimes You Don’t

  23. You’re Soaking in It

  Part III

  24. Fly the Friendly Skies

  25. Reach Out and Touch Someone

  26. The Best a Man Can Get

  27. Betcha Can’t Eat Just One

  28. Ask Any Mermaid You Happen to See

  29. California Über Alles

  30. Twinkie the Kid

  31. You’re Gonna Make It After All

  32. Boys Keep Swinging

  33. Breakfast of Champions

  34. The Best Part of Waking Up

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  1

  Sorry, Charlie

  While the credits rolled, I mentally composed my movie review for the New York Times. A pithy one-liner to start with, I decided, with the serious criticism to follow.

  The house lights went on abruptly, and my daydream vaporized. “We’d better get going, Jim,” my mother said. “Daddy will be waiting.” As we filed out of the auditorium, she paused to check her reflection in the lobby’s mirrored walls.

  “You look fantastic, Mom,” I told her, trying to hurry us outside. Really, I just wanted to get away from my own reflection. I was fourteen, and so far it wasn’t going too well. Mom fluffed her dome of frosted hair.

  The Minnesota afternoon summer heat was intense, and I wondered what Dad might be making for dinner in this weather. Some kind of salad? Whatever he was preparing, I looked forward to it, the jumbo box of popcorn we’d polished off during the movie notwithstanding.

  When you move as often as we did back then, family is the only real home you’ve got, the only element that isn’t constantly changing. For instance, Dad could be counted on to be in his favorite room when we got back. The Carriage House Estates apartment had a galley kitchen furnished only with a cracked Formica countertop and a broken freezer, but he needed no fancy accoutrements to rustle up an elaborate meal.

  He wasn’t always in town; he traveled for work. But I loved it when he was. I pictured how his sleeves would be rolled up, his forearms revealing faded tattoos from his navy days. Scotch and soda on a coaster. The drone of ABC’s Wide World of Sports in the background. I imagined the preoccupied smile he’d give us when we came in.

  MOM AND I WADED through the heat, searching for our station wagon in the parking lot. She might’ve stepped right out of the movie we’d just seen, Fun with Dick & Jane, so strongly did she resemble Jane Fonda’s slim and glamorous character.

  The son in the movie was about my age, too, with sandy hair like mine. Nerdy like me as well. He had a role at the beginning, but then it was as if everyone forgot about him.

  She peered over the rims of her sunglasses. “Honey, I’m not seeing the car anywhere!”

  “Because all the cars look identical,” I pointed out. If it had been up to me, we would’ve gone to the art-house cinema near downtown Minneapolis, but that would’ve necessitated a freeway trip, and my mom viewed the prospect of driving in the fast lane the way most people would view leaning out the open door of a cargo plane at thirty-nine thousand feet, so that was out. Of course, I could have taken the bus downtown myself, but it never would’ve occurred to me to break our standing date.

  “Found it, Mom.”

  She cautiously piloted us out of the parking lot, the air barely stirring inside the car. “I thought that was pretty good, for a regular movie,” I said. By “regular” I meant not like the serious ones I preferred, such as Taxi Driver or Rosemary’s Baby. This one had been a satire. It was about an all-American couple who lose everything when the husband gets fired, and to make ends meet they go on a spree of robberies. “I like that they got away with it in the end. Did you?”

  “I thought they made a very handsome couple. But”—she pursed her lips into a moue of disapproval—“honestly, I found it a little depressing. I didn’t expect it to be so much about unemployment.”

  “Well, but that’s real life.”

  “You don’t go to the movies to see real life,” she retorted, peering anxiously over the dashboard before making a very wide turn. “I know that Daddy just started his new job, but it made me worry. They’re handing out so many pink slips nowadays, it’s scary. If he gets fired this time, I don’t know what we’ll do, honey, I really don’t.”

  Since I’d been a little kid, the phrase “getting fired” had given me a mental image of someone being shut into a steel-lined chamber and engulfed in flames. Even now I couldn’t rid myself of the association. To combat a surge of uneasiness, I ground my teeth. Because it was Sunday, the seventh day of the week, it had to be done seven times. I hid this by turning my head as though fascinated by the overgrown grass and jack pines of the median strip. If anyone knew about my protective rituals, including my mom, their power would be eliminated.

  Now Mom, with much tapping of the brakes, was maneuvering us into a parking space on the main drag.

  “Where are we? Oh . . . I see!” We were parked in front of a Fanny Farmer candy shop.

  She gave me a sheepish smile. “Just a quick stop?” As vigilant as she was about watching her figure, chocolates were irresistible to her, and candy feasts, like Sunday bargain matinees, were another mother-son custom.

  AS WE PULLED IN to the parking garage at our apartment complex, my mom giggled. “Jim, hide the evidence, so Daddy doesn’t ask why we didn’t bring him any.” I played along, making a dramatic show of stuffing the candy wrappers into my pockets.

  Inside, I paused to shuck off my sneakers. Even when we were living in a less-than-wonderful place like this, my mother wanted things neat, and protecting the red shag carpeting that smelled like the previous tenant’s cigarette smoke was no exception.

  It took me a moment to notice that she was standing frozen before the open closet door, one sandal still dangling from an index finger. “Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  Without a word she marched into the master bedroom. I heard drawers being pulled, the medicine cabinet clicking open and shut.

  I had the familiar sensation of anxiety gripping my guts. I ground my teeth again, but I could tell, as I forced myself to walk down the hall after her, that it was too late to rouse any protective forces.

  I found her staring at their bed as though it were a dead body. “Your father,” she announced, not looking at me, “has taken all his things.”

  Half of our belongings were still in storage—we had moved to St. Paul from suburban Chicago just a few weeks prior—but the other half we’d crammed into the small rooms of this temporary apartment. Since Dad kept assuring us that the Carriage House Estates was a temporary situation, none of us had unpacked anything besides clothing and kitchen items yet. And it was immediately obvious that my dad’s side of their bedroom closet was bare except for a few coat hangers.

  Knowing, with mounting dread, that she had already checked, I pulled out a dresser drawer. Where his socks and underwear usually were, there was nothing but some loose change. His polo shirts and shorts were gone from the second drawer. Dad went away for business all the time, but as a seasoned traveler he was adept at packing light. He certainly wouldn’t have taken all his winter coats and every pair of shoes he owned to an office-supply conference. Nor, for that matter, would he forget to tell us if he was leaving. Still, as I ransacked the rooms for his belongings, my mind continued to grope for justifications. But then I checked the liquor cabinet, one of the few pieces of furniture we’d brought with us, and saw that he’d taken everything but a sticky old bottle of schnapps. Then I knew.

  Behind me Mom sank onto a chair. “Go on and watch TV, honey,” she said after a minute. “I’ll make us dinner.”

  “Where’s Daddy?” I managed.

  “I don’t know.”

  That night I dreamed of being chased by a tornado, the dark funnel bending toward me as it whirled faster and faster, dragging at my clothes and hair as I tried to flee on slow, heavy legs.

  DAD DIDN’T RETURN THE NEXT DAY, or the day after that. Since we’d been in St. Paul a grand total of only twenty-three days, neither of us knew a soul there. The previous tenants had absconded with the air conditioner, and I woke up every morning with
my hair stuck to my face with perspiration. In the courtyard below, an old man sat planted in a folding chair from dawn until dusk, cigar clamped between his teeth, transistor radio tuned to baseball.

  Mom and I spent the week performing reruns of our daily rounds. Grocery trips with coupons in hand, dinner in front of the TV. Once an ice-cream truck stopped on our block, and we lined up with the little kids to exchange a couple quarters for a pair of Fudgsicles. Nothing seemed real.

  NOW THIS SULTRY AFTERNOON STRETCHED before me. Mom had gone to the bank. All our neighbors had retreated indoors, their fans and air conditioners whirring; even the old man with the radio had scooted his chair to catch the shade of the parking garage. Only our ancient pet turtle, Peewee, who lay with his arms and legs splayed atop a rock in his aquarium, looked at ease in the heat.

  The television was on, of course. The dial made a snapping noise as it changed channels. Snap! Campbell’s Soup is mm-mm good! Snap! A grandmother at a wedding was turning the crank of a Polaroid camera. Imagine instant pictures with color. Color! In minutes you get bright, colorful pictures. A blank Polaroid resolved into an image of a grinning child. Snap!

  Wait, what was that?

  An emaciated guy with neon-yellow hair in spikes like the plates of a dragon’s back was onstage screaming into a microphone. A droning reporter said, “A reaction to the peace, flowers, and happiness movement of the hippies, so-called punk rock exploded last year and is a direct attack on the anger and confusion of modern-day Britain. And it’s begun to make appearances across the pond, too, in cities like New York and Los Angeles.” He pronounced the last two words Loz Angel-eez.

  “No future! No future! No future for you! No future for me!” yowled the band they were showing now. The singer spit right into the audience, which was a roiling group of people with freaky hair and torn-up clothes. Repelled and amazed, I couldn’t look away. The singer was acting out exactly what he felt—like I felt!—and daring you to hate him for it. The audience was jumping in place like they had so much raw, angry energy that it didn’t matter who was spitting on whom. The only stylistic point of reference I had for what I was looking at was the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, which I’d seen with my mom. In it, David Bowie played a hip, orange-haired space alien dropped into the middle of a rural American town.

  I was hungry to know more, but now we’d returned to the set of the boring show that the segment appeared on. The host leaned back in his swivel chair, mugging as if to say, Would you get a load of that! “In London, the punk rock scene,” he concluded, then turned to his cohost. “What d’you think, Danielle? Ready to go to a punk rock concert?”

  The cohost tittered. “I think disco is wild enough for me, Steve.”

  I plopped a cylinder of frozen orange-juice concentrate into a plastic pitcher, the thwack of the spoon as I stirred it sounding loud in the empty apartment. Dad always preferred to squeeze oranges fresh by hand. He’d pour the pulpy juice over ice and garnish the glass with a twist of peel.

  The cookies in the pantry had gone soft from humidity. I grabbed a handful anyway and took them with me on a search for my keepsakes, just for something to do. Moving so frequently, my family shed more belongings than we acquired, but each of us claimed at least one cache of treasured objects. Mine was in a box I now located beneath a valise full of winter sweaters.

  I set each item out on my bedroom carpet. The souvenir steer’s horn from Oklahoma, the Daniel Boone cap from a trip to Knott’s Berry Farm, the magic wand that reliably failed to manifest the red paper flowers that were supposed to pop out if you tapped it just right. Secreted inside that box was a smaller one in which I kept newspaper clippings of men’s underwear ads. On some I’d penciled in the shadows of penises where they had been only faintly visible. There was one in particular I favored, cut from a Montgomery Ward circular, that showed a shirtless man in powder-blue briefs with darker blue ribbing, and with my finger I would follow the trail of his chest hair where it led to the mysteries of his underwear.

  After I’d exhausted the possibilities of both boxes, I hunted through the closets for a certain cardboard trunk. An old hand at leaving her past behind, Mom was the least sentimental among us about belongings, but she, too, had a special trove.

  She had told me the story many times. She met Dad in late 1945, during his navy days. He’d been visiting their hometown of Baltimore during a shore leave; at the time he was stationed on Treasure Island, near San Francisco. It’d been a blind date, but he’d been so instantly lovestruck that he’d proposed to her by letter the very next day, as he departed Baltimore on a slow train back to the West Coast. After struggling for weeks with the logic of marrying a man she’d basically only known for a few hours, she consented. Her sister Edie had a big hand in talking her into it. “Go, Bernice—I would,” she’d said. As my mother readied to leave home to start her new life in California, my dad sent a blizzard of correspondence.

  Ever since I’d been old enough to read, I loved to go through this bundle of letters. Written on onionskin that contained the exotic watermark PAR AVION, they held a complicated sway over me. My father had only a sixth-grade education, and his labor was evident. His avowals of love were beyond flowery, which made me feel awkward, but in these overblown lines—“You are my darling sweetheart, I am so excited about our life together”—I gleaned something genuine between them that comforted me. It made me a little jealous, too. I wished I could inspire such a show of affection from Dad.

  A burst of cheering from the transistor radio outside made me startle as though guilty, and I put the bundle back in the trunk. While my mom had never minded my reading them, I suddenly realized I didn’t want her to come home now to see me doing it.

  I drifted into the bathroom to stare into the mirror. I looked even skinnier than usual, and there were dark circles under my eyes. My dirty-blond hair was in need of a trim. I bared my prominent front teeth, exaggerating them into rabbity protrusions. “You’re so ugly,” I told my reflection. The bowl of rosebud-shaped miniature soaps seemed to regard me with reproach.

  IN THE MORNING I WOKE to the sound of my parents’ voices buzzing through the walls, and I hurried out to the living room.

  My father had forgone the La-Z-Boy into which he liked to sink, tumbler in his fist, after work. Instead he was on the sofa, his right hand gripping the armrest with white knuckles. My mother was perched on the love seat. She hated that seat, deeming it worn-looking. The expression on her face frightened me.

  I knuckled sleep out of my eyes. “When’d you get back?”

  He drew a breath. “I’ve decided to leave your mother,” he announced to a spot on the carpet.

  The words hung in the air.

  “This has been a very hard decision to make. But I want to live alone, not . . . not in this family anymore. There are a lot of things that your mother and I need to figure out about how we’re going to proceed. But . . . it’s the right thing for me to do.”

  After the remaining awkward, halting words were exchanged and he’d left with a vague promise to see us later, Mom and I sat in silence while tears spilled down her cheeks. Suddenly I was filled with rage at her, at the way she’d sat with her hands twisting in her lap, just letting him walk out the door. “What are we going to do?” I demanded. “We’re not going to stay here, are we?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied faintly. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  She drifted into the kitchen nook and began transferring dishes from the drying rack into the cupboards, then wiped down the countertop. She wrung out the dishrag, folded it in half, draped it over the faucet. Then she brought me a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. I ate it all, its chemical sweetness coating my mouth.

  2

  Hot Wheels

  My father reappeared just long enough to leave Minnesota with us. It wasn’t that he’d changed his mind; it was only because my mother couldn’t cope with driving alone, certainly not on interstates, they both kept telling me, as if it needed repeating. The plan was he’d escort us to my older sister Julie’s place in California and then fly back, leaving us there with the family station wagon and whatever essentials we’d need to start a new life until the rest of our belongings came on a moving truck.