Room to Dream Read online

  I had a girlfriend every year starting when I was really young, and all of them were great. In kindergarten I walked to school with a girl and we’d carry our nap towels. That was the thing you did with girls in kindergarten. My friend Riley Cutler that my son Riley’s named after—well, in the fourth grade I had a girlfriend named Carol Cluff, and in the fifth grade she became Riley’s girlfriend and they’re still married today. Judy Puttnam was my girlfriend in fifth and sixth grade, and then in junior high I had a new girlfriend every two weeks. You’d have a girlfriend for a while and then you move on to a different girlfriend. I have a picture of me kissing Jane Johnson at a party in a basement in Boise. Jane’s father was a doctor, and she and I looked at medical books together.

  I’ll tell you about a kiss I really remember. My father’s boss was named Mr. Packard, and one summer the Packard family came and stayed at the research station. There was a beautiful girl in the family named Sue, who was my age, and she brought her neighbor boy up and they were having sex. I was so far away from having sex, and it just completely boggled my mind that they were so cavalier when they were telling me about this. One day Sue and I ditched her boyfriend and got off on our own. On the ponderosa pine forest floor are interwoven pine needles maybe two feet thick, and this stuff is called duff. It’s so soft it’s incredible, and we would run through these trees and dive into it and go into a long kiss. It was so dreamy. That was a kiss that got deeper and deeper, and it was lighting some fire.

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  Mostly I remember summers because winter meant school, and we human beings block out school because it’s horrible. I barely remember ever being in a schoolroom, and I don’t remember any of my classes except my art class. Even though I had a very conservative art teacher I remember really loving it. I still liked being outside more, though.

  We skied at this place called Bogus Basin, which was eighteen miles away, up these winding mountain roads, and it was real good snow, much better snow than Sun Valley. It was small, but when you’re a kid it seemed real big. In the summer you could work off your season pass by doing a few days of work at Bogus Basin, clearing brush and doing stuff. We were up there working one summer when we found this dead, bloated cow by a stream. We had these pickaxes, so we thought we’d try to pop this cow. One side of a pickax is kind of a blade and the other end is a pointed piece of steel, so we slammed the pointed end of one of these things into the cow, but as soon as it hit we realized we were in trouble. You’d bang the pickax into this cow and it would fly off of this thing—it could’ve killed somebody. The cow would fart when you hit it really hard, and it was a poisonous odor because it was decaying, but we could not pop this cow. I think we gave up. I don’t know why we wanted to pop it. You know, kids…you want to do stuff.

  This place had a T-bar rather than a chairlift to get to the top of the mountain, and in the summer you could find stuff in the area where people stood in line for the T-bar. People would drop things in the snow, then we’d find them after the snow melted. You’d find five-dollar bills, all kinds of change—it was so beautiful to find money. One time I was walking past the junior high on the way to the ski bus, and there were six inches of snow on the ground, and I look over and there’s this fat little blue coin purse. I pick it up, it’s sopping wet from the snow, and I open it and there’s a roll of Canadian money, which works great in America. I spent quite a bit of that money that day skiing. They had Danishes at the lodge, and I might’ve bought some for my friends. I took the rest of the money home and my father made me run an ad in the paper in case somebody lost it, but nobody claimed it so I got to keep it.

  My fourth-grade teacher was named Mrs. Fordyce, and we called her Mrs. Four-Eyes. I sat three or four seats from the front of the room, and there was this girl who sat behind me who’d wear this bracelet and just rub herself like crazy. It’s like she couldn’t stop herself. I sort of knew what she was doing, but I didn’t really know. Kids learn about this stuff in little bits. My sixth-grade girlfriend, Judy Puttnam, had a friend named Tina Schwartz. One day at school the girls were all asked to go to a different room, then they came back. I’m very curious. What’s the deal? That afternoon I go to Judy’s house, then we walk down to Tina Schwartz’s house, and Tina says, “I’ll show you what they told us.” She comes out with this Kotex and squats down and shows me how this thing was supposed to be worn, and that was really something to me.

  People came of age much later in life during the fifties. In the sixth grade there was a story going around about a guy in our class who had to shave and was bigger than most kids. The story was that he went into the boys’ room and did this thing with his penis and this white fluid came out. I said, What? I can’t believe what I’m hearing, but something tells me it’s true. I equate that with transcending with meditation. You can’t really believe that someone could become enlightened, but something inside tells you it could be true. It was the same thing. So I thought, I’m going to try this tonight. It took forever. Nothing was happening, right? And all of a sudden this feeling—I thought, Where is this feeling coming from? Whoa! The story was true and it was unbelievable. It was like discovering fire. It was just like meditation. You learn this technique and, lo and behold, things start changing and there it is. It’s real.

  I remember discovering rock ’n’ roll when I was a kid, too. Rock ’n’ roll makes you dream and gives you a feeling, and it was so powerful when I first heard it. Music has changed since the birth of rock ’n’ roll, but the difference isn’t anywhere near as great as it was when rock ’n’ roll came in, because what had preceded it was so different. It’s like it came out of nowhere. They were doing rhythm and blues but we weren’t hearing it, and we weren’t hearing jazz really, either, except Brubeck. In 1959 the Dave Brubeck Quartet released “Blue Rondo à la Turk” and I just went crazy. Mr. Smith had the album and I listened to it at the Smiths’ house and fell in love with it.

  Movies weren’t a big part of Boise in the fifties. I remember seeing Gone with the Wind at an outdoor theater in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, on a beautiful mowed lawn. Seeing Gone with the Wind on a giant screen, outside, on a summer evening—that was nice. I don’t remember telling my brother about movies, and I don’t remember when I first saw The Wizard of Oz, but it stuck with me, whenever it was. But I’m not alone. It stuck with a lot of people.

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  That fifties small-town thing, it’s different, and to catch that mood is important. It’s dreamy, that’s what it is. The fifties mood isn’t completely positive, though, and I always knew there was stuff going on. When I was out after dark and going around on my bike, some houses had lights on inside that were kind of warm, or I knew the people who lived in the house. Other houses, the lights were dim, and with some houses they were almost out and I didn’t know the people who lived there. I’d get a feeling from these houses of stuff going on that wasn’t happy. I didn’t dwell on it, but I knew there were things going on behind those doors and windows.

  I was out one night with my brother and we were down at the end of the street. Everything is lit up at night now, but in the fifties in small towns like Boise, there were streetlights, but they were dimmer and it was much darker. It makes night kind of magical because things just go into black. So, we were down at the end of this street at night, and out of the darkness—it was so incredible—came this nude woman with white skin. Maybe it was something about the light and the way she came out of the darkness, but it seemed to me that her skin was the color of milk, and she had a bloodied mouth. She couldn’t walk very well and she was in bad shape, and she was completely naked. I’d never seen that, and she was coming toward us but not really seeing us. My brother started to cry and she sat down on the curb. I wanted to help her but I was young and didn’t know what to do. I might’ve asked, Are you okay? What’s wrong? But she didn’t say anything. She was scared and beat up, but even though
she was traumatized, she was beautiful.

  I didn’t see my friends every time I left the house on Parke Circle Drive. One day I went out and it was kind of a cloudy day and it might’ve been early in the morning. The next house over from the Smiths’ was the Yontz family’s, and the Smith lawn sort of blended with the Yontz lawn, and between the two houses was a little space with bushes on one side and a fence on the other and a gate that opened to a dead-end street. Sitting on the ground on this side of the gate was this kid I’d never seen before, and he was crying. I went over to him and I said, “Are you okay,” but he didn’t answer me. So I moved closer to him and asked him what happened and he said, “My father died.” He was crying so hard he could hardly get the words out and the way he said it just killed me. I sat down next to him for a little bit but I realized I couldn’t help him. Death is far away and abstract when you’re a child, so you don’t worry about it so much, but I felt this thing with that kid that was just horrible.

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  Up on Vista Avenue were all kinds of little stores, like hobby shops and hardware stores, and we got stuff there to build bombs. We learned how to make pipe bombs, and we made three of them in Riley Cutler’s basement, and they were powerful. Riley blew up one of them on his own near this big irrigation canal and he said it was incredible. I threw the second one in front of Willard Burns’s house. We all played baseball so we had good arms, and I threw this thing really high; it came down, it hit and bounced up, but it didn’t go off. So I threw it again, and this time when it hit the ground it bounced up and blew like crazy. It turned this pipe into shrapnel and blew a board off of Gordy Templeton’s fence next door. Gordy was on the throne while this was going on and he came out pulling his pants up, holding toilet paper. We said, Wait a minute, this could’ve killed somebody or blown our heads off, so we threw the last one in an empty swimming pool, where it could detonate and not hurt anybody.

  It made a huge noise when it exploded in the pool, so Gordy and I go one way and everybody else went the other way. I went to Gordy’s house, and his living room had a huge picture window looking out to the front. We’re there on the couch and Mrs. Templeton made tuna fish sandwiches and chips, which is something I never encountered at home unless they were on top of a tuna fish casserole. Those were the only chips I ever had. And no sweets except maybe oatmeal cookies with raisins. Healthy stuff. Anyhow, we’re having our sandwiches, and then gliding into view outside the picture window was a gold and black and white giant motorcycle and a giant cop. He put his helmet under his arm and walked to the door and rang the bell and he took us to the station. I was the seventh-grade president, and I had to write a paper for the police on the duties and obligations of leadership.

  I got in trouble for other stuff. My sister, Martha, was in elementary school when I was in junior high, and she had to walk by the junior high to get to school. I told my dear little sister that when she walked by the junior high she should stick up her middle finger at people because that meant friendship. I don’t know if she ever did it, but she asked my dad about it and he got really upset with me. Another time this kid stole a bunch of .22 bullets from his father and he gave me some of them. They have such great weight, .22 bullets; they’re sort of like little jewels. I kept them for a while, then I started thinking I’d get in trouble for having them, so I wadded them up in newspaper, put them in a bag, and threw them in the trash. In the winter my mother would burn trash in the fireplace, so she put all this paper in the fireplace and lit it and pretty soon bullets started flying all around the living room. I got in trouble for that.

  One day we were having a badminton tournament in the back of the Smiths’ house and we heard this giant explosion and ran to the street, and we saw smoke rising at the end of the block. We walked down and there was this guy named Jody Masters who was older than us. Jody Masters was building a rocket out of a pipe and it accidentally ignited and cut his foot off. His mother, who was pregnant, came out, and she saw her oldest son and he couldn’t get up. He tried, but his foot was hanging by tendons in a pool of blood and billions of burned-out match heads. They sewed his foot back on and it was fine. There was a lot of bomb building and gasoline-powered things in Boise.

  We left Boise and moved to Alexandria, Virginia, after I finished eighth grade, and I was upset when we moved from Boise. I can’t express how upset I was, and it was the end of an era—my brother is right when he says that’s when the music stopped. Then, the summer after ninth grade, my mother and sister and brother and I went back to Boise on the train.

  My grandfather Lynch died that summer, and I was the last person to see him alive. He’d had his leg amputated and it never really healed because he had such bad hardening of the arteries, so he was staying in a regular neighborhood house with five or six other people, being taken care of by nurses. My mother and grandmother visited him every day, but one day they couldn’t go, and they said, “David, would you go visit your grandfather today because we can’t go?” and I said yes. Some of the day went by and it got late, then I remembered about visiting him, so I borrowed a bike from this kid in front of the South Junior High swimming pool and I rode out Shoshone Street. There he was in a wheelchair out in the front yard, getting some air. So I sat with him and we had a really great talk. I can’t remember what we talked about—maybe I asked him some questions about the old days, and there were some stretches where nobody talked—but I always loved just sitting with him. Then he said, “Well, Dave, I better go back in now,” and I said, “Okay, Granddad.” I got on my bike, and as I was riding away I look back and I see nurses coming out to get him. I’m riding down the street and I get to a green wooden garage that blocks my view, so the last thing I see is some nurses coming toward him.

  From there I went to Carol Robinson’s house because her cousin, Jim Barratt, had built a bomb as big as a basketball and he was going to set it off. He set the bomb in the freshly mowed backyard and it smelled so beautiful. I haven’t smelled that in a really long time and don’t know of any mowed lawns around here in L.A. Anyhow, there was a porcelain washbowl about a foot and a half in diameter, and he set it on top of the bomb and lit the fuse and this thing went off like you cannot fuckin’ believe. It blew this dish two hundred feet in the air, it blew dirt everywhere, and smoke was coming out of the lawn in a really beautiful way ten or fifteen feet out. It was an amazing thing that I saw.

  Then some moments pass and I hear sirens and think maybe the police are on their way, so I hightail it to the pool and give the kid’s bike back to him. As I’m walking home to my grandparents’ apartment, I see my mother out in the front. She was headed to the car, but when she saw me she started waving wildly, so I go faster and I get to her and say, “What is it?” She says, “It’s your grandfather.” I drove her fast to a hospital in downtown Boise where my grandfather was, and I double-parked and my mother went in. She came out fifteen minutes later and I could immediately tell something was wrong, and when she got in the car she said, “Your grandfather died.”

  I’d been with him just fifteen minutes before it happened. When he said, “Dave, I better go back in now,” I’m pretty sure, playing it back, that something was going wrong in him—I think he had internal bleeding—and he didn’t want to say it in front of me. That night I sat with my grandmother and she wanted to hear all about my visit with him. Later I put two and two together and I realized those sirens weren’t for the bomb; they were going to get my grandfather. I was very close to my grandparents, all four of them, and he was the first one I lost, and I loved him so much. It was a huge thing for me when my grandfather Lynch died.

  I went back to Boise another time, in 1992, to find out what happened to a girl I knew there who committed suicide in the seventies. This story started a long time before that, though. When I left Boise for Alexandria after the eighth grade, my girlfriend was Jane Johnson, and during that first year in Alexandria—my worst year, ninth gr
ade—I wrote to Jane and kind of kept that relationship going. When we went back to Boise the following summer of 1961, Jane and I broke up within the first two weeks, but while we were there I started hanging out with this other girl, and after we went back to Alexandria she became the girl I was writing to. We wrote to each other for years, and in those days you wrote long letters.

  The summer after I graduated from high school I went to visit my grandmother on a Greyhound bus. This bus had a big engine that made a lot of noise, and the driver was going seventy or eighty miles an hour on these two-lane highways, and the whole trip is basically sagebrush. I remember there was this guy on the bus who looked like a real cowboy. He had on a cowboy hat all stained with sweat, and his face was totally lined, like leather skin, and he had steel-blue eyes, and he just stared out the window the whole trip. An old-style cowboy. So we get to Boise and I go to my grandmother’s place, where she’s living with Mrs. Foudray, and they’re old ladies but they doted on me. They thought I was so handsome. It was really great.