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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONThe Blue Devils Of Blue River Avenue
POE BALLANTINE’s latest book is 501 Minutes to Christ (Hawthorne Books). He lives in Chadron, Nebraska, where he is a school custodian. He says, “It feels good to be back in education.”
Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born;
Every Morn and Every Night,
Some are born to Sweet Delight;
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.
— William Blake
OUR FIRST HOUSE, in the autumn of 1963, was a small, mustard-colored tract home in the older working-class suburbs of northeast San Diego. Before that we’d rented. My father had been a mailman, but now he was a schoolteacher. There was nothing on the other side of our street but a mountain and a few cows. Around the corner was a Jack-in-the-Box, where you could talk to the clown and get a hamburger for fifteen cents. They got rid of the clown eventually. For a while you could get deep-fried jumbo shrimp in tissue paper with fries; fried chicken, too, almond brown with miles of crust. It was years before I figured out the secret sauce on the hamburgers was Thousand Island dressing. Behind the Jack-in-the-Box was a Thriftimart with a colossal red neon T that burned in the sky twenty-four hours a day. It was like a crucifix, a giant symbol of grocery-store truth flaming against the mountain. People who came to visit my parents would be guided by the giant red neon T. About ten years later, Safeway bought the store and took down the T, but the Jack-in-the-Box is still there. The cows are all gone: we ordered them through the clown and ate them with Thousand Island dressing.
Our house had yellow cupboard doors and a leaky fireplace and thin brown carpet. The living room was all windows with a sliding glass door at the back, like a giant glass bakery case with people instead of pastries inside. We had long white curtains, like bridal veils, over all the windows. The yellow and pink rosebushes climbed all the way to the tops of the little triangular windows under the eaves and gobbled at the sunlight. There were three lemon trees and the spirit of a long-dead dog and the grave of a pet chicken out back. There was a hedge that was a pain in the ass to clip. The neighbors had a kumquat tree that grew over our fence, and we would pick the fruit. The seeds were shiny, smooth, and brown as walnut, and fit perfectly in your nostrils. You could put one up each nostril and squeeze them out in front of people and tell them your brains were falling out.
My parents were Adlai Stevenson Democrats, which meant they felt sorry for people who were less fortunate than we were. It meant that they read Time magazine. It meant that they admired John Steinbeck. It meant that they watched The Dick Van Dyke Show. It meant that we had roast beef with baked potatoes every Sunday evening at six.
In the mornings we had eggs sunny or pancakes, French toast or cornmeal mush, waffles or cold cereal, cream of wheat or oatmeal. Sometimes we had bacon or sausage. We always had toast and orange juice. My parents drank coffee. We used whole milk, butter, mayonnaise, white flour, and eggs. Sometimes we poured real cream on strawberries, and my mom put it in her coffee. My father always drank his coffee black. He smoked Pall Mall Reds for thirty years and coughed like gurgling red death in the morning. My mother was a housewife who later became a court reporter. My sister was four years younger than me and didn’t like mushrooms or green vegetables or oatmeal or anything that appeared to have raisins in it. She gripped her spoon in her fist and boycotted liver and anything else that looked strange — especially strange meat and casseroles that might have raisins sneaked into them. Mom ladled up the hot cereal and fried the bacon, standing in the holy, twisting bars of sun and steam. My father held the paper up before his face. The sunlight came down through the triangular windows, soaked through the curtains, spread across the table. My father lit a Pall Mall Red. The smoke twirled in slow blue columns through the air. He rattled the paper. The news was important. I remember headlines: “Earth Turns In Flames Of Eternal Desire.” The sun turned the paper yellow before my eyes.
I had to stand around the neighborhood for a while and look stupid before anyone would be my friend. Roland Sambeaux was the first. We were something like instant friends, no need for introductions or background checks. Roland was skinny and dark with a little cap of oily brown hair. He had an older brother named Langston and a younger stepbrother and three younger stepsisters. His eyes were like crystal balls filled with olive oil, and his face was lean and wrinkled in a fine, cracked way, like brown eggshell. Sometimes he had a black eye, once a broken arm, another time a tooth knocked out. He would say that he had fallen off the roof, or stepped in a bucket, or slipped in the bathtub, or tripped into the dining-room table. On the odd days he went to school, we walked together, and he stayed at my left shoulder, like the moon at night. When he came over to my house, we played mumbletypeg or heaved guava berries or played Chinese checkers. We drank lemonade or root beer, and ate kumquats and stuffed the seeds up our noses. On Saturday afternoons, we watched horror movies on Science Fiction Theater. Once, I accidentally hit Roland with a baseball bat and gave him a concussion and two black eyes. He was in bed for three days. I brought him over a Wheel-O and a get-well card. His eyes were a pale green, and when they looked at you, you couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
My mother didn’t like my going over to the Sambeauxs’. There was something mysterious and menacing about that house: a bloodcurdling scream, a silhouette of a knife in the window, a wolf on its hind legs with a leather tail scuffling along behind the juniper trees. Out front were statues of undressed women holding up grapes or baskets and showing their armpits. A cactus garden grew against the living-room window: prickly pear, barrel, agave. Handmade birdhouses swung from the branches of a big yellow poplar. Mr. Sambeaux was an upholsterer. You caught only rare glimpses of him — drinking from a tumbler, or getting into his car to head down to the liquor store, or coming out of the bathroom, his pudgy, scarred, Babe Ruth face shining as red as the Thriftimart T. The sight of him invariably induced immediate, inexplicable terror. He spent most of his days in the dimness of his leather-and-machine-oil-smelling garage, amid the stacked slabs of moldering foam rubber and great, rolled-up bolts of fabric and spools of vinyl and leather. At the back of the garage crouched an industrial sewing machine with a chrome ring the size of a steering wheel; the long, thick needle thumped and slugged like a jackhammer. Often, you could not see Mr. Sambeaux running it; there was only the sound of the heavy needle thumping in the darkness.
Inside the Sambeaux house the walls were upholstered like car seats, red plush with brass studs. Coal red lanterns hung from the ceiling, and a big, gold, ceramic Buddha sat in a lotus on the hearth. Potted Venus’ flytraps thrived in the cool green shade of the enclosed patio. If Roland caught a fly he might drop it in for you with a pair of tweezers, so you could watch the hairy, gooey pod fold around it, like a slow and obscene birth sequence in reverse. In the back yard, below shelves of waterfall granite, was a mossy pool with plump, tattered, red-mottled goldfish flicking along its bottom. Against the fence next to the house were stacked crates of empty wine and whiskey bottles; we set them in cardboard-box shooting galleries and blasted them to pieces with BB guns. Roland’s brother Langston, who at twelve was already going bald and sprouting blackheads in the grease on his high forehead, shot the bottles with a vengeance, shot them with glee. Langston would rough me up, get me in wrestling holds, pin my arm against my back, make me say uncle. It got to where I would say uncle before he even touched me. I came to think of him as Uncle Langston. Roland and Langston both had kind of tricky, troubled, hair-trigger tempers.
Stories about the Sambeaux house circulated for miles. Kids from blocks away would come to stare at it as if it were a house on fire or a house that had burned down or the house of Red Riding Hood’s granny with the wolf still inside — the handmade birdhouses swaying in the yellow poplar tree, the naked women holding up their baskets, the sound of a sewing needle pounding up and down.
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