ONE DAY, my mother told me I couldn’t go to the Sambeaux house anymore. She thought Mr. Sambeaux was a bad man. I didn’t think he could be all bad: he laughed and told us jokes; he had a salty, bowlegged fraternity about him; he gave his children spending money and let them stay up as late as they wanted; he never made them go to the dentist or the doctor or school; he gave them booze now and then, and handed down his nudist magazines; whenever he went down to Mexico, where the liquor was cheap, he brought back firecrackers — black cats and ladyfingers, quarter sticks and cherry bombs, triangles and M-80s. Anybody who did all that couldn’t be entirely bad. My mother, however, thought it best that I not associate with the Sambeauxs. She had a way of announcing things with her jaw cocked slightly, which meant there would be no discussion about it. I didn’t doubt my mother’s wisdom, but she was beginning to make my life difficult. Already I was not allowed to watch Rat Patrol, could have only one soft drink a day, and had to go to bed every night at 8:30 sharp. Play with the Rose children, she said. Play with the Bendonellis; the Bendonellis are very nice. I did my best to stay simultaneously together with and away from the Sambeauxs. I still walked to and from school with Roland when he went, which was about every other day. Whenever he said, Whyncha come on over to my house? I would say I had homework to do, a book to read. He’d look at me with disbelief and disdain. I couldn’t tell him the truth: that my mother controlled my life.

At Christmastime 1966, the Ashmonts, a navy family from Illinois, moved in next door to the Millers. The Ashmonts looked like Illinois people to me: all big teeth and dimples. Homer Ashmont, the oldest child, drifted down to the Sambeaux house on his second or third day in the neighborhood. It was the natural course to take when you were new on the block, like a sailor strolling down to the red-light district, or a tourist looking for the Museum of Modern Man. The Sambeaux house glowed with the kind of desperate energy children give off when slowly broiling in a vodka base with frequent tenderizing chops to the jowls. Homer wore his red ball cap cockeyed. He was tall and careless and let his long arms swing as he walked up the street. He had a big chest and enormous lungs, and could swim or run forever. He was a baseball player — a pitcher, to be exact. He could throw a curve that raped the air with its seams and whistled as it sank for a strike into the dusty catcher’s mitt behind you. His hair was short and fair, and he had the polite and unassuming stride of a farm boy. From a distance, the Sambeaux house must have appeared to him to be the place to make friends. There were children everywhere: peeping from windows, lounging against cars, hanging lemurlike from trees, barelegged, barefoot, the spirit of Peter Pan and Tobacco Road. There were paper clouds above the Sambeaux roof, pink pastel streaks painted across the sky, devils on the rooftop, monkeys on wires. A big cardboard vulture squealed over. Homer knocked on the door. Roland and Langston ushered him in.

After that, Homer was at the Sambeaux house every day, doing the things I had once done. He was more popular than any other kid I had ever seen. He possessed that rare combination of congeniality and the ability to beat you up. He traveled with the Sambeauxs, and I knew everything that was happening — the shoplifting, the porno, the BB guns, the firecrackers, the cigarettes. Whitey was there, too, along with half the other kids on the block, even the Roses and the Bendonellis. The Sambeauxs invited me over, too, but I pretended I had better things to do, like sitting by myself on the curb whittling a dumb piece of wood with the cold clouds blowing overhead. It was my mother’s fault. She wanted me to be a sissy. Well, that was all right with me. I would be a sissy and have no friends. It would serve her right. I would grow up to be the boy of my mother’s dreams.

In the wintertime in San Diego it rains, and when you are a deprived and oppressed child it rains every day. You stay inside with the swollen, bleating television at your back, the eye of your prison-warden mom permanently stitched to your right shoulder, the patches of fog on the windows that you can draw a face into with your fingertip, the smell of mushroom soup and cinnamon toast and frying onions and hamburger meat. The rain streams silver off the eaves like strips of Christmas tinsel. You have about six thousand games stacked up in the closet, but what good are any of them with only one player? All the children across the street are having the child-orgy time of their lives. Your father pulls into the driveway, wipers going, a dark car with black windows. He gets out with his briefcase, stoops his way around the slatted fence and in the door, shedding sparkling drops. He is tired, he says, and gets himself a drink. You don’t wonder about what he’s been doing all day; he just goes round and round from home to work like a hand on the round clock face of the gray days. You have the dreariest family on earth: a father who is always tired; a sister who bawls if you touch her arm; a mother with nothing better to do than manage every waking moment of your life. You are all prisoners in a rainy glass case called home.

One winter morning my mother went out to get the paper and found Bizzy Sambeaux sitting dazed in the mist on our front lawn. We were having bacon and eggs sunny with toasted, buttered English muffins and orange juice. My mother hurried back in with a wild look and took my father’s arm. No one would tell me anything, except to go to my room. My father called the police. My mother went back outside. I watched from the window as two patrol cars glided in from either direction. The neighbors had gathered in their driveways. Bizzy had birdlike legs with baseball knees. She hugged them to her, shivering in her thin green nightgown. There was a brown, egg-shaped blotch, like dried blood, on the front of the gown. Her big green eyes did not blink. I watched her get into one of the cars. The neighbors jabbered and nodded their heads. The patrol car parted gently from the curb and took her away.

The mist did not lift for a long time. Some days it was so thick you couldn’t see the hands on your watch. It was clammy and smelled of mushrooms and bandages and styrofoam cups. It spun and drifted with a lime tint on its edges, and did not stop at your eyes but trickled and pooled in creepy lagoons all the way down to the bottom of your brain. I walked to school by myself in the chilly green mushroom mist with the bare trees like bleached arms and fingers groping for the sky. The mist made me tired and slow. It squashed and muffled time and snickered dankly, like witch voices urging me to dash out in front of a car.

Then one day, Homer Ashmont was there walking next to me. He was about six inches taller than I was, wore his cockeyed red ball cap with the white script L on the front, and carried a lunch bag in his hand: salami sandwiches — I could smell the peppercorns through the mist. He put out his hand. “I’m Homer,” he said.

“Hi,” I said, shaking his hand. “I know.”

“How come you walk to school by yourself all the time?”

“I don’t know.”

“My mom said you weren’t allowed to go over to the Sambeaux house.”

“That’s right.”

“I can’t go over there anymore either. Did you hear about what happened?”

“Yeah.”

“I never heard of nothing like that before. Hey, do you like beef stroganoff?”

“I guess.”

“We’re having it tonight. Do you want to come over to my house for dinner?”

A big shaft of sunlight broke through the cloud canopy and fell across the housetops.

“OK.”

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