Key Grip Page 15

  His reaction was less ecstatic than I’d expected. “Just remember,” he warned, “trophies aren’t everything.”

  Still, I placed the cup on my bedroom mantelpiece, alongside a Hopi pottery bowl. That night, I fell asleep staring at its glowing shape in the dark.

  The second summer, 1951, I arrived at camp armed with confidence. On June 30, I wrote home: “Dear Folks, Did you get my second letter but if you didn’t the important points were more money.” Being exactly that pushy, I walked away in August with the Greatest Leadership cup. At home, my siblings were dutifully impressed, but my father seemed to hardly notice my victory. When I placed the cup in the center of the dinner table, he paused significantly in his carving of the roast. My mother asked me to put the cup on the floor.

  “Be a little less full of yourself, I think,” she said. “Tone down the volume a touch.”

  But for me, things were falling into place. I was eleven years old, and I had the sense that I was, in some mysterious fashion, on my way. That autumn, two boys my age moved to our town. Hungry for company and eager for troops to lead, I organized a camping trip in the reservation behind our house—a survival test, I dubbed it. My new recruits brought along air mattresses, pillows, and comic books. I made a mental note never to invite them again. It was to be a long winter.

  When I turned twelve, my father agreed to one more year of camp. Then, he warned, it would be time to think of “other things.” I knew he meant a summer job. This presented a problem. There were four cups to win, but I was only going to have three years of camp. Like the Oscar for Best Picture, the presentation of the cup for Camper of the Year was always saved for last and was thus the most coveted. I simply had to have it before moving on to “other things.”

  So, in the summer of 1952, I hit the ground running. It seemed there was nothing I couldn’t do. Not only did I get my intermediate swimmer’s patch, but my name was burned into the wooden roster of Sons of Neptune, after I crawled and back-stroked and butterflied the entire length of Silver Lake, behind Mr. Noyes’s aluminum rowboat.

  I pitched a night game under the lights in Lebanon, New Hampshire, climbed Mount Washington faster than anyone else, paddled the White River and the Connecticut. No one could start a fire with flint and steel faster than me. No one was more eager to help Dick Merck—the savvy counselor from Chicago. I followed his lead obediently, led others when called to, and paced myself until the very last day. Looking over my shoulder, as I approached the finish line, I saw no competitors at all.

  That last afternoon of camp is as vivid to me now as if I’d been beamed back in time. I’m walking with Dick Merck, up the grassy, clover-strewn hillside between the cabins and the lake. The low sun casts long shadows from the nearby woods, bringing a welcome coolness to my bare feet. Dick and I have just stowed the canoes and life preservers. Battened down the hatches, as my father would have said. Only dinnertime—during which the counselors will vote in private—stands between this moment and the very end of the campfire ceremony, when Mr. Noyes will surely name me Camper of the Year.

  Veering off toward his cabin, Dick says, “See you tonight, Dusty.”

  I need only answer, “See ya.” Nothing else is called for. To campaign openly for myself this close to the polls would only guarantee defeat. But as I watch Dick move away, a dark uncertainty envelops me. I must know how this is going to end—ensure the ending—right now.

  I’ve since heard it said that the Zuni Indians of New Mexico call living into old age “the long road.” They also use that phrase to identify the life path of certain youngsters they deem difficult—those who don’t trust that life must be lived logically from the beginning, through a middle, to the end, and who are lost in an A-to-Z world. Those who refuse to be taught. Those who break the rules, push the limits, test the boundaries, and take forbidden risks. The squirmers, the gazers, the contrarians. For these children, the path ahead is never straight or predictable or safe, but always twisty and uncertain and dangerous. At the end of the path might lie insight and wisdom—maybe even medicine—but surviving to reach that end, there’s the trick.

  “Hey, Dick,” I call out.

  He stops. Do I read a warning in the reluctant way he turns to look at me? Is there some way, still, to take back the words that already have begun to issue from my mouth like bees from a hive? As the earth drops out between my father’s path and mine, do I perceive—if only for an instant—the nearly endless road ahead?

  “Don’t forget to vote for me tonight!” I yell, before I can stop myself. My voice hangs in the still air, quieting even the birds, then falls in among the silent shadows.

  12. The Second Person

  Thy firmness makes my circle just,

  And makes me end where I begun.

  —JOHN DONNE, “A Valediction

  Forbidding Mourning”

  IT BEGAN WHEN your mother sent you off to kindergarten with an oval-shaped, pink-and-white-checked lunch box. This during World War II, when most schoolboys carried black lunch pails with coved thermos compartments or just brown-bagged it. Your father was in Normandy at the time, your mother simply exercising her feminine prerogative. And, to be fair, you hadn’t objected; you’d kind of liked the oval shape. If the pink part gave you pause, you can’t remember now. Cap guns and lassos were your thing. A lunch box was a lunch box. Or so you thought. Until the hooting of your fellow kindergartners set a humiliation threshold that would inform you for years to come. You “lost” the lunch box during recess.

  But it started you wondering about yourself, didn’t it? Not about your sexual identity or anything like that, but about your headlong, instinctual self and how that self was going to be received in the world. This wondering—the beginnings of caution, perhaps—was new. Life until then had been a consistent breeze. Like the time you were being strollered along a sidewalk near your house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You reached out and grabbed a chocolate ice cream cone from the hand of an unsuspecting child being strollered in the opposite direction. “The whole scoop went right into your mouth,” your mother told you, years later, “and you thought nothing of it, even when the child’s mother protested.” And you know it’s true, don’t you? Even now, it’s only the habit of civility that keeps your appetites in check.

  Predictably enough, right after the lunch box incident, you stole another boy’s cap gun. Without a qualm, you jammed the pistol barrel into your belt, concealed the butt with your jacket, and brought the weapon back to your house. You stood in the window of your second-story bedroom, practicing your aim and picking off pedestrians. When you saw the boy’s mother march her son toward your house, you panicked. You opened the window and tossed the gun out, hoping they’d find it on the grass and leave you alone. But the gun landed on the sidewalk—which is how, as your mother was spanking you with a hairbrush, you learned the word smithereens.

  You began life as a thief, and a bold one. But there was something in the world—the world of your family and your kind, at least—that did not embrace the thief. And something in you that couldn’t quite stomach public disapproval. You learned to modify your behavior and negotiate desire. You couldn’t wait to grow up.

  You’re sixteen; you’ve found the Beats. Ecstasy (the mindset, not the drug) is your thing. This summer, you’ve been imbibing cheap Chianti, rolling Bull Durham cigarettes, reciting Kerouac. You’ve dreamt of traversing “the holy void of uncreated emptiness.” You’ve longed for a glimpse of “the magic mothswarm of heaven,” and you’re now prepared to take “the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows.”

  The complete step seems to involve a tolerable amount of lawlessness—anything from simple car theft to hitchhiking across America. Unfamiliar with the techniques of hot-wiring a car, you’ve chosen the latter, and right now you’re standing on the outskirts of Brattleboro, Vermont, with your thumb stuck out. A state police cruiser passes in the opposite direction. It will be ten years before you call a cop a pig, but something a
bout the way this trooper looks at you makes your skin crawl. A Spanish couple with a baby stops and picks you up. You jump into the back seat of their Chevy. They’re going all the way to New York City. For about a mile you babble at them in your best prep-school Spanish. You coo-coo the baby. Then, suddenly, the police cruiser is alongside you, forcing the couple’s car off the road. Before you know it, you’re being dragged out, thrown over the trunk, frisked, kicked in the balls, thrown into the back of the cruiser, and accused of car theft. You deny it. You don’t know how to steal a car, you protest; you’ve never even been in Rhode Island, where the theft is said to have taken place. As you’re being pummeled, word comes over the police radio that the real thief (your double, it seems) has been seen entering a house in another part of town. You’re thrown out of the cruiser, your black carry bag heaved out after you. Later, in Springfield, Massachusetts, you’ll get nabbed again for the same car theft and released again without apology. It will prove mildly disappointing not to be jailed, but the blessing of being freed isn’t lost on you, is it? You know something of what it feels like to be an outlaw now, without having to pay the price. You relish the story.

  …

  You’re twenty-four years old and testing the yarmulke atop your head. The bobby pins keep slipping. You glance at your boss, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, before entering the Brooklyn synagogue. He’s wearing his yarmulke too, and you want to laugh because it looks as out of place on him as it does on you. You admire this man—so much that you’ve adopted his accent (come hee-ah, go they-ah). As his advance man, it’s your job to pass him a couple of index cards with the names of the rabbis and politicians he must acknowledge before his speech. You precede him into the large hall, signaling him to follow. A burst of applause accompanies not his but your entrance—just for a second—until people realize that, although you are handsome and ruddy-complected and wearing a pinstripe suit, you aren’t Bobby Kennedy. This will happen often during the Senate campaign, in hotel hallways and motorcades—just a flicker of confusion, enough to let you know what it would be like to be recognized and greeted with such sustained adulation. Enough to give you a hint, but only a hint, of what it must have felt like to walk into that kitchen in Los Angeles and be shot in the head by a stranger.

  You’re thirty-two. Fidel Castro’s a declared enemy of America, Vietnam’s raging on, the Kennedys are dead, and you’re in the Dominican Republic trying to get a divorce. There’s a rumor that last night, nine of Castro’s men sneaked ashore in a rubber life raft, and three of them have already been caught and killed. This rumor should be of more than passing interest to you. When you were fifteen, you and your buddies plotted to run away from your Vermont prep school and join Castro’s revolution in Cuba. But if today’s rumor has made any impression on you, it’s a hazy one. You have a hangover; your new girlfriend is waiting impatiently in the hotel; you want to get the legal business over with, so you can have sex in the waters off Boca Chica. You and your Dominican divorce lawyer—your abogado —are stuck in a taxi at a roadblock. A young Dominican soldier, carrying a rifle, demands your passport. You hand it to him. The soldier examines your out-of-date photo. He looks at you quizzically, trying to reconcile your hippie hairdo with the close-cropped sideburns in the photo, your meditation beads with the necktie, your wild Indian headband with the college boy’s brow he sees before him in black and white. In no time, he’s got the muzzle of his Mi up against your right temple. He seems to be rehearsing the word freeze. You glance at your abogado, who’s gone pale. The soldier orders you into the front seat, gets in behind you, and jams the gun up against the occipital region of your brain. You’re driven along bumpy streets to the nearest fort—a two-story building, surrounded by colorful plantings—and, once inside, escorted up a wide wooden staircase. A large oak door is thrown open and you see a puffy-chested army captain sitting at his desk at the far end of an otherwise empty room. The young soldier forces you to your knees, keeping the rifle at the back of your head. “Aqui esta otro Cubano!” he says proudly. A look of incredulity comes over the captain’s face; a huge grin appears beneath his thick mustache; you’re sure he’s about to order your execution. Instead, he stands up and moves out from behind his desk, revealing his side arm. He slaps both knees. “Cubano!?” he howls. “Cubano!?” He strides toward you, choking with laughter, tears streaming from his eyes. He orders the soldier from the room, shakes your hand, apologizes in English. That afternoon, divorced and standing tall with your girlfriend wrapped around you in the salty waters off Boca Chica, you know, at last, something of what it feels like to be a Cuban revolutionary.

  What is this pseudo life? Have you ever owned up to being the imposter that you are? If you died right now, wouldn’t a reader glean from your scribbled journals that you are capable of imagining almost any life but your own? Wouldn’t it come to light that you’ve been content with success by association? That mere brushes with fame seem to stand in for the real thing? What kind of lunch box are you? Will you now admit that there have been times when you’ve let people assume you’re a stunt man, which they sometimes do when they see you wearing a Stunt Specialist cap? Would it be unbearable to confess that in spite of your high-minded stance against the Vietnam War, you wouldn’t mind at all if people thought you’d been a Green Beret back then—a possibility suggested by the fact that you’re wearing one now?

  Go on, say it, get it all out. When Annie Leibovitz, the famous photographer, came rushing up to you on a film set, where you were employed as a key grip, and gushed about the last time she’d worked with you and how much your work in film has meant to her, you let her go on and on, even though you knew she’d confused you with someone who actually was talented and famous. Why? How could you have enjoyed the rub of recognition, or even write about it now, if you’d done nothing to earn it? Who are you? To what end, and for what purpose, have you lived this preposterous, imposterish life?

  How about the time, a few years back, when you quit working on movies and took a fellowship at a writer’s colony? Remember? One night at dinner, a successful poet leaned toward you and asked in a whisper, “Are you somebody famous and I don’t know it?” Remember your enigmatic smile? What else did you have to offer her?

  Well, here you sit, in your sixties, on a bench in New York City’s Riverside Park, your usual indignation about global warming muted for the moment by pleasant late-November sunshine. Green leaves still cling to certain stubborn trees. You can identify with that. It’s midday; most people are at work. You sit here like some ridiculous census taker, laptop on your knees, gazing at passersby, trying to create something significant out of nothing. The traffic on the West Side Highway hisses and thrums like surf. A Jamaican nanny is wheeling a stroller your way. A blond, blue-eyed child is seated in it. As the stroller passes your bench, the child spies you fingering the keys of your laptop. He wrenches around in his seat, locks his eyes on yours, and smiles. For an instant—and an instant is all you need—you know what you are going to be when you grow up.

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt thanks to Columbia University staff and faculty, whose guidance sustained me while I completed my MFA at age sixtysomething: John Bowers, Nicholas Christopher, Lis Harris, Colette Inez, Michael Janeway, Raymond Kennedy, Richard Locke, Honor Moore, Patricia O’Toole, Anna Delmoro Peterson, Phyllis Raphael, Michael Scammell, Mark Slouka, Nancy Wor-man, and Alan Ziegler.

  I am grateful to the following people for seeing merit in my work and shepherding it into print: Don Erickson and Edward Klein (New York Times Magazine); Mark Drew, Peter Stitt, and Mindy Wilson (Gettysburg Review); Leslie T. Sharpe (Quarto); Karen Mann and Sena Jeter Naslund (Louisville Review); Joe Mackall and Terence Smyre (River Teeth, University of Nebraska Press); Joan Connor and Catherine Taylor (Hotel Amerika); Ronald Spatz (Alaska Quarterly Review); and Nicole Angeloro, Susanna Brougham, and Deanne Urmy (Houghton Mifflin).

  Without the support of family, friends, and colleagues, writing is impossible. I th
ank my daughter, Trellan Karr Smith, and her mother, Catherine Smith; my sister, Leslie Borden; my brother, Lochlin Smith; my ex-wife Lucille Masone Smith; and my adopted brother, Mike Little Boy, and his family. My friends from skydiving days—Jim Arender, Steve Boyle, Jacques Istel, Walt Penn, Larry and Gloria Pond, Nate and Jill Pond, and Lewis B. Sanborn—still keep me safe and sane though I no longer jump out of planes. I am forever in debt to all those folks in the film industry for providing me with memorable stories; though I cannot name them all here, I would be remiss if I did not thank Bob Andres, Haddon Hufford, Gary Martone, and Rex North for making me laugh and watching my back. My friends—those who critiqued various versions of these essays or read my work as it appeared in print or simply inspired me—include Mary Weasel Bear, Rachel Bell, Marcia F. Brown, Nat Clifford, Sam Furth, Scott Hillier, Nancy Lord, Peg MacLeish, Suzanne Menghraj, Forrest Murray, Carol Paik, Angela Patrinos, Jack Ryan, Mimi Schwartz, Penelope Schwartz-Robinson, Peter Selgin, Joyin Shi, Jim Sprouse, and David and Sarah Stromeyer.

  I have the good fortune to thank Terry Tempest Williams, who selected my manuscript for the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and Michael Collier and Ian Pounds from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College, which sponsors the prize.

  Most especially, I want to thank Kim Dana Kupperman, without whose faith, love, and selfless collaboration this volume would not exist.

  Bread Loaf and the Bakeless Prizes

  The Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prizes were established in 1995 to expand the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference’s commitment to the support of emerging writers. Endowed by the LZ Francis Foundation, the prizes commemorate Middlebury College patron Katharine Bakeless Nason and launch the publication career of a poet, a fiction writer, and a creative nonfiction writer annually. Winning manuscripts are chosen in an open national competition by a distinguished judge in each genre. Winners are published by Houghton Mifflin Company in Mariner paperback original.