Blue Sky Dream (17 page)

What then, I wonder, did other children look to find in the Robinsons’ projection of family? I know that a recent
Lost in Space
convention in Boston drew over 30,000 fans, many of them approaching middle age, like me. I know, too, that June Lockhart, who often visits NASA’s Kennedy–Johnson Space Center, told me that “nearly everyone I meet there, to a man or a woman, whether it’s a physicist, an engineer, an astronaut, or the guy who zips up the space suits, they all say watching
Lost in Space
made them know what they wanted to do when they grew up.”

I still only hazily understand what I wanted to make of
Lost in Space
as a boy. I would guess that I found reassurance in the crisply defined roles within the Robinson clan, the notion that the family of tomorrow was but an emotionally streamlined version of my family of today. The boy
did
exist at the center of the universe, the father
did
provide security through mastery of technology. I would guess that the CBS honchos and Irwin Allen knew me well, knew that some part of me would have preferred a mother who did not touch the father, who worked in rational concert with manly thinking and did not own the power of sexual sway over her man. I would guess that a mother whose technology allowed her to maintain a perfect tract home world appealed to me very much. June Lockhart in her silver jumpsuit, June Lockhart always lovingly
there
on the periphery of the boy’s adventure, probably offered me the permission I wanted, permission
to close myself to my mother who was loving and who sometimes moped and screamed, who was therefore “irrational,” who demanded that I not take her for granted.

N
icky Giannini moved away just about the time that
Lost in Space
went off the air. His father had been transferred by the phone company to a valley brighter, wider, flatter, emptier than our own. They were moving to Fresno in the San Joaquin. By then everyone on the cul-de-sac already knew that Nicky’s father had a kind of cancer; you could see it on his neck.

A year or so after the move, Mr. Giannini died and not long after that I visited Nicky in his new neighborhood, my parents dropping me off on their way to a Disneyland vacation for the rest of the family. Nicky’s new house, a stucco rancher, looked from the outside much like the one he’d left behind on our cul-de-sac. The interior, however, lacked the precision of old, lacked the tomato sauce smells, too. The hi-fi sat on the carpeted floor of the living room against a bare wall. You had to squat on your haunches to put on a record and there were only rock ’n’ roll records, no Dean Martin, no Jimmy Durante. Nicky’s mother was not feeling well during the week I visited, spending most of her time in the bedroom with the door closed.

Celeste had remained in Northern California where she was living with a hippie artist. Joe, working two restaurant jobs in Fresno, rarely materialized around the house. The yards front and back were neat but lacked the elaborate beds and shrubs that Mr. Giannini had insisted on when he was alive on our cul-de-sac. Beyond the cinderblock wall that ended Nicky’s new backyard, a field of baked clay stretched for blocks until it reached another low line of cinderblock. The Fresno heat sucked a person’s energy, made the insects snap and buzz angrily. Still, for something to do, Nicky and I rode our ten-speed bicycles beyond his neighborhood, beyond the edge of Fresno, into the first foothills of the Sierra Nevada, sweating and gasping and pumping our way up to
the reservoir behind Friant Dam. Looked upon from that height, Fresno shimmered in its valley like a flattened can on a dirt road, a bit of metallic sparkle but nothing worthy of a person’s imagination. On the ride back, farmland gave way to strip malls which gave way to broad boulevards cutting through subdivisions until finally, throats burning, thighs aching, we turned a corner and Nicky’s air-conditioned house swung into view and I saw it as Mr. Giannini and Mrs. Giannini must have wanted to see it when they moved in: as a private oasis rather than as an idea of self-enclosed family life taken too far, taken to the edge of nowhere.

Not long after, Mrs. Giannini died unexpectedly. I heard my parents discussing it with some of our neighbors, nodding their heads about what I had never been told, that Mrs. Giannini, for as long as they’d known her, had been given to bouts of depression. A mixing of medication and alcohol was said to have been involved, though there was no way of knowing if Mrs. Giannini had taken her life intentionally. More likely, everyone agreed, a sad accident was to blame. Mrs. Giannini had been a good woman, a good mother, everyone said. But she could not, in the end, be preserved from the jeopardy posed by her melancholy. She died while napping behind the shut door of her bedroom.

SIX
 CHLORINE
 

M
y young adolescence corresponded with that time when America’s ghettos burned, when the Vietnam War escalated, when campuses roiled in protest, when older children of the suburbs lit out for hippie hedonism. I spent much of that time immersed in water chlorinated and filtered clear, water heated at the proper temperature to be bracing but not chilling, water that smothered sound and turned the black line on the pool’s bottom into a blurry focus of grunting meditation.

My parents had decided that life in our cul-de-sac world did not offer the proper structure for a boy my age; I was finding it too easy to waste time. I was watching too much television, reading too much
Sports Illustrated
, spending too many afternoons playing Battleship and Poker and Monopoly with other boys on our backyard deck. Following the lead of friends who lived one cul-de-sac over, my parents had joined a swim and racquet club and they had placed me on the swim team. “Just try it and see how you do,” my mother had said.

I was the skinniest eleven-year-old I knew. I would stare with dismay at my shirtless chest in the bathroom mirror, my ribs in such clear relief, the bony points atop each shoulder that no other children seemed to have. I was the skinniest boy on the Kona Kai swim team and no natural as a swimmer. “Pick it up, Hat Rack!” the coach would shout at me as I reached the end of the pool and let the fast, experienced kids by, their legs gracefully flopping over and twisting off the wall in a perfect flip turn, a maneuver that confounded me for the first many months of swim practice. “Hep! Hep! Hep! Hep! Hep! Hep!” the coach, a former military man, would chant in rhythm to the rolled-head breathing of fifty children churning the water with crawl stroke after crawl stroke.

An afternoon’s workout would be about one hundred and eighty laps of the twenty-five-yard pool. The total (about two and a half miles) would be divided into distances and strokes and paces of the coach’s choice, which he would write on a chalkboard for all swimmers to see:
200 Warm-up. 10
×
100 freestyle on the 2 minutes. 5
×
200 IM on the 5 minutes
, and so on. This made the true master of the workout a big clock that stood at one end of the pool, its foot-long hands—red for seconds, black for minutes—pointing silent accusation at the swimmers who fell behind the pace, who finished one distance only to look up and see they were already late for starting the next. The slower swimmer tended to get less rest, less time with head above water, and so a workout with fifty children felt to me a very private struggle. My eyes, smarting from the chemicals, would study the black line below me the way a prisoner memorizes ceiling cracks over his bunk. My skinny chest would beg for air after the first twenty strokes; by the last twenty the muscles in my back and butt and upper arms would ache as if I’d been pummeled. After workout I’d race with the other boys to the steamy warmth of the locker-room shower. That was the only pleasure of any workout as far as I was concerned, and yet the children around me all seemed so content to have been placed by their parents on a swim team. They had just tried it to see how they would do. They seemed to
be doing quite well. They did not complain of boredom or sore muscles. Indeed, there seemed a quality of feral happiness about the boys who jackknifed into the pool when workout started and snapped each other with towels in the locker room afterward. They were smooth-bodied children without bony points on their shoulder tops and I wanted what they had, that body, that feral happiness, which, I assumed, would come to me once I had stroked enough thousands of armstrokes.

My parents were pleased that I decided to stick with the swimming, making myself stiff and tired every day following school and, during the summer, twice a day with workouts in the morning and afternoon. My mother did not mind the time she spent driving me (and eventually my brother and sisters) back and forth to swim workouts. “What I like about swim team,” my mother liked to say, “is the kids come home clean.”

T
hose were years when my father grew more pensive and grouchy, as if shaken awake from a dream he could never get back to. As his volatility increased, he required all the more surveillance, and I, having trained myself well, often saw one of his explosions coming while everyone else in the house ignored or even unwittingly fed his frustration. My mother could set him off just by yelling from one end of the house, “Hal? Have you seen the checkbook?” Simply by making a demand on his attention she would have invited his grouchiness upon her, and soon the small matter of a misplaced checkbook would be transformed into the much bigger matter of who had been the first to bitch at whom, who was
complaining
for
no reason.
One afternoon in the middle of an argument with my mother, my father, who had always been a shouter when he lost his temper, did an uncharacteristic thing. He turned and punched the wall in the entryway of our home. To my astonishment, his fist made a hole through the drywall, a hole my father stalked away from without any further comment. The hole remained there until the next
morning when my father came to it with his toolbox and a can of paint. He carefully made a patch, but there was a faint outline if you knew where to look.

Sometime around the beginning of 1968, a time when the slaughter of the Tet offensive was playing nightly on television and United States aircraft were carpet bombing North Vietnamese civilians with the official aim of inflicting “punishment” and “destroying morale,” my father decided that he was going to build an airplane of his own in our garage. He purchased a box of blueprints for a Thorp T-18, a “home-built” two-seater that was pictured airborne (pilot and passenger clearly smiling) in a magazine he showed me. He bought a four-cylinder Lycoming engine that needed some rebuilding and stored it in a corner of the garage. He bought some new tools: a Whitney hole punch, a pop rivet gun, tin snips, aviation scales, precision rulers. He came home with a huge slab of particleboard sticking out of the back of the Dodge 440 and from this he constructed a ten-foot-long worktable with retractable legs and eye-hooks on the corners. With a rope and pulley, my father would winch the table up to the ceiling of the garage where it hung in storage above the two cars until the next time he was ready to work on his airplane.

For a while, my father spent evenings and much of the weekends in the garage making small parts for the Thorp T-18. Some of them looked very promising, airfoil-shaped pieces of aluminum my father had carefully cut and bent and shaped around plywood templates. Whenever he finished a piece he hung it on a hook over his workbench. But after several months the hook held only half a dozen of the many hundreds of pieces needed to make up a Thorp T-18. My father came to the conclusion that he had neither the time, money, nor room to build a do-it-yourself airplane and so he sold the plans, the engine, the table, and most of the tools to another man who came one Saturday and collected everything in a pickup truck.

After that my father moved his hours of quiet aloneness inside of the house to the living room couch. A friend at work had piqued his interest in books by thinkers, books that tried to
make sense of society and human nature and where the country was headed. My father started carrying these thick books with him to and from work. He would read at Lockheed on his lunch hour and in the living room after dinner. He became a student of John Kenneth Galbraith’s critique of corporate life as the misplaced pursuit of money over life’s other, more fulfilling rewards. He soaked up Eric Hoffer’s idea that mass movements are the products of adults gripped by “juvenile” restlessness, which, in turn, is produced by economic dislocation due to technology. He became engrossed by the field of general semantics as explicated by Stuart Chase, who warned that meaning in language is nothing concrete, that people too easily fall for propagandists who pretend “the word is the thing.” He read Desmond Morris’s theories about humans as “naked apes” gone neurotic in the too-crowded cages of the inner cities. He read a number of books about race and prejudice, including
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
and Eldridge Cleaver’s
Soul on Ice.
He took to heart the portrait of a shrinking planet offered by Paul Ehrlich and Alvin Toffler. My father’s titles ran into one another like haikus of gloom …