First Citizen Read Free Page A

Mother would have whinnied that high laugh of hers and called me an utter fool. Thanks to Clary it remained a secret between us until we were all too old to care. But I never forgot.
    Somehow, in the excitement of finding and bringing us children back to port, all the grownups forgot that I had broken the rule of the boat rental place about staying in the harbor. Everyone, that is, except the owner. He tried to sue my family for the loss of the pram. Father in turn sued him for negligence in renting to obvious minors. The matter dragged listlessly through our respective lawyer’s offices until the family moved to California.
    For political or environmental or some other unreal reason, the oil never came in on the Bank. So Father was off to the other side of the country. Mother went happily because she remembered trips to California—Santa Monica and the LA Basin—as a girl and she thought the Monterey coast would be almost as nice.
    It was nicer.
    Jennifer Corbin settled into the art galleries of Carmel the way a tent caterpillar settles into an apple orchard. Father sailed the offshore fault system, dropping charges and scaring the people.
    We lived in a mock adobe house—gunnite shot through chicken wire and troweled until it looked half-melted, like cake frosting on a hot day—in Pacific Grove, right outside the gate of the Asilomar center. That house had two and a half tons of glass sliding in doors and windows, all on ball bearings, and an acre of ultra-white carpeting you couldn’t walk on but had to keep to the clear plastic runners. I didn’t spend much time there.
    Pacific Grove was west of the action, and I don’t remember how I got around. Too young to drive and but-nobody rode what buses there were. I hitched a ride with friends or clean-looking strangers, I guess. Most of the time it didn’t lead to trouble. And when it did, I could handle it.
    My place was Cannery Row, fifty years after Steinbeck, when the canneries were gone except as building shells. And in these, like bold hermit crabs in weathered surroundings, were established the latest designer bars, the tourist galleries, the street artists, the rock bands, and the pushers. It was like a permanent, genteel carnival. Just perfect for a boy turned thirteen who could think this slice of plastique was adult life.
    And then, for two weeks every summer, Mother retreated to Copenhagen; for two weeks in winter, to Venice and Florence. Clary and I ate ice cream in our hotel, picked up Danish and Italian from the local television, and never asked about the giggles and thumps coming through the wall from Mother’s room. All thirteen-year-olds are hardened realists. I told Clary that Mother was playing adult games in there. I suppose she was.
    The taste for drama, like the taste for love, has come and gone with most boys by the time they reach thirteen. It died especially fast for boys coming of young age in mid-’80s America, when drama was lighted with phosphor images of kung fu fists and hurtling cars, when love was sticky with rock video, zip-tab cola, and pinches of coke. I remember being a coldly rational child, too old for my years. I parceled out my emotions and my flights of fancy the way a miser parts with gold.
    For example, we used to play football, shirts versus skins, in a narrow park with an inconvenient pathway—a strip of bare, packed dirt—running right across the widest part of the field. The game was supposed to be touch football, but everyone got to tackling when the runners kept ignoring the two-hand fanny slap and no one called them on it. I watched as one of my teammates, a skin, took a tackle on the edge of this dirt, rolled, and came up with a red patch looking like shiny paint across his shoulders. It proved his manhood, presumably.
    Two plays later I had the ball and found myself bearing down on the same edge of path with one shirt just a stride and a half behind me and two more closing from the grass side. No slap on the rear