The Best Little Gift Horse in Texas
I KNEW I WAS asking too much, but I asked anyway.
It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, 1979. I was 10 years old, living in Kansas City, KS, with my maternal grandparents and my brother Jeremy, who was seven. My mom called on a break from a gig at a recording studio in Dallas to see how things were going and to tell us, for the zillionth time, how excited she was that we were going to get on a plane in a couple of weeks and spend Christmas with her in Dallas. She kept describing it as home, but I mentally translated that to read, "Mom's house in Dallas."
My brother stood nearby, eavesdropping.
I told my mother that the only things either of us wanted were Mega City and Rocket Tubes. For the benefit of those who weren't children in the 1970s, Mega City and Rocket Tubes were plastic playsets, part of the Micronauts line of toys-die-cast metal spaceman action figures with elbow and knee joints and ball-and-socket shoulder and hip joints; sturdy, elegantly detailed and fully poseable, unlike the cruddier but more popular Star Wars toys. Mega City was a faux-city comprising interlocking geometric pieces. The Rocket Tubes were sort of a monorail for people-an intestine-like network of transparent tunnels that pushed little styrofoam spaceships from point A to point A again on gusts of air. Logan's Run, Epcot Center and the Dallas Fort Worth airport all had monorails. In the 70s, everybody thought they were the future.
"I'll look into it," my mom said.
Together, Mega City and Rocket Tubes retailed for about $80. That's a lot of money for a couple of toys, even today. And it was a king's ransom in 1979-especially for my mom, a professional singer who eked out enough by teaching and singing backup in recording studios to support herself and us. We were probably somewhere in the lower end of the middle class, though I didn't have those words to describe our situation at the time.
An uncharitable person might say that any boy who knew his parents' economic circumstances and still requested these ridiculously expensive toys was being manipulative, perhaps punitive. An uncharitable person would be correct.
We'd been in Kansas City four years. Back in 1975, my parents had decided it was better if their sons weren't around while they dissolved their marriage and started over. Plus, my mom was a singer and my dad was a piano player and composer, which meant they spent a lot of their time in the company of other musicians. Most of them were pretty well-behaved, for southern-fried hippies, but the milieu was still not kid-friendly. During the eons I spent waiting for my mom in recording- studio reception areas, I'd seen dozens of musicians and managerial types stumble out of bathrooms sniffling.
"I bet they have them at Toys R Us and Preston Center Toys," I suggested. "Also that little toy shop over by the doctor's office." I added, "Jeremy and I talked about it and decided those are really the only things we want."
It wasn't even remotely true. I'd actually talked my brother into being as excited about the toys as I was. In any event, if we'd really only gotten one present apiece for Christmas, no matter how cool, we would have been disappointed. We were American boys.
"I'll look into it," my mom repeated.
My brother raised a quizzical eyebrow. I gave him a weak thumbs up. He did a soundless dance.
Then my mother said she loved me and she couldn't wait to see us. "Families shouldn't be apart on the holidays," she said, and began to sob.
I did what any boy would do if his mother started crying on the phone while his younger brother was watching. I acted blase. "Don't cry, mom," I said. "You'll short out the phone."
At that point, we'd lived with our grandparents four years. My grandmother was a composer and piano teacher who took private students-kids, mostly. My grandfather worked days at a hardware store and built birdhouses and other crafts in his basement at night and on weekends. He also tended a backyard garden so biologically diverse and intricately designed that he only entered the neighborhood gardening contest every couple of years because his multi-year winning streak was ruining his rivals' morale.
We were not a churchgoing family. We only set foot in a house of worship if devout relatives convinced us to tag along or if somebody was getting married or buried. My grandfather was probably an atheist-he once explained to me that when people said, "God bless you," it meant, "Good luck"-but in an extended family thick with Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, he was wise to be diplomatic. Yet the Bible remained on the short stack of most-read books piled on the small table beside his reclining chair in the living room, along with a couple of old poetry anthologies and the current issues of Reader's Digest and National Geographic. He read the Bible, he once told me, because all of life's mysteries were catalogued there, and he figured if he kept reading it over and over, he might be able to make sense of all the contradictions.
My grandmother had not been especially religious until a couple of years after we arrived, after she fell ill with whooping cough for several weeks. She sweated out her illness in a dark bedroom with the blinds closed and rang for assistance with a tiny bell. After her recovery, she became more interested in spiritual matters. This change could be partly credited to my aunt, a Mormon who said watching the Passion Play at Oberammergau was one of the high points of her life, and who warned me and my brother that the Lord saw everything we did and knew everything we thought and dreamed, so we'd better watch it.
"She makes God sound like Santa, only scary," my brother once observed.
"God has a plan for everyone," my aunt told me, apropos of anything.
"I'm not sure that's true," my grandfather once said, contradicting my aunt when she was not around to argue with him. "I tend to think if God had a plan for everybody, there wouldn't be so much damn killing."
In the first couple of years after we moved in with our grandparents, I felt abandoned. I was sullen and withdrawn. I couldn't understand why any remotely functioning mother or father could stand to be apart from their kids that long. I got in fights with other kids and beat up on my brother a lot, a fact that now shames me.
But after a couple of years, we settled in and made friends at our school, Pembroke Country Day, a private school with very small classes where we were among a handful of children receiving need-based scholarships. We were teased for our Sears clothes and cheap shoes, and when my friends visited, they marveled at how small the place was. One of them asked, "What's it like to be poor?"
My parents came to Kansas City for the occasional holiday. I especially remember my dad coming to stay one Thanksgiving. He invited me and my brother to join him in the kitchen as he prepared an enormous tray of chocolate mousse. It might have been two trays; I'm not sure. Whatever the amount, I know we ate chocolate mousse for weeks, more out of affection for my dad than anything else, until one night when my grandfather opened the fridge looking for dessert, announced, "This mousse looks like liver," and dumped it.
My mother eased us back into a Dallas mindset starting in the summer of 1978, when she brought us home for the summer. She picked us up from the airport and waited until we pulled into the driveway to tell us she was living with a guy named Bill, a bass player who'd moved from Queens a couple of years earlier to be near his brother, a Dallas cop. Bill was a tall man with broad shoulders and a woolly beard. He looked a bit like James Brolin in The Amityville Horror, which creeped me out at first.
The first night I spent in the same house with Bill, we got in an argument because I'd called my grandparents long-distance without asking, and he told me to ask permission next time. I accused him of treating me like an inferior being.
"A what?" he said. My mom, sitting on a couch next to his ratty recliner, nearly spit out her drink.
"An inferior being," I said. "Like on Star Trek."
"I'm not treating you like an inferior being," he said. "I'm just saying long distance costs money, so you should ask first."
Like my mom, Bill smoked a lot. He was also an accomplished black-and-white photographer, a regular patron of the local repertory cinema, a devotee of Ayn Rand and a staunch atheist and libertarian. One time, a toll booth attendant handed him back some change and said, "God bless you" as we drove off, and I asked if he was offended. "No," he said. "They're just being nice. It's their way of saying good luck."
Eerie.
I bent his ear about Star Wars, Godzilla, Close Encounters, Logan's Run and Alien. I hadn't actually seen the latter because it was rated "R," but every time my grandmother took me to Jones' department store, I went to the book section and read the Mobius-illustrated Heavy Metal graphic-novel version and lingered over the gory parts.
"It's actually not as bloody as you think," Bill told me. "Except for the part where the guy's stomach explodes. Mostly they keep it in shadow until the end."
About a week after my initial request for Mega City and Rocket Tubes, my mother called Kansas City to tell us she couldn't afford them and I had to ask for something else. I said it was okay, that I understood. But I put a little catch in my voice, just in case she was bluffing.
During this same conversation, my mom informed me that we were going to stay in Kansas City for one more year-because my grandparents had specifically requested it-and then move back to Dallas for good.
"Both you boys need to be home, sweetie," she told me.
That night, I couldn't sleep. I kept staring at the ceiling of my room. The headlights from passing cars flickered across the wallpaper in bright squares that stretched into rectangles, then vanished.
I don't remember what my grandparents said to us at the Kansas City airport. I remember that my grandmother cried and my grandfather didn't.
I don't remember what either of them gave either of us for Christmas that year, or what my father gave us, or my aunt or anybody else in our extended family.
My mom did end up buying Mega City and Rocket Tubes. We were elated until we assembled them. Mega City was just a bunch of pieces of plastic that didn't even hang together that well. The Rocket Tubes were just pieces of plastic, too. I don't know if the instructions were confusing or if we were in a hurry to put it together, but we never could get the little styrofoam spaceships to whoosh around inside the tubes. It was basically a $40 air compressor.
By the end of Christmas Day, both toys were broken beyond repair, probably on purpose. I went to bed feeling disgusted with myself for believing the tv ads, and thinking about all the other cool stuff my mom could have bought.
I asked permission to call my grandparents. I told them I was having a good time and I missed them.
For my birthday, Bill and my mom gave me a Super 8 camera, a couple cartridges of film and a book on the basics of movie photography.
"Read that book," Bill told me. "If you don't, you'll never know what you're doing."