BUTT'S UP

"Butt's Up" is the third in a series of essays about my childhood. If you haven't already read "Foxy's Firehouse" start there, then read "Strays," and then come back here!

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In 1979 my brother Mike and I invented a game on the racquetball courts at our apartment building. “Butts Up” involved players taking turns throwing a racquetball as hard as they could up against the front wall. The next player would have to catch the ball – straight off the wall or on the bounce – it didn’t matter which. If his catch was clean, then he threw the ball at the wall and the game kept going. But if he dropped it he had to run to the front wall as fast as he could, touch it, and call “safe!” before the other players got the ball to the wall first. If the ball made it to the wall before the player who dropped it, the meaning behind the game’s name became clear. The fumbler had to face the wall, like a suspect waiting to be frisked, as the other players gathered behind the service line, promising to “light your ass up.” They’d take turns firing the racquetball at the fumbler’s butt while he waited – cheeks clenched and eyes closed – to feel the sting of the rubber against his body or the sweet relief of hearing it ping off the wall.

Getting hit on the ass wasn’t that uncommon then. Corporal punishment was still a thing in school; something I experienced first cheek, and Mom would occasionally deal a few whacks with a wooden spoon or a shoe. Before we were evicted from the Jones apartment, my brother Dennis once stepped up to discipline Mike and me. Mom, who was clearly tired of hearing neighbors complain about us running wild through the complex while she was at work, lacked the arm strength to effectively whoop two growing delinquents. 

Greased Lightnin'... It's automatic, systematic, and hydromatic. And red. Photo: Paramount Pictures

Mike and I were delighted to have our big brother step in. Dennis was fun. He took us to the Autorama to see the Batmobile (POW!), and the hot rod from Grease (the red one from the “Grease Lightnin’” sequence, not the white one Danny drove at Thunder Road). Another time he gave me and Mike five dollars to stand in the outfield of a nearby park while he and his friend shot bottle rockets at us. We were so sure that Dennis was more likely to smack a pillow than our asses we didn’t even put on extra underwear. When he came to our room and shut the door without winking or whispering for us to fake our screams and cries, Mike and I just assumed Dennis was already in character, a consummate professional dedicated to selling the moment to Mom. We weren’t acting when we spilled down the stairs, rubbing the sting from our hindquarters and yowling like cats whose tails got run over by a hoopty full of T-Birds. I wonder if that was Dennis’ attempt to be the man of the house Mom wouldn’t let him live in because the guy she had been dating didn’t want him there?

That was John. Mom started seeing him when my “boy and his dog” story was at its joyful zenith, but we weren’t sure why. He did drive a nice car, wore designer clothes, and (too much) Aramis for Men, but John was scarecrow tall and skinny, with gray eyes and questionable teeth. He wore his thinning hair in a feloniously tight perm. My mother was petite, but curvy; a verifiable babe who wore red lipstick that matched her short, stylish hair. But she also had three kids at home and two more in orbit; a hard sell in the Me Decade, no matter how pretty you were. That he didn’t run screaming after meeting us for the first time was probably John’s biggest selling point.

John's continued attention came with notes. In a less misogynistic world, the single mother would run the casting call, but here was Mom, reading for what she hoped would be her breakout role – just as she had with my father almost a decade earlier, and husband number one before that. At John’s urging, she got rid of all our pets except Sammy and Tara, and started dressing our nearly naked days in itchy, complicated layers. Roaming the desert looking for lizards and treasures among the tumbleweeds and trash gave way to parenthetical thisses and thats designed to make way for John’s rescuing presence. She should have watched the dogs. They would lower their heads and growl whenever John came too near, sensing the static and crackle he’d generate well before he started yelling and throwing things that weren’t his. 

She didn’t know it then, but whatever stability Mom hoped John might bring when she accepted that perm and rejected her oldest son never arrived. In the nine years he spent in our lives, John was an “emotional parent,” the most infantile of Dr. Lindsay Gibson’s four types of emotionally immature parents, who “react to small upsets like the end of the world.” Given the inherent unpredictability that comes with being around any child — let alone wilder ones who had experienced the trauma and upheaval we had — upsets of all sizes inevitably happened, and John invariably overreacted, even in those early days. I carry a scar just above my right eye, a desperate echo from an ashtray smashed against a wall during one of his rages back on Drake Circle. I look into the mirror and hear his angry voice thundering about something I don’t remember in a house he didn’t live in or pay for.

John‘s demands and the storms that broke over us when they weren’t met served as evidence of how unprepared he was for the breathing, reckless reality of “your kids.” But he used other levers on Mom; petty jealousies over her playing softball, or spending time with her girlfriends. Mom’s reticence at abstaining from these activities became obstinance, so John put down the housewares and threw her around instead. When Dennis found out, he picked me and Mike up in his Plymouth and drove us to John’s apartment. I had just turned eight, Mike was ten, and Dennis was seventeen. I’m not sure how menacing we looked droning down the hall like angry bees, but when Dennis’ tire iron stung John’s door, John wisely kept it closed.

It makes sense that Mom and John were on hiatus when we got kicked out of the Jones apartment after die Nacht des Geschmolzenen Marshmallows. Neither wanted to take a pilot so fraught with production problems to series. But exasperated, broke, and now desperately in need of a place for us to live, Mom called John. What was that conversation like? Was he immediately eager and supportive, selflessly offering to open the door that Dennis damaged a few months earlier? Or did he make her beg, bargaining for concessions and imposing conditions we were bound to break? Whatever story they thought they were writing, Missy wrote herself out. She had already moved in with her boyfriend when, a few days after that phone call, we carried our baggage into an apartment too small to contain it. 

Cambridge Towers, now known as Prime Apartments, today. Photo: Redfin

The idea that mothers and fathers “raise” kids hints at a level of authorship even the best parents don’t deserve. Grownups don’t write their children into adulthood, but they do live the language kids use to ultimately tell their own story. Everything our parents do and don’t can impact our ability to fluently read and write our lives. John’s arc in my story began with Drake Circle and flew over Jones Boulevard before landing at a fourth floor apartment in the Cambridge Towers Tennis Racquet Club. The pages of my short time at John’s swinging bachelor pad are full of erasures, but I know we had some of the physical and financial security mom wanted for us. There was food in the fridge, clothes that fit, and Mike and I occasionally got some spending money. Another Sam entered our lives, this time a calico kitten we named Samantha that Mom found covered in motor oil in a hospital parking garage after John had fallen at work and blew out his knee — because selling used cars can be a full-contact sport. 

All of these things should’ve carried me back to Buffalo, to Voorhees Avenue and that time before Foxy. Instead they sit as bullet points; facts about my time at Cambridge Towers in an apartment I can hardly remember or feel anything for. What happened in that space, the path I traveled from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom, didn’t get enough foot traffic to blaze a lasting trail through my neural pathways because they happened under guard so I moved through them quickly. Living with John was like playing Butt’s Up, only the rules were shifting. His moods were angular and too unpredictable on the bounce; his expectations too hard to catch cleanly. We would fumble balls we didn’t know were in play. One Sunday he ate his breakfast and read the paper. John loved bear claw danishes, and when he got up to change for the day, he left his dirty dishes, crumbs, and newspapers scattered all over. Then he came back and exploded. “Look at this place!” he demanded, “Are you pigs, because you live in a pigsty!” When Mike and I pointed out that the mess was his, John made our “talking back” the issue. 

So we avoided the apartment as much as we could, especially when John was there, something he encouraged by telling me and Mike to “go outside and play in the traffic.” There was enough in and around Cambridge Towers to keep us busy. In addition to the tennis and racquetball courts there was a gym and a swimming pool on site. There was also a gameroom with a pool table, and a few video games. Bobby Vinton, or some similar crooner, lived in the penthouse and passed out full-sized candy bars on Halloween. At our third school in four years we joined the kickball team, and found other after school diversions like stealing from stores at The Boulevard Mall, which we passed to and from school each day. We became entrepreneurs, swiping keychain pistols and scented Hello Kitty erasers, which we’d then sell for pure profit to our classmates. ​

The Boulevard Mall, sometime in the late 1970s. Photo: Lee Jackson

The world beyond my field of vision began impinging on my periphery. The Iran Hostage Crisis was pouring salt on the wounds of American supremacy, and I couldn’t understand how my two Iranian kickball teammates could come from a place that hated “us” so much. I also became a bit class conscious. Like a lot of schools in my ever amorphous city, the student body of Ruby S. Thomas Elementary cut a broad swath across the socioeconomic spectrum. My classmates included students bused in from the predominantly poor African American Westside to satisfy integration mandates, Iranian and Indochinese refugees, and children of the country club set. The latter, some of whom had their lunch brought to them from McDonald’s each day, became our best eraser customers.

We wrote our boyhoods in the same messy script that got us kicked out of the Jones apartment, only we were careful to keep any evidence of the crimes we were committing under the bed and out of sight. I felt a kind of power in the small risks I was taking — the stealing, the rough games — like putting your hand over a flame and seeing how long you could keep it there; measuring how much pain you could stand without really hurting yourself. It numbed my sadness and served as a release valve for stress generated by living with a man who I wasn’t sure wanted me. I was in third grade then, and I got into my first real fight, one I started with a sixth grader who used to come to the tennis courts for lessons. When Mike and I fought, we had rules – no hitting below the belt or above the neck. Maybe I expected the kind of tolerable body shots those fights produced when I kept getting into this kid’s face and calling him chickenshit; this older boy who clearly did not want to fight. In the end, my inability to shut my mouth and keep my hands to myself, combined with the pressures of public boyhood, left him no choice. 

Our “match” didn’t end with a tangle of bodies rolling around on the ground the way most childhood fights do. Someone had taught this kid how to throw hands, for real, and when I finally pushed him one time too many he punched me just above my left eye and knocked me back. I came forward again, and got punched again. Then I came forward another time, and got knocked back again, and then again, and then another time. I was soon on the ground, bruised, bloodied, and sobbing as he stood over me, untouched save for his bloodied knuckles. That’s what Mike saw when he stepped out of the apartment building and onto the sidewalk. Smaller than the boy, and a year younger, Mike flew at him in a frenzy that ignored any rules or boundaries. It took two men to pull my brother off of that kid, who Mike kept kicking even as he was pulled away.

I think I picked that fight with that particular boy because of John. I barely knew the kid, who actually seemed pleasant enough, and I doubt John had ever set eyes on him. But with his blonde hair, blue eyes, fancy tennis gear, and two matching legs, I imagined he was the kind of boy John would prefer to have around. His presence alone judged me, even as his actions towards me were benign. And I hated him for it because I desperately wanted John to like me. It had been two years since divorce blew Pop back east, and when you’re a lonely kid yearning for someone who left, it’s not really that specific person’s absence that leaves your heart heavy and your throat dry. You’re thirsty for the way they made you feel. John’s presence brought on phantom pains from when my family was whole. I wanted to feel the way I did when my father called out “nature boy!” as I ran naked into the living room after a bath; to feel his whiskers across my laughing face when he’d hug a towel around me. Instead I got “Why don’t you go outside and play in the traffic.”

Mom found our stolen stock and ill-gotten cash under the bed, and she was pissed. “Where,” she wanted to know, did all of these pleasantly scented erasers and this dirty money come from? In what would be a crucial misstep on her part, she didn’t grab a spoon or a shoe, nor did she call Dennis. She told John. I think we – me, Mike, and Mom – would have preferred a beating to the sanctimony that slowly tarred out of John’s mouth as we sat captured on the couch. Mike and I were animals, he said. It was Mom’s fault for not being able to control us. We were ungrateful. Inconsiderate. On very thin ice. All of us. “If you are going to act like trash,” he said, looking at me and then Mike when he was really speaking to Mom, “then I’ll throw you out with the garbage.”  ​

Photo: Sprinkles & Puffballs

Photo: The Rusty Splinter

We got grounded for a month; but, like everything else this sentence triangulated back to and was truncated by John’s inability to breathe the cool, conditioned air with us. There was a logic to the aversive punishment Dennis doled out to Mike and me that day on Jones Boulevard. He was, in his way, trying to teach us something; to get us to behave in a way that might make Mom’s life a bit easier. John’s punishments generated a mutual aversion and made life harder on everyone. We would cross paths to and from the kitchen, the bathroom, out the door in awkward silence. Plus, it’s not like Mike and I were sitting in our room quietly contemplating the negative impact our stealing might have on Woolworth’s third quarter earnings report. By the time that first weekend hit, my opening a kitchen cabinet was enough to set him off, so John angrily sent us outside. We didn’t stop to ask if we were still grounded. We trusted the rhythm of the world outside, and longed to be anywhere John was not.

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One night Mom blew a catch, and John got the ball back to the wall before she could reach it. Mike and I lay in bed listening as words morphed into shouts into muffled thuds and slaps. I have no idea what they were fighting about, and Mike doesn’t remember either, but it was probably money. Finances were yet another lever John used against Mom, as she was a lowly waitress while he was purveyor of Sin City’s finest gently used automobiles. They would sit down to do the bills, come up short, then cups and calculators would start flying. Mike and I would leave the TV and slink into our room where we’d listen to John shout out the many ways we were contributing to his imminent financial collapse from behind our closed door. We drank too much milk. We grew out of our clothes too quickly. Since he worked on commission, all of us – including him, he’d point out – were just one bad month away from the street, and Mom wasn’t carrying her weight. He’d say all this wearing an expensive designer watch that peeked out from the sleeve of a tailored shirt as he pointed a manicured finger weighed down by a gold-nugget crusted ring at my freeloading mother; ignoring the fact that even his perm came on credit, and that the car he drove had dealer plates.

Mom usually managed to ride out his words, but this night either she could or would not. Or maybe John felt words weren’t enough. I’m not sure how many blows landed between them before Mom had us up, dressed, and out the door as John fumbled to follow, but we easily beat him to the elevator, then made it through the lobby, and across the parking lot. We climbed into our orange station wagon – the one that brought us to Vegas from Buffalo and was still running on duct-tape and pure Vegas luck – relieved that John was nowhere in sight. But as Mom backed up the car and swung it into drive there he was, spotlighted in amber like a comic book villain, bathrobe flowing behind him in the headlights as he stood blocking our exit, spitting for us to stop. “Hit him, Mom!” Mike and I gleefully yelled from the back. “Light his ass up!” We spent that night in a shelter I can remember about as well as John’s apartment. Mom said this was it. She didn’t know where we were going, but we were definitely not going back. Any uncertainty we felt facing tomorrow was buffered by Mom’s certainty that it would not include John. Mike and I drifted off to sleep; his absence like a lullaby. 

Instead of going to school the next day, Mom drove us to Valley of Fire, a state park about an hour outside of town that truly looks the way it’s named. Mike and I explored the Martian landscape, scampering over red rocks under blue skies, reading petroglyphs and trying to catch chuckwallas with our t-shirts. We lay on our bellies and watched pollywogs swim in Mouse’s Tank – a small pool time carved in the sandstone that collects rain and is named after a Paiute fugitive who used the area as a hideout, just like us. We lost ourselves in the dusky smell of sagebrush and sand as Mom tried to form a Johnless future for us from the sunkissed air. But she could or would not. We climbed into the station wagon and went back to Cambridge Towers

Mouse's Tank in the Valley of Fire State Park, just outside of Las Vegas. Photo: Charli Dawns

Despite my Dad’s alcoholism and its accompanying violence, I never felt like he didn’t want me until many years after he left. This made the ache of his absence more visceral. Pop was guilty of seeing “family” as an all or nothing proposition – of having dreams he couldn’t reconcile with his crumbling reality. He may not have been a good father, but even Mom thought his disappearance from our lives was a measure of his love for us in some bizarre way. He didn’t want to have us if he couldn’t have us completely, so he was making way for someone who could. In my father’s absence and Dennis’ exile, John became my primary adult male role model, and even though his presence was a constant from the time I was 9 until 17, he never dulled the ache of Pop’ absence. A man who ran a boys home I never got sent to did that when I was 12.

Why would someone who seemed so disinterested in being a parent spend almost a decade of his life playing at one? Not only was John an emotional parent run by his feelings, he was also an archetypal example of Gibson’s “rejecting parent” – the kind who “engage(s) in a range of behaviors that make you wonder why they have a family in the first place.” What became immediately clear to me after just a few weeks at Cambridge Towers was that John was not someone I could go to if I got hurt, or needed help with homework, or had an issue that needed sorting out. His was a house where children were only seen and heard on his terms, and for his purposes. 

This combination of emotional and rejecting styles was the result of John’s internalizing societal expectations his own rejecting parents didn’t prepare him to meet. In order to get ahead (even in the cutthroat world of used car sales) John felt he needed a family. So he found a pretty wife who had a couple of kids lying around, and eventually added a house, a nice car, and a dog. Mom, her small but steady income, and her two kids gave John a respectability he wore like one of those expensive shirts. In the coming years, John would take us from Cambridge Towers to other parts of the Vegas Valley, miming the things families are supposed to do as he worked for a paper-doll version of an American Dream he wasn’t even sure he wanted. He was punching beyond his skill, just like I was when that kid beat the shit out of me. John knew it, but he kept punching anyway. What else could he do?