Blue Sky Dream (18 page)

 … a brooder’s bibliography. These were thinkers suspicious of group-think and the pronouncements of officialdom. They were voicing deep dissatisfaction with how things were and, as well, equating maturity with the sober acceptance that limits must be obeyed, that affluent America must recognize there could be too much of a good thing. The serious grown-up, these books seemed to say, questions every premise of blue sky optimism.

To my grateful surprise, my father’s books formed a new bridge between us. He would be well into his latest and want to share with someone his head full of ideas. If he had me there beside him holding the flashlight for a fix-it job, he might say to me, “I’m reading an interesting book, Dave,” and then, in the wholly adult language he always used with any child over the age of four, he would begin laying out the book’s thesis and making connections to his own experience. He would speak of an insight he’d gleaned about Lockheed: “The primary purpose of any bureaucratic institution is to continually justify its own existence.” He would be excited by a semanticist’s version of why a husband and wife talk past each other: “Words are useless unless two people agree on their meanings. The map must agree with the territory!” He would toss such wordy nuggets at me as if I were his peer and not a boy of twelve or thirteen who mostly read novels about sea adventures. Though I obviously grasped little of what my father tried to convey, I found it exhilarating that he had thrown open this door to his mind and had invited me inside. He seemed to be asking me, as a potential equal, to accompany him on an intellectual journey just begun.

The restrained, rationalist tone of the economists, the semanticists, the social scientists won my father’s trust. “Here’s my test of any author’s hypothesis,” my father would tell me often during our impromptu discussions. “I look around me and see if my experience matches the theory put forward. In the case of Galbraith” (or Chase or Morris or Hoffer or whoever) “I find his hypotheses to be borne out in the real world.”

In his books my father found schematic diagrams that might offer solutions to a malfunctioning America or, perhaps, to the uneasiness in his soul. He was the troubled troubleshooter, a systems engineer in search of systems underlying the human condition.

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y mother’s frame of reference on those times was quite a different one. She did not hunger for systemic explanations. She remained secure in her faith in the one system revealed through the Catholic Church. The wars and the race riots, all the day’s disturbing news could be read as evidence of the continuous struggle between God’s grace and man’s sinful nature. Clearly there was not yet enough human goodness in the world, for which failure every person shared some measure of collective guilt. In this she reflected the thinking of a Catholic she had read and admired in college, the Trappist Thomas Merton, who told himself at the dawn of the Second World War: “I myself am responsible for this. My sins have done this. Hitler is not the only one who has started this war: I have my share in it, too …” The more hellish the headlines, the more the Catholic was called upon to pray and confess and lead a virtuous existence. And, too, to scan the horizon for saintly examples who might offer cause for hope.

My mother found embodiments of hope in two Catholic men: Cesar Chavez and Bobby Kennedy. Chavez, who spoke of St. Francis as his inspiration and who enjoyed the support of Catholic bishops, was asking suburban mothers to boycott California grapes, and so my mother did. Cesar was “for the poor” (as all saintly Catholics must be). Bobby, too, was “for the poor”; more so, in my mother’s view, than any other presidential candidate. On the June morning in 1968 when Bobby Kennedy died of shots to the head, I woke to the sound of the television at an hour still black outside. In the family room I found my mother alone under a blanket on the yellow Naugahyde couch, devastated by the martyrdom replaying every few minutes on the screen.

My mother was a Kennedy Democrat with unreserved sympathy toward the struggles of blacks and Mexican grape pickers in the United States, but it was to a different cause, a different saintly endeavor, that she devoted her charitable energies during the late 1960s. Queen of Apostles parish had adopted as its missionary an American woman named Mary Nouveau, who lived in
a high desert region of Sonora, Mexico, with the Tarahumara Indians. Their brown faces hung in the church foyer, telling me that through the Catholic Church I was connected with their otherwise unfathomable lives. Every Sunday my mother collected ten dozen doughnuts from a shop and sold them after Mass at a folding table just outside the church doors. All the profits went to Mary Nouveau and the brown faces, helping to increase in some small way the level of human goodness in the world.

Here, then, was the odd truth about life in a blue sky subdivision at that time. The social upheaval occurring fifty minutes up the road in Berkeley and San Francisco felt further removed from our existence than the cave dwellings of the Tarahumara Indians. I remember a rare family outing to San Francisco during those years, a Sunday spent on the green and tidy side of the city at the Palace of Fine Arts with its lagoon covered by swans and ducks. When we returned to the Dodge 440 and unlocked its doors for the trip home, a strange stink of burning met our noses. “What is that?!” we all said as we settled into our places in the station wagon.

“I wonder,” my mother said, “if some hippies might have broken into our car and smoked some marijuana in here.”

After a few sniffs, my father decided the actual source of the smell was a shorted-out wire in the car’s electric-powered rear window.

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ore than a million armstrokes through water, three years of workouts, proved me to be a quite average swimmer in all events but one, the fifty-yard breaststroke, at which I was slightly above average. This was official because the Amateur Athletic Union, based on the times of every registered swimmer, had established a curve of performance broken into “B” level (the majority of swimmers including me), “A” (better swimmers), and “AA” (potential Olympians). The only “A” time remotely within my
reach was the breaststroke standard, which is what my father wanted to discuss with me one afternoon in the living room.

He had been doing some figuring in the small spiralbound notebook he always carried in his pocket. By his calculations, the few seconds separating me from “A” time need not be as daunting as I made them out to be. How many strokes, my father asked me, do you take in a fifty-yard race? I made a guess. He folded that figure into his equation and solved. To be an “A” breaststroker I need merely pull myself an extra three inches farther per stroke. “Three inches,” my father said to me. “If you think about it, that’s about the length of your fingers outstretched. Work extra hard at practice. In a few weeks, at the championships, make up just that little bit more distance with each stroke, and ‘A’ time is yours.”

Who was I to argue with the numbers in my father’s notebook?

The swim meet was a communal ceremony for a corporate tribe. Unlike Little League, which gave Mother and Father nothing to do but cheer behind a fence, the swim meet could not go forward without layer upon layer of parental involvement. For every lane in the pool there needed to be three parents clicking stopwatches and another who wrote down each swimmer’s name, time, and order of finish. For every heat swum, a parent was needed to bring the records from the pool to a central point where other parents tabulated the data and posted official results on the proper forms. A parent was needed to declare “Swimmers take your marks” and to shoot off the starter’s pistol, another to make announcements over the loudspeaker. Parents were needed to write names on every prize handed out, to set up all the tables and chairs early in the morning, to break everything down after, to sell doughnuts and coffee and hot dogs during and then to account for the proceeds.

The swim meet was a tribe’s beliefs manifested for its children. Belief in the power of tasks highly organized (a role for all). Belief in performance measured precisely (each child’s progress monitored to the tenth of a second). Belief in hierarchy (each
child ranked in exact relation to every other child). Belief in meritocracy and its rewards (ribbons for places six through four and medals for three through one). Belief that repetitious rigor in a sterilized environment was best for children (“they come home clean”). This is why competitive swimming flourished in the affluent aerospace suburbs of the Sunbelt during the sixties and early seventies. The practice pool of El Monte Aquatics, the powerhouse of Southern California, lay within twenty miles of Cal Tech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and plants of Northrop, Rockwell, Hughes, and Lockheed. In Northern California, the families of Lockheed and Ford Aerospace and GTE and other military contractors supplied swimmers to two world-class teams: De Anza Swim Club (650 members, and Santa Clara Swim Club, with its perennial national champions). In such places, for every superteam there were hundreds of little clubs like Kona Kai, hundreds of swim meets underway every weekend during the summer months.

Meets that pitted one team against another lasted half a day, while much larger ones, open invitationals for “B” swimmers, filled an entire weekend and drew many hundreds of participants. My thoroughly involved parents experienced the meets as busy blurs, but for me they were something else again. For me they were not really about the manic plunges into cold water that lasted a minute or two at the most. They were about all the time passed in between the day’s races.

Swim meets for me were about lazy yearning, hours spent lounging with other young teenagers on sleeping bags made warm by the sun above and the concrete beneath. Naked but for a thin film of Speedo nylon, we lay and played cards and sucked honey out of plastic bottles shaped like cute bears. I would lie there and want. I wanted the beautiful girls whose nipples showed through their wet suits, whose pubic hair, incredibly, peeked out from the elastic around their vulvas. I would sit this way or that to hide my erections, the Speedo useless as disguise. I would lie and look and craft in my head the funny thing I would say to one of the beautiful girls, though usually I did not say it or if I did, she would give
me the quizzical look I knew I deserved. She and I would know that within the seemingly random sprawl of young bodies on sleeping bags there existed a social order. I was skinny with freckles and zits, a “B” swimmer. The beautiful children (smoothly muscled, smoothly tanned, smoothly featured), they ruled the drowsy interludes between races with yawns and stretches and decisions about who to play cards with, whose sleeping bag would be spread next to whose. They tended, as well, to be the “A” swimmers.

I did not reach “A” time in the championships that summer, although I did take three tenths of a second off my time for the fifty-yard breaststroke. I never did, in fact, achieve an “A” time.

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y father’s company made one of the jet fighters that strafed and bombed North Vietnam, the F-104. Lockheed also built the airplanes that spied on the Vietcong: the supersonic SR-71 Blackbird, the U-2 jet, and a secret airplane called the QT-2, a converted glider fitted with a muffled engine, a wooden propeller, and infrared sensors. The QT-2 would quietly fly low over the jungle at night, pinpointing enemy movement so that the B-52 pilots knew where to drop their tons of bombs the next day. Reconnaissance pictures of the Ho Chi Minh trail were snapped by Lockheed’s CORONA satellite. And it was my father’s employer that built the fat-bellied transports that brought weapons and ammunition and hundreds of thousands of young Americans in and out of the war. It seemed you could not watch a television news report about Vietnam without seeing turbo-prop C-130s or jet-powered C-141s and C-5s taxiing in the background, Lockheed products all.

At the time, in an effort to rise within Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, my father pursued a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. He would study at a card table in my parents’ bedroom under a window that looked out on the front
lawn. On the other side of the window, the children of the cul-de-sac would be machine-gunning each other, little bodies flying everywhere. My father would stick his head out and yell, “War is not a game! Knock it off!” But his own thoughts were not so easily chastened. Once he had his master’s degree, after he had decided he could not build a real airplane in his garage, he began spending hours at his workbench meticulously assembling and painting plastic models of the warplanes of his youth. They included the heroic Spitfires and Hurricanes that won the Battle of Britain, and I remember my father’s eager anticipation the day he took me to see the new movie about that air battle, a film heralded for its realistic dog fight scenes. I remember that when a German gunner got it, his goggles filling with blood, the audience cheered while my father only stiffened, clucking his tongue. When my father’s models covered the top of the television and a bookshelf, he gave a few to me to hang over my bed. He also, some of those autumns, took me to the Reno air races, where for two days we would watch the Bearcats and the Mustangs—World War II killing machines now painted like giant toys—chase one another around the desert.