The Children's Crusade (39 page)

James came closest to thinking about his mother’s question and its obvious answer. Instead, he noticed a tear in her shirt that exposed the vulnerable skin of her underarm, and he recognized a kind of rigidity in his father’s posture, and in order to resist going where these observations would take him, he made a decision. Summoning a tone of great injury, he shouted, “I’m out of here,” and he took off at a run.

9

JAMES

I
was born at the Stanford Hospital on January 6, 1968, the same day Dr. Norman Shumway reported to a crowd of waiting journalists that he had transplanted a heart into the ailing body of one Michael Kasperak, the first such surgery in America. The hospital had the air of a carnival, and in the maternity ward my mom’s obstetrician had to call three times for someone to come suction meconium from my tiny lungs. To me this says everything—not the medically historic significance of my birth date but the fact that I was born with my mouth full of shit.

Thirty-seven years later, I was born again. I don’t mean I accepted Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. I mean I arrived at last among my people.

I was at a low point when I found them, a part-time cashier at a Costco in Eugene, Oregon, making ends meet only because of my share of the rent we were collecting on the Portola Valley house. I lived across the Willamette River from Eugene, in working-class Springfield, in a four-unit apartment complex that backed onto the parking lot of a multiscreen movie theater. My roommate was so quiet and reclusive that all I really knew about him I learned on the day he interviewed me, when he said certain scents gave him migraines so I’d have to use his brand of shaving cream and deodorant if I wanted to live there.

I spent my free time watching Three Stooges DVDs on my dad’s
old laptop. Dating seemed like too much work, but a U of O dance professor had flirted with me in a café, and we had sex from time to time. One evening we were on her porch and her neighbors walked by, a middle-aged couple carrying matching water bottles in pouches at their waists. We chatted, and maybe because I was in a bad mood anyway I started in on a spiel I’d been developing about the isolation of modern life. Where had I gotten this? I didn’t know. I’d been spouting it for a while, long enough that even I found it boring.

“I mean,” I said to the dance professor and her neighbors, “how well do you guys know each other? You live on the same block and this is only the second or third time you’ve talked, am I right? I wish there was a club I could join that would give me a bunch of people I could call if my power went out. Or I got sick. And they would have to help.”

“I have half a dozen people like that,” the dance professor said. “They’re called friends.”

“But friends can bail. They’re allowed to be busy.”

“You’re talking,” the husband said, “about an intentional community. We know people in one, right here in town. They’re looking for new members. Do you want to talk to them?”

I kept myself from snickering. I imagined a bunch of earnest people with a mission statement, having three-hour meetings to talk about how often and where they should have their three-hour meetings. “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.”

“Why?” the dance professor said. “Call and find out about it. It’s not like you’ve got anything else going on in your life.”

Nothing like hearing the truth to shake a guy up.

They called themselves the Barn, twenty-six people spread over seven households dotted around Eugene. The idea had originated with two couples, the Smith-Berkoffs and the Rankin-O’Sullivans, who’d met when their children were in preschool together. They
wanted a community and decided to make one. Getting dinner on the table seven nights a week was at the top of everyone’s stress list, so each Tuesday and Thursday one household made enough dinner to feed the entire Barn, and the other households sent someone to pick up the food. Next, a monthly workday rotated from household to household, when everyone would pitch in on a big project. And finally, the whole group got together on the first Sunday of each month for a meeting and potluck.

I was invited to a gathering at Amazon Park. It was July, and there were blankets spread under trees, kids swarming a play structure, adults chatting. I liked the way subgroups formed and re-formed, by age, gender, hobbies, pieces of common history. I talked to two guys who shared my passion for Neil Young, a woman who’d grown up in Palo Alto. “This is James,” people kept saying. “He’s interested in us.”

That evening I logged on to the Barnboard with my guest password and found a list of the members. In addition to the Smith-Berkoffs (Marie, Dan, two kids) and the Rankin-O’Sullivans (Sarah, Greg, three kids, and a live-in grandfather), there were the Lees (Priscilla, Mike, no kids), the Batchelors (Terri, Tom, three kids), the Komarovs (Margo, single mother with two kids), the Norton-Fieldings (Celia, David, two kids), and the Kinsellas (Beth, Stan, no kids).

“So I guess I’d be the Blair?” I typed, and within minutes I’d gotten four responses, from “Whatever you want” to “Wouldn’t you just be James?” to “Let’s see what happens organically” to my favorite, from Celia Norton, “You already are.”

“So I’m in?” I asked Dan Berkoff on the phone a couple days later.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, don’t you want to do a background check?”

“You like us, we like you. What we’re doing is pretty simple. If it
doesn’t work, we vote you out.”

It was like falling in love, but with a whole crowd rather than a single person. Everyone was so open and welcoming. I found out that the group had been inspired by Dan Berkoff’s childhood memory of growing up Jewish in suburban New York. Within his synagogue, groups of families helped each other with religious observation and other aspects of Jewish life. The Barn had the same idea, minus the religious observation and the word “Jewish”: a group to help each other with life.

If the official activities were the monthly meetings and the workdays and the twice-weekly dinners, the community’s true life sprang from postings on the Barnboard. “Does anyone have a good recipe for tamales?” “We’re going to feed the ducks and have two extra seats, anyone want to get rid of a kid for a couple hours?” “Starting clothing drive for Katrina victims, care to help?” I jumped right in. I didn’t have much to offer in the way of recipes to share or equipment to lend, but I had a lot of time and got an enthusiastic response whenever I said I was going to such-and-such a store and did anyone need anything. I participated in as many threads of conversation as I could, even posting one- or two-word responses so I would get notified when there were further comments. Not that I really needed to get notified, since I was checking the board every hour to see what was new.

The first workday happened about three weeks after I joined, a daylong project digging out and replanting the Kinsellas’ backyard. By dinnertime I was completely wiped and felt better than I had in a long time. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” Tom Batchelor said. I twisted from side to side, stretching my back. “Yeah,” I said, “in that oh-hello-muscles-I-forgot-about way.” “No, this,” he said, sweeping his hand to indicate the group. “I mean this.”

I really didn’t know how to cook, so for my first dinner I used my
employee discount to buy bags of salad and pans of Costco enchiladas. I knew this was pathetic and was a little worried I’d get a discontinue notice, like the phone company turning off your service:
Due to incompetence we are hereby terminating our agreement with JAMES BLAIR to participate in the organization known as THE BARN.
Instead, people started inviting me to come watch how they did it—to learn how to cook for a crowd, someone said, kindly skipping over the more basic fact. “What do you normally eat?” Marie Smith asked as she showed me how to make tomato sauce with actual tomatoes. She was asking how I’d gotten by in life. By the skin of my teeth was the answer.

Being six-four, I was asked to clear off the top shelf, get the ball out of the tree, hang the new light fixture. “You’re so handy,” Terri Batchelor said one workday as I painted her kitchen ceiling without a ladder. I figured she meant tall. “Isn’t James great?” people said to each other. “You’re a great addition, James.”

I was used to disappointing people, so all of this was pretty new, and I wasn’t surprised a few weeks later when it seemed the other shoe was about to drop. “Can I be honest about something?” Margo Komarov said to me one afternoon as I stood at a picnic table slicing watermelon. I was gearing up to make a joke out of whatever came next, but she smiled and said, “I wasn’t sure about you at first, but I’m so glad they voted me down.”

Twenty-five hours a week I still worked at Costco. Still hated it, but it bothered me less. My boss was an asshole, but even that didn’t bother me much. Most Mondays I worked one to seven, leaving my mornings open, and in late September I answered a post from Sarah Rankin looking for someone to drive her dad to physical therapy. From then on, I was his chauffeur, this cool grandpa from Seattle who’d ruptured his Achilles doing a half Ironman. He was maybe five-seven and all muscle, though the injury had sidelined him and
he complained about how fast he was losing tone. The physical therapy office was on the other side of town, so we had some time in the car together. “Don’t get old, James,” he told me one morning. “Are you exercising? Can’t do anything about your genes, so get your butt moving.” He was seventy-five, the age my dad was when he died, but he seemed younger, more like sixtysomething. Back at the house that day, he showed me photos from his two dozen triathlons and then directed me to make us a vegetable smoothie while he sat at the kitchen table with his foot propped up. “Another thing?” he said. “Don’t let your wife die. Get a wife—and then don’t let her die.”

That kind of talk usually bummed me out, but there was something about hearing it in a happy house: it made me optimistic. Not about finding a wife but because he’d said it. He couldn’t tell I was someone you didn’t say that to, someone who had no future. Maybe I did.

When the weather changed, the monthly meetings moved indoors. In November we met at the Smith-Berkoffs’ house, and suddenly the kids dominated. They were everywhere, and even when they were out of sight they were still in mind.

“Notice how the girls sit and the boys run? I didn’t truly believe in gender differences until I had kids.”

“She’s having trouble with the baby.” “Nursing trouble?” “No, she loves him more. She thinks the other two know.”

“They met with the teacher, and it turns out the twins aren’t
being
bullied, they’re bullying.”

I moseyed around, picking up bits of conversation and wondering how I’d feel about the whole thing after six months indoors. Rain hammered at the windows. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and the sky was the color of wet concrete.

Stan Kinsella joined me at the fireplace. He and his wife were the oldest couple—midfifties—and didn’t have kids. “Lots of small fry,”
he said. “Hope you’re not overwhelmed.”

“No, no. I have a niece and two nephews.”

“Beth and I debated about this. Did such a kid-oriented group make sense for us. But our only other option was a group of folks in their sixties and seventies, sort of an ad hoc retirement community. Their bylaws included mandatory advance directives.”

“You had options?”

“This is where we’re all headed. Or should be. No one goes to church anymore, so we have to make our own congregations. You know what ‘congregate’ means? It’s from the Latin. ‘Greg’ means herd. ‘Con’ means with. We’re with our herd.”

“Huh,” I said. “One thing that really got me after 9/11 was Bush saying we should all go to church. ‘Go to your churches and temples and mosques—go and pray.’ Something like that. It pissed me off so much.”

“Like you didn’t count?”

“Like I didn’t care.”

Stan nodded. “If something like that happened again, I’d want to be with these people.”

I thought of my life at the time of the attacks, how bad it sucked. I was living in Santa Rosa, washing dishes at a lousy restaurant and fucking the bartender. I didn’t like her very much, and she alternated between scorn and indifference toward me. There was a lot of stuff in the media about people drawing together and being kinder and whatnot, but things between this woman and me went downhill. I finally just walked off the job—punched my time card one last time and drove away. When I arrived at my pit of an apartment, I realized I hadn’t even taken off my apron.

Across the room, ten-year-old Rosie Rankin-O’Sullivan caught my eye and stuck out her tongue at me. I put my fingers in my ears and crossed my eyes. She lolled her head sideways and let her tongue
hang out the side of her mouth. I reached my arms behind my neck and simultaneously wiggled my right earlobe with my left fingers and my left earlobe with my right fingers. This made her laugh.

Later, she tracked me down in the kitchen with two younger kids in tow. She directed me to “do that thing again,” and when I reached behind my head for my earlobes, they all squealed.

“How long are your arms?”

“How do you do that?”

“I want to try, I want to try!”

This led to a discussion of proportion and flexibility, and finally to a step-by-step demonstration that attracted so much kid attention we had to move to another room. “Look, everyone!” Rosie called. “Look what the Blair can do!” A little later, I was lying on my back on the rug and four or five children were pulling and bending my limbs, and from the doorway tiny, dark-eyed Celia Norton smiled at me.

Half a dozen weeks went by. Rebecca offered me a plane ticket so I could go home for Christmas, but I didn’t want to use any vacation days. Plus I knew at least half the Barn would be gathering. “What will you do instead?” Rebecca said, and because I hadn’t told any of my siblings about the Barn, afraid they’d mock me or disapprove, I said I was going to work, prepping the store for the huge sale starting December 26. In fact, I went to a feast at the Batchelors’, and it turned out to be the happiest Christmas I’d had in a long time.

“You seem to be getting the hang of this,” Celia said one Thursday in January when I stopped at her house for my dinner basket. We didn’t always see the cook when we picked up, but she happened to be on her porch, gathering her mail.

“Guess I am.”

“You’re a natural.”

“Oh, that’s funny. For a sec I thought you said
You’re unnatural
.”

She smiled. “No, you’re very natural.
And
you’re a natural.”

“Phew, I like to be more than one thing.”