In the beginning there was mom and dad, sisters, and brother. My best friend shared a back yard separated by a chain link fence. I broke my collarbone (the first time) flying off their trampoline, visible through the fence. I would glance over 50 times a day to see if anyone was there to jump with me.
Later, after my divorce, I was able to temporarily afford a starter home not far from the lake. I bought a trampoline (something their mom had fought against for years) for my backyard. Boom. Instant connection with my kids. Even though I was struggling, they were making the best of it. At any moment either one of them could yell, “Get up and JUMP!” I had to go out and jump with them. Rain, cold, dark. Not after bedtime, of course.
When my ex-wife came after my house, I gave the trampoline to a neighbor with two autistic boys. They were going to love it. The dad had become a friend, then an enemy, then a beneficiary. “Sure, I’ll take the trampoline.” We rolled it a few blocks to his house. “Thanks.”
At some point, my dad’s success led to an expansion of the lake house. My bio memory doesn’t have any data points of the summer house. When I was in first grade we moved into the lake house mansion my father had envisioned as a way to outshine his father. Of course, his father was already dead. Again, I have scant neural memories of this time. I did recall losing my best friend, neighbor, and confidant. And I spent a lot of time alone escaping into the wooded areas by myself.
The glass castle had an incredibly steep driveway. There were no safe bike trails. What had been a cluster of Orange Pealers, and Lime Pealers, and various other fruits owned by the bike-riding kids of the neighborhood, all vanished. My initial childhood adventure at that point, vaporized.
I was never good at basketball, because I didn’t have anyone to shoot hoops with. Baseball, same thing, no one to hone my throwing and catching skills. My dad was a tournament-winning tennis player, but he wouldn’t play with me or my mom. He only wanted to up his game, and we were not competitive enough to hit with him. What an asshole.
I played tennis with my kids. I play with people who don’t know how to play. I love tennis. As I said to my daughter a few weeks ago before Winter had arrived, “It’s time together with someone I love, doing something I love.” It wasn’t about the tennis for me. My dad focused on winning at any cost.
Our family unraveled quickly after the launch of the lake house. I guess my dad’s bravado and confidence had also led to his overuse of alcohol as a relaxant. I have only emotional scarring-type memories of “Dad’s Home!” shouts in the lake house. I don’t think it was happiness we all felt during those few short years on the shore of Lake Austin.
My bike went into the tool shed with some of the other miscellaneous artifacts of the happy times. All the affluence brought nothing but fire on our heads. Firewater consumed by father and brother at the same time. I remember years after my dad was banished from Camelot, I sourced one of his left-behind bottles of Vodka. Mixed with something sweet it was almost drinkable. The dizzying filter was welcomed.
At some point along this path to the end of my family of dreams, my father was in the finals of a local tennis tournament. Tarryhouse, in Tarrytown is one of the most exclusive clubs in Austin. My father had split sets. I was running around with the other orphans, looking for trouble. My dad reclined on the lawn with a huge Texas-sized glass of iced tea.
911 was called. My mom had left for some errand and wasn’t around. The EMTs hustled my dad’s sagging and pail body into the ambulance and were gone. I went home with a near-friend who lived in the neighborhood. His trampoline is the second one that broke a collar bone during one of my greatest tricks.
My dad switched to golf. He did not temper his consumption, cigarette smoking, or seek to reset his priorities. He doubled down.
It’s odd, looking back, how my dad never knew I was also a championship tennis player. He was marginalized by his self-inflicted wounds. He opted out of the family and married another drinking fan, a younger woman we called Sam. In seventh grade, I won the year-end district championship. I wanted my dad and everyone else to be proud of me. Happy for me. Celebrating me.
As it turned out, I was set to play my teammate, our best player, in the finals. It was early evening, on a Sunday in April. “We’ll just let you take both trophies and play the match at your convenience.” My big moment was not televised, it wasn’t even seen. My victory was appreciated by our coach, officiating, and the boy I beat.
“I peaked in seventh grade,” I used to joke. I have better jokes.
The next year, in eighth grade, all hell was fragmenting in my life, I’d gotten accepted into some prep school in New Hampshire, and I lost in the first round of the eighth-grade district tennis tournament. I remember being confused. Unclear on how the emotional maelstrom had affected my match. I know better now, forty-eight years later.
As a young boy you have to take your lumps and keep moving. No time to cry or feel the crazy shit going on around you. Except, I wasn’t very good at being stoic. Not good at all.
In first grade, I was moved out to the school system closer to our house, Westlake. I recall first becoming aware of the girls on the playground in first grade. My mom was doing her best, but now that I see the alignment of the timeframes, I see that she was fighting her own trauma and depression and watching her prince charming melt into an asshole right before her eyes.
For two years, as she attempted to keep her family together, my mom drove me back into town to be with my friends with bikes. She was fighting to slow her husband’s decline. Struggling to fix my obvious depression about being away from my childhood friends. And finally, watching her husband come home (via boat, mind you) later and more angry. Occasionally, smelling of another woman’s perfume. Everyone loved my dad. He was handsome and loaded.
The final first collapse is a vague memory of being called into the school office in third grade. We, my mom and the kids, were going to Switzerland for Christmas. We were going to learn to downhill ski. Dad wasn’t going.
During the separation,my dad got a swell apartment on the top floor of a skyscraper. We would make paper airplanes and fly them in a contest to see who could get closest to the stadium of the University of Texas. He also showed me how to make paper helicopters that actually rose up in the warm currents of the summer evenings in Texas.
“I’m going to come back home for you, son.” As vague and lost as most of my memories of that time have become, this one is cinematically clear.
Dad was coming home!
It lasted three weeks. My mom took the oldest daughter and fled to Mexico. Sure, we had help at the house. It was my dad, my other older sister, and me. My brother had devolved into a creep and alcohol fan. He was never around. He had a car.
A Gold and White Cutlass Oldsmobile SS. He would drum his fingers on the dash to Leon Russell’s Stranger In a Strangeland and tell me he could play it on the piano. I believed him.
“How many days has it been since I was born, how many days til I die…” The song still pulls me back to those moments of heavy losses, heavy songs, and the power of music to enhance if not make sense of the emotional fallout.
