MEMOIR
Stranger Than FictionLOS ANGELES, CA 28 January 2010 |
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It should probably shame me to admit that I used the same bedroom furniture from the time I was eleven years old until the time I was nearly thirty. The bed I slept in as a boy was the bed I slept in until I met my wife, who quickly informed me that a change would be necessary in the near future.
To be clear, and to defend myself preemptively against charges of arrested development, there had been a change of mattress over the years. It was a queen-sized bed, and I think I went through two or three of them in a span of two decades. The frame, however, was always the same. The headboard---a Scandinavian blond wood design with simple, clean lines---remained constant. Somehow it followed me around the country, no matter where I went.
I mention the furniture only because I'm thinking of my bedroom---my childhood bedroom---the one in suburban Indiana, the two-story house on a nearly treeless cul-de-sac in a neighborhood featuring an assortment of man-made ponds stocked with catfish and sunfish and turtles and smallmouth bass. I grew up fishing in those ponds, and one of the most disturbing memories of my youth involves a friend and I standing along a shoreline, beating a catfish over the head with a stick, trying to kill it for no good reason. The fish was making terrible, guttural sounds---sounds which in my mind can only be classified as "crying"----and after that day I only fished a few more times before I was finally done for good.
But back to the bedroom.
I remember it only vaguely. I moved away from Indiana in 1993, off to Colorado for college, and my parents followed suit shortly thereafter, selling the house in 1995. That was the last I ever saw of my Indiana bedroom. It troubles me now as I struggle to remember the layout. The bed on my right as I walked in the door. The dresser, desk, and mirror lined up along the far wall, all done up in the same blond wood as my headboard: a matching set. The windows opening up over the sloping front lawn, where one measly tree stood in its infancy.
The couple who lived across the street---middle-aged, nerdy, and professorial---were childless, and apparently by choice. They were therefore treated with quiet suspicion by nearly everyone else in the neighborhood, an assortment of Midwestern nuclear families, most of whom were intensely traditional in their bearing. This couple---the "Hood People," we called them---used to go on long walks together wearing matching hooded sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up over their heads, an eerie affectation which only added to the grim mystery. I used to watch them from my bedroom window, peering out through the Pella blinds, wondering who these people were...if they somehow worked for the government, or perhaps a foreign government. Wondering if they were spies.
There was a large framed photograph of a red Porsche 911 hanging over my headboard, and this also now seems odd, as I have almost zero interest in cars, and never have. Or maybe that's incorrect. I seem to have a distant memory of fetishizing the Porsche 911 for a brief period of my youth, and maybe it had something to do with Sixteen Candles and Jake Ryan and Samantha Baker and this is how you get girls, or maybe it had something to do with my friend whose dad bought a yellow one and kept it covered under a tarp in the garage and almost never drove it unless it was summer and the weather was perfect.
But the thing I really want to talk about---what started me writing this bit in the first place---is a book, a science fiction novel, the classic science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein called Stranger in a Strange Land. Published in 1961. A parable for its times, embraced by both the cognescenti and the counterculture. I don't think I've ever read it. I have no recollection of its plot. (Then again, having no recollection of its plot doesn't necessarily mean I've never read the book, as I am notorious for forgetting the contents of entire novels almost immediately after reading them.)
What strikes me about Stranger is the fact that I remember it so clearly, I remember having it so clearly. I didn't realize how impacted it was in my psyche until just the other day, as I was reading something online; the Heinlein title was mentioned, and a crystalline memory bloomed in my head out of nowhere. I suddenly found myself sitting in my childhood bedroom, the book on my bookshelf (the top shelf), or sitting on my nightstand like a bible. It was always there. I remember it was always there. I kept it like a talisman, for reasons I didn't fully understand. I never even really read it, I don't think. Or maybe I did read it. Or maybe I tried to read it, but couldn't get through it. But still I kept it because I thought I was supposed to keep it. I sit here now trying to imagine why it might have seemed so important.
So many memories of my youth have long faded---so many details and narratives and important conversations---but the memory of that book and the fact that it stayed in my room all those years, with such prominent placement, is as sharp and clear as any other remnant in my brain. The green hardcover, robbed of its dust jacket. The gold lettering.
Perhaps it's a matter of simple psychology. I had moved to Indiana at the age of eleven, just as I was entering junior high, and in the process had left behind everyone and everything I had previously known in my former hometown in Wisconsin. This, in its way, was a kind of death; my introduction to it. And somewhere along the line, probably at some bookstore in some shopping mall in the corn, I must have stumbled into Heinlein and Stranger in a Strange Land, and, responding to the obvious title, begged my mother to buy it for me, in hopes that it might provide instructions.
I don't think I have the book anymore---not that particular copy, anyway---but it doesn't really sadden me. My sentimentality has its limits. There's a chance the book now resides at my parents' new home, in the bedroom my mother has approximated as "mine." This room, which I guess you could classify as a very modest shrine, still houses some relics from youth: old soccer trophies, Cub scout badges, and the like. I can't help but wonder if the book is on a shelf in there somewhere. I'll have to investigate the next time I visit. And if it is in fact there, I'm going to take it with me, and I'm going to read it. Or re-read it. It's probably important to pay attention to such things, though I can't say I'm entirely sure why.
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Brad,
Probably your mom or dad put up that poster of the 911 because your walls were bare and it looked like a boy would live there.
You probably didn’t read it. If you read something you like, and you would like this, you’d at least remember that you enjoyed it, even if you forgot the story altogether.
Oh no. I have the same problem. I totally forgot I had read Dean Koontz’s _Fear Nothing_ until I discovered it in a box when we moved into our house.
I wondered whose book it was. I read the back cover and vaguely remembered something about the main character it mentioned, and suddenly had a rush of feeling-rememberance…I knew I had read it because there was a feeling associated with it, but couldn’t remember a thing about the plot. As far as that information went, I had never seen the thing before in my life. Very weird.
I think I used to have that book, too. I don’t think I’ve ever read it. Is that the book where the word “Grok” came from?
People of my mothers generation always use that word and makes me giggle. Much like it does when they say “Mary Jane” or “Reefer”.
But that could totally be the wrong book and I’ve mussed up your comments.
What happened to the bed? Did you give it a proper burial?
Strange the way memory works, isn’t it? The post Irene put up earlier today about her precocious child brought to mind some of my own exuberant tendancies at that age–they landed in my brain like a cartoon anvil hitting Wile E. Coyote. Hadn’t thought about them in years, and them suddenly, there they, playing out in the Technicolor film of my memory.
Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the books that formed the literary gestalt of my childhood and adolescence. I haven’t read it since I was a teenager, and have been telling myself that I need to go back and revisit it, as I’m curious as to how my perspective on it might have changed after 7 years’ worth of higher education and adult living.
I grok now might be the time to finally get around to doing so.
I had that book too. I don’t remember much of it. But oddly I remember being impacted by it, and sitting and thinking and thinking about it after I was done. I don’t think I have my copy anymore either.
I do have the first novel I ever read that my dad gave me while I was in third grade. It’s a torn up old paperback version of “Back to the Stone Age” by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I clung onto it like a teddy bear and gobbled its words.
I didn’t have that book, but I like your description of having and owning it and keeping it around. I remember having an abridged version of Moby Dick as a boy, and never finished it, but it seemed that the book was a measure of myself, or the direction in which things were headed, something precious I might aspire to.
Strange how those books of childhood evoke such memories. I remember my old greenish covered copy of Stranger. And speaking of strange, Heinlein was the photographer for one of my co-workers weddings (his first). Unfortunately it was such a crappy marriage that he doesn’t think he still has the photos. He remembered Heinlein as being as surreal as his books. Ah well.
Nice memories.
Brad,
Although I too had books I held on to for no apparent reason, I can really relate to the “Hood People”. I’m pretty sure Indiana had a rule that all streets had one couple that missed the bus to the Twilight Zone. M.Glass and I had a family that creeped me out in a nightmarish way. Our heat went out one winter and my family had to spend the day over there…it was frightful, and I still have problems playing with play doh with my oldest son (that was the activity I was stuck doing with their eldest).
You don’t read “Stranger in a Strange Land.” You grok it.
I had this very same thought process recently over a book called The Book of the Dun Cow that I remember reading often as a kid. It was in my parents’ library of books and I read it over and over again. I don’t really remember much about the plot, except that it was trippy, narrated by animals, and some chickens fought in some sort of apocalyptic showdown at the end. I suddenly remembered the book and wrote myself a note to maybe find it at the library, just to see if re-reading it might evoke any weird nostalgia.
Please write about any cool memories reading Stranger in a Strange Land brings forth for you.
Now this is bizarre
because just this morning
I woke up with “Stranger in a Strange Land” in my head
& I thought it was the Iron Maiden version
but it wasn’t.
It was the Ace Frehley version.
So I did some looking and a song by this name
was also cut by Leon Russell, U2, Barbara Streisand, Eddie Money
Triumph & Bambi Lee Savage.
All different though. I listened.
Wait, did say reading?
You probably had clippings of porn in there and a religious episode caused you to block out the memory… or not.
I hate how you toy with my emotions, Mr. Listi. Casually dropping in a vivid and visceral blip of mind and mood altering information and then, leaving me distraught and moaning like a beaten fish, just carry on like it was nothing.
There’s a backhanded compliment in there but I still hate it.
I love that photograph though.
I’ve been reading and studying “The Stranger” for a week now… How strange…
And I hear you on the bed issue. I got a small bed when I was much younger than eleven… Probably about five or so. And it’s still there, with new sheets but the same mattress. Granted, I haven’t lived at my parents’ in many years, but whenever I go back I’m reminded of why I’ve grown up with back problems - the least comfortable mattress ever!
Jesus, that catfish memory would be a disturbing one.
I’ve never read Stranger. I’ll have to add it to the list.
That goddamn list.
Simon, STOP!
We don’t want to hear any more disturbing stuff about the fish crying!!!!!
Stop encouraging him!
“This couple—the “Hood People,” we called them—used to go on long walks together wearing matching hooded sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up over their heads, an eerie affectation which only added to the grim mystery.”
Such a good line! Enjoyed this immensely.
I really hope someone cracked that kid’s skull open. Poor catfish. I’ve often wondered why little boys are so violent. I had an ex who said he used to snap the heads off snakes. He also fed alka seltzer to ducks (apparently, they explode, though I have not confirmed, nor do I plan to confirm.)
Well, I think it was an attempt to mimic what we thought you were supposed to do when you caught a fish and wanted to kill it “humanely.” I don’t know a ton about fishing, but I’m pretty sure you crack a fish over the head with a stick or mallet of some kind after you catch it, and this kills it quickly, supposedly, with minimal suffering. Not so in my boyhood experience, however. Embarrassing.
That catfish story is enough to make me never want to fish again. Not that I do it much, anyway.
There are numerous photos of me posing next to the carcasses of dead deer my dad had killed while out hunting. Often, they were hanging, gutted, in one of his buddies’ garages. Me and a little friend, the buddy’s kid, probably, standing on either side holding the antlers to lift the head up, the thing’s tongue lolling out.
I remember the first time this type of photo op transpired, I wouldn’t go in the garage with the dead things. I was maybe 4 or 5. I remember distinctly the coat I was wearing (late fall, of course) and riding back and forth on the little friend’s tricycle just outside the garage entrance.
My dad would never force me to do anything I didn’t want to, but he did coax and reason with me. After much coaxing, I went in and took the picture, but I was intensely uncomfortable. I don’t think I’d ever seen a dead thing before.
I can’t fish. I don’t disapprove of fishing, and I don’t disapprove of killing things for food. I used to be able to fish. Even enjoyed it. Then one year, for whatever reason (and I was relatively old. Maybe 22), I couldn’t do it anymore. I just can’t watch a suffocation. That’s the worst part about fishing. The gasping. Even if it’s a quick & simple hook removal and release and the thing returns to its fish life with nothing more than a pierced lip. The heaving gills. Oy.
Like you, I’ve tried to remember the layout of my childhood/adolescent bedroom — or I should really use the plural, since I moved around five or six times before I left home (and in New York, I moved at least that many times in half the time). I wish I’d taken pictures. I’d be curious to know what books were on the shelves, though some I’ve never forgotten.
As to Stranger in a Strange Land, I’ve never read it. (I don’t think I’ve ever read a work of straight-ahead science fiction.) Someone who was interested in publishing Banned for Life, though, was talking to me about Stranger, saying he used to recommend it until a feminist friend of his pointed out some apparently sexist remark in the book, and he never recommended it afterward. He was embarrassed that he’d ever liked it, in fact. He was a very PC guy, to say the least, which is why he ultimately decided that BFL wasn’t for him.
Very well-written piece, by the way. It was a pleasure to read.
Your disturbing catfish memory makes me think of that Raymond Carver story about the fish/eel thing. Makes the breath catch–the poignancy of kid-memories like that one.
Also–
“It’s probably important to pay attention to such things, though I can’t say I’m entirely sure why.”
I’ve had the same thought looping through my brain in the last year, and I’m trying to follow up, to trust that somewhere deep w/in us lies language-defying explanation…