The Discomfort Zone (4 page)

At the end of the week, my parents and I drove deeper into Florida, so that I could be taken to Disney World. My father was big on fairness, and because my brothers had
once spent a day at Disneyland, many years earlier, it was unthinkable that I not be given the equivalent treat of a day at Disney World, whether or not I was too old for it, and whether or not I wanted to be there. I might not have minded going with my friend Manley, or with my not-girlfriend Hoener, and mocking and subverting the place and allowing myself to like it that way. But mocking and subverting in the presence of my parents was out of the question.

In our hotel room in Orlando, I begged my mother to let me wear my cutoff jeans and a T-shirt for the day, but my mother won the argument, and I arrived at Disney World in an ensemble of pleated shorts and a Bing Crosbyish sport shirt. Dressed like this, miserable with self-consciousness, I moved my feet only when I was directly ordered to. All I wanted to do was go sit in our car and read. In front of each themed ride, my mother asked me if it didn't look like lots of fun, but I saw the other teenagers waiting in line, and I felt their eyes on my clothes and my parents, and my throat ached, and I said the line was too long. My mother tried to cajole me, but my father cut her off: “Irene, he doesn't want to ride this one.” We trudged on through diffuse, burning Florida sunshine to the next crowded ride. Where, again, the same story.

“You have to ride
something
,” my father said finally, after we'd had lunch. We were standing in the lee of an eatery while tawny-legged tourist girls thronged toward the water rides. My eyes fell on a nearby merry-go-round that was empty except for a few toddlers.

“I'll ride that,” I said in a dull voice.

For the next twenty minutes, the three of us boarded and reboarded the dismal merry-go-round, ensuring that our ride tickets weren't going to waste. I stared at the merry-goround's chevroned metal floor and radiated shame, mentally vomiting back the treat they'd tried to give me. My mother, ever the dutiful traveler, took pictures of my father and me on our uncomfortably small horses, but beneath her forcible cheer she was angry at me, because she knew she was the
one I was getting even with, because of our fight about clothes. My father, his fingers loosely grasping a horse-impaling metal pole, gazed into the distance with a look of resignation that summarized his life. I don't see how either of them bore it. I'd been their late, happy child, and now there was nothing I wanted more than to get away from them. My mother seemed to me hideously conformist and hopelessly obsessed with money and appearances; my father seemed to me allergic to every kind of fun. I didn't want the things they wanted. I didn't value what they valued. And we were all equally sorry to be riding the merry-go-round, and we were all equally at a loss to explain what had happened to us.

IN MAY 1970,
a few nights after National Guardsmen killed four student protesters at Kent State University, my father and my brother Tom started fighting. They weren't fighting about the Vietnam War, which both of them opposed. The fight was probably about a lot of different things at once. But the immediate issue was Tom's summer job. He was a good artist, with a meticulous nature, and my father had encouraged him (you could even say forced him) to choose a college from a short list of schools with strong programs in architecture. Tom had deliberately chosen the most distant of these schools, Rice University, and he'd just returned from his second year in Houston, where his adventures in late-sixties youth culture were pushing him toward majoring in film studies, not architecture. My father, however, had found him a plum summer job with Sverdrup & Parcel, the big engineering firm in St. Louis, whose senior partner, General Leif Sverdrup, had been an Army Corps of Engineers hero in the Philippines. It couldn't have been easy for my father, who was shy about asking favors, to pull the requisite strings at Sverdrup. But the office gestalt was hawkish and buzz-cut and generally inimical to bell-bottomed, lefty film-studies majors; and Tom didn't want to be there.

Up in the bedroom that he and I shared, the windows were open and the air had the stuffy wooden house smell that came out every spring. I preferred the make-believe no-smell of air-conditioning, but my mother, whose subjective experience of temperature was notably consistent with low gas and electricity bills, claimed to be a devotee of “fresh air,” and the windows often stayed open until Memorial Day.

On my night table was the
Peanuts Treasury
, a large, thick hardcover compilation of daily and Sunday funnies by Charles M. Schulz. My mother had given it to me the previous Christmas, and I'd been rereading it at bedtime ever since. Like most of the nation's ten-year-olds, I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house. My brothers were less like siblings than like an extra, fun pair of quasi-parents. Although I had friends and was a Cub Scout in good standing, I spent a lot of time alone with talking animals. I was an obsessive rereader of A. A. Milne and the Narnia and Dr. Dolittle novels, and my involvement with my collection of stuffed animals was on the verge of becoming age-inappropriate. It was another point of kinship with Snoopy that he, too, liked animal games. He impersonated tigers and vultures and mountain lions, sharks, sea monsters, pythons, cows, piranhas, penguins, and vampire bats. He was the perfect sunny egoist, starring in his ridiculous fantasies and basking in everyone's attention. In a cartoon strip full of children, the dog was the character I recognized as a child.

Tom and my father had been talking in the living room when I went up to bed. Now, at some late and even stuffier hour, after I'd put aside the
Peanuts Treasury
and fallen asleep, Tom burst into our bedroom. He was shouting sarcastically. “You'll get over it! You'll forget about me! It'll be so much easier! You'll get over it!”

My father was offstage somewhere, making large abstract sounds. My mother was right behind Tom, sobbing at his shoulder, begging him to stop, to stop. He was pulling open
dresser drawers, repacking bags he'd only recently unpacked. “You think you want me here,” he said, “but you'll get over it.”

What about me?
my mother pleaded.
What about Jon?

“You'll get over it.”

I was a small and fundamentally ridiculous person. Even if I'd dared sit up in bed, what could I have said? “Excuse me, I'm trying to sleep”? I lay still and followed the action through my eyelashes. There were further dramatic comings and goings, through some of which I may in fact have slept. Finally I heard Tom's feet pounding down the stairs and my mother's terrible cries, now nearly shrieks, receding after him: “Tom! Tom! Tom! Please! Tom!” And then the front door slammed.

Things like this had never happened in our house. The worst fight I'd ever witnessed was between my brothers on the subject of Frank Zappa, whose music Tom admired and Bob one afternoon dismissed with such patronizing disdain that Tom began to sneer at Bob's own favorite group, the Supremes; which led to bitter words. But a scene of real wailing and open rage was completely off the map. When I woke up the next morning, the memory of it already felt decades old and semi-dreamlike and unmentionable.

My father had left for work, and my mother served me breakfast without comment. The food on the table, the jingles on the radio, and the walk to school all were unremarkable; and yet everything about the day was soaked in dread. At school that week, in Miss Niblack's class, we were rehearsing our fifth-grade play. The script, which I'd written, had a large number of bit parts and one very generous role that I'd created with my own memorization abilities in mind. The action took place on a boat, involved a taciturn villain named Mr. Scuba, and lacked the most rudimentary comedy, point, or moral. Not even I, who got to do most of the talking, enjoyed being in it. Its badness—my responsibility for its badness—became part of the day's general dread.

There was something dreadful about springtime itself. The riot of biology, the
Lord of the Flies
buzzing, the pullulating mud. After school, instead of staying outside to play, I
followed my dread home and cornered my mother in our dining room. I asked her about my upcoming class performance. Would Dad be in town for it? What about Bob? Would Bob be home from college yet? And what about Tom? Would Tom be there, too? This was quite plausibly an innocent line of questioning—I was a small glutton for attention, forever turning conversations to the subject of myself—and, for a while, my mother gave me plausibly innocent answers. Then she slumped into a chair, put her face in her hands, and began to weep.

“Didn't you hear anything last night?” she said.

“No.”

“You didn't hear Tom and Dad shouting? You didn't hear doors slamming?”

“No!”

She gathered me in her arms, which was probably the main thing I'd been dreading. I stood there stiffly while she hugged me. “Tom and Dad had a terrible fight,” she said. “After you went to bed. They had a terrible fight, and Tom got his things and left the house, and we don't know where he went.”

“Oh.”

“I thought we'd hear from him today, but he hasn't called, and I'm frantic, not knowing where he is. I'm just frantic!”

I squirmed a little in her grip.

“But this has nothing to do with you,” she said. “It's between him and Dad and has nothing to do with you. I'm sure Tom's sorry he won't be here to see your play. Or maybe, who knows, he'll be back by Friday and he will see it.”

“OK.”

“But I don't want you telling anyone he's gone until we know where he is. Will you agree not to tell anyone?”

“OK,” I said, breaking free of her. “Can we turn the air-conditioning on?”

I was unaware of it, but an epidemic had broken out across the country. Late adolescents in suburbs like ours had suddenly gone berserk, running away to other cities to have sex and not go to college, ingesting every substance they could get their hands on, not just clashing with their parents
but rejecting and annihilating everything about them. For a while, the parents were so frightened and so mystified and so ashamed that each family, especially mine, quarantined itself and suffered by itself.

When I went upstairs, my bedroom felt like an overwarm sickroom. The clearest remaining vestige of Tom was the
Don't Look Back
poster that he'd taped to a flank of his dresser where Bob Dylan's psychedelic hairstyle wouldn't always be catching my mother's censorious eye. Tom's bed, neatly made, was the bed of a kid carried off by an epidemic.

 

IN THAT UNSETTLED
season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape, Charles Schulz's work was uniquely beloved. Fifty-five million Americans had seen
A Charlie Brown Christmas
the previous December, for a Nielsen share of better than fifty percent. The musical
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown
was in its second sold-out year on Broadway. The astronauts of Apollo X, in their dress rehearsal of the first lunar landing, had christened their orbiter and landing vehicle
Charlie Brown
and
Snoopy
. Newspapers carrying “Peanuts” reached more than 150 million readers, “Peanuts” collections were all over the bestseller lists, and if my own friends were any indication, there was hardly a kid's bedroom in America without a “Peanuts” wastebasket or “Peanuts” bedsheets or a “Peanuts” wall hanging. Schulz, by a luxurious margin, was the most famous living artist on the planet.

To the countercultural mind, the strip's square panels were the only square thing about it. A begoggled beagle piloting a doghouse and getting shot down by the Red Baron had the same antic valence as Yossarian paddling a dinghy to Sweden. Wouldn't the country be better off listening to Linus Van Pelt than to Robert McNamara? This was the era of flower children, not flower adults. But the strip appealed to older Americans as well. It was unfailingly inoffensive (Snoopy never lifted a leg) and was set in a safe, attractive suburb where the kids, except for Pigpen, whose image Ron
McKernan of the Grateful Dead pointedly embraced, were clean and well-spoken and conservatively dressed. Hippies and astronauts, the rejecting kids and the rejected grownups, were all of one mind here.

An exception was my own household. As far as I know, my father never in his life read a comic strip, and my mother's interest in the funnies was limited to a single-panel feature called “The Girls,” whose generic middle-aged matrons, with their weight problems and stinginess and poor driving skills and weakness for department-store bargains, she found just endlessly amusing.

I didn't buy comic books, not even
Mad
magazine, but I worshipped at the altars of Warner Bros. cartoons and the funnies section of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. I read the section's black-and-white page first, skipping the dramatic features like “Steve Roper” and “Juliet Jones” and glancing at “Li'l Abner” only to satisfy myself that it was still trashy and repellent. On the full-color back page I read the strips strictly in reverse order of preference, doing my best to be amused by Dagwood Bumstead's midnight snacks and struggling to ignore the fact that Tiger and Punkinhead were the kind of messy, unreflective kids whom I disliked in real life, before I treated myself to my favorite strip, “B.C.” The strip, by Johnny Hart, was caveman humor. Hart wrung hundreds of gags from the friendship between a flightless bird and a long-suffering tortoise who was constantly attempting unturtlish feats of agility and flexibility. Debts were always paid in clams; dinner was always roast leg of something. When I was done with “B.C.,” I was done with the paper.

The comics in St. Louis's other paper, the
Globe-Democrat
, which my parents didn't take, seemed bleak and foreign to me. “Broom Hilda” and “Funky Winkerbean” and “The Family Circus” were off-putting in the manner of the kid whose partially visible underpants, which had the name
CUTTAIR
hand-markered on the waistband, I'd stared at throughout my family's tour of the Canadian parliament. Although “The Family Circus” was resolutely unfunny, its panels clearly were based on some actual family's humid,
baby-filled home life and were aimed at an audience that recognized this life, which compelled me to posit an entire sub-species of humanity that found “The Family Circus” hilarious.

I knew very well, of course, why the
Globe-Democrat
's cartoons were so lame: the paper that carried “Peanuts” didn't
need
any other good strips. Indeed, I would have swapped the entire
Post-Dispatch
for a daily dose of Schulz. Only “Peanuts,” the strip we didn't get, dealt with stuff that really mattered. I didn't for a minute believe that the children in “Peanuts” were really children—they were so much more emphatic and cartoonishly
real
than anybody in my own neighborhood—but I nevertheless took their stories to be dispatches from a universe of childhood more substantial and convincing than my own. Instead of playing kickball and Four Square, the way my friends and I did, the kids in “Peanuts” had real baseball teams, real football equipment, real fistfights. Their relationships with Snoopy were far richer than the chasings and bitings that constituted my own relationships with neighborhood dogs. Minor but incredible disasters, often involving new vocabulary words, befell them daily. Lucy was “blackballed by the Bluebirds.” She knocked Charlie Brown's croquet ball so far that he had to call the other players from a phone booth. She gave Charlie Brown a signed document in which she swore not to pull the football away when he tried to kick it, but the “peculiar thing about this document,” as she observed in the final frame, was that “it was never notarized.” When Lucy smashed the bust of Beethoven on Schroeder's toy piano, it struck me as odd and funny that Schroeder had a closet full of identical replacement busts, but I accepted it as humanly possible, because Schulz had drawn it.

To the
Peanuts Treasury
I soon added two other equally strong hardcover collections,
Peanuts Revisited
and
Peanuts Classics
. A well-meaning relative once also gave me a copy of Robert Short's bestseller,
The Gospel According to Peanuts
, but it couldn't have interested me less. “Peanuts” wasn't a portal on the Gospel. It was my gospel.

Chapter 1, verses 1–4, of what I knew about disillusionment: Charlie Brown passes the house of the Little Red-Haired Girl, the object of his eternal fruitless longing. He sits down with Snoopy and says, “I wish I had two ponies.” He imagines offering one of the ponies to the Little Red-Haired Girl, riding out into the countryside with her, and sitting down with her beneath a tree. Suddenly he's scowling at Snoopy and asking, “Why aren't you two ponies?” Snoopy, rolling his eyes, thinks: “I knew we'd get around to that.”