served in red-and-white-checkered baskets heaped with curlicue fries. We’d sit at a picnic table spotted with squirrel and pigeon shit, and we’d eat this hot and perfect food and wash it down with cold Cokes.
Afterward, if she had the money, we’d continue our Mystery and find ourselves at the drive-in, the sun setting over a massive movie screen rising up out of scrub and weeds. Because of the van, she had to park in the far back and she’d pull it sideways so we could hook three or four speakers onto our open windows, each of us with our own bench seat to stretch out on.
Most of the movies were rated R and most were bad; I remember fast cars and naked breasts and pistol barrels flashing in the sun. Some disturbed me, like Joe where a father hates hippies and gets another father to go shoot up a commune where the first father accidentally kills his own daughter, her dead body lying bloody in the snow. There was Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, Dustin Hoffman playing a hit music composer who has a split personality and ends up committing suicide in his private plane. There was Woody Allen, who talked fast and said funny things about sex I was embarrassed to hear in the van with my mother. But it was the Clint Eastwood westerns I really liked; he could shoot and kill and did it all night long to bad men who’d done bad things to him and his family. He didn’t run from them. He didn’t hide. He faced them, usually three or four at once, and in just a few words he told them what he thought of them, then drew his Colt and gunned them down like the pigs they were.
One Friday when there was a warm, misty rain and we had to roll the van’s windows up, we watched Billy Jack. The lead actor wore a tight black T-shirt that showed off his chest and arm muscles, and he plays an Indian and a Green Beret who fought in Vietnam. He’s also a master in some form of martial art, and he spends a lot of time alone, walking softly, his carved and handsome face shadowed beneath the brim of his black cowboy hat and its band of beads. But then his wife, a kind and pretty blonde, opens a Freedom School for Native American children on the reservation and when she drives the kids into town for ice cream, they get chased out by white racists and she ends up being staked to the ground spread-eagled where she’s raped and left to the ants and the sun and Billy Jack spends the rest of the movie hunting down the men who did it and he beats them to death using roundhouse kicks to the temple, straight rights to the face and heart and groin, fast and lethal moves I’d never seen, these cruel, vicious men reduced to silent bloody heaps on the floor or in the dust.
That night I couldn’t sleep; my heart wouldn’t slow down. I kept seeing myself do that to Clay Whelan and George Labelle and every kid who’d ever punched or kicked or pushed me; I saw myself doing it to the drunk who’d pissed in our hallway; I saw myself doing it to the two or three boyfriends of my mother’s I never liked; I saw myself doing it to anyone, everyone.
3
O NE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Pop drove up to our house on Lime with Theo Metrakos. He had thinning dark hair and a thick mustache, and he was an inch or two shorter than my father but well-built. He was a first-generation Greek studying for his Ph.D. in literature, one of Pop’s roommates in an apartment in Bradford, though I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew is he had muscles like Billy Jack, that later in the day I cut my foot on a piece of broken glass in the sand and Metrakos carried me piggyback a hundred yards up the beach to the blanket where Pop had a cooler with ice and drinks. I put ice on the cut, and Metrakos ran back to the water and dived in and swam over the waves and stayed out there swimming for close to an hour.
This beach was ten or twelve miles away on the New Hampshire coast. Sometimes, if a Sunday was real hot and Pop couldn’t
Afterward, if she had the money, we’d continue our Mystery and find ourselves at the drive-in, the sun setting over a massive movie screen rising up out of scrub and weeds. Because of the van, she had to park in the far back and she’d pull it sideways so we could hook three or four speakers onto our open windows, each of us with our own bench seat to stretch out on.
Most of the movies were rated R and most were bad; I remember fast cars and naked breasts and pistol barrels flashing in the sun. Some disturbed me, like Joe where a father hates hippies and gets another father to go shoot up a commune where the first father accidentally kills his own daughter, her dead body lying bloody in the snow. There was Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, Dustin Hoffman playing a hit music composer who has a split personality and ends up committing suicide in his private plane. There was Woody Allen, who talked fast and said funny things about sex I was embarrassed to hear in the van with my mother. But it was the Clint Eastwood westerns I really liked; he could shoot and kill and did it all night long to bad men who’d done bad things to him and his family. He didn’t run from them. He didn’t hide. He faced them, usually three or four at once, and in just a few words he told them what he thought of them, then drew his Colt and gunned them down like the pigs they were.
One Friday when there was a warm, misty rain and we had to roll the van’s windows up, we watched Billy Jack. The lead actor wore a tight black T-shirt that showed off his chest and arm muscles, and he plays an Indian and a Green Beret who fought in Vietnam. He’s also a master in some form of martial art, and he spends a lot of time alone, walking softly, his carved and handsome face shadowed beneath the brim of his black cowboy hat and its band of beads. But then his wife, a kind and pretty blonde, opens a Freedom School for Native American children on the reservation and when she drives the kids into town for ice cream, they get chased out by white racists and she ends up being staked to the ground spread-eagled where she’s raped and left to the ants and the sun and Billy Jack spends the rest of the movie hunting down the men who did it and he beats them to death using roundhouse kicks to the temple, straight rights to the face and heart and groin, fast and lethal moves I’d never seen, these cruel, vicious men reduced to silent bloody heaps on the floor or in the dust.
That night I couldn’t sleep; my heart wouldn’t slow down. I kept seeing myself do that to Clay Whelan and George Labelle and every kid who’d ever punched or kicked or pushed me; I saw myself doing it to the drunk who’d pissed in our hallway; I saw myself doing it to the two or three boyfriends of my mother’s I never liked; I saw myself doing it to anyone, everyone.
3
O NE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Pop drove up to our house on Lime with Theo Metrakos. He had thinning dark hair and a thick mustache, and he was an inch or two shorter than my father but well-built. He was a first-generation Greek studying for his Ph.D. in literature, one of Pop’s roommates in an apartment in Bradford, though I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew is he had muscles like Billy Jack, that later in the day I cut my foot on a piece of broken glass in the sand and Metrakos carried me piggyback a hundred yards up the beach to the blanket where Pop had a cooler with ice and drinks. I put ice on the cut, and Metrakos ran back to the water and dived in and swam over the waves and stayed out there swimming for close to an hour.
This beach was ten or twelve miles away on the New Hampshire coast. Sometimes, if a Sunday was real hot and Pop couldn’t
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