Marty White knew his life was going to be different the day he came home from school to find naked hippies jumping off the roof into his family’s swimming pool. Being only twelve years old, he simply didn’t understand just how different it would be! He heard yelling, and huge splashes in the back yard that sounded like depth charges. Dropping his school backpack in the hallway (which always used to make his dad furious), he went into the kitchen for a closer look. Someone had been smoking in there, and it wasn’t cigarettes! Rock music was playing loudly from a beat up old radio on the melamine kitchen table. “Excuse me, while I kiss the sky!” Jimi Hendrix ripped through the purple haze of late summer shadows. For a well-behaved suburban boy like Marty, the concept of what constituted a “normal” life was about to become a moving target for several years.
Opening the sliding glass doors, he heard a noise and looked up. Two husky, bearded men were up on the roof of his two-story, upper middle class tract home, silhouetted against the sun. As he shaded his eyes in amazement, they plunged into the large swimming pool, feet first; with gusto. “Yahoo-o-o-o!” They just stepped off and plummeted twenty feet straight down like incoming missiles, and Marty was shocked to realize they weren’t wearing bathing suits! One had his hand over his nuts; the other’s parts waved wildly as the hairy torpedoes hit the water, one right after the other. Ker-splash! Ka-ploosh!! A huge spray of water doused the patio where Marty stood next to his mother, Marjorie, and his breath caught in his throat. Ouch! That must have hurt!!
He looked at his mom, incredulous. Thankfully, she was at least wearing her swim suit. Then he noticed she had a can of beer in her hand on a Friday afternoon, which seemed totally out of place. She saw him looking, and tried to hide it. “I’ll explain later,” she muttered through her teeth in a tone of voice that squashed the conversation underfoot like a bug.
Suddenly, another long-haired projectile vaulted over the railing of the master bedroom balcony. Splash! At least this one wore cutoffs! Right after him came a fourth scraggly missile, running naked out of the bedroom and hurdling over the balcony railing; crashing into the pool with all five of his appendages flailing. Ker-splash! He narrowly missed the diving board and the other bobbing beatniks, who cheered his daring with rowdy enthusiasm.
This couldn’t be happening, Marty puzzled with mouth agape. It must be some sort of dream, or a reaction to the slightly spoiled bologna sandwich I had for lunch, he mused dumbly. He looked around as if to validate his surroundings in the richly landscaped backyard, with its huge redwood deck, rhododendron bushes, and blue swimming pool, in which now churned an exuberant flotilla of laughing, long-haired lumberjacks enjoying their nude pool party. He peeked downhill to his right, through large glass panels in the fence to the backyard of his nosy neighbor, Mrs. Peabody. She stood in her garden, transfixed with curiosity, shading her eyes up at the noisy spectacle with a huge frown under her wide-brimmed hat. The water from her hose had overflowed the planting box, and was spreading mud onto her clean walkway. Marty was certain that the homeowner’s association would hear about this!
One of the roustabouts who had jumped off the roof thrust his beefy arms out over the side of the pool, squinting into the sun. “You must be Marty,” he said, white teeth gleaming behind a copper beard. In one agile motion, the burly man pushed himself out of the pool to his feet, and walked full frontal and dripping towards the skinny, Beatle-haired boy, with his huge hand offered in an easy, friendly way. He was over six feet tall, and his entire muscular body was covered with curly red hair. “I’m Jimbo, pleased t’meet ya.” Marty tried to look only at his eyes as he lost his hand in Jimbo’s huge, calloused catcher’s mitt.
Another naked, hairy mountain of a man slapped his huge feet across the wet cement, tapping water from his ears. “I’m Jack,” he said pleasantly with a wave, as he groped for a towel on the back of a chair. He resembled one of those ersatz wrestlers on TV, but without the tights.
Jimbo posed like a red and white Colossus of Rhodes in the sun, with hands on hips and chest out, surveying the frothing water and shouting men, who had only one swimsuit between the two of them. “That’s Frank, and that’s Frodo.” A pretty blonde lady was now waving at him, and leaning over the balcony with bare breasts. “And that’s Linda.”
Marty tore his twelve-year-old eyes away from the bare breasts and gawked at his mom, silently demanding an explanation now, please. “They’re my friends,” she said with a shrug, sipping her beer awkwardly from the can.
“Wanna go swimming?” Frank (or Frodo?) called from the pool.
“C’mon, join us!” The other one chimed in.
“No thanks, I have homework.” For once, he was grateful for his sadistic seventh grade math teacher, who often gave assignments on weekends. He opened the wet sliding glass door and went back inside warily, wondering if more naked giants or Hobbits might be frolicking in the kitchen. The coast was clear. He grabbed his bag and stopped at the foot of the stairs, suddenly remembering there were Bare Breasts up there. The door to the master bedroom was wide open, and he could see movement. Quick as a chimpanzee, he dashed out the front door and clambered up the fence up to his balcony, as he often did to get inside the house undetected. The young Tarzan entered his bedroom through the window, put a chair under the knob of the door, and sat down to think. Did that just happen? He stood up again, put on a Jim Croce album to drown out the unusual noises, and asked himself rhetorically, what would my dad say if he saw that?!
“You don’t tug on Superman’s cape,
You don’t spit into the wind,
You don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger, and
You don’t mess around with Jim.”
Marty’s parents had been divorced for only a month. The pressure of their separation had been building up for years, until it suddenly erupted like a volcano earlier that summer. First his dad was there; then he wasn’t. One evening, he noticed his father’s brooding, taciturn presence was missing from the “family room” (which had been poignantly undeserving of that label for years). He asked his mom where he was, and she burst into tears. “David and I are getting a divorce,” she blubbered through theatrical sobs of shame. “But don’t worry, we’re still a family.” He was stunned, and somewhat vexed. Marty had known for a long time that his parents disliked each other intensely, and were basically posing as a sham couple for the neighbors, but the reality of their split-up came as a total shock. In a childlike way, he had never considered the possibility that they would not all be living in the same house.
“Where is he?” Marty asked at the time, trying not to cry and hating the sudden lump in his throat. In a confused way he felt responsible, as if his father had died and he was now the man of the family.
“He’s getting his own place, I don’t know,” she sniffed, “But you, your sisters, and I are staying right here in this house.” Her lower jaw thrust out and her face became hard and resolute, as it often did when she talked about ‘that man.’ “He’s not welcome here anymore. I have new friends, now.”
The official family records will show that Marty’s dad was a selfish, petulant tyrant, and a relentless psychological bully. Self-centered and self-righteous to the extreme, he enforced detailed, arcane rules of conduct for every facet of his children’s lives, and strictly evaluated their performance against his standards. As a result, the kids avoided him as much as possible, which suited him just fine. The less he had to consider other people, the better. For many years he was increasingly absorbed in one ambitious project after another, in order to avoid domestic contact. First, he built a deck the size of a basketball court. Then he restored an antique car. Well, he intended to restore it, but just took it all apart, labeled the pieces, and put all the small ones into little numbered boxes. Then he created an index to all their locations. Even the nuts and bolts that held the frame together were catalogued and labeled. His obsessive compulsions made squirrels look downright apathetic!
Then he designed and built an addition to their house, using his domestic subjects as slave labor. Marty, his mom, and sisters mixed bags of cement for the foundation, hauled lumber, and listlessly cleaned up the construction site, all under the watchful eye of the merciless Pharaoh. He drove them all to tears on more than one occasion, and begrudged the lost hours of labor they spent licking their wounds. There was never any appreciation or approval for what anyone did, so Marty performed his assignments poorly until the intolerant taskmaster would make a big deal out of showing him the ‘proper’ technique. In this way he won a small victory from time to time, as prisoners might privately exult to trick the guards in a minor infraction. The megalomaniac would take off his shirt and work outside until he couldn’t see anymore, seething with resentment at being surrounded by such incompetent minions, while they covertly mocked him from inside the house.
Julie was the first to rebel openly, by wearing a hippie headband and bell-bottomed jeans on her first day of high school. Her dad grounded her for a week, and deliberately picked her up from school just to embarrass her. Marty, ever the good boy, tried hard to please his father by getting superlative grades and doing his chores, but was never given any acknowledgement for the effort. If there was anything less than an A on his report card, he’d have to pull extra weeds in the yard. It was a very big yard. Susie, the youngest, spent most of her time trying to avoid the ogre’s wrath whenever possible. She was an unplanned pregnancy; a failure of preparation on the part of her mother, who never lived it down. Even though it wasn’t Susie’s fault she was born, her father always found a way to make her feel that way. “We could have bought the four-piece dining room set and saved money,” he’d say when he noticed the sixth chair sitting vacant.
David’s mania for control pushed him to design and build a complex model railroad setup that nobody was allowed to touch. It was his own precise, detailed world over which he could exert clear dominion. It had a custom-built table to support an intricate layout, with the sides painted in drab military colors to feature the tiny, colorful trains and miniature buildings. Of course, the sly inmates of his domestic penitentiary inspected it thoroughly when he wasn’t there, and put all the parts back exactly as they had found them. Even so, he often suspected someone had been trespassing on his miniature N-gauge kingdom. His intense blue eyes swept across the room like prison yard searchlights from behind his magnifying goggles in the evening, after he’d had a few “drinkie dinkies.” He knew when his things had been touched, and was frustrated at having no evidence with which to confront anyone. He slowly worked his jaw from side to side, chewing on an impotent fury that had no outlet. In another corner of the room he was constructing a scale model of a geodesic dome, with all the measurements and angles calculated from scratch on his slide rule. In truth, if he’d invested in his family relationships just a fraction of the energy he put into in his hobbies, he could have reaped rich dividends as a husband and father. However, that was not where his heart found its treasure.
On Friday nights, he forced the troops to gather together and watch All in the Family, which was a terribly ironic choice of programming. Marty thought his dad actually admired Archie Bunker, and wanted others to see what an important role model he was for maintaining order and discipline in a household. It was easy to laugh at the outrageous bigotry of Archie, but Marty secretly rooted for the subversives: Gloria and her husband, Mike, aka “meathead.” From the genius of the writers, the impressionable boy learned quite a bit about the counter-cultural shift that was happening at the time.
The White House was going through the Watergate cover-up at the same time the White family was creating its own scandals. While Nixon was paranoid and delusional, and in total denial that things were falling apart all around him, Marty’s father officially renounced his domestic responsibilities. Apparently, he had come to realize that he preferred a different lifestyle than raising children. For Marty, the thing that hurt most was the utter callousness with which the choice was made. There was no explanation to his underlings, no patronizing letter of transition, and certainly no apology. He cast aside their lives with no more compunction than donating some old clothes to Goodwill.
There was a knock at the door, interrupting Marty’s sad reminisces. “Honey, are you in there?” That was his mom, with her usual delayed-reaction pangs of guilt. He could imagine her on the other side of the door, playing with her hair and ravaging her fingernails, which she often chewed when agitated. Marjorie was the type of mom who would worry about not having anything to worry about.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” Marty chirped with fake good cheer, and spread out his homework as if he’d been working on it. His sisters were down at the equestrian center of their posh neighborhood, and might be home any minute. He hurried so he could witness their reactions to the hairy beef stew in their swimming pool.
Marjorie was a beautiful soul who would give her last meal to a stranger. She had a rebellious streak, and mistrusted authority, but didn’t have enough courage to stand up to G.O.D., or “Good Ol’ Dad,” as the kids called him behind his back. His Lordship fancied himself a playboy entitled to have many women, and to satisfy his conceited fantasies he would force Marjorie to change her appearance drastically on a regular basis. It was a bizarre masquerade for which she had several wigs and a variety of wild Seventies outfits. One weekend she’d be a hip-looking redhead, and other times dressed to the nines as a blonde bombshell. She rarely went out with her Lord and Master as the kids saw her every day: a petite, pretty brunette with blue jeans, a bob haircut, and horn-rimmed glasses. She silently bore a constant, suppressed tension from playing the role of “the good wife” in photographs or in public, while secretly yearning to be herself. Good Ol’ Dad liked to show her off regularly down at the country club, where the Saturday night dinners were a ruthless, bloody arena for the fashion gladiators.
For her kids, whom she considered the only good things to come out of her marriage, she strove valiantly to be a sturdy shield against the wrath of G.O.D. She surreptitiously softened their frequent punishments, and showed leniency when they truly deserved discipline. Owing to an unusual thirst for affection, she was keen to be liked by children. When hers were younger she used to join in their silly games, and on birthdays she’d create fanciful cakes in the shapes of animals. This seditious gaiety lost momentum over the years as the tension level increased in the household, the way a wartime actress recites her tired, old lines to the troops. She had married young, and gave up a promising career as a special needs teacher to raise a family. Over time, her disappointment at the choices she made in her life slowly fermented into a noxious, contentious brew of resentment that sometimes made her drunk with shame.
On that day, however, the sense of freedom was spontaneous and infectious. By the time Marty’s sisters came home, the new revolutionaries were all respectably clothed. Julie, the buxom 15-year-old who knew everything and always had to be in control of every situation, was straining to appear casual, as if naked hippie pool parties were nothing new. Little skinny Susie, who bore the brunt of their collective suffering as serfs of a feudal tyrant, furtively looked around as though she was doing something wrong. In discreet moments, Marty told them of the debauchery and nakedness he had witnessed, and their mouths dropped open with shock, never to close again the rest of the night. Loud music and laughter shook the walls all that evening, instead of yelling and crying. New faces, sounds, and smells were everywhere. Despite all the strangeness, their tense and constrictive suburban manor was somehow made expansive and cheery for the first time. It was the weirdest slumber party, ever! Julie and Susie looked at their brother as if he was supposed to provide an explanation.