The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(35)

Mom didn’t really like to cook, though we did eat at home most of the time. Meatloaf, ham, hamburgers, hot dogs, and fish sticks were the regulars in her rotation of entrées. The vegetables came out of a can, though Mom, to her credit, knew how to whip up some tasty mashed potatoes. Mac and cheese was a side dish almost every night. It’s amazing that Dad kept his weight at a consistent 173 pounds, a number he proudly reported to us whenever he stepped off the scale.

We also dined out a fair amount, too. The local Sizzler, part of a chain that had only been founded a few years earlier in Culver City, was a go-to spot. Once in a while, we went to the Kings Arms, a medieval-themed luxury restaurant where there was a sword set in stone by the front entrance. Ron and I drank Shirley Temples there. Between the sugar high from those, the cartoons that I had seen about King Arthur’s court, and the Olde English interior decor, I was often motivated to make a dramatic scene of trying to pull that sword out for laughs.

My fondest early memory of brotherhood is of jumping out of bed, before Mom and Dad were up, to join Ron in the hallway, where he lay stretched out near the wall heater, absorbing the Los Angeles Times’s sports section. After our dog Gulliver died, Mom and Dad got us a cat, who we named Mitts because he had an extra pinkie claw that made him look like he was wearing a catcher’s mitt. Ron woke up early to feed Mitts. After that, he brought the newspaper in. I liked to climb onto Ron’s back as he studied the box scores aloud and recounted the highlights from the Dodgers game. Snugly in place atop my big brother, my blond head peering out over his red head, I listened intently as he narrated to me what Don Drysdale, Maury Wills, Tommy Davis, and his beloved Sandy Koufax had done the night before.

There was no safer feeling: the warmth of that heater, the softness of our PJs, the encouraging voice of my brother as he taught me how the game worked.





RON


I loved that sensation of Clint’s weight on my back, and of having someone to evangelize to about my beloved Dodgers. Dad was athletic but never cared much for team sports, being a product of the lonesome prairie. His things were boxing, wrestling, and horseback riding.

I was so successful at explaining batting averages and other baseball statistics to Clint that the teachers at Stevenson Elementary believed that he was a math prodigy. He was bringing some of my lessons into the classroom at kindergarten level. Someone from the school called my parents and said, “He doesn’t just know his numbers, he understands the concepts of multiplication, division, and percentages.”

The school thought it had a legit math genius on its hands, a Good Will Hunting situation. They put Clint in some advanced classes, but then he sort of leveled off in terms of proficiency, and it was deduced, finally, that his facility for reciting baseball stats had created a misimpression.

Still, Clint had a sharp mind. As he evolved from the Hee-Hee Man into my walking, talking roomie, I began to appreciate him as a person. He was funny and irreverent in a way that I wasn’t. As we lay in our beds, we both cracked up at his droll little observations about Dad’s efforts to cover up his thinning hair, the comb-overs and the foggy applications of hold-it-in-place hair spray that drove Mom crazy. (Of course, karma would get back at us in a big way. Early in my Happy Days era, I noted the amount of red hair that was damming up the drain when I showered. I then contemplated the hairlines of every male I had met on both sides of our family and humbly accepted my fate right then and there.)

Clint was also highly coordinated for his age, good enough to play reasonably competitive games of Nerf basketball and Wiffle Ball when we were still little. We also wrestled, as brothers do. Or “rassled,” because that’s how Dad said it, in his otherwise faint Oklahoma accent.

One of our bonding rituals was watching pro-wrestling matches on Channel 5, a local station. We couldn’t get enough of it: the flamboyant heels Freddie Blassie and Gorilla Monsoon, the pretty boys Buddy Rogers and John Tolos, the abnormally huge Haystacks Calhoun. Like lots of kids, Clint and I couldn’t quite suss out if the violence was real. It looked real, but something about it felt a bit . . . theatrical.

Whatever it was, we loved it. Clint and I imitated the pro wrestlers, tackling each other to the floor. Sometimes, when I was pissed off at him for knocking down a Lincoln Log house I’d made or telling on me like a whiny little bastard, our fights turned real. I had a major physical advantage, being five years older, and I would pin Clint to the floor, my face flushed with anger and vengeance. He would scream, “Mommmmmm!”

It was always Dad who ran in and separated us. He had a stock speech that he gave us whenever this happened: “One of these days, you boys are going to be grown men living in different places, and you’re going to wish that you were friends. I hope you really cherish what you’ve got. Because you are brothers, but you have a chance to also be lifelong friends. And that starts now.”

It was a good cooldown speech, but I realize that it was also rooted in a kind of regret. He and his brother Max had an eleven-year age difference and were not close. He didn’t want history to repeat itself.





CLINT


The truth is, Dad loved wrestling as much as we did. He initiated the action by declaring, “C’mon, boys, let’s do some rassling!” We’d move the furniture to prepare the ring, though this didn’t always assure us safety. Doesn’t every boy remember cracking his head on the sofa?