The World Played Chess (2)

William called it OJT. On-the-job training.

I suppose he was right.

Like most eighteen-year-old young men, I inhabited the center of my own universe, though cosmologists steadfastly maintain the universe has no center, that it will forever expand. Try telling that to a high school senior who thinks he’s immortal because he has yet to experience mortality and indestructible because nothing has harmed him, who believes he can achieve anything he puts his mind to simply because others have said he can.

I said as much in my valedictorian address to my classmates, 172 eighteen-year-old young men. “Good seeds,” I had called them, making an analogy to a biblical psalm. Good seeds who had fallen on good ground and would achieve great things. When I had finished, my classmates stood and applauded because, like me, they believed their futures to also be inevitable and rich with promise. The realities of life had not yet popped the bubbles in which we lived. We did not know that nothing is guaranteed, not even nineteen.

Unlike for my own children, social media had not pierced holes in our naivete. My social media consisted of a rotary-dial phone on the kitchen wall, and good luck competing with four sisters to use it. At eighteen years of age, I could count on one hand the number of times I had stepped on an airplane, and I had never traveled outside the state of California, except during summer vacations at Lake Tahoe when my family crossed the border into Nevada. News of the world came only at prescribed hours of the day, only from three television networks—NBC, ABC, and CBS—and only if I chose to watch it.

I rarely did.

I learned of Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation, and of Elvis Presley’s death in 1977, from important newscasts that interrupted the radio in the car. I did not have the ability to FaceTime, text, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter anyone about these events. Not that I’m sure I would have—except, perhaps, to tweet the death of Elvis. I was, and remain, a fan.

Russia was an evil empire, China an emerging but backward giant, and Vietnam . . . Vietnam was just an annoying country on the other side of the world that the United States had failed to liberate from the bonds of communism.

I couldn’t be bothered with any of it.

I intended to make the most of my last summer before I left for college. I intended to go out every night with my high school friends and drink in—literally—what remained of my youth. I wanted to put off, for as long as possible, the responsibilities and obligations I knew would come with being an adult. I had claimed to anyone who would listen that I was Peter Pan, youthful, carefree, and without worry.

A part of me very much wanted it to be so.

But it couldn’t be.

As my classmates’ applause for my valedictorian address faded in the church vestibule and our principal released the class of 1979 into the world, I rushed out those bronze church doors and never saw the fist that would punch me in the face, the fist that would shatter my illusions about life, death, and my Peter Pan youth—the same fist that would punch Beau in the face his senior year.

Like William, I, too, had intended to be a journalist, and I, too, had kept a journal, a present from my mother on my seventeenth birthday. I diligently kept a record of the events that transpired during the next year, including that summer, because I had also been certain my scribblings would someday be the basis for many novels.

Like William, I shoved my journal in a box and forgot about it. Like William, I gave up my dream of writing a novel.

Until the day his journal arrived in the mail.

I found that box in my attic, and in that box I found my brown leather journal beneath the plaques and medals commemorating my high school achievements. Unlike William, I never had the nerve to throw out those awards. In my attic I thumbed through my journal and read that final entry I had written before I left for college. A poem. A very poor imitation of the great Dr. Seuss. I’d written of the reality that came that summer, despite my best efforts to stop it. It came like the Christmas that Dr. Seuss’s Grinch couldn’t steal from the people of Whoville.

It came, just the same.

September 16, 1979

Reality came last summer without boxes or ribbons or packages or bows.

It came without warnings or excuses,

And gripped me from my head to my toes.

And I puzzled and puzzled till my puzzler was sore.

How could I have missed something at my essence, at my very core?

Reality came, yes it did, with its own devilish plot.

It came like a net, and I like the fish, that in it was caught.

It struck like a fist, hitting me square in the jaw.

A blow without warning, unapologetic, and savagely raw.

The pain lingered for days, then for months and, finally, years.

It lingered and lingered until its message became clear.

The world, it seemed, had been busy playing chess,

While I had played checkers . . . and ignored the rest.





PART I

I AIN’T NO SENATOR’S SON





August 26, 1967

“Don’t stand out. Just blend in. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Mom.”

My mother draped a gold chain over my head and pressed her hand to the crucifix.

“And don’t be a hero. Just blend in and come home.”

“I will,” I told her, because I knew it was what she wanted to hear.

And I didn’t want to think about the alternative.