In Pieces(20)
On her private pages she nonchalantly writes that because we now had no money, she was faced with the overwhelming task of selling the Libbit house and finding us somewhere else to live as quickly as possible, while Jocko vanished. Hired to play the villain in the film Tarzan the Magnificent—which starred Gordon Scott and was being shot in Africa—Jocko had decided to leave weeks earlier than the production needed him. Baa writes that he had to leave, that he couldn’t watch, that he found it too painful to witness everything, all his cherished possessions, dissolve. And so, during the next few months we packed up our belongings and moved from our sprawling house in Encino to a small home in, yes, it’s true… Tarzana. Everything seemed to disappear at once: the house, the Cadillac, and for a while, Jocko.
Unlike the law stating that I couldn’t wear lipstick until I was five feet tall (which didn’t happen until 1963), one of my stepfather’s ironclad rules doesn’t seem completely unreasonable in retrospect. This edict—which Jocko had repeated regularly and emphatically for years—pertained to dating: I was not allowed to do anything that resembled a date, could not go anywhere with a boy alone, until I turned fifteen years old. But I was not quite fifteen when I started the tenth grade and met a boy. And even though I was terrified of Jocko’s scrutiny and avoided inviting anyone to my house, miraculously this boy walked right in, mowing the lawn for Jocko, doing the dishes for Baa, making everything seem easy. So, two days before my birthday, when I hit fourteen years and 363 days, before we moved from the Libbit house and before he departed without a word, Jocko allowed me to go to the movies with Steve.
Steven Craig Bloomfield was born in Fargo, North Dakota, a year and a half before my birth. His father abandoned his family when Steve was only a few months old, never initiating any contact with his son again. Steve then grew up under the scrutinizing eye of his mother, Glory Rose, who was a hard-edged, exacting businesswoman, perhaps because she had to be. And maybe she placed her four-year-old son in a military boarding school because she felt she had to, felt it was the only option she had. Maybe that’s true. But at four?
When Steve was thirteen he no longer went to a military school but attended Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, which at that time was both junior and senior high. Finally free from scratchy wool uniforms, he joined up with a little band of Valley guys who got their kicks from pushing parked cars over whatever cliff was available, occasionally getting lucky when the car landed in someone’s swimming pool. On a smaller scale, they’d fold wads of dog shit into the daily newspaper, set it on fire, then leave it on a stranger’s doorstep after repeatedly ringing the bell. You can imagine what happened when the victim answered the door and began stomping on the package hoping to extinguish the flames.
Never comfortable being one of the gang, Steve split off from that band of merrymakers and started breaking into houses. But not to do any harm. He would find an unlocked window or crawl through the dog door and walk around the home, never actually stealing anything but looking in people’s drawers and closets, or rearranging the furniture the way he thought it should be, then sitting in the house for a while, as if he lived there, always departing through the front door. It was a home, with a family, something Steve didn’t have.
When he was finally caught, Glory found a way to keep her son from being sent to Juvie Hall (a juvenile correctional facility) by agreeing to have him imprisoned in a different institution for a year: a boarding school for children with learning disabilities. Maybe that too was the only option she had, I don’t know. But at the time, the term learning disability could include a whole range of things, so among the students were kids with varying forms of autism and borderline mental health issues, like the overweight fourteen-year-old boy who felt compelled to save all his bodily fluids. There were kids with different degrees of brain damage along with a few whose parents were simply too busy to deal with them.
Luckily, one of the counselors at the facility recognized Steve’s bright mind—which must have been like spotting an orange jellybean in a bowl of green ones. He ordered Steve to go to the small library every morning, find a book, then take it outside and sit under a tree on the big lawn the rest of the day. For one solid year, day in and day out, Steve sat under that tree and read. From Dickens to Hemingway, Steinbeck to Twain and Tolstoy. Devouring book after book.
Steve had spent much of his childhood in institutions, not unlike my grandmother. And whether in a military school or a facility for the mentally challenged, there was always a list of rules, a strict set of enforced boundaries, walls that held him in and doors that locked him out. Steve refused to surrender, refused to play by those rules wherever they were. He went in the door that said Exit and left through the door that said Enter. Forever in deep revolt against the world that tried to tell him in what tempo he had to march, starting when he was only four.
A year or so after being released from the facility, he intercepted me at a school football game, jumped right into step as I walked to the snack bar to get drinks for the girls, who were waving at me from the bleachers. Steve began the conversation by saying that his friend wanted to meet me, then pointed to a boy waiting in the stands, but since that sounded like the prelude to a humiliating prank, I shied away. He kept right on talking, and by the time we’d completed fifteen laps around the snack bar, he’d forgotten about his friend’s attributes altogether and focused entirely on his own. Long after halftime was over, I continued to sit on an empty bench—snackless—with persistent, determined, gentle Steve.