No matter how hard we
try, few of us are able to become very different from the people our childhoods
moulded. I suspect it would be very much more illuminating if, instead of
asking each other to name our 10 favourite albums, we instead enquired about the
iconic experiences of our respective childhoods.
I can’t remember a
time when I wasn’t clumsy and physically inept. One of my earliest memories is
of being unable, at around four, to master the art of tying my own shoelaces.
In a way, I was born into the wrong body — one that tends to stumble a lot, to
lurch, to collide with immobile objects. As a boy, I wanted desperately to be
strong and fast and agile, to be as athletic as my most admired of my
classmates were. Being smart was no consolation whatever, especially because I
wasn’t quite smart enough — as how many children are? — to recognise that I
ought to have played to my strengths and left the sports that I adored, but
played dreadfully, to others.
When I was around
eight, my dad won me a new Schwinn bicycle in a supermarket-sponsored
competition by being better at colouring than any of the children who’d
entered. Another boy — A Real Boy — might have been elated, especially if able
to accept the morality of his father’s having cheated on his behalf. (Dad was
sure lots of fathers had done as he’d done.) I was the opposite of elated. What
if, when the guy at Thriftimart presented my bike, he chuckled, “Well, don’t
you want to take her out for a little spin?” That I couldn’t ride a
two-wheeler was one of the most
shameful of a whole trunkful of secrets I lived in mortal fear of others
discovering when I was a boy.
Dad took me
up to a sparsely populated, traffic-less side street in our little southern
California beach town to teach me to ride, but it was hopeless. Sitting on the
bike, I was probably half a foot taller than when standing, and, given my
defective sense of balance, I had no doubt I’d fall off and hurt myself if I
tried to ride. Not that being paralysed with fear was new to me. I’d been comparably
paralysed four years earlier when Dad, who’d adored frolicking in the Atlantic
in southern New Jersey during his own boyhood, tried to get me to go into the
ocean with him. Mom had vividly communicated her fear of the water to me, and I
wouldn’t finally learn to swim until around 14. Dad made no secret of his disappointment.
(Throughout
my childhood, he’d tell me he was going to teach me to swim as he himself had learned. He’d take me to a public swimming pool and toss me in. I’d either
figure out what to do or drown. Child abuse, without a finger being lifted.)
So here we
are at last in the Signature Moment of My Childhood. My dad is taking a
cigarette break from the frustration of trying to get his son to…man up a
little bit, shaking his head in frustration and incredulity. I am sitting on
the curb near my accursed bicycle, drowning in my own shame, hoping, as I have
never hoped for anything else, that the world will end before he can finish his
cigarette and sigh, “Let’s give it another try.”
The world
doesn’t end, and I don’t find the necessary courage to mount the bike. Disgusted and defeated, Dad
takes another tack. He’ll go home, and I can learn to ride the bike at my own
pace. I can ride my bike home.
After maybe half an
hour of continuing to hope in vain that the world will end, I get up on the
bike, push off from the curb, and almost immediately fall off, face first,
knocking out my three front teeth. Some things just feel destined.
The good
news. I was riding by the age of nine— just like A Real Boy! — and loving it. And 10 days ago, during the infernal heatwave,
I swam back and forth across the Thames twice. (I finally learned at 14.)
The bad news. My
largely excruciating childhood produced an adult that, as in my song FrenchFries for Breakfast, hated himself, but hated the world much more, and wasn’t
stingy, when the world began viewing him (as though for some vicious prank) as gorgeous and bright and talented,
with gratuitous cruelty, my many memories of which are nearly as painful as
that of the morning on a quiet street in Playa del Rey that cost me my front teeth.
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