Looking Back Page 8

  Not just the outcomes, either, but the whole world the characters inhabited was reassuringly familiar. I knew where Harriet Nelson kept her stainless steel and where the phone was at the Petries’ house and where Beaver Cleaver sat at the dinner table before he left it (his pie untouched), as he always did when he was in trouble, with “Uh, Mom, could I be ’scused?” I got so I could predict punch lines and endings, not really knowing whether I’d seen the episode before or only watched one like it. There was the bowling ball routine, for instance: Lucy, Dobie Gillis, Pete and Gladys, they all used it. Somebody would get his finger stuck in a bowling ball (Lucy later updated the gimmick using Liz Taylor’s ring) and then they’d have to go to a wedding or give a speech at the PTA or have the boss to dinner, concealing one hand all the while.

  We weren’t supposed to ask questions like “Why don’t they just tell the truth?” These shows were built on deviousness, on the longest distance between two points, and on a kind of symmetry which decrees that no loose ends shall be left untied, no lingering doubts allowed. (The surgeon general is off the track in worrying about TV violence, I think. I grew up in the days before lawmen became peacemakers. What carries over, though, is not the gunfights but the optimism that shone through all those hours spent in the shadows of the TV room, the memory that everything always turned out all right.)

  Motivations stemmed from the most basic things in human nature and so I recognized all that I saw from what I knew of myself. The way Beaver tried to look jaunty, tossing his cap in the air and swinging his lunch box, hoping to conceal the weight of the bad report card inside, the way Dick Van Dyke crossed and uncrossed his legs when he was nervous and rubbed his chin and scrunched his hands deep in his pockets so that his shoulders came up, the way Patty Duke arranged her face just to talk on the telephone, and the way her dumb-nice boy friend Richard looked when he ate a cake she’d made for him and burned—showing us that it tasted awful at the same time he was trying to show her how much he liked it, which showed us how much he must like her.

  There was a congruence to everything that happened on those shows, so that the outcome seemed fated, which excused my passivity and powerlessness as I lay stretched out on the sofa for hours on end, eating grapes, experimenting with red nail polish. (Thy will be done, and not a thing I could do about it, even if I tried—reason enough not to bother.) It was all unstoppable. Steve Douglass would have three sons, one of whom would marry and become the father of, naturally, triplets—three sons. Desi would give Lucy a new dress for Christmas, and he’d be sure to find that Fred Mertz next door had bought one just like it for Ethel. Everything fell into place, just about geometrically, yet watching it happen never seemed dull.

  Many people are shocked and dismayed by the tranquilizing sameness of so many TV shows, I know. They call TV “the boob tube” and speak of the apathy and passivity they feel it produces in young all-day viewers, and often they’re right, it does. I think a lot depends on how a parent guides his children through the television experience, and the dangers brought on by too much easy-chair safety. If all that TV comedies did was to provide us with was a rest from TV tragedies (one half-hour dose of no emotion, to make up for a tense hour spent in the courtroom or the hospital), then they were indeed useless. But as rest spots between moments of real living, as an escape from things that happened in the real world during a decade whose metabolic rate seemed to have been unnaturally sped up, nothing did better than the kinds of TV I drenched myself in, more than I should, probably, on all those afternoons when I came home from school. Even now I don’t know what my mind fills itself with when I watch that kind of television show—maybe nothing at all. I cannot stop the world and get off, or stare at water and go blank, but I can turn on “I Love Lucy” reruns and turn off. Raised in the age of the THINK sign, being able to do just that was, I believe, no small accomplishment.

  My favorite program of all was not a situation comedy, though, but a six-part show about a hospital whose kidney machine could take on only six patients and had applications from twelve. Each week we saw the applicants and their families pleading their cases, listened to the doctors (Kildare and Gillespie) deliberate. Between shows, my friends and I speculated as to who would be put on the machine and which patients’ blood would be left unfiltered to poison and kill them. Like little gods we bent over our carrot sticks and Twinkies, cold-heartedly weighing the age of an applicant’s children against the indispensability of another in a particular chemical plant, against another patient’s wife’s suicidal tendencies, against another’s surly attitude. The week when the doctors’ choices were revealed, I found my guesses had been exactly right. Which proved not that I’d reached some height of wisdom or judgment but only that, just as I’d learned to pick Miss America and her runners-up not on the basis of whom I liked best but by predicting what the judges were looking for; I had learned to second-guess TV.

  What I acquired in my years of Kildare-watching was not a set of ethics but a sense of TV absolutes, the ten commandments of the screen, by which I now know that if a hero falls in love with somebody, she’ll have to die, and that, while mean criminals can get sent to prison, good-ones-gone-astray must end up, instead, with bullets through their hearts, because for them it must be all or nothing, happiness or death, and prison seems too inconclusive a finale. I learned not how things are, but how things are on television, and once having learned that, far from being bored at having lost all feeling of suspense, the need to watch grew stronger. Like the pleasure you get from doing math problems over and over, once you’ve learned the theorem that proves them, I watched to see the patterns I’d become aware of be confirmed. I found it marvelously comforting to feel that at least something in life could be predictable.

  EVERYBODY HAS ONE SOMEWHERE in his memory of growing up—a death remembered, a date whose anniversary you note each year (one year ago today … two …), a place on some highway whose skid marks remind you, a yearbook page, edged in black, “in memory of”—even listing them sounds sentimental and tear-jerking; as the word “prom” carries instant connotations, so does the mention of crashed cars and memorial scholarships. We go back to them at odd times—late at night and full of beer, on New Year’s Eve, in thunderstorms—and tell the story over and over again; like “the night I lost my virginity,” it comes up: your first encounter with death. Grandparents and distant relatives are rarely mentioned—they may be loved, but old people are supposed to die; there’s sadness, but no real shock in that. It’s the death of another young person—maybe one you barely knew—that comes back.

  I don’t think I was abnormally death-possessed, but I thought about it a lot. I worried about my own death, of course, and was fascinated by the deaths of others—people my own age especially. I turned to the newspaper obituary column first thing every day, before Ann Landers and the comics, even, to see if someone young had died, and when they had, I read the announcement several times for any scrap that would reveal what death was like. I pieced together everything I could, hoping to find a clue. “In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to the Cancer Society …” was self-explanatory; “after a long illness …” meant homework missed, a teacher’s visits, maybe, with workbook pages to fill out, or letters sent from everyone at school, composed by the teacher, written on the board and copied by the class, graded for penmanship and sent with a paint-by-number kit they’d all chipped in to buy; “the infant son of” filled my mind, and our recess-time discussions, with visions of failed incubators and quarter-sized coffins. I mulled the details, studied the faces of the mourners, with what must seem cruel fascination. All children do it though. (I had a friend whose parents had forbidden her to say “death” or any word related to it around her younger brother, which didn’t stop his knowing about it, of course, or his thinking about it, but only kept the fear nameless.) It seems a necessary process, the only way to learn about death—getting shocked and shaken until you reach the point where it no longer takes you by surprise, when de
ath seems, finally, natural. It took me years of obituary-reading to arrive at that point, if I am there yet.

  Slowly, at least, I reached the realization that I could go at any moment and that, though I was not allowed to stay up past eight-thirty or ride my bike on the highway, though I didn’t own more than half a dozen Kennedy half-dollars and a few dolls and books, I did own something as awesome as my life, and had the power to end it. I had only to stick my wet hand in the light bulb socket, to close the garage door while the car warmed up on winter mornings or, a little later, when I could drive, to swerve the steering wheel just half a turn, into the left hand lane, and I could bring about a change more catastrophic, to my family, at least, than anything the President or the Russians could accomplish. It wasn’t that I ever considered suicide (though most of us have contemplated it in childhood—after a spanking or a banishment, the momentary thought of “Boy, could I show them …!”); what fascinated me about death was that I could bring it about myself.

  I talked about it, thought about it, studied all evidences of it that I could find, hoping, I guess, that by constant exposure I’d get accustomed to the idea. Walking home from school, after a little boy who lived nearby us had been run over and killed, Becky and I would ponder God and The Universe. (Death always led to discussions of the solar system. Fourth-grade science merged with theology, so that I pictured heaven—not that I really believed, but just in case—somewhere above the rings of Saturn, orbited by a moon, while hell lay ninety-three million miles away in the corona of the sun.) And then, abruptly, we’d switch to the earthly details of the death—“What do you think the little boy’s teacher will do about his name written up on the reading group chart? Will she cross it out or leave it there? What are his parents doing now? Will they eat supper? Do you think they’ll give away his toys? Would you want them?” The possessions of a dead person, the beds they slept in, the chairs they’d sat on, seemed to carry the contagion of death. We knew there were no germs, no viruses attached to car accidents and cancers, but we avoided certain spots of road and certain cafeteria seats anyway, full of the superstitions we all carry about death, bred from its strangeness.

  There couldn’t have been many twelve-year-olds in 1966 or so who ever missed watching “Dr. Kildare.” Not because of Kildare himself—Richard Chamberlain seemed a white-coated neutral quantity to us—but because of the far greater appeal of death and disease. Oh, we bore with him when he took a week every so often to fall in love (once it lasted four consecutive episodes—an Italian romance—and we grew impatient) but what we really loved were the cancer weeks, the amputations, the blindnesses. True, the unhappy patients were only actors giving their all to a juicy part, but I studied their faces anyway to catch a glimpse of death. Those episodes I remember perfectly; they were discussed beforehand from what scraps the previews gave us, prepared for with a fresh batch of chocolate chips or brownies, and watched together sometimes with a next-door-neighbor friend, so we could hug ourselves that it wasn’t us who had only three months to live. I remember the beautiful surfer girl who discovered she had epilepsy, was forbidden to surf and disobeyed Kildare (we saw him in bathing trunks that week) to take her final wave, eyeballs rolling, and die.

  There was the full-grown man who’d lost the power of speech and was reduced to baby talk until, after a night-long session with Kildare, sitting before a mirror mouthing syllables, he came out with the barely comprehensible sound of his wife’s name. (The idea of an adult mind imprisoned in an infantile clumsiness of speech fascinated all of us. When I reminisce with friends about old Kildare shows, they often mention that one. I think it touched on real and thrilling childhood fantasies—the man-baby, totally stripped of dignity as children are so often stripped of theirs.) That ending was presented as a happy one (much to my disappointment, they usually were; patients rarely died) but what we liked about it was the fundamental bleakness of the resolution.

  Another time a teen-age girl lost one eye in a car accident (with her no-good boy friend at the wheel). She didn’t know, at first, that the eye had been taken out, under all those bandages (shades of my all-time favorite childhood movie moment, when Ronald Reagan wakes up, cheerful after an operation by a quack doctor, looks under the sheet and says, “Hey, you cut off my leg!”). Then, after she realized what happened, there were fittings for a glass eye, instructions in using it, then a reuniting with the boy, who loved her even more this way. (Once again, though I knew the actress hadn’t really lost an eye, I watched her face to see if I could tell the difference.) It was all part of accustoming myself to accident and death, searching for the scraps of clues the Kildare shows gave us to what death was really like.

  It must seem that we were morbid, and we were. My friends and I pored over Life magazine whenever it ran photographs of war amputees or thalidomide babies or Siamese twins. Terrible accidents held the same power for us—I remember the photographs Life ran of the Flying Wallendas, moments before their fall, and one eery shot of an airplane stowaway, a teen-age boy, falling from the plane as it took off, and frozen in mid-air, far enough from the ground, I told myself and shivered, to have had time to think. Oh, and the murders. Richard Speck and the eight nurses, the In Cold Blood slaughter and, years later, (I, ashamed now of my interest), the Charles Manson-Sharon Tate killings, the worst of all. The victims’ old yearbook photographs and their ironic near-escapes (“She decided, at the last minute, to stay home…”) all tantalized us. (“What if …” and “if only …” we murmured.)

  The truth was that, though we never would have admitted it, we thrived like vampire bats on these catastrophes—expected them. They gave our lives suspense—who will be next?—and made us thrill at our miraculous survival, imagining dangers and close calls. (“Just think,” a friend told me, “I was in Chicago just two months before those nurse murders. It could’ve been me.”) We all felt newly desirable, the possessors of something—life, and virginity—that every rapist/murderer wants. Violence and danger lurked in every corner, cancer in every glass of diet cola, blindness in every sporty red convertible. So—by the obscure workings of twelve-year-old logic—we all felt safer, snug in our beds the way a flannel-pajama-ed, quilted sleeper feels when he can hear the storm winds rage outside.

  I CAN’T SAY THAT none of us read books, but certainly we weren’t a Generation of Readers. We never had to read—there was always TV, and so we grew accustomed to having our pictures presented to us, our characters described on the screen more satisfactorily, it seemed to many of us, than five pages of adjectives. Once accustomed to television, we were impatient with book dramas: they moved so slowly, took so much effort, required us to visualize things and cluttered the story, as I saw it then, with the superfluous details writers put in only to please English teachers. I skipped over descriptions of people’s eyes or their sitting rooms or the sunsets they walked through, moving instead straight to the action, which could never compete with what I got watching “Highway Patrol” and “Wagon Train.” Having witnessed on the screen whole armies marching, lions moving in on their prey, ghosts, monsters, witches, Martians, nothing that we merely read about could shake us much. Anybody could tell us on paper that something happened (showing it on TV was more respected) but how could we believe it just from wordy hearsay? And for us, believing—having the conviction that what we read was really true—mattered a lot.

  Because the main function of television and movies was, for us, to get the story told, we came to see the arrival, and not so much the journey, as the important part of all fictions —of everything in life, in fact. We are outcome-conscious, we watch or read to see how it all turns out, just as we play to win (it isn’t really, we all know, how you play the game that matters) and enter college to graduate, and graduate to get a job or to get into graduate school. So the purpose of books seemed often simply to move us toward the ending, and if we could have read the last page without plowing through all the others and still have understood what happened, we would have done it.
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  When we read the book it was because we couldn’t see the movie, or because we’d seen it already and wanted to recapture something of the movie experience. (Just as you read a keepsake menu, sometimes, to summon the memory of a good meal.) We’d open Gone With the Wind knowing what Scarlett O’Hara looked like, and what color her dresses were in every scene, and how Melanie wore her hair. The easy short-cut method of description made possible by cameras came to influence our writing and our speech, I think. We lost something of the power to describe from scratch because we no longer needed to. Instead of telling what a friend looks like, we have only to show his photograph and say “He’s really great.” Or that he looks exactly like Steve McQueen. One picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes we read books less to evoke the characters and settings than to evoke the theater we saw the movie in.

  I ordered stacks of school book club paperbacks, “for junior readers,” each month—abridged classics, joke books, high school romances, biographies (Clara Barton—Angel of the Battlefield, Nellie Bly—Reporter. Wernher von Braun, I seem to remember, was Father of Rocketry, or maybe King of Lightning). I lined them up along my bookshelves (alphabetically, by author), but few were ever read. What I liked best was the idea of reading. Wrapped up in quilts before the fireplace, with thunder and lightning pounding outside, and a cup of cocoa or an apple or a bowl of popcorn in one hand, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase in the other, I would stop and think, every other sentence, how nice this was, and that I should do it more often. Like a kid on a rusty Ferris wheel at a just-about-deserted amusement park, screaming “Isn’t this fun?” more in an attempt to believe than in the conviction it was true. I got my pleasure from the image I’d acquired (on TV and in the movies) that things like this were full of atmosphere. The act itself—moving my eyes across the page—almost always put me to sleep. Even Nancy Drew seemed too abstract—words, no pictures.