Escaping fate, p.18
Escaping Fate, page 18
It occurred to me that Dad came from the same generation as my biological parents, but that never caused him to cut them any slack. He bad-mouthed his own generation worst of all.
He reached for his beer, took a gulp, watched it as he swirled it around a bit, then took a bigger gulp. "I'm telling you all this because I don't want you to get frustrated, and think of yourself as a freak because you don't fit in. I'm not advising you to be a conformist—I would never ask you to do that. But you'll get along much better if you self-regulate what you say and what attitudes you allow to show."
I nodded soberly, appreciating the apparent gravity of his message while trying to conceptualize all he said.
He studied me, then nodded.
"Oh, and, if you're still interested, the junior high school I'm enrolling you in has a football team."
Chapter 20: Pathways
I wouldn't understand right away why Dad believed the 1950s to be the best time period to grow up in, mostly because I subconsciously connected quality of life to advanced technology. Cars and trucks were still powered with flathead engines—the overhead valve V-8 wouldn't become the prominent powerplant for a couple years. Jet aircraft were new and cutting edge, but most planes were still propeller-driven. And computers were enormous vacuum-tubed monstrosities with extremely limited usefulness.
Television was all the rage. Every kid wanted one, but not every family had one yet. The ones who did only owned one set, and they would all watch it together in their living room on weekday evenings after supper. Those who didn't have one would sit in their living room listening to radio programs instead—Archie Andrews, The Lone Ranger, Dragnet, etc.
Families even ate their meals together, around the same table (but with no television blaring). This was normalcy at these coordinates, I found out. Families actually enjoyed spending time together. Parents valued their children. It was common to consider kids a blessing—not a curse.
Adults out of high school got married as early as possible and started having kids. It was more important to them than high-powered careers and big paychecks, apparently. (Not that it was difficult to make enough money to live comfortably at these coordinates.) Family was of utmost importance to adults, and they gave their kids everything they wanted.
Dad said the generation that I was now imbedded in was the most pampered in world history. Of course, they didn't have all the nifty technology that would come later, but I came to understand he was right, anyway. Their parents had survived the Great Depression, and were determined to provide for their children's financial security, so they would never have to go through that hardscrabble existence themselves. Not only did the kids eat well, they were also usually given all the luxuries available at the time. Their parents set aside savings for vacations and such, money for the kids' college educations (enough for the entire ride—tuition, room & board, etc.), and even nest eggs of cash for the kids to make down payments on their own first house. All this on a single income by fathers working regular jobs, from which they could retire in middle age and live comfortably off the pension.
The children who grew up in this jackpot of unprecedented affluence and freedom would show their appreciation by strangling the Golden Goose so that following generations could never enjoy the same benefits. But, Dad reminded me, we had ways of escaping those consequences.
There were no women like my biological mother in our new neighborhood—or much of anywhere, so far as I knew. Divorce was little more than a concept, outside Hollywood; and unwed mothers were unheard of. Nearly every grown woman knew how to cook and bake, and girls learned when they were teenaged, or younger.
Another strange scenario in this world was grocery shopping. Instead of going to one store to get everything, housewives went to the butcher shop for meat, the bakery for bread (if they didn't bake it themselves), a farmer's market for fruits and vegetables, and the milk man delivered dairy products. Staples of the diet were not laden with industrial chemicals. There was hardly any fast food, junk food, or TV dinners, and the diet really agreed with me. Real butter tasted better than margarine; homemade bread and deserts were fantastic; beef was plentiful and cheap; and I felt healthier than I'd ever been.
NOT LONG AFTER WE MOVED into our nice, two-story house, Dad brought home Angelina—a beautiful Italian woman who cooked, cleaned, did laundry, sewed, knitted, and spoke English with a heavy Sicilian accent. She hugged and kissed Dad all the time, sat in his lap, and shared the master bedroom with him. She was a friendly enough lady (like Carmen), but my loyalty to Mami kept me from reciprocating her affection at first.
Nevertheless, Dad told me I had to call her "Mom." She knew me as "Isaac" right from the beginning.
Dad's cover story for her (to any curious outsider) was that they met when Dad was in Italy. After the war, he returned to visit her, and they wound up getting married before he brought her to the States with their young son (me) in her belly. The timing seemed a bit off, since that meant I couldn't have been born until 1946 at the earliest, but Dad accounted for that anachronism by claiming I had been moved up two grades in school because of gifted placement scores. That was a laugh, considering what a lousy student I was.
Dad advised me not to share the cover story with my peers if I didn't have to. They probably wouldn't ask to see my birth certificate or compare notes with adults who did hear the cover story, and so would assume I was their age. Not knowing I was supposed to be years younger than them, it wouldn't seem odd that I matured more or less at the same pace they would mature. It was all pretty confusing.
I don't know how he convinced Angelina to go along with this whopper, or exactly what cover story he gave her, but he seemed to have no worries about letting her make friends with other housewives, and chatting away to her heart's content.
Years later I would theorize that he had married into an old Mafia family through Angelina. Sicilian women in those families were used to keeping secrets, preferred not to know everything their husbands were involved in, but were fiercely faithful through and through.
The genius of Dad's plan only became obvious after I heard him give the cover story to a neighbor couple who ate supper with us one night. Mr. White did the math, glanced at me, then developed a smirk, revealing he didn't buy it at all. He correctly identified it as a cover story, but didn't guess it was meant to conceal time travel. He assumed Angelina got knocked up when Dad got a three-day pass after helping liberate Sicily, married her a couple years later, and concocted the fiction to avoid the embarrassment associated with children born out of wedlock in the postwar era.
It was obvious to me Angelina adored Dad—as did all the other wives/mistresses of his I would meet. What surprised me was how deeply he treasured each one of them, individually. I didn't understand that. With a wonderful woman like Mami, why would he need anyone else? And how could he love more than one?
But Dad didn't just live at one coordinate—he bounced around between several, and wanted a good woman waiting for him at every one. He didn't trust any of them to the point he would tell them about jumping warps. Much less show them.
Not that I knew much yet, but I thought I would rather settle down with just one woman—one who was trustworthy enough to take wherever I went in the continuum.
Gloria would be that woman, of course.
DAD SPLIT MY BIRTHDAY celebrations up between Mami and Angelina, who both spoiled me with presents, cakes, and sumptuous meals.
On top of school, Dad had his own curriculum for me. I resumed training; and once I learned all the kicks and hand-foot combinations, Paulo began teaching me grappling techniques. I didn't enjoy grappling as much as striking, but I guess I was a natural at it. I picked it up so fast, Paulo quickly moved on to training me how to fight multiple assailants. Dad also began teaching me in the use of weapons—not just martial arts weapons, but pistols, shotguns, and rifles. We overhauled another engine together, and a transmission, too. He began teaching me how to drive. My first flying lessons also began that year, in a little single-engine biplane.
We did all this on weekends or evenings after school. I had no trouble falling asleep at bedtime.
Dad kept his word about letting me see Mami regularly. I grew very attached to her, and she fell in the habit of telling me she loved me, both in English and Spanish. She was in my Top Two List of the best things that ever happened to me..
Dad had a system and kept meticulous notes on our warp jumps. When we visited Mami, for instance, we had to be careful that the next time we saw her it would be the next weekend in her timestream—not the day before or three years later. This held true for every person in their respective timestreams, and it would prove crucial on Christmas each year when he visited all his different homes and women.
At first I only accompanied him to the Orange Grove and BH Station, because Mami, Carmen, and Angelina were the only ones who knew me (or knew of me, perhaps). So I started off with a triple Christmas, when even just one Christmas with dad scored me more presents than I ever received before. That first year he replaced my football, for one gift. He also got me a heavy bag, double-end bag, bag gloves, an encyclopedia, some books, stacks of pulps and comic books, my own radio, a a bike, a Swiss Army knife, and a BB gun. Mami gave me a sweater (she knitted herself), a fedora, a telescope, a model car, truck, boat and plane.
My emotional state in this life was polar opposite from what it had been before...yet it wasn't without some bad days. Those were almost completely my fault, because even though I had nothing to complain about, I did sometimes complain anyway. I guess I got so acclimated to the good life that I occasionally forgot to be grateful. I would temporarily forget what life could be like without all these privileges and benefits. It's dumbfounding how fickle human beings can be—especially children. So anyway, Dad had to correct me when I had ungrateful, ignorant, and rebellious episodes. I'm sure he would have used corporal punishment if necessary, but all he had to do was get me to think of the big picture and how my attitude or behavior fit into it. More often than not, he was able to nip my bellyaching in the bud by simply saying, "Sorry your life turned out so rough, Hero."
As much as I admired Dad and loved being part of his family, I recognized, even at my age then, that he had some issues.
Dad sometimes seemed to almost enjoy seeing certain people suffer (though he was never that way with me). One time we saw a guy on a motorcycle tearing up and down the street. At each end he would skid the bike sideways to slide to an impressive stop—similar to how a skater or downhill skier would. Then he would burn out while spinning the bike around with the front brake locked, marking huge black rubber circles at each end of the street before tearing off to do the same thing again. But one time as he skidded into what would be another dramatic sliding stop, something happened. The bike flipped, sending him flying from the seat. The motorcycle tumbled along the pavement, bouncing off his body a couple times until man and machine finally lost their momentum and slid to a stop, in a badly battered condition.
I and most everyone else who saw it happen were shocked, and fearful that the rider was hurt or killed. Dad thought it was hilarious. I didn't see him laugh that hard...well, almost ever.
Another time he raced some foppish guy, in a sports car, with the Willys...and blew the guy's doors off. Afterwards the guy demanded to see under the hood, and got arrogant. Of course, Dad wasn't going to let him snoop around the car, and brushed him off. The guy made the mistake of giving Dad a shove to emphasize that he was serious.
The fop never had a chance. He was well out of the fight by the time Dad started bouncing his head off the ground. Dad stopped himself before the guy's skull cracked open, but it sure looked as if he was taking pleasure in the brutality of it all before he quit.
Other times, Dad would drink.
He wasn't a mean drunk, necessarily. He didn't bully me or push his women around. He just became increasingly taciturn until he would finally pass out. Sometimes, before he did, he would mutter, "If only I had known then what I know now..."
I didn't know why a man like Dad, who had everything a man could want (and then some), would need to hit the bottle the way he did. But I was one of those kids who pretty much accepted adults the way they were, not really pondering why they might be that way. Maybe that was a hallmark of my native generation.
Dad and I were watching Terminator II one time at BH Station, and he was drinking. The first time through the movie, when normally we both remained silent, we got to the part where young John Connor explains to the good Terminator what his mother's message "NO FATE" meant, and Dad erupted.
"That's horseshit!"
I turned from the screen in surprise to look at him.
Red-faced, he declared, "Fate is a force to be reckoned with, whether you want to believe it or not. And it's a scheming, petty, sadistic bitch, too. It doesn't care what we 'make for ourselves.' It stalks us like a damn lion! If we don't make a mistake it can exploit, it'll just bring in something or someone else to fuck us up!" He glared at me, jabbing an index finger toward my face. "Some people are born with a golden horseshoe up their ass. But then there's people like us. We were put here just to suffer failure and defeat. Over and over again, Our whole miserable lives."
An ugly, malevolent grin twisted his face. "But I cheated that bitch. When she wasn't looking, I slipped the hand Fate dealt me back into the deck, and stole some good cards meant for one of her golden horseshoe butt boys."
He laughed so harshly that he wound up coughing.
"I punked her ass, good," he said, sneering, before swigging more vodka. Then he turned angry again. "But she's a vindictive whore and she never quits. I pissed her off, is what I did. Watch yourself, Ike. She's out there looking for you. Trip up and she'll find you. I guarantee she wants revenge for you escaping."
"Fate?" I asked.
"Damn right."
I didn't know if all this was something he believed when he was sober. I asked him if this person or being he referred to as "Fate" was an actual person—the one who sent the Erasers after me. But by then he was watching the movie again.
"That's some stupid bullshit, too," he said, shaking his head. He had moved on to the next problem with the movie (as he saw it), his tirade of moments before seemingly forgotten. "You can't stop the advance of technology by killing one dude."
Something came over him when he talked about fate, that was way beyond anger...and it scared me, whether he was drunk or sober. But the concept didn't strike me as lunacy, either. Quite often in my former life, I had entertained notions of some unseen, sadistic killjoy pulling strings from behind the scenes to make me miserable. Conventional wisdom was to chalk all my experiences up to life's "ups and downs" with "occasional bouts of bad luck." I was just a pessimist, according to common sentiment, with fantasies of persecution. The pendulum swings both ways, Spoil Sport.
I remembered that mindset, but didn't live with it anymore. Not since Dad transplanted me into a radically different life, and the pendulum swung in the opposite direction.
ON MY FIRST DAY OF school, Dad drove me.
He parked in front of the school, where we could see hundreds of kids milling around outside before they went in for their first period classes.
"Take a good look at all of them," Dad said.
I looked.
"In a way, this is a microcosm for your life as a whole," Dad said. "Out of all those kids there, you can make friends with some of them. There's plenty of cute girls—some of them might become girlfriends. Each relationship you develop, whether it's romantic or platonic, will alter the path you walk through life. They may swing your path to the left or right, by a little bit or a lot."
"How would they do that?" I asked.
"Because, even with independent thinkers like you, friends and girlfriends will influence the decisions you make. The deeper that friendship is, the bigger the decisions they can influence."
"What decisions are you talking about?"
He shrugged. "Right here and now: what electives you choose. Whether you go to class or skip. How you behave when you do go to class. Whether or not you study and do homework. Hence, whether you pass or fail, which means whether you advance to the next grade, or get left behind and have to do the year over again. Whether you play football or not. What position you try out for. How well you memorize the playbook. Whether you work hard at practice, or goof around and slack off. Hence, whether the coach plays you or not. If you become friends with the wrong kids, they may influence you to shoplift, or vandalize other people's property, bully younger kids, or other stupid stuff."
"I won't make friends like that," I said, confidently.
"I hope you're right. But shitbags like that are usually the most charming, persuasive people out there. You won't realize what assholes they are until you get to know them—and then you'll try to overlook their shortcomings because you're a loyal person. Savvy?"
"I guess so. Kinda'."
"It'll be harder for friends to change your path too much right now, because you got me. If they try to pull you off too far to the left or right, I'm gonna put you back on track. The real danger is if you don't understand the seriousness of this once you're out on your own, and you don't need my permission on big decisions."
I stared out into the crowd of kids, my mind wandering away from Dad's lecture.
He thumped me in the chest with the back of his hand.
"Pay attention, Sprout! I know it doesn't seem like it right now, but I'm telling you this to help you have a happy life."
"Okay," I said, respectfully. He had scared me into taking his advice seriously.
"Let's say you're 17 years old and out on your own. You have a high school diploma and the world is your oyster. You meet a girl and want her. Seems like she wants you too. You date for a while. She strikes you as the bee's knees, and you get married. You have a kid, or two. Then the drama begins. If you're stupid, you just let her make all the decisions. Or you try to make the decisions, but she fights you on everything. You spend all your time fighting. You're miserable. Eventually you start to appease her, hoping it will give you a little peace. So you change your decisions according to her demands. But the peace only lasts until the next decision. So you appease her again, and again, and again.
