of her time to lie on the sand and let me build castles, because being connected to the rhythms of the ocean cleansed her body and her spirit. They were big words, which made an impression on a small boy: I must have been aware already at that point that things were not going as they should.
The beach just south of here—Ocean Beach proper—is where Gus took me surfing when I came back to Point Loma from my exile in the boys’ school. I’d been away for my sophomore and junior years, and I’d hated it. After I married Caroline and went back east and got to know people who’d grown up there, I discovered that there were schools where academic excellence was considered as important as sports or meeting boys who would form an old boys’ network in ten years’ time. But the school my parents sent me to wasn’t a Western version of Choate or some other Ivy League prep school, nor was it a Jesuit or Christian Brothers school, where there was a centuries-old tradition of dedicated teaching.
No, what they put me in was an imitation military academy, which advertised itself as making men out of boys. There were drills and parades and uniforms and teachers you could only address after saluting and whom you had to call “Sir.” There were also a lot of boys who were having problems adjusting to a new stepfather or who had parents who travelled a lot or, as in my case, had death hovering over their families. Some of the boys were cruel, some of them were stupid, none of them came from Point Loma or Ocean Beach, and I had very few friends.
I was bad at everything except the school work (which wasn’t very challenging to anyone who could read with ease) and target practice. The school had two rifle ranges: one outside where we used three artillery pieces left over from the First World War as well as .22s; and one underneath the gymnasium where we shot .22s and handguns. I liked the smell there, and the feel of lying on my belly and shooting at a target, with the weapon rebounding against my shoulder, the sudden noise that stopped my breathing, the satisfaction of hitting something far from me with what might be deadly force.
During those years I lived for the summers and holidays, even though the house was heavy with my mother’s illness. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer when I was fourteen, but her health problems had begun before that. By the time I was ten, her arthritis had made it hard for her to walk along the shore or carry her easel and watercolours. She tried to ignore her sore and swollen joints—perhaps to protect me—but I didn’t mind fetching and carrying what she couldn’t handle herself. She was funny, she was cheerful, she was affectionate. None of which my father was.
But then she went into remission and, through one of those quirks that medicine can’t explain, the arthritis all but disappeared too. Both she and my father knew that it wouldn’t last, but they didn’t tell me. They just asked if I wanted to stay in San Diego and do my last year of high school at Point Loma.
I said yes without thinking twice. It couldn’t be worse than the boarding school, I told myself when I had a chance to think about what it meant—coming into a place where people had been together for sophomore and junior years already, where I’d have to try to make friends again.
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