was like comparing pictures of the Beatles circa 1964 to pictures of the band in its late-1960s incarnations. That same, perplexing leap forward obtained.
Pictures of the house taken during the early years in town show a rectangular structure, twenty feet across the front and forty-eight feet long, with green-and-white aluminum awnings over the windows and a small, sun-splashed front porch covered in indoor/outdoor carpeting the same color and texture as 1970s-era Astroturf. Aside from the strange back door and the fact that it sat in the middle of two wide lots—one of just two homes on that side of the street, while on the other side there were six homes crammed into an equal space—the house didn’t look all that different from other houses in the neighborhood. However, that would change soon enough.
Sometime during our first year in town, my brother Paul decided to ride his baby walker—one of those four-wheeled, legs-through-holes, baby runabouts that have since been banned worldwide—down an unfinished flight of stairs leading to an uncarpeted expanse of raw concrete. When he reached the bottom, the walker slammed forward, and Paul cracked his head on the concrete floor with what has always been described to me as “a sickening thud.” (This is how we discuss the event in my family, our sentences always beginning with Paul himself or else in the passive voice—The door was left open—so that all question of how this could have happened, or who could have left the door ajar, remain unasked.) In the aftermath of this terrible event, Paul was rushed to a small hospital in the middle of Dodge City and from there to a larger one three hours away in Wichita, where things got so bad for so long that my mother removed herself to the hospital chapel, where she remained on her knees, refusing to budge or even to talk, until news of a miracle was brought to her. Only Patricia Rebein and God Himself know what promises were made in that dark little chapel. However, they must have been sufficient, for against all odds, Paul pulled through with no permanent damage to his brain or any other part of him.
“It was a miracle, all right,” my mother insists to this day. “All of the doctors and nurses agreed. They had never seen a situation that bad turn around that completely. Think about that the next time you need God’s help.”
Soon after this my father moved the stairs from the center of the house to the back, between the bathroom and the big glass door, so that now the stairs did not descend in a single flight but instead turned twice on the way down. They were covered as well in a thick shag carpet, such that a newborn might have tumbled down them without coming to any harm. Indeed, in the course of our childhood in the house, Paul and I used to trip or hurl each other down these stairs on a regular basis. However, they were so padded and safe, the effort was mostly wasted.
This moving of the stairs signaled the beginning of a larger remodeling project that soon saw the entire basement finished. When I asked my father, years later, what had guided his thinking in finishing the basement, he paused a moment, then replied, “Well, I had all those materials from Urban Renewal I wanted to use. The other part of the plan was to make the basement nice enough that you kids would stay down there and leave the upstairs to your mother and me.”
He succeeded in both of these objectives. The new basement’s wood paneling, ceiling tiles, door to the outside, and the pool table that was its most prominent and (in my eyes) most important feature had all enjoyed previous lives on Front Street in the years before the demolition, and there was no question the basement was an attractive place to hang out. More than half the square footage was given over to a carpeted TV room and an adjoining rec room housing the pool table and the family’s new 8-track tape player. On the other side of the rec room were two dorm-like bedrooms, one green and one red, each featuring bunk beds along with built-in cabinets and desks. Rounding out the floor plan at the base of the stairs was a small bathroom with a tiled shower and the aforementioned door to the outside, a feature I came to appreciate fully only during my teenage years, when the ability to sneak in and out of the house without my parents knowing became such an all-important thing.
Once finished, the basement was ruled over by my older brothers, who soon instituted many arcane and (to my eyes) arbitrary rules concerning it. The first rule was that anytime an older brother wanted the use of a chair or any other piece of furniture being used by a younger brother, all the older brother had to do was to say the words “Pass down,” and the younger brother was required to move at once. As you might expect in a family of seven boys, the free exercise of this law created many a musical chairs–like moment, as the oldest in the family kicked the next oldest out of his chair or couch, and that brother responded by invoking the pass down rule on the brother just beneath him in age, and so on, until finally all of the furniture in the room was occupied and those of us at the bottom of the pecking order had to lie on the carpeted floor to watch TV. Similar rules concerned the selection of TV shows (the oldest brother in the room always decided what we would watch), what music could be played on the 8-track and at what volume, and, most devastating to me, who was allowed to use the pool table.
“The felt on this table is brand new,” one of my brothers intoned. “Do you think we want you ripping it up, or spilling juice on it, or anything like that?”
Needless to say, I ignored the rule regarding the pool table every chance I got, dragging a chair next to the table to stand on while I practiced my shots. My one desire in life was to become a billiards expert on par with my heroes Minnesota Fats and Willie Mosconi, who later took part in the legendary $15,000 “Great Pool Shoot-Out” announced by Howard Cosell on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. However, short of this lofty goal, I would settle for beating any of my older brothers at a game of eight ball. I had noticed that as soon as one of my brothers got old enough to play in pool halls like the Golden Ace downtown or Duffy’s in South Dodge, they quickly lost all interest in our table, and this was a weakness I planned to exploit. Finally, I got good enough to beat the next brother above me, Steve, and I began to set my sights even higher. However, I was disappointed to find that none of my brothers older than Steve would play me.
“You’re all scared,” I taunted them.
“That’s not why,” my brother Tom said with a laugh.
“Why then?”
“You’ll find out, one of these days.”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied, thoroughly disgusted.
However, it turned out he was right after all. I did find out. As soon as I was old enough, I headed downtown and sneaked into the Golden Cue, where I challenged a middle-aged feedlot cowboy to a game of eight ball.
“How much you want to bet?” the cowboy asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How much do you want to bet?”
“How about five dollars?”
This was far more than I had been expecting, but I had the money on me, and by now it was impossible to back down. “You’re on,” I said.
Nothing about the table on which we played felt remotely like our table. The ball rolled much more slowly, and the action off the cue ball felt different, too. None of my trick shots—or even my regular shots—worked. After taking a licking in that game and one more, I headed home, tail between my legs, and found my brother Tom in the TV room, eating popcorn and watching a rerun of Hawaii Five-O.
“What’s the deal with the pool table?” I asked.
“You’ve been playing at Duffy’s, haven’t you?” he observed with a smirk.
“The Golden Cue.”
“And let me guess,” Tom said, smiling broadly. “The table felt a little different.”
“That’s right. Why?”
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