up the bare wall. It was a rather chilling illustration of a pudgy boy and girl, pinkly angelic and barely past the toddler stage, clutching each other at the foot of a large, threatening black tree. The boy is trying to be brave as his little sister weeps tears of terror; the tangled and sinister woods behind them seem to be conspiring to eat the innocent tots like succulent capons. The poster gave Liza nightmares. She did not want to be abandoned in the woods with Ned, who would think it futile to intervene and probably just watch with scientific curiosity as badgers dragged her by the hair into a dark, wet hole.
In 1976, during this period of Noreen’s regular babysitting, the Montreal Olympic Games were on television; the children, now eleven and nine, were mad for them. They tried to reenact various gymnastic events on Noreen’s living room settee; knees were pressed through the cheap pink cloth of nightgowns; rug burns bearded little chins. Liza was especially affected, particularly in her vivid mental moments before sleep, during which she had a rich and ego-gratifying fantasy life. Liza, at an age when every glory in life seemed possible, would beat out Nadia Comaneci, in slow motion, for a gold medal in the floor routine, to the haunting strains of Nadia’s Theme (Theme from The Young and the Restless) every night. The fantasy expanded during the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, with Liza taking to the ice and beating Dorothy Hamill for more gold medals in figure skating. Everyone would be watching—Peppy, Noreen, Ned, her kindergarten classmates, her teachers, the president. Everyone would clap and cry as she swirled beautifully, her legs in the splits over her head in any direction, her arms swanning upward. As adoring fans wrapped her in an American flag, she would drift into a giddy, love-filled, and triumphant slumber. That is what it will be like, when I am fourteen.
Liza’s waking hours, however, were not spent backflipping over gym mats, or gyrating in empty skating rinks. After school, Liza and Ned watched six to nine hours of television each day; a practical hobby in that they could do it almost anywhere.
Peppy would often hook up with men vacationing in Reno, and the children would be taken on long car trips through the desert and into the Sierras, then deposited on atrocious carpets in faceless towns for periods not less than three days (school holidays) but no more than six weeks (summer vacation). There was a multitoned green shag carpet full of pennies and dog hair in Concord, CA, that belonged to Ray Tilper, who ran a drapery cleaning service. There was a coffee and oil-stained pink carpet with large blue roses that sat in the middle of the linoleum floor of the home of Dennis Van Kittelstrom, who ran a certified Bultaco dirt bike repair shop in Williams, CA. There was blood-red carpeting that aggressively complemented the golden couch legs in the TV room of Luigi Fontanesca, who had recently taken over his grandfather’s veal sausage factory in Elko, NV. This rash of brief and unserious unions finally came to an end in 1978 when Peppy fell in actual love, with (and there should be a drum roll):
THE AMAZING JOHNNY BODRONE (cymbal Clash!)
Johnny Budrone had been a promising rodeo bull rider in his youth until a particularly nasty throw crushed one of his vertebrae and tossed the muscles around it into a splintery mélange he called “crabmeat.” Peppy first saw him performing at the Lucky Seven club with his air gun act; with one in each hand, sporting a pair of yellow-tinted aviator-frame glasses, he would shoot a flurry of pellets into large, formless heaps of white balloons, loudly sculpting them into a kind of pneumatic topiary: rabbit heads, hearts, clubs, spades. The rest of the time he drank alone, a lot, to offset his constant back pain. Being another regular at Bil’s Red Turkey, the solitary woman at the other end of the bar, who sometimes had jet-black hair, sometimes auburn, became a compelling enigma. One night Johnny was drunk enough to approach Peppy, who was wearing her Natural Honey Blonde wig, and drawl, “So what’s your hair down there like, anyhow”—gesturing at her crotch with his Marlboro—“Neapolitan?”
It was not the best pickup line Peppy had ever heard, nor was it the worst. The worst was: “You wanna come in the john with me and put Bactine on my stump?” (Dan “Claw” Haverman, June 1974.) Johnny’s line, at least, suggested a sexually viable man with an active, if tasteless, sense of humor.
Apart from the exploded veins, bowlegs, psoriasis, and gangrenous-looking assortment of blurring tattoos, Johnny was a handsome man, and Peppy felt a warm twinkling in herself that had almost nothing to do with the four or seven Fuzzy Navels she had consumed. The subsequent affair with Johnny Budrone was actually the closest she’d ever come to the kind of ovary-squeezing, sublimely unbearable, ice-cream headache-y love she had imagined as a hormonally exhilarated teen.
“That Johnny knew how to treat a lady,” Peppy would sigh, later.
He would pick Peppy up at her mother’s house in a clean gingham cowboy shirt and his newest Wranglers. She would run giggling to the screen door in hanging earrings and a pair of beige high heels. He would smell of Mitchum deodorant and Wintergreen Skoal “chaw,” she of Jean Naté body spray and talc, with a hint of Wicked Wahine Eau de Toilette around the pulse points; a gambler’s whisper of hope for the jackpot honeymoon in beautiful Hawaii.
At around 5 a.m. his Falcon Ranchero would growl mufflerlessly up the street again and they would park carnally in the quiet, the sleeping residential block unaware of their hot bourbon tongues and denim-searing concupiscence.
Forty-five minutes later the car would start again, and the white-steamed windshield swabbed from the inside. Peppy would step out onto the lawn, kiss her fingers and wave, her wig askew, her shoes unstrapped, sighing deep pink sighs.
“That Johnny was a real man,” Peppy would say, later.
Johnny was a man of few words, but he made each child one sincere overture of friendship. Ned was twelve and already starting to display what would be a lifelong proclivity toward introverted lumpiness. Johnny bought him a Daisy air rifle and took him out in the desert to shoot cantaloupes; Ned fainted from the heat and wet himself while unconscious. Ned was profoundly embarrassed, but Johnny was understanding and friendly about it. He bought Ned a new pair of pants, a bag of pretzels, and a Gatorade, and never told Peppy about the mishap, but Ned had a shameful association with the gun afterward and stuck it in the back of his closet.
Johnny took Liza out for bubble-gum ice cream and was not angry when she picked all the gumballs out with her fingers and lined them up, mouth-sticky and bleeding primary colors, on the dashboard of the Ranchero, where the sun baked them into semipermanence; they could not be removed from the aged vinyl surface without ripping it down to the foam. After that, Johnny pretty much figured they were a family.
The children mostly loved Johnny for his gallery of smeared tattoos.
Johnny would lie on the brown and orange-striped couch with a burlap throw pillow embroidered with a yarn owl under his mangled middle-back, and the children would pry his sleeves up and gaze insatiably at the fading wonders: a horse head framed by a large horseshoe, with the name ZIPPO under it. A crudely wrought parrot with a long curlicued tail. A cowgirl in a skimpy fringe dress, with a gun and spurs. Yosemite Sam standing incongruously on a bed of roses. On special days in the summertime the children could see the bull that ended Johnny’s rodeo career—a large blue-black, bucking monster with the unlikely name FEELIN’ GROOVY written on a sash between Johnny’s shoulderblades, over his six-inch operation scar.
“You gotta give credit to the things that crush you,” Johnny explained when asked why he decorated his body with the bull that made him wince through the better part of every day. Ned and Liza were impressed by this philosophy.
The year 1978 was also when Ned and Liza took the bus to see a Saturday matinee and witnessed the cinema phenomenon Ice Castles. (“When Tragedy Struck, Love Came to the Rescue,” promised the movie poster.) This film would lodge itself firmly in Liza’s psyche; it was the pole around which the sprouting bean-plant of her mind would twist for years to come.
Ice
