By Chip Jacobs
Gazing up from our dining-room table that evening in 1969, my seven-year-old eyes began grasping my peculiar circumstance. My father was an old man.
Allow me to rephrase that. He was a man with graying temples and emerging crows-feet invisible on the other dads in our living room for a meeting of “Indian Guides,” a pre-Cub Scout troupe that played on Native American stereotypes and corny getups to promote youth camaraderie. I briefly wondered what this meant, him being a virtual grandfather against a backdrop of late-thirty/forty-somethings, until my curiosity exhausted its half-life. Then, it was back to the night’s agenda: father-son teams threading beads and, black, plastic “bear claws” onto rawhide strings for the least ferocious, battle necklaces mankind has ever produced.
Around ten, transitioning obsessions from action figures (G. I. Joe, Major Matt Mason) to team sports, I asked the 6’1 all-knowing presence in my life to throw the pigskin around. That was an age-gap shocker by itself. My dad didn’t lob spirals like the younger, springy-armed fathers down the block so much as heave noodle-armed balls tricky for my runt arms to catch. Switching to basketball, supposedly his “best” sport as a second-stringer on Caltech’s notoriously crummy squads, I watched him shoot free-throws underhanded.
Underhanded? In the 1970s? Abe Lincoln, to my mind, probably last used that humiliating form.
Right there, noticing my shock, dad cracked the Black Box of his past a sliver. How, being born in 1918, he’d come of age during the teeth of the Great Depression. How in college, long abandoned by his own father, he was barely able to scrape together the money for tuition and his cockroach-infested dorm room. Some nights, he admitted, he lacked the “two bits” for a hamburger dinner. He lobbed up a brick of a shot next to spare him from revealing more personal history from a scratch-and-claw America I never knew existed. My mom, a future beauty queen and social butterfly, was born in 1921, nestled into a Hollywood family that’d been demolished by heartbreaks. The rub? The last one occurred two decades before I gulped my first lungful of air.
I arrived in October 1961 as a “whoops baby,” a blockbuster surprise to parents already in their forties— parents cautioned by doctors not to conceive after numerous miscarriages and a special-needs brother twelve years my senior. Peter was already living in a Santa Barbara institution by then. My oldest brother, Paul, fifteen years older and the one I most tried copying, was married and also out of the house. Despite being smothered in love, I often felt the lonely, only child in a big, empty space. You know, the one constantly ratcheting his neck up just to make eye contact with anyone.
By my question-everything teen years, my folks resembled living relics viewing this late-stage, Baby Boomer through foggy, two-generation-apart spectacles. My mom, theatrical in nature, encouraged my writing, all the while on razor’s edge about her impish, prep-school son getting sucked into L.A.’s sex-drugs-and-rock-‘n-roll vortex. You can’t really fault her. As creature of my culture, I was exposed to a world of TV sitcoms, beanbag chairs, serial killers, cults, pizza deliveries, and rowdy rock concerts. She’d grown up, by contrast, around Model-T Fords and FDR’s “Fireside Chats,” planning her teenage monkey business during practice, air raid blackouts. When she once bragged about playing on a studio lot with kid-star Mickey Rooney, I asked “Mickey who?” She felt the same about Jimmy Page.
It was the same generational dissonance seeking my father’s help with complex math equations. Like everyone in my grade, I relied on a Texas Instrument calculator to derive the solution. Like his technical peers, my dad relied on a bone-white slide-rule, usually beating me to the answers with the satisfaction he didn’t need a modern gizmo to do his “heavy thinking.”
Being the baby son of “Greatest Generation” parents did have its benefits, just the same. Sure, they tapped their toes to the Glenn Dorsey, ol’ Blue Eyes, and Nat King Cole, while I rode with Cheap Trick, UFO, and the Sex Pistols. Yes, my mom devoured anything James Mitchener while I worshipped at the gonzo altar of Hunter S. Thompson. What counted was that she and my dad weren’t far from Social Security age by the point I was in high school. This meant they zonked out by eleven, providing me with bountiful opportunities to sneak out of my room during midnight-2 a.m. weekended intervals. Into the darkness I’d venture to hang out with equally daring chums, all of them the sons of much-older parents like me, or into a clumsy love-nest with a girlfriend in her father’s musty, driveway-parked Winnebago.
For my most part, my folks remained oblivious to my minor debauchery, unable to detect the metallic squeak of my sliding-glass door because their hearing wasn’t what it used to be. Another time, my mom discovered the ceramic weed pipe that I stashed under my mattress my junior year, growing hysterical I was rotting my brain “smoking cocaine” out of it. It was the perfect illustration of everything she misunderstood about my era. After all, she still pronounced Los Angeles as “Los An-Gel-EEZ.”
