A Boy's Life

I walked out of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial not giving much of a shit about the stupid rubber alien with the glowing finger. That was just the plot. Even at the age of ten I could tell that the plot of that movie was entirely irrelevant to the film's true message, which had sweet F.A. to do with aliens. In this case, the medium was the message, that medium being perfectly captured by E.T.'s working title of A Boy's Life.

The world of A Boy's Life was alien to me in ways that had nothing to do with waddling creatures or spaceships. I had grown up in tree-thick communities, hoary with snow then hot with decomposing leaves, short sightlines and old houses. Though I'd left Brooklyn a full thirty-five years before the wannabes and the jerkoff Gawkerites arrived, I'd seen early in life that New Yorkers never looked up. There is no vista to see. Your vision is blocked on all sides. This was as true in the dignified decay of Upper Arlington, Ohio as it had been in Columbia, MD and everywhere else.

The world of E.T. was something else entirely. It was barren, bare, the open California sky above and the naked dirt to all sides. The homes squatted close to the ground. Until I saw that movie and really looked at it, I'd never considered that perhaps the sun of the East Coast was fettered by humidity and the omnipresent deciduous canopy above. When Danger Girl came here from New Mexico three years ago, she confessed that the rolling, absurdly fertile Ohio landsdcape made her paranoid, claustrophobic. Surrounded by living things.

And, of course, you had the BMX bikes, Ceppie Maes and Bob Haro making Kuwahara famous. There was so much freedom to be had out there. In Ohio my peers and I were relentlessly tracked and oppressed by intact family units and a neighborhood that considered discipline to be a distributed service, like the French Resistance always three steps too slow or stupid to outwit the Wehrmacht. Out in the amorphous amalgamation of Spielberg's ur-Cali, the kids ran free, their divorced mothers out pursuing their own pleasure every night and abandoning their progeny to a sort of benign anarchy full of D&D games and unsupervised insanity. The very fact that these kids could hide a being from another planet in their house for days at a time... my mother would have discovered E.T. three hours after he touched down. Max.

I longed for that California the way Huck Finn yearned for the Territory. My BMX friends went without me, moved to Westminster and other places to live the dream. I put my head down and went to school instead. There are people I could blame for that decision but it would be weak of me to do so. The choice was mine. I didn't acquire a genuine working knowledge of California until I was in my late thirties. Nowadays I know most of the state's racetracks and backroads pretty well. I've probably spent a hundred days of my life in the Golden State, from San Diego to Eureka and points north.

No matter what I do as an adult, however, when it comes to that idealized California childhood I will forever be an outsider, a cargo-cult native of a backwards island worshiping a Coke bottle. Which brings me to the story I'd like to share with you: the life of a modern Californian boy, told by someone who understands the San Fernando Valley the way I understand the side streets and forested paths of central Ohio.

My long-time readers know of my admiration for a blog called Up In The Valley. Its proprietor is a sensitive, thoughful man who is unafraid to approach matters with the kind of morally-conscious --- dare I say Christian? --- approach that was once considered to be the default educated American sentiment but which in today's doubleplusgood duckspeak environment is considered slightly more recondite than the Gospel Of Thomas. The demands of honesty in this context also force me to admit that I find his wife just a touch delightful; she reminds me of every voluptuous Catholic-school part-time teacher I had as a child.

Last month, our author considered the fragile state of California boyhood in $THE_CURRENT_YEAR. I'd encourage you to read what he has to say. Normally I tend to automatically dismiss the opinion of childless men when it comes to the care and feeding of sons, but I think "Mr. Upinthevalley" has tapped into his own childhood desires here to consider the unpleasant contrast between that E.T. daydream and the dangerous reality.

We don't have it so bad in Ohio any more. Last night, as has been our constant weekend practice as of late, John and I went to Ray's MTB park so he could spend three hours riding trails. He is now competent to ride the mile-long, often quite daunting "flow trail" on his own. He insists on going without me. I wave him off as if I don't have a care in the world. Then I wait fifteen nervous minutes conceiving his death or serious injury on every dropoff, every box jump, every high-speed two-story downhill. He returns and I smile. I tell him that I'm bored and that I want to ride as well. Then we proceed together, his annoyance with my presence a sort of spiritual nourishment to me, this idea that he wants to fly solo. The day is coming when he will be able to drop me effortlessly on the trail, his ascending abilities crossing the line marked by my inevitable sunset as a rider. I look forward to that day. He is already so good on the bike, so fast, able to absorb the twenty pounds into the scant fifty he carries in his own body and move them together as one.

someday I'll fly someday I'll soar cause I'm bigger than my body gives me credit for