Marshall Blvd

CNF by Jason M. Thornberry

I was a latchkey kid. Generation X—a child of the 1970s. I walked to kindergarten. In first grade, I rode my bike. My mother gave me forty-five cents, which bought me a meal in the cafeteria. Unlocking my bike after school, I rode back and let myself into the stuccoed Spanish-style single-storey house on Marshall Boulevard that I shared with my mother and my first stepfather, using a key my mother gave me. The house key and padlock key for my bike were attached to a leather ring with a tag bearing the name of the bank where my mother worked as a teller. My mother set up my first savings account, and I remember learning to keep track of my money using a passbook. Doing chores for an allowance. Saving money. So I could buy things. So I could be my own person. Having my own money made me feel independent. I was seven, but the house key and my savings account made me feel older.

The night I was born, my mother was watching The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre on television. It was the dead of night, dead of winter, 1971. I don’t know if she named me after the film’s lead, Jason Robards. I can’t rule it out.

I was born in a hospital in San Bernardino. My parents lived a few miles away on the east side of Colton. My father worked for Agape House, a rehabilitation center for young people grappling with drug addiction. My mother says she kicked my father out of the house they rented when she discovered he was sleeping with Pat, a young woman he counselled. I was fourteen months old. My father became director of Agape House.

Articles in the July 28, 1972 issue of The Sun, a local newspaper, described Agape House and my father’s new role there. My father was photographed in profile, his palms up, appearing to address an audience. A separate photo showed Pat lighting a cigarette. My father lived with Pat.

I lived with my mother and her boyfriend, Gary, in Colton. They rented a house with an elevated front yard. The house could have used elevated ceilings—Gary’s head brushed them when he entered the room. I remember seeing cobwebs in his hair once. Gary carried a gun at all times; he worked at the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana, and he wore work boots bigger than my mother’s Volkswagen. My mother stood on a chair and married Gary; then we moved into the stuccoed Spanish-style single-storey house on Marshall Boulevard in San Bernardino. We lived a mile from Dad and Pat. I visited every other weekend. Pat became my stepmother.

Dad and Pat rented a boxy little light green house with a backyard full of drooling Saint Bernards on North E Street. When I visited, I held my father’s hand, and we walked up the sidewalk and across the street to a small park. A few of his fourteen dogs followed. I learned that this wasn’t a park at all but an historical site: the Old Catholic Cemetery. I remember tombstones from the 1800s. Walking back to the little green house, we spent the rest of the day listening to music. Dad introduced me to the music of Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, The Doobie Brothers, Santana. Music became my thing.

This was the year my stepfather shot himself in the leg, playing with his pistol in the kitchen, one night. We hurried Gary to the emergency room. I occupied myself, sitting alone in the waiting area in my one-piece jammies, watching other people, being an unobtrusive four-year-old. Sitting there for hours.

My father worked as a janitor, going to school at night. He’d started as a psychology major, leaving grad school to study law. I never knew what made him change course, withdrawing right before his thesis. Maybe psychology bored him. He never mentioned it to me—not that a preschooler would have understood. I was busy learning to finger paint.

Around this time, Dad’s best friend’s brother gave me a partial drum set: Ludwig snare, bass drum, floor tom, Zildjian crash cymbal. At night, I dragged the set out to my father’s little backyard, setting it up as best I could before propping the business end of a garden hose between a pair of bricks; then I turned the spigot all the way and beat my new drums, pretending I was playing an enormous rock concert—with water in place of pyrotechnics. I’m sure my father’s dogs—and his neighbors—hated it. I know my mother wasn’t keen: she made me keep my drums at Dad’s. But I brought my sticks home and played on pillows in my room.

My stepdad drove a van. I used to steal his keys and sit in it, listening to his eight-track copy of David Bowie’s Young Americans album. I loved hearing Bowie’s voice slow down and deepen as his song “Fame” neared the end. The following year, my mother bought me my first record: Devil Woman by Cliff Richard. And the first record I purchased with my own money was Love Gun by KISS. Drumming on my pillows, I pretended I was Peter Criss. That summer, my mother sent me to Adventure Trails Day Camp, and the camp visited Glen Helen, a park with a pair of lakes. I caught a pair of baby bluegill fish, bringing them home in a bag. They lived in a tank in my room; I called them Ted and Fred.

My father quizzed me: was I happy? We’d be in his tiny living room; he’d be seated in a wicker armchair, brow furrowed, hand beneath chin. I’d be on his couch, holding a vinyl copy of a Beatles album, wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, my light brown hair almost touching my shoulders. He’d ask me again: was I happy? How could I be happy, he wondered, living with my mother?

But I remember plenty of good things about living on Marshall Boulevard with my mother and stepfather. I had a sense of freedom that I took for granted. I had toys. I had a little black-and-white TV. I had chores and responsibilities and my own money to could spend as I pleased. I borrowed books from the library up the street; I listened to music for hours; I watched scary movies—the ones my dad said I was too young for. I learned to cook: flour tortillas doused with butter and salt; Chef Boyardee Raviolis or Beefaroni spooned from the can into a bowl and slid into the microwave. I’d pour a glass of whole milk. Or Tang. I drank Tang because the astronauts drank it. I pulled a coffee can down from the shelf, peeling the rubber lid, lowering my nose toward the grounds, breathing deep. My mother said little kids weren’t supposed to drink coffee. Not yet. You can smell it all you want, she said, but you’ll have to wait until you’re older to drink it. My stepdad Gary let me sip from his cup when my mother wasn’t looking. I grimaced, eyes bulging like my fish, Ted and Fred. My mother let me watch Jaws, but I couldn’t drink coffee.

I awakened in the morning, poured cereal and milk into a bowl, grabbed a spoon, and sat at the kitchen table, listening to my mother fix her hair in the nearby bathroom. She’d brush out the knots, cursing; then she’d enter the kitchen in a dark brown robe, cigarette in hand, smoking while she made a pot of coffee. She’d ask me how I slept last night. Okay, I’d say, poking my cereal. Sometimes scary movies gave me nightmares, especially if I had dessert before bed. Stirring sugar and half-and-half into her coffee cup—a hand-thrown stoneware cup her best friend Jimmy made—she returned to the bathroom, making trips to the bedroom for clothes. She’d kiss me before I left for school.

At school, on the playground, I was Steve Austin, the bionic astronaut from The Six Million Dollar Man. I wrestled other boys, punching them in slow motion. Everything in the sandbox was acted out in slow motion, complete with slow-motion sound effects. We took turns being Steve Austin or one of the bad guys. The lines were clear: there were always good guys and bad guys—and you took turns being both. I remember my first girlfriend and my first bully. My girlfriend’s name was Jennifer, and she was taller than me. My bully’s name was Earl. Earl was taller than Jennifer. I kissed Jennifer on the playground. When I wasn’t wrestling the other boys. When I wasn’t avoiding Earl.

After school, I watched cartoons. Then I did what little homework I had, and played alone in my room, listening to records on a little green-grey turntable Gary gave me. Along with my KISS and Cliff Richard records, I’d borrowed a few from Gary: The Joker by Steve Miller, Revolver by the Beatles, That N*****’s Crazy by Richard Pryor. I loved playing records at the wrong speed, turning the stereo off with a record spinning so I could hear it slow down, music and voices gaining physical density as they ground to a halt.

Living with my mother and Gary, I was self-reliant, coming and going as I pleased. Like a cat. As long as I finished my homework, I could be out riding my bike, kicking a ball back at Marshall Elementary School, playing in someone’s backyard or whatever else I felt like doing until the sun went down. Until it was time for dinner.

My mother made dinner every night. She smoked a joint while she cooked, clutching the telephone between her jaw and collarbone, talking to Jimmy. Jimmy was my godfather, and he looked a bit like me. My mother talked to Jimmy every day. After dinner, my mother, my stepfather Gary, and I watched TV in the den: Happy Days or Laverne & Shirley, Taxi or Kung Fu, Charlie’s Angels or Mork & Mindy. Gary and my mother’s chow chows—Tyrone and Ginger—lay near the couch, fifty-pound orange cotton balls with purple tongues. Tyrone was a replacement for Max, Gary’s growling Doberman pinscher. Max snarled at me occasionally; Ginger licked my face. Gary christened her Ginger-Lick-Em-Up.

My mother fought with Gary occasionally. Gary spanked me occasionally. I learned to stay out of his way, to lose myself in music when he and my mother were arguing. All in all, I guess I was happy. As an average elementary school-aged boy living in the 1970s suburbs, I had nothing to measure my happiness against.

My father insisted I wasn’t happy. He’d finished law school and was building a house in the middle of nowhere—far from the city. He said once the new house was finished, he wanted me to live with him and Pat, my stepmother. He talked about it constantly. He said I could have whatever I wanted when I moved in. My mother complained that when I spent the weekend with my father and stepmother, they always sent me home with dirty clothes. Doesn’t he have a washing machine? she asked. I knew she didn’t like my father, and I knew he didn’t like her. I was too young to mediate. They often said mean things about each other in front of me. Whenever they complained about each other, it felt like they were really complaining about me—like I’d made them have me.

I remember my mother queuing to fill up her car during the fuel crisis of 1979. What’s taking so long? she’d ask, exhaling smoke. I’d be in the seat beside her fiddling with the radio. My mother was relegated to buying gas on certain days, depending on the last number on her license plate—odd or even. It made no sense. She’d give me cash and send me into the dairy/gas station to buy cigarettes. Viceroys—that was her brand. Shopkeepers didn’t care: they simply handed cartons of smokes over to me. I was eight.  

As the seventies ended and I started fourth grade, my father’s campaign intensified: this was a brand-new decade; I should start it right by moving in with him. Dad and Pat lived in the new house. My mother and Gary were fighting more now.

Weeks into my fifth-grade year, my father picked me up in a copper BMW for my weekend visit. Dad smirked when my mother asked him to please wash my clothes before he brought me back. I didn’t know it yet, but my life was about to change.

BIO: Jason M. Thornberry is a disabled writer whose work appears in World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, Grub Street, Maryland Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. His chapbook, The Finish Line, is available through Sand and Gravel Press. Jason lives in Seattle with his wife and dog. Email: thornberryj1@gmail.com Website: https://jmthornberry.wordpress.com/ Instagram: @jason_m_thornberry/ BlueSky: @jason-m-thornberry.bsky.social