The DOUG BATCHELOR Story As told to Marilyn Tooker Edited by Marvin Moore Illustration by Lars Justinen Cover Design by Penny Hall Copyright © 1991 by 5431 Auburn Blvd., Suite A-l • Sacramento, CA 95841 All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America Remnant Publications, Coldwater, Michigan This edition printed in 2005 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-62156 ISBN 0-8163-0876-4 91 92 93 94 • 5 4 3 2 Contents 1. Out With a Bang! 2. Military School 3. Runaway 4. Free at Last! 5. The Secret Cave 6. Crime Doesn’t Pay 7. Shipped Out! 8. On the Road 9. The Arabs Are Coming! 10. New Mexico and Back 11. Discovering the Truth 12. Star for a Day 13. Trying the Churches 14. If at First You Don’t Succeed 15. But Lord, I Could Never Be a Preacher! 16. Indian Tales 17. Going Home 18. The Rock That Would Not Roll 1 Out With a Bang! I sat on the edge of my bed in my mother’s New York apartment and buried my face in my hands. Tears ran down my cheeks and seeped through my fingers. I seldom cried, but this time, something really broke loose. I had been in fights almost since the day school started, and here I was in trouble again! I wondered if I would ever amount to anything. I just couldn’t seem to control my temper. If Mom were here, maybe we could talk things over, but that night she was gone. Since the divorce, she worked full time and had less time than she would have liked for my brother and me. Evenings, she either went out with friends, or sometimes had a party at our apartment. We seldom had an evening at home together. But now Falcon, my brother, best friend, and worst enemy, had gone to live with Dad in Florida. With his cystic fibrosis, Falcon needed a milder climate, so here I was in the apartment, alone, and desperately in need of someone to love me and care what happened to me. I thought of my beautiful mother. She had lots of friends, most of them actors, writers, and singers. Her talent and good looks made her the queen of every party. She was drawn to show business like a moth to a flame. Her career really took off when she started writing songs for Elvis Presley, but she had been involved in show biz in one capacity or another ever since I could remember. She wrote musicals for TV and plays, did bit parts in movies, and worked as a film critic. She used to take Falcon and me to work with her during summer vacation, and we enjoyed all the attention from the stars. They would come over and talk to us and tell us jokes between tapings. Some of the well-known ones that I still remember were Red Buttons, Frankie Avalon, Nancy Sinatra, Rowan and Martin, Maureen O’Hara, and Lloyd Bridges, but our favorites had to be the Three Stooges. How they made us laugh! Yet something about the exciting people who made up the world of theater bothered me. As I got old enough to understand, I noticed that a frightening percentage of them were homosexuals, and it seemed that many of them were on drugs or alcohol, or both, yet they weren’t happy. “Why do they work so hard to achieve fame when it makes them so miserable?” I wondered. If Mom ever noticed the discrepancy in their lives, she never mentioned it. For her, the more excitement, the better. She used to have parties at our apartment, but all the guests wanted to do was sit around and talk and smoke pot. They would do dumb things like pop the bones in each others backs and laugh at their own stupid jokes. Some of them were so out of touch with reality! They looked like ghosts as they floated in and out of their own world. They seemed weird and lonely. Lonely. How I hated the word! Sitting by myself on the edge of the bed, the events of the day crowded back into my mind, and as I relived the fight I’d been in, the scorching lecture from the principal, and my teacher’s disapproving scowl, I felt lower than a clam. Who was I? Where did I come from? Why was I here? Those were not new questions. I often stared in the mirror and wondered. I’d been told that I was just another step in the process of evolution—an overly developed monkey. If that’s all there was to life, why not get it over with? I wasn’t afraid to die. When you died, you just rotted and turned back into fertilizer—or so our teachers told us. I decided to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, lie down on my bed, and’ never wake up. Simple. Resolutely, I stood up, wiped the tears off my hands onto my pants, and strode into the bathroom. Opening the door of the medicine cabinet, I stared at all the bottles and jars lined up neatly on the shelves. Which one had the sleeping pills in it? I knew Mom took one or two every night to go to sleep, but I hadn’t paid that much attention to which bottle she used. I began taking them down, one by one, and reading the labels, but none of them said “sleeping pills.” Finally I found one that said “Take one at bedtime. Valium.” I was thirteen years old, but I’d never heard that word. I put the bottle back and continued the search, but nothing else sounded right, so I returned to the Valium. I unscrewed the lid, poured the whole bottle into my hand, and reached for a glass of water. My hand paused midair. What if these weren’t sleeping pills? What if they were some kind of pills for ladies? What if they just made me sick? I didn’t want to get sick. I’d had enough pain and misery. I wanted to die! I leaned over and reread the label on the bottle, but I found no new clues, so I stood there for a long moment, trying to decide what to do. Slowly I reached for the bottle and poured the pills back inside. I’d find a better way to kill myself another day. Looking back, I wonder how I could have been so blind to the clues that told me Mom cared. She tried to express her love in her own way. She would write a musical play for our class and put me in a starring role. She worked very hard at it, too: casting, costumes—even conducting the rehearsals herself. It took her away from her work, which meant smaller paychecks. We enjoyed a certain togetherness before Falcon left. Sometimes we would sit around in the living room together watching TV. Mom and I would smoke pot, but Falcon couldn’t because of his cystic fibrosis, so she made him cookies, putting in a generous amount of marijuana or hashish. Hashish was harder to find because it came from Turkey, and she only got it when some of her friends brought it back from their travels, but she would use some of it for Falcon’s cookies. I thought, “That shows she must care.” Mom’s maiden name, Tarshis, betrayed her Jewish heritage. My grandparents used to say we were related to Saul of Tarsus, but I think they were joking. When we moved to New York, my mom found that half the people in show business were Jews. She was proud of her Jewish heritage, but she had no interest in religion. When my report card came out a few weeks after the big fight, I opened it with fear and trembling. My eyes scanned the page. Sure enough, my grades were a disaster. Quickly I closed it and shoved it into my pocket. How could I show this to Mom? At home that evening my heart was filled with dread. I knew she would yell and be upset, and probably end up crying. Again my thoughts turned to suicide. Maybe I could jump off the roof of our apartment building. I wondered if the door to the roof had been left unlocked. I took the elevator to the top floor and walked down the hall to the stairs that led onto the roof. I tried the doorknob, and it turned easily. I opened it, went up the steps, and walked out onto the roof. I climbed out onto the ledge that ran around the edge of the building and looked down. Sixteen stories. The street noises floated up to my ears: cars honking, engines revving, and sirens wailing in the distance. The people on the streets were so far below they seemed like ants scurrying about, all in a hurry. “Why do they run around like that?” I asked myself. “Where are they all going?” I knew many of them were hurrying about trying to make money. I thought of my father. He was wealthy—a multimillionaire. He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, either. His father died when he was only seven. The oldest of four sons, he did what he could to help support the family. He sold newspapers on street corners and did every odd job that came his way to help feed the hungry little mouths at home.