Eight steps

Sam tagged me.

Here are the rules:

1.Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

But this would be too easy. To make it more of a challenge, I’m going to begin at age 5 and share some memories in eight easy steps, five years at a time. Sound like fun? I think so. See me under the covers.

When I was 5, I rode the back of my brother’s bike and got my left ankle caught in the spokes. Cue high-pitched screams, blood everywhere. A neighbor ran out of his house, picked me up, and carried me back to my house. For what was nothing more than a bad scrape, he acted like he had saved my life.

One trip to somewhere (an ER? I don’t recall), one tetanus shot, and a few feet of sterile gauze later, I was pronounced good to go. It took the rest of the summer to heal that damned thing, not that it kept me out of the ocean or swimming pools. I obsessed over that scab, the odd colors it would turn whenever it got wet. I became a morbid scab-picker.

Wanna see my scar?

Hey, at least I didn’t show you my circ scar.

By the age of 10, my fascination with women had taken on undeniably sexual overtones. I was small enough and cute enough that I could go to high school basketball games, head into a throng of high schoolers, and “accidentally” collide with the women. Sixth grade girls would let me kiss them (well, one did, anyway). My distant cousins, Roberta and Not-Roberta (help me out here, Sis), both around 16 or 17, let me do considerably more than that until my dad broke things up. Thanks a lot, Dad.

Here I am with my mom and my “Snow Gal.” Yes, those are snow boobs.

And here I am at 15:

At 15, I changed high schools. In 9th Grade I went to a high school that valued their football players more than any other students. The jocks got first choice of classes at the beginning of the year and everyone else got the leftovers. Thanks to this brilliant system, my 10th Grade schedule looked something like this: Art, Study Hall, PE, Algebra/Trig, Spanish, Study Hall. My counselor promised that if I were patient, I would surely get my pick of English and science classes in, oh, the next few weeks.

Well, screw that. My sis taught English at Alhambra High and my dad was a veteran math teacher in the LA City School District. Changing high schools was effortless.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three ways in which this changed my life. First, I had never had a good relationship with my sister; by driving in together day after day, we became very close and we have remained so. Second, AHS’s academics kicked ass over TCHS. By the end of three years, I was well prepared for college.

Third, I met my gf at AHS. As I’ve mentioned before, she sat behind me in biology. We teamed up on dissections and experiments, and I did endearing things like hide frog skin in her textbooks. (I suspect she never forgave me for that. I don’t know. We don’t talk about the frog skin.) “Brat” was her most common name for me back then.

Our biology teacher was oooold Mr. Miller, who could be entertaining in a decrepit Mr. Rogers kinda way. I recall him explaining an earthworm’s digestive system: “Imagine sitting on the toilet, eating a McDonald’s hamburger. In one end, out the other.” I also remember being exquisitely embarrassed by his answer to my question about the sex symbols,

I mean, I really didn’t need to know from this geezer that the arrow symbolized an erect penis, the cross, a vaginal crease. Couldn’t he have made up some sort of bogus answer? God knows the man had the requisite flexibility — that whole year, he never mentioned evolution, not once.

By 20, I had broken up with my high school gf, but I had not yet met Karen. I took a six month internship at Stauffer Chemical Company, where my bosses were hard at work trying to infringe upon another chemical company’s herbicide patent. For the company newsletter, I was asked to write my own blurb.

This piece reads, in part,

With regard to his hobbies, Doug quips, “Hobbies? I need no steenking hobbies.” But he lists, as avocations, hiking, biking, and writing.

Jeez, what a card. Doug has come a long way.

25 years old: Karen and I married at 22, then bounced around from one apartment to another until we ended up at the Oakwoods on Saratoga Avenue (in Sunnyvale?) When we were looking for an apartment, one landlady told us, “You seem like such nice people and I would love to rent to you. But I think anyone who would feed a rabbit to a snake is sick.”

This is Elissa, named for one of our best friends (Stan’s wife). She’s a rainbow boa. The idea here was to photograph her in the sun to catch her iridescence. Yup, it didn’t work too well. Trust me, though — they’re called rainbow boas for good reason.

Elissa was a bitch. The snake. Elissa the human: not a bitch. Sweet, lovely human being. Elissa the snake: at this size, even if she couldn’t swallow a cute li’l wabbit, she would have tortured it to death by biting it over and over again. Kind of like the treatment she gave us.

Oakwoods was way too expensive for us. When we looked the place over, though, it felt so, so . . . so not like the kind of place where graduate students would live. They had tennis courts (nope, don’t play tennis), a weight room (um, didn’t lift back then, do now), swimming pools (I drown), and a hot tub. The day we visited, that hot tub hosted a group of four young Asian women sipping champagne. That decided it for me. And you know, I never saw them again. It’s like the Oakwoods management had read my mind, knew my Achille’s heel.

But we were still uneasy about the rent. “Splurge!” the woman said. “Eat a few less steaks each month!” Yeah, right. Like we were eating steak. As it happened, we never ran into financial trouble because of the rent.

The only thing we hated about Oakwoods was the teenager who liked to practice his singing in the stairwell. Cuz of the resonance, you know. He thought he was Mick Jagger but crooned like an emasculated civet cat.

When we were 30, give or take a year, we went to Hawaii for the Doug’s Uncle Memorial Trip to Hawaii. Oops, there goes the inheritance. We stayed at the Maui Hyatt and they upgraded our room! Two bottles of champagne, a pineapple, fresh macadamias, chocolates, and a floor guy/gal whose whole job was to keep us happy. We rented a convertible, ate at the best restaurants, and had a blast. Hands down, this was our best vacation ever.

Several things strike me about this photo. I have hair! Damn, Karen looks cute here (but oh, so serious). Who the hell shot this picture?

Karen will note that I didn’t post the photo of us in our bathing suits. Maybe next time.

I’m trying to remember . . . I think we did this during my second year of residency. Four days in Maui, and we peeled through money like we had a piece of Paris Hilton’s fortune. (Had to insert that sentence to catch folks googling “piece of Paris Hilton.” Sorry, folks! No Paris cooch photos here! Heh heh. Did it again.)

By now, I imagine you’re thoroughly sick of my face, so here’s Karen at 35:

In ’96, we lived in San Antonio. Karen was housebound for nine months out of the year, thanks to the heat. Jake never fared much better. What kind of place is it where you can’t take your kid to the park? If it wasn’t the heat, the wasps, the fire ants, or the scorpions, it was the Texans. Way too many of those in San Antonio.

We bought our first house there, an attractive, almost-new, four-bedroom place on an acre of land. Neither of us had owned LAND before, so an acre sounded desirable. I spent most of our two years in that house poisoning fire ant mounds, spraying those awful burr plants with Round Up, and patroling the perimeter fence to block areas where Sydney (our tortoise) sought to burrow his way to females and freedom. Land? Feh.

Yeah, the back yard was a disappointment. A few days after we moved in, I stupidly allowed Jake to wander around by himself. I was watching him, of course, but still — you don’t let a toddler poke around in a southern Texas yard. Less than two minutes later, I noticed he had come to a dead stop. His face had blanched and he looked at me with big, sad eyes. I covered the distance in seconds, imagining he had run afoul of the fire ants, dreading having to tell Karen what I’d done. (Or not done.) But it wasn’t fire ants. It was those awful burrs. His socks were full of them, and he couldn’t move without them digging into his ankles. I carried him back to the house and very carefully peeled off his socks.

Nope, we don’t miss Texas.

At 40, I decided to channel all of my midlife crisis energies into becoming a novelist. My first effort was Karakoram, which I self-indulgently call Casablanca — In Space! Rather than give you an eighth photo, I’ll close with a snip of the kind of stuff I wrote 5 years ago. Ain’t terrible, if I do say so myself. (But I am selecting one of the better bits.)

By the way, I know I’m supposed to tag eight people, but I don’t have the heart. Sorry, Sam, but I’m going to cop out. I tag whomever wants to do the Eight Meme. If you do it, let me know in the comments, and I’ll give you some linky love below. Just like a Thirteen!

Freeman knew he’d been made when the gargoyle kid in the pink frock and Shirley Temple wig caught his eye, curled her puggish muzzle into a pearly white-toothed grin, and launched into a fit of spontaneous tap dance. Two Elkalept females stood nearby, growling little endearments to encourage the child – Good one, baby!  Now you’re stylin’!  But they too snuck hungry peeks in Freeman’s direction, eager to gauge the effect this prodigy might be having on the mysterious blue gentleman.  The ferret-faced one in the chartreuse sari, the cooler of the two, she had to be Mom; the other gal used too much rouge and kept lashing out with her tail, catching Freeman slyly about the ankle, slipping away, catching him again and again.

Was a time when he might have pointedly ignored them, and a time before that when he would have walked away.  But now he stayed, he played it to the end, because it gave him so much pleasure to repay their torments.

“You’re right, she’s good!  You go, Tina!” cheered the gal with the errant tail.

“Go on, Candi, ask her anything,” said Mom.

Tina kicked out behind her, swam through the air with broad, stylized arm sweeps, cocked her head side to side, smiled as though a loaded gun were pressed to her temple.

“What’s the square root of two hundred?” asked Mom’s friend, Candi.

Never once breaking step, the Elkalept kid pursed her face, frowned, and said, “Thirteen!”

“Wow!” Candi cried on cue.  “She’s something!  Mister, why’n’t you give Tina a try?”

Freeman had the wrenching impression he’d just been invited to the child’s bed.

See ya in the funny papers.

D.