The Whitest Summer
In the summer, my brother, Garth and I, were driven south on I-5 to spend time with my California parents.
For those ten or so weeks, we lived in a housing development in Clovis, a cowboy-town that abutted Fresno, California. Some neighbors replaced their square patches of lawn and shrubs with rocks. Others went further, making gravel into patterns that resembled giant checkerboards. Our house, and this was no accident, was beside my father’s best friend, Jon Shaver’s home. At the time, the term ‘bromance’ hadn’t been invented. But what else would you call their special bond? Dad and Jon drove matching white Ford trucks they’d gotten for a steal from a local dealership. They quoted lines from Saturday Night Live in tandem. They entered gun shooting competitions together, socialized together, crafted together, worked together. You get it—I’ll stop.
For Fourth of July, Dad and Jon crafted homemade fireworks out of wax and gun powder and shot them off in the street. How the hell didn’t they burn down the block?
The whitest summer wasn’t limited to my father’s friendship. It was defined by our work as well. My brother and I spent hours wrinkling our lower halves in the swimming pool as we pumiced calcium off the tiles. We were paid by the inch. During the week, we worked with our father at CSUF, sometimes stuffing envelopes, other times updating ATI-net, or teaching farmers how to log on to this new system. In Garth’s case, he also spent a single day working in the grape fields wearing jeans and a long-sleeved, button-down shirt. Each day at noon, we drove home where we’d ‘cook’ lunch; ramen noodles splashed with copious amounts of soy sauce or microwaved hot dogs rolled up in Wonder Bread. We’d slurp our lunches, Perry Mason reruns in the background, then return to work.
Saturday mornings, my brother and I did chores to earn allowance and before the fold marks from my father’s wallet had straightened, Garth had spent every bit on comics. Me? I’d hoard my dough, ready to lend it to my brother the next day. I’d charge him excessive interest, thus teaching him about credit card debt and the futility of minimum payments. Or maybe what I taught him was that even his cute little sister could be an asshole.
Most evenings, we’d visit Rocky’s and rent movies; new releases, B-flicks, and a few award-winners. After viewings, while the VHS tape rewound, we’d float in the pool and analyze what we’d seen. OG Cinema Sins, right? Some quotes from those chats became jokes we repeated for decades. “Make me a sergeant in charge of booze!” Some lost their connection to the actual movies that had inspired them, while others were more obvious, “Sadie Rose! Sadie Rose!” (Our dog Sadie vocalized in her sleep)
Speaking of pets, that was another summer highlight. Our birth mother is fur-slash-animal-averse. Not my California family. We had two dogs and sometimes a cat. Artemis, though, the reddish-golden retriever, was the main event. He loved to swim and would nose a toy until it fell into the pool, then he’d jump in to fetch it. The pool water chapped poor Artie’s balls. Yes, those balls, because for some reason, Dad would not allow Artie-boy to be neutered. Dad was so devoted to the cause, I remember him rubbing Vaseline onto Artie’s shriveled, black, sagging sacks.
The pool water was so over-chlorinated it caused near-instant blindness when you dared to put your head under; I’m talking liquid-effing-bleach. I’m not exaggerating. Losing my vision didn’t stop me from racing my brother across the pool, though. Determined to finally beat him, on one occasion I pushed hard, propelling across the water in the agreed upon stroke, the butterfly. Eyes burning, I had no idea how close I was to the end of the final lap, but I knew Garth was closing in on me. I dipped down and pushed upward in a final, glorious burst and collided with the wall.
I raised my arms, victorious. Garth stood stunned, I thought, because of my incredible show of strength and agility.
He stared at the water’s surface with his squinty-bleached-blood-red-eyeballs. Finally, he said, “Teeth float.”
“What’d you th-ay?” I asked, my words coming out weird. I felt the inside of my mouth with my tongue.
“Umm, teeth float. I didn’t know, ‘til now.”
I spent the rest of the summer smiling, jagged shards for front teeth, pointed arrows like the ribbons on a special award.
One summer night, house empty except for Garth and I, we played the Beatles’ White Album backward and at various speeds seeking to verify the rumors about the satanic message. Some time after midnight, we found what we were looking for in Led Zepplin’s, Stairway to Heaven. Thanks to our Apple Macintosh and sound software, the words rang out crystal-clear and yes, we scared ourselves shitless.
Summer in the Central Valley was scorching hot, and not just because my brother and I had opened a portal to hell with our dead-of-night-exploits. It was hot, as in regularly breaking their own records of consecutive days above a hundred degrees. At bedtime the grownups turned on the air conditioning for an hour or so, but soon after, it was switched off and come morning, we’d wake in a puddle of sweat.
Those California summers were filled with music. We listened to 50s tunes our father had dubbed onto reel-to-reel from his 45s, which, now that I think back on it, might be one of the bleach-frigging-whitest things ever done in the history of white people. We sang Lucille by Kenny Rogers in a wood-paneled Datsun station wagon that refused to start at random, and often the worst possible, times.
We ate chili dogs with forks and knives at a restaurant called Spoons.
Those precious weeks in California were the best part of my year, and did more to shape me than any song or book or college lecture.
If you’d like to immerse yourself in a simulation of that time, boil chicken-flavored ramen, add soy sauce, slurp noodles, then bloat-out and sugar-blue while you listen to this playlist I created in honor of my father, Gary Riley. Link here.
As always, love and health to you and yours until next time. <3 Jennifer