In the insistently moist cellar, a pair of lightbulbs were nestled deep in the pockets between ceiling joists, allowing us to brighten the darkness only to a sinister murk that did not disturb the colonies of scheming fungus in the corners. As a child, I half believed that the fungus possessed a malevolent consciousness and waited patiently for me to let down my guard.
After my ninth birthday, I shared furnace-tending duties. The iron beast stood opposite the coal-room door. Mornings, I shook the grate to drop the cinders and ashes into the collection bin, shoveled coal through the main door, and lighted tinder to encourage the coal to burn more quickly. On those evenings when I had no school the next day, I would bank the fire to ensure hot coals for the morning and to keep the house heated through the night.
Banking the fire always proved to be an act of folly. This was not a forced-air furnace. Heat rose through a large iron grate in the living-room floor and traveled up-stairs so slowly that on a bitter winter morning, water left overnight in a glass had turned to ice.
We had no bathroom until I was twelve, just a shower-head that sprouted from one cellar wall, over a drain in the concrete floor. Solely to serve the shower and the washing machine, water was heated by a kerosene burner designed by a pyromaniac. A large glass jug of fuel had to be inverted to feed a ring wick by gravity drip. The contraption was shaky, and I expected a kerosene fireball to bloom through the house and turn us into human torches.
A vivid imagination is a blessing if you want to be a writer, but it is also a curse. Sometimes, in the coal room, I wondered if this would be the occasion when the shovel would turn up the pale hand of a corpse concealed under the anthracite. As he was always threatening violence, I had cast my father in the role of murderer.
I can say two positive things about the cellar. First, hot water could be drawn from a faucet, whereas at the kitchen sink only cold water could be had and only by using a hand-operated pump that tapped a well. Second, although acrawl with spiders, the cellar harbored fewer eight-legged stalkers than the outhouse.
When I was eleven, my mother received a modest sum from the settlement of my grandfather’s estate, and she used it to provide the house with indoor plumbing: a small bathroom with hot and cold running water, and faucets in place of the hand-operated pump at the kitchen sink. She also replaced the tar-paper roof with asphalt shingles.
We felt as if we had moved into a palace. After all, we now had a shiny porcelain throne instead of a wooden bench with a hole in it and spiders lurking below.
Although we had few possessions, we were always in danger of losing everything we owned. Our perpetual dance with destitution resulted from my father’s conviction that what he earned would be squandered if spent to pay bills and the mortgage, considering that poker or craps offered him the opportunity to quadruple his holdings in a single evening.
If the cards and the dice proved treacherous, he required the consolation of a saloon. Buying a round for the guys at the bar allowed him to pass for the man of means he dreamed of being.
When not in bars or games of chance, my father held forty-four jobs over thirty-five years, many of them in sales, primarily as an insurance agent. More than once he was fired because he punched out the boss—never a smart career move—or a fellow worker who offended him. Sometimes he quit because he felt unappreciated, and probably because the current enterprise included no one whom he wanted to punch, which made the workday boring.
Although my mother was slender, pretty, and good-hearted, my father chased other women. At least two were female wrestlers. In the 1950s, female wrestlers were as rare as armless banjo players, and they were not the bikinied beauties who began thrashing around in mud during the ’70s. My father had affairs with female wrestlers who had bigger biceps and deeper voices than he did.
When our telephone rang after midnight, the caller always proved to be one barkeep or another, reporting that my father had passed out drunk and needed to be removed from the premises before closing time. If the saloon lay within a few miles of home, my mother and I would trek there on foot and load my father into his car.
On one occasion, a woman at the bar asked my mother if we could give her a ride home, as her date had walked out on her. This sturdy blonde had a perm so tight that her curls would have served as life-saving shock absorbers if anyone had hit her on the head with a sledgehammer.
I sensed that in fact my gentle mother regretted not having a sledgehammer close at hand, but I was too young to figure out that the blonde’s date had not walked out on her but had passed out, that he was my old man. Enlightenment came the following evening when, lying in bed, I listened to my parents downstairs as they argued about the curly one.
As a consequence of post-midnight, father-salvaging expeditions and other mortifying experiences related to his behavior, I grew up in a state of embarrassment. Because my father’s shortcomings were widely known, I cringed when asked if I was Ray Koontz’s boy. Instead of answering directly, I said my mother was Florence Koontz, because no shame came with that association.
From the moment they saw me in the cradle, two of my aunts were convinced that I was no less of a good-for-nothing than my father. If they chanced upon me, a seven-year-old, lazing dreamily in the summer sun, their faces clouded and they declared solemnly, “Just like your father,” as if other boys my age were earning their first hundred dollars at a lemonade stand or volunteering to empty bedpans in nursing homes.
My dad’s lack of interest in me, his fits of rage and violence when drinking, his threats to kill himself—and us—the anguish and anxiety he caused my mother: None of that affected me as deeply as the embarrassment he brought upon us by public drunkenness, skirt-chasing, a tendency to brag extravagantly, and other behavior that made him a subject of gossip and scorn.
By high school, I was shy and insecure, and I compensated for my low self-esteem by being quick with a funny line and playing the class clown. Language skills were my shield and my sword.
In no aspect of my life did shyness manifest more than in my interactions with the opposite sex. If I asked a girl for a date and she turned me down, I never asked her again. She might decline with sincere regret, and it might turn out to be true that her mother was in the hospital and her father incapacitated by two broken legs and her beloved sister stuck in the twenty-third century after participating in a secret government time-travel experiment. However, I assumed that she looked at me, saw my father, and decided that setting her hair on fire would be wiser than accepting my invitation to the sock hop followed by milk shakes at Dairy Queen.
Then in my senior year, along came Gerda Cerra. I had been attracted to certain girls before, charmed by them, captivated, but I had not previously been enchanted. I had not before been smitten. In fact, I thought it was not possible to be smitten if you were born after 1890. Petite, graceful, beautiful, Gerda had a soft voice that made every word seem intimate and romantic. When she said, “Something is hanging from the end of your nose,” my heart soared. Not least of all, her self-possession seemed other-worldly.
That I pursued her, shy as I was, all the way from a senior-year date to a marriage proposal is a testament to the impact that she had on me—especially considering that she turned me down four times.
In the first instance, upon hearing which evening I hoped to take her to a movie, she claimed to be working at the dry cleaner that night. Previously, if a girl in a full-body cast pled immobility as a reason for not accepting a date, I assumed the truth was that she found me repellent, and thereafter I avoided her. But a week later, I approached Gerda with a second invitation.
This time she informed me that, on the evening in question, she would be working at the movie theater, behind the refreshment counter. Here was a young woman who either redefined the meaning of industrious or could not remember the dry-cleaner lie that she had told me a week earlier.
After taking two weeks to restore my courage, I asked her for another date—only to learn she had a babysitting