Six years after my father left us, in the summer of 1977, my mother, my younger brother, and I were living in a single-wide trailer in the desert of Wildomar, California. My mother’s sister Anne and Anne’s husband, Gerick, lived with their boys in a double-wide on the same property, ten acres of scrubland my wealthy grandparents had bought as an investment. We must have resembled squatters, but we were there legally. I was ten and would enter the fifth grade that fall.
In my father’s absence Gerick had stepped into the role of principal adult male in my life. He taught me that survival is a competition, and the competition started right there among my cousins and me. He presided over Big Wheel races down steep, winding tracks on a dusty hillside. (The surest path to victory was to sideswipe the other guy off the track.) He had us dig trenches for elaborate forts, and he built a wooden ramp and held bicycle-jumping contests that often ended in injury but never in tears. The one inexcusable crime, in Gerick’s mind, was to complain or cry. His biggest boy, Nils, was a year younger than I was, and Gerick encouraged a rivalry between us. Being older, I was expected to win and usually did, but the victories were hollow, as Nils never seemed to try his hardest, and so I played just hard enough not to lose.
