IN 1954, WHEN we moved into the Libbit house, Jocko’s career was on a solid climb upward: from B movies to co-starring in A movies with important actors like Rock Hudson and Jeff Chandler and then eventually becoming the lead actor in A-ish movies. The ride went up and up, until 1958, when he was cast to star in a half-hour series on CBS. As popular as The Range Rider had been, it was only regionally televised, so Yancy Derringer was a much bigger deal. I can’t say that the series thrust him into the same arena as James Garner of Maverick or Clint Eastwood of Rawhide, who were starring in more prestigious, hour-long shows, but it came very close. The whole house seemed to vibrate with the swagger of achievement. Jocko walked taller, his voice got deeper, and I swear the fringe on his jacket grew longer. He was a peacock with his tail fully spread and fluttering.
But when Yancy Derringer was suddenly canceled after one thirty-two-episode season, down went the ride. Even as a twelve-year-old, I remember feeling a sense of hush in the house as though there’d been a death in the family. Ricky and I didn’t talk about it and Princess was too young to understand, but we all felt it. Outraged conversations were taking place in the den behind closed doors, and loud debates with someone on the phone upstairs could be heard all over the house. Muffled tidbits of the tragedy floated through the air: The new management at the network, Jim Aubrey—who was now executive vice president—had been systematically canceling all the shows he hadn’t participated in from the beginning, or Aubrey had some kind of problem with Jocko, or this or that. But the truth is, “That’s show biz, folks.” And after all the indignant smoke had cleared, we discovered that the financial bubble we’d been living in had popped. We were standing in midair without a parachute or any rainy-day savings account… flat broke. Jocko needed a job, but as the weeks and months went by, the more he needed one, the less likely it seemed he might get one. And the less likely it seemed, the more he would inflate himself, going from a peacock to a puffer fish as he tried to pretend to be bigger than he actually was.
I’m sure this first real slam in his career was devastating, but I never saw Jocko take the punch like the brilliant stuntman he’d always been, never saw him register the blow or pause to reassess who he was, as an actor or a human. Righteously fuming, he would blame it on everyone else’s spiteful incompetence, saying that it was the network who had lost, not him. But when the ride seems to be headed nowhere but down, how can you change your course if you won’t recognize where you’re headed? How can you change who you are and learn what it takes to get up, over and over, if you can’t allow yourself to feel how much it hurts to be knocked down?
My mother continued to work, but erratically and without the same energy, as if inch by inch, day by day, she was losing her confidence. The proud twinkle in her eyes was starting to fade along with her flawless face, now beginning to puff from vodka’s nightly numbing. And as the tension in the house increased, so did the size of those evening cocktails. Though it never happened in our presence, I had the sense that she and Jocko were fighting and I felt frightened for my mother. Once, Jocko told us that we had to stay completely quiet all day, that Baa was in bed, that she’d taken a hard fall and hit her head. We couldn’t go upstairs to see her, or talk to her in any way. All we could do was keep quiet. We whispered, tiptoeing around, afraid to move, as if we were hiding from the Nazis.
We didn’t go out much. I think this was opening night of the circus.
Over the years, I slowly created a place where I could toss all the feelings I didn’t understand, or the ones I didn’t want to understand, was afraid of. Emotions that many times came to me as physical sensations without words, like the uncomfortable fingernails on the blackboard inside me. Instead of trying to verbalize what I was feeling, even to myself, I’d shove them away. I would pack them up and send those parts of me out the window to stay safe with the tree, while only one piece remained, muted and dulled, though dutifully performing the required tasks. But as adolescence approached, my emotions began to overload. The man I had lived with most of my life, the father figure whom I had looked to for love and affection, now seemed only dangerous, and I couldn’t expect protection to come from my mother, who had lost sight of everyone, including herself. So, I unconsciously created an internal sycamore tree, a safe place. What I didn’t want to see or feel, I would send off into a cloud of fog, hidden in a mental whiteout.
I began to live in that foggy world to such a degree I couldn’t focus on my schoolwork, could barely read a book much less write a report on it. Subjects I might have loved and excelled in, like language or history, would go in one ear and out the other so fast, I couldn’t remember any of it. Mathematics was simply out of the question. I started thinking of myself as being stupid because I couldn’t hold anything in my head. What I could do was memorize a poem, or focus completely on anything relating to the drama department, which luckily, I discovered at this exact moment. Other than that, it was all a muted fog, and floating through the fog was the familiar feeling of fear. Always, I felt afraid.
Then, when I was newly fourteen, I just stopped talking to him. One day I was his little Doodle and the next, I refused to look him in the face or acknowledge he even existed, answering his questions with as few words as possible. Without touching him or knowing why, I pushed him away. And he felt it as surely as if I had hit him with a club. I shut down, tucked everything so completely inside my fog that, at the time, I couldn’t clearly see what had happened, what had finally tripped the wire. I used the only words I could, which were no words at all, and my about-face infuriated, confounded, and hurt him. After that, Jocko and I entered a war together, mortal enemies, communicating with the only language our intense relationship could speak: anger on his part and silence on mine.
Turning fourteen.
With each day, a new theater of war opened up. He began spying on me, listening on the other phone if anyone called, accusing me of behaving in ways I couldn’t even fathom, things he saw only through his eyes. I was a teenager who desperately needed her peers, trying hard to be friends with a group of girls, to be invited to their slumber parties, to be included. Once, he lay spread-eagle on the big front lawn, flat as a pancake and undetected by the light of the moon or passing cars as he waited for me to return from an eighth-grade party I’d been allowed to attend. But when I was securely dropped off by the parent of another girl at exactly eleven o’clock—my curfew—his hopes of trapping me in some kind of deception were thwarted. God knows how long he’d been planted out there on the damp grass—which definitely needed mowing.
Then there was the time a boy I knew from school impulsively walked me home from the Little League field, less than a mile away. I remember feeling flustered, but, thinking Jocko wouldn’t be home until late, I invited the young man to stay for dinner. Ricky and Princess joined us, thank God, because they did most of the talking, making the conversation seem friendly and fun. As we all sat around the kitchen banquette, eating Baa’s dinner of pan-fried pork chops and canned corn, I was so caught up with the novelty of having this impromptu guest that I didn’t notice Jocko’s unexpected entrance through the back door.