|
Her heart skipped a beat when she spotted the note, crudely written on the back of an old envelope, laying folded
in half on the kitchen table. She was so in love. Just knowing that it was his hand that had penned her name was enough to
bring a smile. But the moment quickly turned dark.
“I’m tired of us being broke. I’ve taken the cash and your jewelry to Palm Springs to gamble.
When I come back, we’ll get married…”
She did not know that John McGraw would never come back. Nor did she know she was pregnant and that John McGraw
would never know about his son.
When Constance Campeau discovered
she was pregnant, she did what people did back in the late 40’s when this sort of thing happened. She paid a friend
to marry her so the baby would have a name. The baby was born Timothy Joseph Curtis. The marriage was annulled three months
later.
In Legends of the Plastic Chairs, Grandma Campeau was featured singing a proper old vaudeville
tune:
“In the shade of the
old apple tree,
Where the love in your eyes I could see,
When the voice that I heard, like the song of the bird,
Seemed to whisper sweet music to me.”
In reality,
however, she was much more likely to be singing a more hilarious lymrick:
“Went downtown to see my lady, Nobody home, but Kitty and the baby. Kitty
was drunk, and I was sober. Kitty let a pffft and knocked me over...”
Like the author’s mother, Tim’s mother also suffered from bouts of mental illness, depression and schizophrenia,
and spent a good deal of time in the hospital because of it. It was not an illness that could be easily explained. Connie
would be okay for a while, then suddenly she would change. Hospitals for her type of illness were not a pleasant place to
be. She fought being hospitalized, dreading the electro-shock treatments she knew she would be forced to endure.
Tim was a champion marble player. Back before video games and pogs, kids
played marbles. And he was good at it. They had a dirt lot down at the end of the street…they used to go down there
almost every day and play a game called ‘poison.’ When Tim was in the 6th grade his school held a marble championship
down at the schoolyard and he won first place. He still has that blue ribbon.
“I got my first kiss in the 7th
grade. There was a group of about a dozen of us at a party playing spin the bottle. It eventually became Debbie Farnsworth’s
turn to spin. Debbie was big, ugly, and rude. I remember sitting there praying the bottle would not land on me. But
sure enough, it stopped pointing straight at me. Then Debbie belted out, “EEEUUUUWW, I don’t wanna kiss HIM!”
I was incredulous! I asked her, ‘Well, why not?’ She said, ‘Just go home an look at yourself!’ So
I did. I went home and looked at myself. And I thought, well if Debbie Farnsworth doesn’t want to kiss me, I must really
be ugly. It took me quite a few years to get over that.”
An extremely bright child, Tim dismantled everything he could get his hands on just for the joy
of understanding out it worked. He took apart and reassembled the telephone so many times the wires hung out the back like
red and black entrails. Especially fascinated with electricity, he built a phonograph from scratch using bits and pieces of
junk he pulled out of neighborhood trash cans. Tim could figure out how just about anything worked…except when it came
to girls.
“One day when I was twelve the girl next door and I were seated
on the couch of the music room of our old home. We decided we would experiment with some kissing, which I discovered was quite
fun. She asked me if I knew about the birds and bees. And I thought to myself, of course I know about the birds and bees.
You go to bed early, you get up early, you eat the right foods and you’ll be healthy.”
Fitting in with the other kids sometimes
required ingenuity.
“The fad in high school was to paint a racing stripe down the center
of your car, and then take an old Army helmet and paint it to match the car stick it in the back window. Since all I had was
a bicycle, I painted an Army helmet to match my bike and attached my grandfather’s old pipe lighter to the top of the
helmet. The flame could be adjusted on the lighter to where it could shoot up at least 12 inches. I used to like to ride in
front of store windows to I could see the reflection of the flame shooting out of the top of my head. One day some buddies
and I went to see a movie at the old Fox Redondo. They walked in first and sat down in the second row. I followed a few moments
later wearing the helmet with the flame adjusted to full height, which of course, lit up the entire theater. I was a hit as
I walked casually to the front and sat down. I doused the flame and passed the helmet down to the last guy at the end of the
row who stashed it under his seat just before the usher showed up. He asked if we had seem a kid walking through the theater
with fire shooting out the top of his head. We said, nope.”
During a long
period of his mother’s institutionalization, Tim spent the 9th grade in Provo, Utah, at Farrer Junior High School. Largely
because he was an unknown new kid at the school, in P.E. when teams were chosen, he was always the last one to be picked.
“I had been
on the all-city, all-star basketball team,” he recalls, “and this was not what I was used to back home.
Being chosen last had such a powerful psychological effect on me that I played lousy at Farrer. The best I could do was play
basketball in the exact same way a kid chosen last would be expected to play – terrible. I felt like Chris Evans in
The Cipher in the Snow.”
Back in Redondo, at the age fourteen Tim learned the fine art of hitchhiking. He discovered
you could get to any point on a map so long as you knew the secrets to getting people to stop. The rules were simple. You
gotta be clean cut. Alone. Not too intense. A big bright smile. And a surfboard under your arm doesn’t hurt. From his
fourteenth birthday until he bought his first car, Tim logged in over 100,000 miles on his thumb, and no parental figure ever
tried to stop him.
Surfing was Tim’s entire life until he turned nineteen. When life chooses to imitate art, it sometimes
looks just like the movie Big Wednesday, and that’s the life Tim lived. Chevy Nomads, surf bands,
madras shirts, Bubble Up, bonfires, sun blistered skin, paraffin wax, and always watching the swells. Always waiting for that
perfect set of waves.
Life changed dramatically for Tim when he went on a
two-year mission to Texas for the Mormon Church in southeastern Texas.
“I
remember one day I walked into the mission office building (which, to a missionary is like going to the City of Oz), and I
went into a room that had about two hundred pictures of missionaries pinned to a map of the state of Texas. Looking closely
at the photos, I noticed that one in particular stood out. It was a guy by the name of Lewis Hamberlain, and what struck me
was that he had bright red hair and freckles, and it seemed like maybe the camera flash was too close to him because his face
was enormous and almost phosphorescent. I didn’t know this guy, but I felt sorry for him so I went home and that night
and I fried him a giant cookie a frying pan. I mailed it off to him the next day with a letter: Dear Lewis, You are definitely
the ugliest missionary in the entire state of Texas. My condolences. Well, as luck would have it, about two weeks later,
Lewis and I were assigned to become missionary partners together. He was from Idaho and I was from California, and we had
almost nothing in common. He was a good sport and cracked up over the whole cookie thing. We did our best to serve our mission
and parted ways at the end. Now, fast-forward a couple of years and I have been assigned a roommate in the dorms at BYU. Guess
who it ended up being? None other than Lewis Hamberlain. Well, this time Lewis and I became the best of friends and we’ve
been each other’s shadow ever since.”
A telegram had arrived special delivery to the small house he shared with his Mormon missionary
companion, Lewis. Tim was leaning over pulling on his socks when the knock sounded at the door. Puzzled, he hurriedly tore
open the letter written in the shaky hand of his aged aunt. He made no sound as he read the words detailing his mother’s
death from being over medicated.
Constance was buried in the Redondo Beach cemetery alongside Grandma
Campeau and several other ancestors. Tim dropped out of BYU after four semesters and returned to Southern California to make
his way. Before leaving Utah, however, Tim had befriended one of his favorite college professors, Dr. Ches Gottfredson, who
would become his life-long closest friend. Tim became one of the first students of Dr. Gottfredson’s unique study of
personal ontology, which he termed Prophecy and Philosophy.
Tim has six children,
sons Tom, Ben, Jacob, Joshua, and Daniel; and a daughter, Summer Dey. Tim’s roofing career, combined with his deep interest in philosophy, has led him to pen his own book, initially aimed
at helping other contractors improve their business by better understanding the human dynamic. He is in the process of converting
his book into a broad-base appeal, scheduled for publishing soon.
|
