VERY FIRST PERSON : Beverly Hills in the ‘50s : For a Boy Trying to Find His Way Through a Famous Divorce, Life Was About Found Bullets and Catechism, Baseball and Hallucinations, Red Skelton and Marilyn Monroe

While my mother slept on a fold-out couch in the living room, my sister and I shared the bedroom. Lucy and I had twin beds. In the darkness before we fell asleep, I instituted a program called “Assembly,” modeled after school assemblies. I introduced talent, frequently a singer, and then sang a song (“16 Tons” maybe, or “Mr. Sandman”). Most likely I was trying to restore order to our shattered reality, and I remember feeling contentment as I went about this ritual. Lucy was ambivalent about it--sometimes protesting that she wanted to sleep, sometimes joining in with a song or an announcement herself.

In the fall of 1951, we had moved with our mother from a small mansion with an orange-tiled roof on North Rodeo Drive to this one-bedroom apartment at Olympic Boulevard and McCarty Drive. My father and mother were getting divorced for the second time, their second marriage having lasted six months. I was almost 8, Lucy not yet 6, and my mother just 27.

It happens that our stay in that apartment corresponds to the dawning of continuous memory in my life. Before it I see scattered glimpses: an apartment with gray walls near the Plaza Hotel in New York, where my parents broke up the first time . . . the bridle path down the center of North Rodeo Drive, where one quiet, sunny afternoon I taught myself how to ride my bike no-handed. But from the apartment building on, a narrative coalesces.

Martha Stevenson is a friend of my mother’s. A pretty, young Southern woman, blond with delicate features, she had been married to the bandleader Hal Kemp, who died in an automobile accident after they had been together only a few years. Their daughter, Townsend, is a year or two older than I, excellent in school, and a know-it-all. One day at Martha’s Beverly Hills house, Townsend asks if I can do a swan dive.

“Yes,” I answer.

“Really?” She’s impressed. “Can you do any other dives?”

“A jackknife.”

“A jackknife? Really? Can you do a flip?”

“I can even do a double flip.”

A week or two later I’m poolside with Townsend. She awaits my swan dive, jackknife and double flip. I go to the diving board, walk to the end of it and, after the briefest hesitation, dive.

“Why did you lie?” Townsend asks indignantly as I get out of the water.

But for some reason, Townsend’s mother, Martha, takes an interest in me, and probably I owe my passage through this crossroads of my life to the kindness of this gentle woman. She has a slightly side-wise smile--a trait I recognized years later with an immediate sense of trust when I met my wife. Martha arranges for me to be baptized as an Episcopalian, and I’m then promptly enrolled at the local Catholic school for the third grade.

My reading is poor, and it isn’t helped by the introduction of catechism, of which I understand barely a word. Often I’m ordered to stay behind during recess, kneel and recite 50 Hail Marys in repentance for my poor performance during class. My mind seems to be a repository of tension, electrical static, which limits my capacity to learn. However, when I get on my knees in the empty classroom and let the words of the Hail Mary go through my head, although I don’t understand them, I find myself actually praying.

On regular evenings during the school year, Martha takes me to the minor league baseball games. There are two local teams, the Hollywood Stars and the Los Angeles Angels, and they play each other over and over.

The fresh green and white of the baseball diamond at night under the stadium lights thrills me, and the brightness of the players’ fresh uniforms as they take the field. Martha has season tickets, and she patiently teaches me how to keep a box score. At the start of each game we settle into our seats with the programs, and at the end we’ve each neatly filled in our play-by-play record. As we leave, Martha tosses her program into the trash, but I hold onto mine. It’s evidence that I can still learn how to do something correctly, which is important to me.

What the psychological mechanisms are, I’m still not clear about, but one afternoon when I kneel on the sidewalk and hold up the front end of my bike to spin the front wheel--as the wheel spins in front of my eyes, I experience a hypnagogic hallucination. All the neighborhood noises, as well as my inner monologue, turn into demonized gibberish. It’s as if all noise becomes sonically wrinkled, and this pattern of wrinkles threatens to take over my mind so I won’t understand what I’m hearing or thinking. I have more than one of these episodes, but none so severe that I can’t hold onto my identity through it. None lasts more than 10 minutes or so.

I also sometimes experience noises Lucy makes as if they were made solely to annoy me. If she’s in the bath, for instance, and I hear her splashing as I lie on my bed, the splashes take on a quality of smug contentment that I hate.

“Stop making that noise!” I shout from the bed.

Hannah, a German emigre painter and a friend of my mother’s, does portraits of Lucy and me in the German Expressionist manner, with bold strokes of primary colors.

Hannah’s boyfriend, a tall, easygoing American named Ted, is the first person I meet who is said to be a poet.

“Michael’s a--green name,” he says one evening in Hannah’s living room after we’ve watched a game show based on charades.

“Green?” I say, uncertain what he means.

“Don’t you think it’s sort of a green name--Michael?” he asks, relaxed and offhand.

“I guess so,” I answer, warming a little because of his manner.

“What color would you say the name Sam is?” he asks.

Instantly a color leaps to mind. “Black?”

“Good!” he says. “You got it.”

Eisenhower is running against Stevenson for the first time, and Beverly Hills is full of red, white and blue “I Like Ike” buttons. There are fewer “All the Way With Adlai” buttons.

One late afternoon as I ride my bike, I encounter a boy with a mop of curly dark hair also riding a bike. We strike an instant rapport and ride around for a while. His name is Josh. When it’s almost time to head home, he asks which candidate my parents want to win.

“Stevenson,” I tell him.

“Mine, too!” he answers, delighted.

As if this parallel ratifies our natural rapport, we both immediately stop our bikes, get off and embrace each other.

Around the comer from our building is a cobblestone alley. My friend Tommy and I like to play and explore there in the warm sunshine. Just off the alley, an old man has a workshop with pinups on the wall. There’s Marilyn Monroe stretched naked across red velvet, and one of another voluptuous blond with her breasts visible in a white fur coat.

One afternoon, in the alley we find a small bullet in the crevice between two cobblestones.

“Don’t touch it!” I shout, holding Tommy back.

“Why not?”

“Fingerprints,” I remind him.

“Oh, yeah. I’ll go get something to pick it up with. You guard it.”

He lives in the corner house on the alley: a normal boy with a normal family who all eat Rice Krispies for breakfast. He returns with a paper napkin. Carefully, we pick up the bullet and walk to the police station.

“Can I help you boys?” the officer behind the counter asks.

“We’d like to report a bullet,” I say.

We open the napkin. The officer asks and we tell him how we found it. He takes this in, thanks us and keeps the bullet. Leaving the building, I feel a little surge of pride for having done my civic duty. It’s late afternoon now. As we walk down the steps, Tommy pokes me.

“Look,” he says, “it’s Red Skelton.”

Dressed in a white suit, the red-haired comedian is coming up the steps, and we turn to watch him. At the building’s landing, he approaches a group of blue-uniformed policemen.

“Break it up, boys,” he commands them briskly, “or I’ll call the cops!”

As part of the divorce agreement, that fall my mother, Lucy and I move into a new ranch house in Pacific Palisades. As the Eisenhower era goes into gear, our life settles down for several years into a tranquil (and for my mother, deadly boring) suburban routine: car pool, public school, neighborhood friendships and, for me, the Little League. I forget about going crazy. I want to hit a home run.