A Big Little Life Read online

  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 otherworldly.

  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 job that night. She seemed to be sincere, but everyone believed Hitler, too, when he claimed that he wouldn’t invade Poland, and we know how that turned out. I did not think Gerda intended to invade Poland, and I wanted to believe I still had a chance to court her, so I accepted her turndown with grace.

  Because she might have begun to feel stalked if not cornered, and therefore might reject my fourth invitation by setting her hair on fire, I brooded weeks before asking her to accompany me to an event that she was already required to attend. Year after year, she had been president of her school class; therefore, I invited her to the junior-class dance.

  When she declined, claiming to be busy on the night, I appealed to her in what I remember as an earnest tone, although as an honest memoirist, I must acknowledge it was more likely a pathetic whine: “But you have to go to the dance, it’s the junior-class dance, and you’re the junior-class president.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I’m going. But I have to spend the first part of the evening selling tickets at the door. Then I operate the record player for a shift, then I sell refreshments for a shift, and then I clean up the gym.”

  I declared that those were my top four favorite things to do on a date, which left her no way to be rid of me other than to beat me with her purse or scream for the police.

  She smiled and said, “All right.” In her soft voice, those words sounded like a declaration of undying love. Because at that moment nothing was hanging from the end of my nose, I felt as suave as Cary Grant.

  Eventually I would learn that her father, Bedford’s shoemaker, immigrated to the States from Italy and had many Old World attitudes, including the notion that children should work by the time they were teenagers. Gerda actually had part-time jobs at the dry cleaner and the movie theater, and supplemented those incomes with babysitting. From the age of thirteen, she bought her own clothes or, because she was a good seamstress, purchased the materials to make them.

  On our first date, between selling tickets and spinning records and selling refreshments and cleaning the gym, we found time for only one dance, but we shared a lot of laughs.

  Nevertheless, after escorting her to her door and saying good night, I worried about the impression I had made. I considered racing home to call her and ask for an official date evaluation, but decided I would appear too needy.

  The following day, Sunday, was interminable, as if the rotation of the Earth slowed dramatically. Monday morning, at school, I was lying in wait at Gerda’s locker when she appeared in the hall outside her homeroom. I half expected a polite hello and a claim of amnesia regarding the events of Saturday evening. Instead, she professed to have laughed so much during our five hours together that her tummy muscles hurt the next morning.

  I always assumed girls found dating me to be painful, but this was good pain. We continued to date. And laugh together.

  I asked her to marry me, and she did.

  Shortly after college, and after our wedding, I went to work in a federal anti-poverty initiative for seven months, long enough to discover that such programs enriched those administering them but otherwise created more poverty. And the low pay extended my penury for over half a year.

  Although Gerda was a bookkeeper with accounting skills and had worked in a bank for a few years, she couldn’t find such employment in the tiny Appalachian town, Saxton, where I taught disadvantaged kids. She took a piecework job in a shoe factory, and boarded a company bus at four o’clock each weekday morning for a forty-five-minute trip over the mountains to the manufacturing plant.

  We were married with a few hundred dollars, a used car, and our clothes. Of the few houses for rent in Saxton, one had full indoor plumbing. Having moved up from an outhouse lifestyle a decade before, I was loath to return. Rent was sixty-five dollars per month, more than we could afford, but we scrimped on other things to pay it.

  The house had neither a refrigerator nor a stove. We bought a used fridge and an electric hot plate. Without an oven, with a hot plate instead of a cooktop, Gerda prepared wonderful meals and could even bake anything we desired, except pies, because the filling woul
d burn at the bottom and remained uncooked at the top.

  Financially, that was an iffy year for us, and we worked long hours. But we were happy because we were together.

  From Saxton, we moved to the Harrisburg area, and I taught high-school English for eighteen months before Gerda made me an offer that changed our lives. Writing in my spare time, I had sold a few short stories and two paperback novels. “You want to be a full-time writer,” she said. “So quit teaching. I’ll support us for five years. If you can’t make it in five years, you never will make it.”

  I sometimes claim that I tried to bargain her up to seven years, but she was a tough negotiator.

  All these years later, I am humbled by her faith in me and the love that inspired her offer. Considering our situation at the time—shaky finances, limited prospects, more rejections than acceptances from publishers—her trust seems extraordinary. Although I hope that over the years I have become a man who would make such an offer to her if my talent was for math and hers was for words, I am humbled because I was not that good a man in those days.

  Growing up in poverty, with psychological and physical violence, always embarrassed by my father’s escapades, I became by my twenties a man who needed approval almost as a child needs it. I needed too desperately to prove myself, and as a consequence I made numerous bad decisions in business. I was too eager to trust the untrustworthy, to believe patently false promises, to take bad advice if it came from someone who seemed to be knowledgable—and especially if they manipulated me with praise. Always an excellent judge of character, Gerda knew in every instance where I was going wrong, and she tried gently to steer me away from the current cliff, but I took too many years to realize that the only approval that really mattered—in addition to God’s—was hers. Throughout my adult life, Gerda has been a light to lead me.

  When some members of both our families and other acquaintances learned that I now wrote fiction full-time while Gerda brought home the bacon as well as the eggs and potatoes that went with it, they took this development as proof that I was a good-for-nothing like my father. They pitied Gerda—and from time to time needled me.

  For Gerda and for me, for so many reasons, failure was not a possibility we could accept. At the end of the five years, she quit her job so that we could work together. She managed our finances, did book research, and relieved me of all the demands of life and business that sapped creative energy and that kept my fingers away from the typewriter.

  By then, we were making a respectable living but not a fortune. During the next five years, the quality of what I wrote improved, but progress in craft and art was seldom matched by increased financial rewards. After a Pennsylvania spring in which we never saw blue sky for forty days—very biblical—we had moved to California for the better weather, and incidentally because of opportunities to do screenwriting. In my early Hollywood ventures, however, I found the film business unfulfilling and depressing. We knew that novelists come and go, that if I did not become essential to a publisher’s bottom line, I would sooner rather than later be one of those who had gone and was forgotten.

  By 1980, success began to come. Twenty-nine years later, as I write this, worldwide sales of my novels are approaching four hundred million copies. Critics have been largely kind, readers even kinder.

  Besides a passion for the English language and an abiding love of storytelling, success required persistence and countless hours of hard work. The central experience of my life and of Gerda’s has been hard work, at least sixty hours a week, often seventy, sometimes more.

  Our faith tells us that when the last hour comes, the best places to be taken are while in prayer or while engaged in work to which we committed ourselves in cheerful acceptance of the truth that work is the lot of humanity, post Eden. If done with diligence and integrity, work is obedience to divine order, a form of repentance.

  For many years, as we gave ourselves to work, we talked about getting a dog. Even in the days when we were on a tight budget, we surrounded ourselves with beauty—cheap posters instead of original oil paintings, carnival glass instead of Daum vases—because beauty soothes the troubled mind and inspires. A dog can be a living work of art, a constant reminder of the exquisite design and breathtaking detail of nature, beauty on four paws. In addition, year by year, we became more aware that this world is a deeply mysterious place, and nothing confirmed the wonder of existence more than what we saw happening between dogs and people with disabilities at Canine Companions for Independence. Being guardians and companions of a dog would be one way to explore more fully the mystery of this world.

  We knew that dogs are not well loved if kept largely in the yard, that they are pack animals born to live within a family, and that a dog therefore requires almost as much time as a child. We hesitated to take the plunge because of our work schedules and because after more than three decades of marriage, we had a rhythm to our life that worked and that we feared disrupting.

  But in September of 1998, a dog finally entered our lives. Over the subsequent nine years, she often amazed us, frequently astonished us, always delighted us, and in time evoked in us a sense of wonder that will remain with us for the rest of our lives. As any man or woman is not only a man or a woman but is also a spirit corrupted in minor or major ways, so this dog was not only a dog, but also a spirit uncorrupted as no human spirit can be. Of all the agents of this world that have changed me for the better, this dog takes second place only to Gerda, and she brought as much to Gerda as to me.

  This dog was as joyful as the most joyful of her kind. She possessed all the many virtues of her species. She was as direct as all dogs are. But she was uncannily intelligent, as well, and in a most undoglike way, she was also at all times mysterious and capable of a solemn behavior that was not merely mood, that was a ceremonial solemnity, as though she observed an important truth implicit in the moment and wished for you to recognize it as well. Gerda and I were not the only ones to witness this behavior, and the more that I grew aware of it and heard it remarked upon by others, the more I became open to the changes this special dog would make in me.

  Along came Trixie.

  III

  anticipation, adventure, and anal glands

  SHE ARRIVED WITH her name. Trixie. I joked sometimes that it sounded more like a stripper than a dog. They told us we could change it and that she could quickly be taught to answer to a new name. But if it sounded more like a stripper than a dog, it sounded more like an elf or a fairy than a stripper. Elves and fairies are magical beings; and so was she.

  Trixie came to us not as a puppy but as a highly educated and refined young lady of three. As a consequence of elbow surgery, she had taken early retirement from a career as an assistance dog to a beautiful young woman, Jenna, who had lost both legs in a traffic accident. Trixie went into service just as Jenna began the student-teaching portion of her senior year at college, and made quite an impression in an elementary-school classroom.

  Since 1990, Gerda and I have been supporters of the Southwest Chapter of Canine Companions for Independence. This remarkable organization raises and trains assistance dogs of four kinds.

  A dog in a “service team” is paired with an adult or adolescent with physical disabilities—paraplegics, quadriplegics—and performs tasks such as calling elevators, opening doors, picking up dropped items that a person in a wheelchair can’t reach…. Some adults who could not live alone before receiving a CCI dog achieve independence; children in wheelchairs gain confidence—and a new best friend.

  In a “skilled-companion team,” a dog is matched with a child or an adult with a physical or developmental disability, and with that person’s primary caretaker, which is usually a parent. The dog helps with various tasks but primarily provides companionship, establishing a deep bond of love. The effect these dogs can have on an autistic child or one with cri du chat is nothing less than miraculous.

  A dog in a “hearing team” alerts his deaf or hard of hearing companion to alarm clocks,
smoke alarms, doorbells, and other sounds.

  “Facility team” dogs are paired with teachers, rehabilitation specialists, or caregivers in hospitals, in classrooms full of kids with developmental disorders, in nursing homes…. These dogs work miracles every day.

  The assistance dogs given by CCI to people with disabilities do great work because of their training, but their most exceptional achievements may be a consequence of their qualities as dogs.

  Tom Hollenstein, a friend and board member of CCI’s Southwest Chapter, suffered a major spinal injury in a bicycle accident when he was twenty-four. A tall, handsome, personable guy, Tom found himself in a wheelchair, living with his parents again. He is one of the most highly motivated people I’ve ever met, and he could not long endure a lack of independence. With his first assistance dog, Weaver, Tom took control of his life, moved out of his parents’ house into his own apartment, landed a job, and never looked back. Weaver was something special, and one of those human-dog bonds formed that was even deeper than usual. Tom has said that, given the choice of never having been disabled or never having known Weaver, he would choose the dog and therefore the spinal injury. Tom does not speak about such things lightly; he means what he says. He told me that when he lost his four-legged companion, he discovered, in his grief, depths of emotion that he had not realized were in him.

  I first read about CCI when I was researching a novel, Midnight, that included a character in a wheelchair. I was so taken with the organization’s work that I specified the fictional dog, Moose, was CCI-trained. Midnight, my first book to reach number one on the best-seller list, caught CCI’s attention, and they asked if I would add a paragraph to the end of the paperback edition to promote them and to provide the address of their national headquarters in Santa Rosa, California. I was happy to oblige, and this led to our personal involvement with the Southwest Chapter, long before Trixie was born.