Projecting

Aunt Doodie’s house had a large-screen TV. In 1978, this meant a giant screen perched atop a projector system housed in a three-foot square wooden base. The projector had three lenses for the primary colors, which shot the TV feed onto a mirror that then projected it onto a screen. The picture was terrible, and the sound didn’t quite sync up, but it was very expensive, very big, and my stepdad and I had never seen anything like it. I can’t speak for Pete, but I was trying hard to think it was really impressive. I was five years old, experiencing cognitive dissonance for the first time, and it was life-changing.

In the same basement where they kept the TV, there was a built-in sauna. I didn’t know what a sauna was and didn’t find out on that trip because it wasn’t working at the time. They also had an inground pool and a jacuzzi, for which they had fenced in and paved their entire backyard with cement. Keith, Aunt Doodie’s third husband, gave us a tour of all of this.

Keith stood next to the projector system, pointing out the mirror and how to use the controls to make the colors sync up—which they didn’t, quite. Keith was a big man, about 350 pounds, none of it muscle. He had a rum and Coke in his hand and a smug smile on his large white face. We had a console television at home. It was also big, but not the screen part. The screen was normal-sized, but the wooden box it sat in was as large as a compact car. It had three channels, and you had to cross the room to change them by hand. Keith’s entertainment system had a remote control. In our house, I was the remote control. Our TV was furniture. Keith’s TV was technology—technology that almost worked. Keith went on and on, pointing out features and building up to the reveal of how much he’d paid for it, aiming for maximum wow factor. When he finally got there, my stepfather nodded, grunted, and took a swig of his Budweiser. Keith probably thought he had stunned Pete into silence, but he hadn’t been in the family long enough to know that Pete rarely spoke unless he was yelling at me.

For my part, I sat there watching as a red, blue, and yellow Godzilla attacked three Tokyos. They say size doesn’t matter, and most of the time, when people say that, they’re trying to spare someone’s feelings. But in my case, it’s true. I’ve never needed a large or even a good screen to get absorbed in a TV show or movie. If the story hooks me, I’m there—whether it’s IMAX or a four-inch screen embedded in the back of an airplane seat. I was raised on TV; it’s my native environment. But this thing was making me nauseous.

Still, it was huge, complicated, and expensive, and clearly, projector TVs—like inground jacuzzis, basement saunas, and homemade ice cream makers (another thing Keith showed us but didn’t demonstrate)—were the future. So, in spite of the nausea, I tried to be duly awed. We had come a long way to see all of this, and I was determined not to be disappointed, no matter how hard it all tried. This was everything TV had promised me California would be. Of course, we were in Kansas, but at five years old, I didn’t know the difference.

California was in our living rooms all the time. The Brady Bunch, Charlie’s Angels, The Rockford Files, The Incredible Hulk, CHiPs. We knew what California was: the place where exciting things happened to rich people—and also James Rockford. I knew, even at five years old, that it was somewhere west. I also knew Aunt Doodie was rich, lived somewhere west, and had an exciting life. So when I was told we were going to see my aunt at her home in Kansas, I didn’t get past the first syllable. We were going to California. And according to my mother, it was only a five-hour drive from our home in eastern Missouri.

Everything about my aunt’s glamorous life in Olathe, Kansas, lived up to what I expected of the Golden State—or it almost did. It got close enough.

My sister and I spent most of that day in the pool. Keith, Aunt Doodie, and my stepdad shuttled between the pool area and the basement bar, which shared space with the sauna and the large-screen TV. The house had an upstairs, all shag carpet and exposed wood, with orange-upholstered furniture that looked straight out of a Home & Garden magazine from 1978. A historian of interior design might have taken notes, but the upstairs—where the kitchen, living room, and bedrooms were—made no impression on me. The basement was where it was happening.

Eventually, Keith’s two teenage sons came home and showed us a brand-new thing called an Atari. They wouldn’t let us play, but we could watch them.

Our mom didn’t drink, so she sat in a lawn chair in a white bathing suit with white sunglasses, watching us get sunburned while reading People magazine. Years later, I wondered if she felt uncomfortable. She and her sister couldn’t have been more different. My mom didn’t drink or curse. Instead, she took us to church twice a week. Aunt Doodie had made a career out of marrying well. Eventually, she got a real estate license, though whether it was before or after she divorced Keith, I can’t say. Keith was her last husband. After establishing her career, she stuck to well-off boyfriends, avoiding contracts that required lawyers to escape.

But to me, my mom looked right at home by the pool. If she felt out of place with all the toys and newfangled accoutrements, she didn’t show it. Then again, we were only staying a few days, and I was oblivious as a kid. Always off in my own world—imagining spaceships, supervillains, and exploding volcanoes. I’d draw pictures of my adventures in the back seat of the car, so wrapped up in my fantasies that my parents could have planned a coup, sold me to a carnival, or committed a murder, and I wouldn’t have noticed.

All I knew was that I now had a new setting for my adventures: California. A land of magnificent wealth—projector TVs, bubbling outdoor bathtubs, and video game consoles that some kids even got to touch. It was a magical place, not far from the Ozarks. You could make it there in a day.