Read Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography for Free Online Page B

Spanish missionary Father Dumez, who cowed the local Chumash Indians into Christianity, it is rumored to be haunted, and stories of ancient burial grounds and lost underwater villages are legend. At the moment I’m unaware of this unsettling history, although within months I will see the signs everywhere. But as we turn into a cul-de-sac of modest ranch-style houses, I only know that my mom has chosen Point Dume because it has the best air quality in Southern California.
    Our new house is a rented, single-story ranch house, very plain, with three bedrooms, one bath, and a yard strewn with what look to be small moon rocks. Chad and I will come to despise this yard, as we will have to weed it of intruding crabgrass every weekend before we can go out to play. But the real showstopper is the tiny horse corral, which Mom tells Chad and me was constructed with the leftover wood from the set of Planet of the Apes . I can almost look down the gully behind it to see the beach where Charlton Heston discovered the remains of the Statue of Liberty in one of filmmaking’s most iconic scenes. There’s also an unsubstantiated rumor that the Captain and Tennille may have lived in our house. I am quickly sensing that, in Point Dume, there is adventure as well as Hollywood history at every turn.
    An entire book could (and should) be written about Malibu in 1976. In the bicentennial sunlight of that year, it was a place of rural beauty where people still rode to the local market on horseback and tied up to a hitching post in the parking lot. Long before every agent and studio president knocked down the beach shacks to build their megamansions, Malibu was populated by a wonderful mix of normal working-class families, hippies, asshole surfers, drugged-out reclusive rock stars, and the odd actor or two. The town was extremely spartan. Its lone movie theater only got films months after they had played everywhere else. Its one record shop wouldn’t have the latest record for weeks and weeks after you could find it all over Los Angeles. There was a taco stand, a donut shop, a biker bar, and one or two restaurants in all of its twenty-two miles. Although Hollywood was only a forty-five-minute drive away, at that time it might as well have been forty-five light-years. It’s almost impossible now to imagine a Malibu without Wolfgang Puck, Nobu sushi, Starbucks, and paparazzi documenting every B-list celebrity who walks out the door with a latte, but it did exist, once upon a time.
    As I’m settling into my new bedroom, which I will share with Chad, my mom tells me she has a surprise in the other room. Chad is convinced it’s a puppy. He and I run into the living room, excited to see what she has in store for us.
    It isn’t a puppy.
    From behind a stack of boxes emerges a dark-haired, dark-eyed man with a black beard. (Think one of the guys on the box of Smith Brothers cough drops.) Chad gasps. “Dr.… Dr. Wilson?”
    “Hey, Chad-o!” he says, smiling. I look around the room. Dr. Wilson? The allergy hospital guy? What’s he doing here?
    “How do you like the surprise?” Mom asks cheerily, as if she’s just presented us with a new jungle gym or, indeed, a puppy.
    “Hey, Rob-o!” he adds warmly.
    “Steve is going to be living with us!” Mom announces.
    I look at her. She is beaming. Happy. After taking a moment to digest the announcement, Chad seems to be down with the program as well. And in a testament to the simplicity and resilience of twelve-year-olds, I take a minute and process this instant addition to our family and conclude … sounds okay to me, can I have the bed by the window?
    Later that night as I sleep in my new room, I think about what’s become of our family. I’m desperately homesick for my dad and grandparents. I wonder if my friends are playing football without me. I consider my mother. She must be a brave person to leave an unhappy marriage when so many people of her background stick it out. I figure she is to be