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Basically, she is a traditional suburban mom with a thin veneer of yesterday’s counterculture not too securely fastened to the outside. It’s not a good idea to kick the scenery too hard, but if you hold very still and view it all through a squint and from a certain angle, you can just about get a glimpse of how she likes to see herself, and it’s actually very sweet. She was quite a bit younger than my dad was when they got married and she had me when she was super young, so she’s still quite pretty. By the way.

My dad was married to another lady before he got divorced and married my mom. I know nothing at all about my dad’s first wife, except that she lives in Europe somewhere and her name is Melanie. And that my mom hates her guts, even after all these years. She calls her Smellanie, and says she’s getting a migraine if anyone ever brings her up. And believe me, you don’t want to be around Migraine Mom. I strongly recommend avoiding that subject.

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T

* * *

he current man in my mom’s life, technically my stepfather, is a full-on hippie, though. There’s just no getting around it. He’d say “former hippie” probably, but that’s too fine a distinction in my book.

Our official legal relationship is pretty recent, though he’s been around for quite a while. I don’t know why they decided to get married all of a sudden. They went away for the weekend to see Neil Young in Big Sur and somehow came back married. They still refer to each other as partners, though, rather than husband-wife. “Have you met my partner, Carol?”

Like they’re lawyers who work at the same law firm, or cops who share a squad car. Or cowboys in the Wild West.

“Howdy, pardner.”

Unfortunately, Carol’s dogie-wranglin’ varmint-lickin’

yella-bellied pardner’s name happens to be Tom also. Just my luck.

He has tried to establish the system where I call him Big Tom and he calls me Little Dude. So that any observers (like, say, if someone had planted a spy cam in the TV room) could tell us apart. See, you can’t have two Toms in the same room.

It would be too confusing for the viewer. Well, he can call me what he likes, but I hardly ever say anything at all, so it never comes up from my end. He’s the one who calls himself Big Tom. Which is funny because he’s very small for a full-grown man. The spy cam doesn’t lie: Big Tom is little.

Little Big Tom can be annoying, but I eventually got used to him. Amanda, on the other hand, has never accepted his legitimacy. She spent the whole first year of the “partnership”

sobbing. (So did my mom, come to think of it, but that’s not the same thing: my mom spends a great deal of time crying regardless of who happens to be married to whom. Odds are she’s crying right now. I’ll bet you anything.) These days, 25

Amanda contents herself with methodically running through all the possible ways to give him the cold shoulder, one after another. No amount of bribery or family-counseling gim-mickry ever manages to charm her, though he continually tries. It just makes her angrier. She gets pretty excited when my mom and Little Big Tom have an argument, because she’s always imagining that this will finally be the one that leads to their getting divorced. It never is, though. It’s weird to watch the situation unfold: you never know who to root for.

One time I said “Get a haircut, hippie” to Little Big Tom, because I’d heard him mention that that’s what people used to say to him in Vermont where he’s from. He thought that was hilarious, and actually seemed quite excited that I’d said anything at all to him, since that doesn’t often happen.

He raised his beer and put an awkward arm around my shoulder, and I tried not to stiffen up too noticeably. Then he pushed the mute button on the remote, turned to me, and said, “Kid, you’re all right.” There was a long silence. Then he took his arm away, de-muted, and sighed heavily. Well, the Giants were down by two.

“Kid, you’re all right.” How sad is that? What an ass. For a moment, though, I felt a surge of—what? I don’t know the word for it. It’s like when you feel lonely, but for someone else. I don’t know how to say it. Like you feel sorry for yourself, but it’s somebody else’s situation that makes you feel like that. Not feeling sorry for someone in the usual condescend-ing way, like when you feel bad if you run over an animal or when a midget can’t reach a shelf. More like you suddenly find yourself pretending to be the other person without meaning to, and feeling lonely while playing the role of the other person in your head. I guess, well . . . you could do it with an animal, too.

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But let’s be clear. In no way should this Special Moment undermine our central thesis, which I will always stand squarely behind: Little Big Tom should get a haircut.

Seriously. That ponytail has got to go.

When Highway to Hell was over, we put on Desolation Boulevard and started to roll stats for “War in the Pacific.” Sam Hellerman was playing the Japanese. At around “No You Don’t,” Little Big Tom came in and stood in the doorway. He nodded as though listening to the music; then he said, “How about we go easy on the decibels for a while? Your mom’s trying to rest.”

I stared at him until he did a little decisive frown-nod and flitted out. Then I reached over and turned the volume up a notch.

Little Big Tom is a pretty nice guy, actually, and it’s not fair that I’m so unaccommodating.

He means well. He likes to walk around making little helpful comments.

“Now, don’t fill up on milk,” he’ll say if he thinks someone is drinking too much milk. Or he’ll say, “Ladies and gen-tlemen, welcome to the homework hour!” if he thinks there’s not enough homework going on at any given time. “Let’s put some light on the subject,” he always says whenever he turns on a light.

He also likes to dispense words of encouragement when he’s making his rounds. Like, Amanda will be working on this plaster cast of her hand for art class, and he’ll come in and say, “nice hand.”

Once, Little Big Tom stuck his head in the door while I was trying to play “Brown Sugar” on the guitar.

“Bar chords,” he said. “Rock and roll.”

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Little Big Tom wasn’t actually saying that my halting ren-dition of “Brown Sugar” was rock and roll. No one would have said that.

He likes to say “rock and roll” all the time, but what he usually means by it is “way to go!” or “let’s get this show on the road!” or “this is a fantastic vegetarian sausage!” Like, he figures out how to set the clock on the VCR and he’ll say

“rock and roll!” Or he’ll say “rock and roll!” when everyone finally gets in the car after he’s been waiting for a while.

Sometimes he’ll even say it quietly and sarcastically when something goes wrong. Once he knocked over my mom’s art supply shelf. He bent down to pick everything up, whispered

“Rock and roll,” and sighed deeply.

I’m a bit rough on Little Big Tom, I know, but I’m nothing compared to Amanda. She can hardly bear to be in the same room with him, and she says even less to him than I do.

That time he said “nice hand,” for example? Her reaction was to pick up the half-finished hand, drop it in the garbage, and walk out of the room without a word. I don’t know if it hurt his feelings quite as much as she was hoping it would, but he sure didn’t enjoy it, if the strained tone of his whispered

“Rock and roll” was any indication.

We had just reached “7 Screaming Diz-busters” on Tyranny and Mutation and things had begun to turn around for the Allies in “War in the Pacific” when Little Big Tom stuck his head through the door and said “Chow time!” What he meant was that he had fixed some vegetarian slop with lentils and bean-curd lumps and weird-tasting fake cheese, and that we were welcome to have a crack at choking some of it down. So Sam Hellerman hightailed it out of there.