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that little brothers were supposed to do what their big brothers told them to do. Ross wouldn’t answer to me or to anyone else, and if you got into a conflict with him, he would never back down.
    Dean felt much the same about Ellie and Georgia as I did; a fight with either of them would cost us severely. We distracted ourselves by playing a lot of football and baseball with the McDonald kids—
    Johnny, Karen and Cameron—who lived next door. The hatchet was much easier to bury when we needed the girls to help make up teams. These games are easily my favorite memories of growing up—an escape where I found team spirit, order and rules that made sense.
    The last weekend of the summer before school started, my dad arrived home with boxes of apples, bananas, oranges and all kinds of vegetables tied to the roof of the car. Safeway regularly gave him all the distressed produce he could take. I eagerly helped unload the heavy cardboard crates, stacking them under the porch where the bear used to live. I couldn’t have been happier lifting all those boxes of nice yellow bananas. I loved bananas.
    When we grumbled about hand-me-downs and such, my mom would speak of how tough times had been for my father when he was a kid living in poverty with his two sisters and his parents on the unforgiving Alberta prairie, sometimes with only a canvas tent and an open fire to keep them warm, eating rabbits and birds that Stu hunted with a slingshot. My paternal grand-mother had died before I was born, and Stu never talked about his sisters. We never met any of our aunts. The only link to those times on the prairie was Stu’s father, Edward, who’d had nowhere to go and had recently moved into a room next to the gym in our basement, together with his Dalmatian, Zero. My grandfather was nice enough to me, but he was a religious zealot and perhaps a bit nutty: He used to take his dog on long walks of thirty miles or more. His attitudes and habits drove my mother crazy.
    Stu kicked off the new wrestling season with a better crew than he’d had for a while and with a new TV show, Wildcat Wrestling, which aired on Saturdays. He had started major renovations on the house, but they were left unfinished when the money from Clearwater Beach fell short that summer.
    The brickwork around the big picture windows was missing and the old house grew colder as the days grew shorter. At night I’d go looking for one of our many cats to put under my blanket as a way to keep warm.
    There was a new villain working the territory, one who would make a lasting impression on me.
    Sweet Daddy Siki strutted into the ring with snow-white hair and white sunglasses, a black Adonis in white trunks with red pinstripes and a fancy red-sequined robe. He carried two white hand-mirrors just so he could admire himself. He was too handsome, too smart, too cocky and too cool. He was also an innovator and a great showman. Regi Siki, out of Houston, Texas, was probably a bigger influence on Muhammad Ali than Gorgeous George, whom Ali would later credit as being his greatest inspiration. But Sweet Daddy Siki was also deeply influenced by Gorgeous George, so I guess it all comes to the same thing.
    Later, Sweet Daddy would tell me that he was the first black man to wrestle for the NWA world title, against Nature Boy Buddy Rogers in Greensboro, South Carolina, back in the 1950s. The Ku Klux Klan had ringside seats for the fight. They all stood up in unison, arms crossed, letting Siki know he’d never walk out of the building as world champion. Sweet Daddy feared for his life that night. He was wrestling as the babyface, or good guy, and the ref told him not to even think about closing his hand into a fist. Siki let Rogers call every move and take the whole match too. This wasn’t just wrestling, it was a matter of life or death.
    I remember crowding close to our old black-and-white TV, which had a bent coat hanger for an antenna, watching Stu’s new ring announcer, Ed Whalen,