Thus, toy rocket ships, to scale, with realistic details, each of which must be pointed out; toy figures of Gus Grissom and Wally Schirra, star charts and posters depicting orbital patterns, the boy’s trailer bedroom stuffed to bursting with the ephemera of space exploration. Narrations of interesting facts, anecdotes, startling figures (do you know how much you weigh in space? Nothing!). Worst of all, ludicrous to my mind, is the helmet, not just a plastic costume version but an incredibly elaborate affair, a wearable white bubble with clear acrylic visor and spiral patterns of little holes beside the ears. I want nothing to do with the helmet, but the boy wants only to put it on and roar around, immersed in his private adventures. He’s Linda’s opposite; he will impose his will on the world, he will make the grass and dust between trailers into the surface of the moon, and he’ll be its conqueror. I do my best, at least for a while; we set up a little rocket with some chairs and I am the assistant pilot; we enact the blastoff; we veer and roar through space. He yells and falls down while I watch. Monsters interest me, and lost civilizations on other planets; but this is just action, pointless and dull. I have seen Zsa Zsa Gabor in Queen of Outer Space, in which she plays a Venusian queen who must remain masked because a nasty guy threw acid on her face. There are only women on her planet, and she likes it that way, though when a man shows up in a spaceship she is outraged in part because she is inflamed by desire, so she takes off the cat-eyed mask and reveals her disfigurement, and she makes him take off his shirt and tortures him until finally she gives in and kisses him and they escape together from Venus while the icy bitches of the planet all go up in flames.

No such fun with All Boy: Zoom, yell, fall, and soon I am bored out of my skull, and wind up sitting on the grass close to adults while they smoke and play cards and their laughter gets louder. But my evident restlessness draws the visit to an early close, something my mother doesn’t really seem to mind. Safely out of the cluster of trailers, on the way home in our new Chevy Impala, she says, “I could never live in a trailer park.” My father says, “Jimbo’s a good old boy,” his voice full of appreciation for his friend, and my mother doesn’t answer.