The sting of her words was compounded by how uncharacteristic they were. Mom’s default behavioral mode was chipper, chatty optimism. I recognized that there were things that upset her, like those times in public when people approached her and Dad and thoughtlessly asked, “Is that your son?” I was old enough to understand that no marriage is perfect and that every partnership that endures must weather some adversity.
But I was unprepared for something like this. The force of it was so great and unexpected that my mind went into instant worst-casescenario mode, projecting forward. This is what it looks like when a family begins to fall apart. This is what happens to show-business families. Now it’s happening to us. Things will never be the same. Having witnessed my share of kids and family units damaged by the stresses of our business, I had nevertheless assumed that the Howards were immune. We had made it this far. We had always lived in a bubble of safety, love, and mutual trust—or so I had believed.
My next thought was to protect Clint. I was already on the cusp of adulthood, out of the house, but at fourteen, he still had a ways to go. He wasn’t finished growing up. Now what was going to happen to him?
I grabbed Clint and said, “Let’s get out of here.” We drove to Cheryl’s house. I reported to her what had happened. Cheryl was a child of divorce and talked a little about her parents’ breakup. We were both sensitive to Clint, not wanting to alarm him. But what to do in the meantime? I decided to drive the three of us to Glendale, the next town over, where they had batting cages. For a quarter, you could buy twelve swings at pitches shot out by machines at various speed levels. For $3.50, you could buy half an hour’s worth of unlimited swings. I went for the deluxe package, figuring that it would burn off a lot of the anxiety and stress that Clint and I were feeling.
CLINT
Given that I was fourteen, I had not fully developed the emotional capacity to process what was going on. My gut instinct was to giggle. Not at Mom, but at the whole scene, in an Isn’t this all kinda nutty? way. I saw how upset Mom was, and I was thrown by the venom coming out of her mouth. But I also thought that it would all pass. Ron was more affected because he was so deeply in love with Cheryl and better understood the stakes, the gravity.
Don’t get me wrong; I was freaked out when Mom declared she was moving back to Duncan. We were so settled in the greater Burbank area that I couldn’t imagine us ever living anywhere else. The thought flashed through my mind that if Mom really did move back to Oklahoma, I, at least, would stay in California with Dad.
But as bad as that day was, I just couldn’t see a horrible development like that happening. I thought that Mom and Dad would be okay.
RON
The “moving back to Duncan” thing really disturbed me. Yes, I was almost out of my teens, but in the moment, I worried about the heartbreak and destabilization this could bring to our nuclear family. My concerns for Clint were really concerns for both of us. It threw me that Mom referred to Duncan—a place I’d only been to a few times—as home. Wasn’t her home with us, her kids, in the San Fernando Valley? Wasn’t that what we were all about?
When we got the batting cages, I calmed down a little, if only because Cheryl had offered some soothing words, and taking swings with Clint was a nice distraction. But then I noticed that we had been recognized and were attracting a few young onlookers, some of whom were using the O-word.
“Look, Opie and Mark are having batting practice,” some kid said. “Hey, Opie, where’s Barney Fife? Hey, Mark, where’s your bear?” Even when Clint made solid contact and drove the ball, the compliments were framed as needling remarks: “Mark’s a better hitter than Opie!”
We had always been taught to be gracious in public, so we didn’t engage with these kids. But I came close this time. Clint and I were trying to get through something heavy and these assholes wouldn’t just let us be. To top it off, they approached us when we were done hitting to ask us for autographs, thrusting some wrinkled napkins in our faces to sign. We obliged because, well, that’s what our folks would have expected us to do. But in my mind, in that moment, I was cursing the very fact of public life.