Icelandic Cod
This summer the Lilly twins are turning 64. The Beatles wrote a song about it. As we begin our final years of will you still need me, will you still feed me, each of us is hoping to live into our 70s, and maybe even a little longer.
Sadly, the odds of us living to ripe old ages are low. I'm now have two stents in my heart, with signs of early congestive heart failure and bradycardia. Mars is suffering from symptoms of chronic kidney failure. But we still have right now, and that's all any 64-year-old identical twin can really ask for.
It's funny how we wound up living in neighboring Asian countries, Mars in Cambodia and me in Vietnam, as our Beatles old man anthem fast approaches.
I've been in Da Nang for nine years. For eight of those years, I've been married to Lana, 42, who I met in her hometown of Bien Hoa, an industrial city 45 minutes from Saigon by car. Mars recently got married to Eang, 44, in her hometown of Siem Reap. As the crow flies, my twin bro and I are just 613.7 kilometers away from each other now.
There was a time when we both believed in the impossible. Back in high school, we were 6-foot, slow-footed, white basketball players with the vertical jumps of sea slugs. But we loved the game, believed in hard work, and eventually became two of the top prep players in San Diego County.
At one point, long before boys began turning themselves into trans athletes so they could compete against and beat the pants off girls, we'd considered becoming subjects in a University of California study on the effects of growth hormones in identical twins.
That's probably not a precise description of the study, but the gist of it was that if we signed up to be lab rats in the research, there was chance we might grow a few inches taller. Due to some possible life-shortening side effects, however, including weakened or enlarged major organs, our parents refused to let us do it.
Despite our physical shortcomings, and thanks largely to our mother, we were born with above-average athletic skills such as quick reflexes and exceptional eye-to-hand coordination. We had the same focused drive and endless dedication as of any of the world's top athletes. Hardwired to become the best players we could, by the eighth grade our hoop dream had taken on a life of its own.
The place was Keflavik, Iceland, in 1972, where our father had taken a job as civil engineer at Naval Air Station Keflavik (NASKEF). The military base was home to an enormous gymnasium, which became our home away from home for much of the year that we lived there.
Our family moved into 4-bedroom house a few miles off base, a second-story walk-up with a balcony and windows on all sides overlooking some of the other asymmetrical, pastel-colored homes in the neighborhood. Most of the Icelandic-style dwellings around us had the greenest, most immaculate lawns I'd ever seen. It was a peaceful, picture-book place to live.
The gym stood kitty-corner between the base's combined school and movie theater. Just down the road was a snack bar with a jukebox, which gave us a cozy place to eat and hang out between classes, films, and most importantly, getting our basketball jones on in the gym.
For us, the gym was everything. It offered plenty of open play hours and top-brand leather balls from the equipment room to boot. We shot around and played halfcourt pickup games to our hearts' content for hours on end. And as we'd soon find out, the massive, airy facility also hosted basketball league games and boxing smokers.
The gym had one main court in the middle, with two half courts along one side fronting a high, long column of retractable wooden bleachers. They kept the first few rows of the bleachers pulled at all times as bench seating, where players and other visitors could sit, watch, or rest between pickup games.
On the other side, they'd installed a fully enclosed racquetball court in the middle, and two partially equipped matted areas on either side, one for gymnastics and the other for boxing and martial arts.
For us, it was a dream come true. But our hoop dream, in fact, had actually started two years earlier, in the sixth grade at Mission Beach Elementary school, where we fell in love with the game out on the school's playground, a multipurpose blacktop with a single steel pole, netted hoop, and half-circle backboard near the lunch tables. The court also included a painted key area and free-throw circle.
We spent countless hours during the school's afterschool program on that court, honing the skills that would one day make us two of the most well-known high school stars of the day.
In retrospect, our athletic ability and work ethic might've been better served on a tennis court, or in the Pacific Ocean just a couple hundred yards away, where many young boys our age were strutting their stuff on surfboards. But thanks to Jerry West, we believed in our chances of achieving greatness in the sport.
How little did we know. The truth was, in terms of our innate athletic skill, tennis and surfing legends like John McEnroe and Skip Frye had very little on us. Similarly built and equally coordinated, light-footed, and sure handed, our chances of reaching the professional pinnacles of the tennis and surfing worlds were much better. But as fate would have it, we chose Naismith's game instead.
Not long after we arrived in Iceland, about the time our family was settling into our new, green and serene Icelandic community, Mars and I decided we wanted to return to San Diego on our own. We wanted to go back to Pacific Beach Junior High, and the local recreation center, where life and the friends we'd left behind seemed safe and familiar.
Our parents, Tom and Marsha, arranged for us to stay on a monthly stipend with the Flores family, our neighbors for several years while living in the queerly designed yet fantastically situated single-story beach house we'd rented at 3930 Bayside Walk in Mission Beach, the one with a private beach as a front yard right on the edge of Sail Bay. Mr. and Mrs. Flores were all set to take us in, but at some point, we changed our minds. It was one of the best decisions we ever made.
The first friend we made on the base was Glenn Craig, a handsome, strapping teen of 14 who also liked to play basketball. He was tall and lean, at least three inches taller than us, with the glossy and flowing shoulder length jet-black hair of a model. He was a dreamboat, really, with the foxiest girlfriend in the ninth grade to prove it.
Our bromance began in the summer of '72. Glenn's girlfriend, Julie, was on summer holiday with her family when we ran into him at the gym, so for several weeks we had the rugged teenage Adonis all to ourselves. It wasn't a gay thing, at least not consciously.
As twins, it had always been easy for Mars and me to make new friends. We traveled through our halcyon youth guard's way down and hearts wide open, seeing almost everyone we met in the best possible light, without judgements or preconceived notions. We immediately liked every single person we met, and most of the people we met like us right away too.
That summer spend most of our time either in the gym or a quarter mile down the road at the snack bar, which had a bus stop out front where off-base busses ran until late in the evening. With Elton John's Crocodile Rock, Daniel, and Rocket Man playing on the jukebox, we spent many a late afternoon sharing orders of salty fries washed down with fizzy, throat-burning fountain cokes on ice while waiting for whatever bus we wanted to take home that day.
Our second most favorite place was the movie theater. Tickets were dirt cheap, around 75 cents from what I remember, and they showed many of the top Hollywood films of the day. After playing pickup games all morning, we'd walk right across the road on the other side of the gym to catch the daily matinee. Tubs of buttered popcorn and sugary soft drinks also kept us entertained and satiated until we got to those fries later on. It was an idyllic life, and we loved it.
But when Glenn's girlfriend came back, the special feeling of comradery we shared with him suddenly changed. It was weird and hard, dealing with that sort of jealousy at that particular age. We met her one day on our way out of the gym, and while crossing the road to the movie house, she looked at us with beautiful but suspicious eyes. For reasons beyond our limited comprehension at the time, his foxy bitch wasn't the slightest bit impressed by or interested in her boyfriend's new twin bosom buddies.
After that day, she barely looked at or spoke to us again. It was as though she were entirely immune to our twin powers of friendly sociability, and that we were completely off limits in her mind to any thoughts of approval or acceptance. Our closeness to Glenn petered out after that, and later, in the spring of 1973, I'd lose my cool in a touch football game, and in the process lose whatever remaining friendship I had with Glenn forever.
Life's funny that way, the way some people like us while others don't. When we meet people who decide not to like us it can be hard to change their minds. Sometimes we can do things to get them to like us after the fact. Other times, when we meet people who initially like us, we can do things that make them dislike us, or even hate us, in the end. That's what happened with Glenn and a few other friends we met on the base.
Life's a funny thing for sure. Time flies and youth fades away like the court lines on a light varnished hardwood floor. The composite leather of a basketball eventually wears away, leaving blurry dreamscapes of uproarious jocularity and tortuous pathos. The memories of our hoop days, which took off in Iceland like the first iPhone, can only be recalled in fuzzy, chopping-block pieces of recollection. It has simply been too long.
Be that as it may, I shall rethink and reconstruct the events and remembrances of our shared past as accurately as I can, taking artistic liberties as needed to piece together our life story to the very best of my ability. No matter who reads it, sharing these chapters in our lives will be my last labor of love.
