The Incandenza line and the itinerant desert boyhood

pivotal · UNDATED (B.S. era; JOI's Tucson/Southwest boyhood, three generations; two memories stamped Winter 1960 and Winter 1963 — events 2-3)

• When: UNDATED (B.S. era, southern Arizona / West Coast); JOI's "itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood" through his flight east; two stamped boyhood memories are broken out as events 2 (Winter B.S. 1960, scene 049) and 3 (Winter B.S. 1963, scene 099); his grandfather and father both predecease him, and the wraith account later re-narrates the whole boyhood from beyond (scene 162; wraith=JOI itself open — see event 21)
• What: The paternal line runs oculist -> failed actor -> JOI. JOI's grandfather (after whom Mario is named) was "a dour and golf-addicted Green Valley AZ oculist" who made a small fortune inventing the non-working "X-Ray Specs!" novelty, sold the rights to AcmeCo, and dropped dead mid-putt (scene 071). JOI's father, James Incandenza Sr., was a former top junior player and "promising young pre-Method actor" who curdled into "a disrespected and largely unemployable actor," driven back to native Tucson, splitting his time between resort tennis-pro stints and the Desert Beat Theater Project — "a dipsomaniacal tragedian progressively crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite and by stage fright" — his last career the sandwich-bag "Man From Glad," after which he "efficiently drink[s] himself to a cerebral hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway" (071). Around the nadir of his fortunes the father went to his basement and built JOI into a tennis prodigy "the way other fathers might restore vintage autos"; JOI proved "a withdrawn but compliant student," using tennis scholarships to finance an education "just about as far away from the U.S. Southwest as one could get without drowning." The father's silence is load-bearing: in scene 005 JOI (in the conversationalist's voice) mourns having "prayed daily" that his father would open the Tucson Citizen "and not turn that newspaper into the room's fifth wall." The two stamped first-person boyhood scenes are broken out below: the father's Winter-1960 garage monologue (event 2) and JOI's own Winter-1963 Sepulveda account — the still-costumed Man-from-Glad father, the squeaking bed, and the germ of annulation (event 3). The wraith of event 21 (scene 162 — never named in the text; wraith=JOI is a convergent-detail identification, left open) recasts the whole boyhood as the primal wound: a childhood spent "trying unsuccessfully to convince your father that you even existed," the father in turn "driven" to drink and an "early cerebral hemorrhage" by JOI's own grandfather, "the blank wooden man." Hal reports the inheritance of hauntings ("Himself allegedly used to see his father's ghost on stairways sometimes, but then again toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair," scene 167); Molly Notkin adds JOI was "apparently... extremely close to his own mother, in childhood" (scene 159). [Bears on the death and its open motive: the father-line silence and self-loathing JOI reproduces with Hal, surfaced, resolved nowhere.]