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  My interest in fossils led to an interest in rocks, since fossils are basically rocks with a good story to tell. This led me to rock collecting, a pastime for the most elementary of hoarders. As luck would have it, at the time I began to covet minerals, a new business opened on Delaware Avenue, the main street of Kenmore, my hometown. The words “Fimbel’s Lapidary Shop” were painted over the door—and then in smaller letters on the window “Rocks and Minerals.”

  During the time Fimbel’s remained in business, I became a frequent visitor and an occasional customer. The proprietor was Bud Fimbel, a tall handsome man in his twenties. He wore a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and the thick black hair on his arms made them look like shoe brushes. Over the course of eight months, Bud went from entrepreneurial optimism to the harried look of a hobbyist who had lamentably come to understand that his arcane interest would never become a commercially viable business.

  Unfortunately, Bud opened his business at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, fifteen years away from the dawning of the New Age when crystals developed spiritual attributes, and healing chunks of quartz sitting on coffee tables became as indispensable in Manhattan apartments as an air conditioner. In the late 1960s the market for collecting rocks was, as far as I could tell, limited to one boy with an allowance of $1.50 a week and the thirty or so grown men within a hundred miles of Buffalo who delighted in the acquisition of choice ore samples.

  When I entered Fimbel’s Lapidary for the first time, a small bell on the door jingled, and I now feel that the ringing wasn’t announcing the presence of a customer so much as mourning the loss of Bud’s life savings. The difference between Fimbel’s sparsely stocked store and an empty storefront was negligible. The store looked like an abandoned quarry where the rocks were left in place at the end of the day when the steam whistle blew. Presentation was a concept that eluded Mr. Fimbel, but a stylish showcase for his inventory couldn’t be expected from a man whose heart pounded at the sight of a gravel pit. Mr. Fimbel had hung a few shelves and installed two glass display cases, one of which still featured a faded advertisement for another business failure: Hoak’s Birch Beer! It was ominous that Mr. Fimbel didn’t take the time to remove the advertisement from the display case. There should be a small-business superstition about it being bad luck to have the logo of a failed business on the premises of a new business.

  One display case was filled with rocks and minerals, sold in clear plexiglass caskets, each specimen nestled in foam rubber. The other showcased chunky jewelry that was too geologic to appeal to women and yet too feminine to appeal to male rock collectors. On the wall, behind the cash box, Mr. Fimbel had framed the first dollar he’d earned. It was hung in a burst of optimism, but the noncommittal expression on George Washington’s face made it look like even he had doubts about the business.

  Workbenches, lathes, and grinding tools took up a large part of the store. I had to step around a cairn of rocks once I got past the doorway.

  Mr. Fimbel put down his fried-bologna hero and asked, “Is there anything special that you’re looking for?” He wasn’t a fat man, but every time I came in the store he was eating something: a slice of pizza, a chicken leg, or two foot-long hot dogs.

  “Do you have any petrified wood?”

  “I sure do,” Mr. Fimbel said with a wait-until-you-see-this smile. He went over to one of the shelves and pulled down a dirty half-crumpled shoe box. Inside were several splintered gray-and-brown chunks jumbled into a petrified wood pile. They didn’t bear any resemblance to the red, orange, and yellow pieces of petrified wood I had seen at the Museum of Science. Mistaking my disappointment for doubts about their authenticity, he reassured me, “Those are REAL pieces of petrified wood.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was almost ten years old, mature enough to understand that many adults were bonkers—but too young to feel comfortable expressing my observations to these wackos. You had to look closely at the pieces to determine that they had once been wood. Charcoal briquettes were more exciting. Twigs would have inspired more awe.

  “I can give you a good price on any of those.” With the slightest hint of pleading, he added, “I will even take 20 percent off my discount.”

  I had to say something because I was beginning to worry that our duet of commerce would end up with him begging, “Will you please just buy one of these fucking rocks?!”

  “Yeah, these are neat,” I lied. “What else do you have?”

  “Have you ever seen the inside of a geode?”

  “No.”

  “Well, look at this.” He pointed to a rubber bucket labeled “crystal geodes.” Sitting on top of the pile was one neatly sliced in two. It resembled a prehistoric gumball that somebody bit in half and, disgusted by the artificial grape flavor, had thrown away. Then over thousands of years, the forces of nature transformed sugar and food coloring into amethyst.

  “You pick one out, and I’ll slice it open for you right now.” He sounded like a waiter trying to entice me to order the lobster.

  “Are they all the same on the inside?”

  “Um, yeah.” Trying to put a good spin on that fact, he added, “But each one is unique.”

  The geodes cost four bucks. That was a lot of money for me back then. They looked okay, but the prize inside a box of Cracker Jacks offered up more suspense.

  “Do you have any fossils?”

  “You bet I do.”

  In the showcase, he pointed out an entire row of trilobites: small fossilized arthropods that looked like the ancestor of potato bugs. I wondered if trilobites also rolled up into a ball if you tapped them with a Popsicle stick.

  “They look like potato bugs,” I said, not having learned yet to sometimes keep my thoughts to myself.

  “Well, sort of. But these were ancestors of the potato bug. They’re 250 million years old.”

  If I brought one home, I could imagine my mother saying, “You paid two dollars for an old bug?” And as much as I liked fossils, I had to admit she would have a point.

  Mr. Fimbel finally did the sensible thing and said, “Why don’t you just look around, and if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them. Feel free to open boxes. Just don’t mix things up.”

  Since everything was a heap of rubble, looking for rocks at Fimbel’s was closer to beachcombing than shopping. After methodically working my way from agate to rhodium, I decided to leave. When he saw me headed for the door, Mr. Fimbel asked, “Have you ever seen luminescent minerals?”

  “Glow in the dark?”

  “Yep.”

  “No.”

  “Come on back here.”

  In the back of the shop, he’d built a small partition where six aquariums were shelved. Inside each aquarium were several large rocks. It looked like he had started collecting tropical fish, but they had all died and he decided to just empty the water and enjoy the gravel on the bottom of the tanks.

  Mr. Fimbel turned off the light switch in the partition and turned on the lamps over each aquarium. The lamps emitted a violet shadow, and each of the rocks glowed: some hot pink and orange, others a sickly green, others a combination of blue, green, and red. I was impressed. These were rock stars.

  “They glow under ultraviolet light,” he said.

  “They’re cool.”

  It didn’t occur to me then that Mr. Fimbel was missing out on a great business opportunity. It was 1967 and psychedelia was in full flower power. He should have been marketing luminescent rocks to college students tripping on acid—not nine-year-old boys.

  Next, Mr. Fimbel tried to interest me in his special pursuit: lapidary. Farther back in the store, I heard something rattling in cans. Bud opened a door and showed me four rotating lathes attached to four revolving Chase & Sanborn coffee cans.

  “Lapidary is easy and fun. With just some basic equipment, you can polish rough minerals into semiprecious stones!”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Only two months!”

  “That long?
”

  “It’s nothing. Once you get going, the time flies. And the polishing goes on night and day. Before you know it, you’ll be making quartz crystals into polished pieces suitable for jewelry. Once you start, there’s not much you have to do. If you get more than one coffee can going, then every other week you can be taking stones out.”

  A hobby based on erosion was too dull—even for me. I preferred rocks in their natural state. The small polished pebbles Mr. Fimbel showed me looked like unappealing candy.

  The more he tried to interest me in lapidary, the more drawbacks I could see. Having four machines running continuously in the basement wouldn’t go over too well with my father. He hated it when we left the dining room light on or opened the refrigerator door before we had decided what we wanted. He’d yell, “What are you doing? Cooling off the house? Shut the refrigerator door!” The spinning coffee cans would have to produce diamonds from coal, or else my father would never stop complaining about the amount of electricity I was wasting.

  I usually visited Fimbel’s once a week and eventually bought three rocks after mulling over each purchase for months, as if every decision in my head was a tumbling unpolished stone. First, I bought a piece of asbestos.

  “That’s a beauty,” he said.

  The label indicated that it was mined in Quebec. Mineral asbestos is a metallic green with long white filaments giving the rock an almost Rapunzel quality. My second purchase was of a small piece of uranium glass. “It’s radioactive!” said Mr. Fimbel. It was a bright chartreuse color and under ultraviolet light became dayglow, like it was trying to shout, “Cancer!”

  By some unerring instinct I had picked the two deadliest rocks since the one David chucked at Goliath. I’m not going to be surprised when research reveals early exposure to asbestos and radioactive glass can cause ALS.

  My third purchase was a piece of Iceland spar, a transparent rhomboid-shaped piece of calcite that is double refracting. It cost three dollars—two weeks’ allowance—but I loved it. When the Iceland spar was placed over handwriting, the letters appeared doubled. It was almost as if I had an inkling that I would need something to make reading prescriptions for ALS more fun.

  Fimbel’s Lapidary Shop went out of business overnight. There was a big Closed sign in the window, and all the rocks were cleared out. But I kept my deadly collection for years in my dresser, ignorant that I was probably the last person in America to install asbestos in his house.

  When I was nine, I asked for a junior geologist’s set for Christmas. It came with fifteen bottles of chemicals and twenty small sample rocks and minerals—in case the buyer was unsure of what a rock looked like. It also included an alcohol lamp that you could sprinkle powdered iron pyrite into to create sparks. Best of all, the set came with a child-sized miner’s pick and a small vial of hydrochloric acid. Giving a nine-year-old boy a vial of acid and a pick hammer was like giving a six-pack and set of car keys to a sixteen-year-old. The junior geologist was supposed to place a drop of acid on a rock sample, and by observing the reaction, he or she could determine its identity. But I never felt the need to distinguish whether feldspar was a rock or a mineral. There were better uses for my acid.

  Small boys worship Kali the destroyer and show their devotion by breaking off five of the arms on her statue. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I used the acid to burn holes in paper, crayons, potato chips, and a strand of my sister’s hair. The course of my scientific investigations led me, like Galileo and Darwin, into controversy about my methods. My sister didn’t appreciate it when I used my acid to burn a hole in her Barbie doll, and she started screaming when Barbie’s smile became an oozing cold sore. My mother’s explosive chemical reaction furthered my awareness that she wasn’t made of money and that I didn’t respect other people’s property.

  All of my odd interests came into focus at a very early age, when my aunt Ann, my favorite aunt, gave me a subscription to the children’s National Geographic magazine. It was a condensed version of the grownup mag, the only difference being I had no chance of seeing photographs of topless native women. At the time, I didn’t fully understand why this omission didn’t bother me. Nor did I understand why cavemen became more intriguing when I read that Neanderthals had builds like modern weight lifters. (This supports my theory that Neanderthals became extinct because homo Homo sapiens looked better to Neanderthal guys than their brow-ridged girlfriends. And homo Homo sapiens liked dating guys who looked like bodybuilders thirty-five thousand years before the Greeks invented gymnasiums.)

  The kids’ mag heavily promoted the National Geographic television specials, and when I read one was going to be about those big-biceped cavemen, I made a point of watching it. “Dr. Leakey and the Dawn of Man” aired in 1966, when I was eight years old. That night my father came home and wanted to watch a football game on television. As he went to change the channel, my mother said, “Tom, Bob wants to watch a National Geographic Special.” He backed away from the television with “Oh, I didn’t know.”

  I rarely requested to watch any specific program. Christopher Isher-wood wrote, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” He offered that as the raison d’être of a writer living in prewar Berlin, but it was also an accurate description of my childhood sitting in front of the television. My viewing was almost godlike; I watched everything. But judging from my impassive response, like God, it was hard to tell if I was enjoying the show.

  Most of the time I didn’t care about what I watched because watching something boring was almost always better than just being bored. But I wasn’t bored by the special about Louis Leakey and his wife, Mary.

  To an eight-year-old boy, the Leakeys had the perfect life. They lived in Kenya, but where they worked was in the Olduvai Gorge, a remote area in Tanzania. It was a boy’s paradise where lions, giraffes, and other wild animals were common and where the Leakeys slept in tents, which made it seem like they were always on summer vacation. It looked to me that being a paleontologist was a great job. They got paid to play in the dirt and enjoyed the Halloween thrill of digging up skeletons. Somehow I didn’t hear the narrator mention that the Leakeys had spent twenty years searching before they discovered their first major find.

  In 1966, the two most important discoveries that Louis Leakey had made were actually made by his wife, Mary. In 1948, she discovered a sixteen-million-year-old Miocene primate skull, and then in 1957, while walking her dalmatians, she discovered the almost complete skull of an early australopithecine hominid, which they named Zinjanthropus—a discovery that brought them worldwide fame and led to the financing of their work by the National Geographic Society. (The only disappointment about the special was learning that Zinjanthropus definitely wasn’t my type. Too much chimpanzee, not enough Tarzan.)

  It never occurred to me while watching Mary Leakey on television that someday I would meet her. When I was a boy, it was easier to imagine meeting dinosaurs and cavemen than it was to imagine meeting people who appeared on television.

  In May 1991, at the age of thirty-three, I had decided to go on leave for the summer from my job as a waiter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was going to perform stand-up comedy in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for six nights a week with my friends Danny McWilliams and Jaffe Cohen in our show, Funny Gay Males. We had a successful three-year run at the Duplex in New York, but this was a pivotal step. We were all quitting our day jobs and going to try to earn our living primarily with our comedy. I was beset by doubts that I would ever make a living as an out gay comedian. But I also thought of all my friends who had died of AIDS. If I was lucky enough to be alive, it seemed wrong not to try to do what I wanted to do with my life.

  On May 15, a month before we would leave for Provincetown, I was hired to work as a cater waiter at the commencement dinner thrown by the president of Columbia University. The man in charge of the party was named Victor, and he looked normal enough until you noticed the teensy five-inch braided ponytail dangling
down the back of his neck. It made me wonder if he was still angry and had never forgiven his father for not letting him play with dolls and this embarrassingly unattractive hairstyle was his revenge. At the start of every job, Victor liked to let people know he was in charge, but he did this with such wistfulness that every command seemed like a vague yearning rather than an order.

  I had overheard Victor mention one of the guests of honor at the dinner, and I asked him, “Did you say that Mary Leakey is getting an honorary degree?”

  “Yeah, who is she?”

  “Who’s Mary Leakey?”

  I felt like the sole remaining devoted fan of a forgotten silent movie star.

  “She’s Mary Leakey . . . of the Leakeys.”

  Victor’s expression didn’t change, and I realized that not everyone had watched every National Geographic Special while growing up. (I hadn’t thought about Mary Leakey in years, but my excitement after hearing her name made me feel eight again.) After Louis’s death in 1972, Mary became a public figure in her own right. She went on to lead an expedition to excavate a site at Laetoli, Tanzania, that had interested her for decades. It was at this site in 1976 that a member of Mary’s team made a major find. In the volcanic ash that covered the Laetoli site was a trail of perfectly preserved 3.5-million-year-old hominid footprints that proved conclusively that walking upright happened much earlier than suspected. (Unless measured by the scale of a lifetime, 3.5 million years is an unimaginable span of time. Using thirty years as a generation, the footprints in Laetoli could have been made by my great-great—plus 117,000 more greats—grandparents.)

  At first glance the trail of footsteps suggested only two hominids, but a careful examination led to the discovery that inside the larger footsteps were another set of smaller footprints almost as if a child was playing follow the leader. To me it seemed incredible that less than ten years after man had first walked on the moon, evidence of the first steps of man on earth were discovered.