Praise for Broth from the Cauldron
“Shamanic Witch Fallingstar (The Heart of the Fire) explores her life of spiritual seeking and magical experiences in this intriguing collection of reflections. Readers into witchcraft will find much to enjoy in this touching and humorous memoir.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Pagans, spiritualists and other open-minded thinkers will relish this memoir.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Throughout her life, Cerridwen Fallingstar has gathered plenty of wisdom and is ready to share her anecdotes and personal beliefs with those feeling a bit lost in life. Telling the story of her life and her personal transformation to a spiritual being, Broth from the Cauldron details what it means to leave a world of denial behind and embrace a new kind of awareness. For anyone interested in personal growth, this new non-fiction book will show you the way to finding a better version of yourself.
—Life Goals Magazine
A Wiccan reflects on her lifetime of magic in her thoughtful mem- oir Broth from the Cauldron, a text full of guidance for living a more spir- itual life.
Fallingstar’s writing is conversational and welcoming, encourag- ing introspection. Her entertaining stories illustrate deeper truths about how others should be treated, regarding the wisdom of animals, and about the power of intuition.
Fallingstar suggests ways for others to live their own spiritual lives, in tune with the earth, nature, and all its creatures
—Foreword Clarion Reviews
Broth from the Cauldron [She Writes Press, May 12th 2020] offers a collection of good-for-the-soul stories told from one of today’s most inspirational spiritual leaders.
As deeply personal as it is powerful, Broth from the Cauldron is a memoir assembled of memories and moments shared by Shamanic teacher and Wiccan Priestess Cerridwen Fallingstar. Intended as a “journey through mystery and magic”, Fallingstar guides her reader through carefully curated moments of her own life as she uses her own trajectory through teachable moments of compassion and wisdom to inspire the same in others — and it works.
While Fallingstar grounds each story within her unique brand of spiritualism, her own journey is as unique as it is relatable, which is something magical in itself: it elevates the book from a collection of essays into something that feels so genuinely heartfelt and inviting that the experience of reading feels like having a warm conversation with a close friend.
—The Nerd Daily
Astounding miracles and magic intricately thread between and through the sorrows of tragedy and loss, weaving a magnificent tapes- try of a life fully lived. Compelling and impactful, the story is a pow- erful testament of how listening and following your inner voice can open up your world and inspire you to live it!… this motivational book succeeds in creating a healing balm for a battered spirit. Skillfully and expertly written, it is an exceptional piece of work.
—Reader’s Favoirts
How does a Republican girl, raised in an agnostic scientific house- hold, become a Pagan Priestess? Broth from the Cauldron: A Wisdom Journey Through Everyday Magic (May 12, She Writes Press) by Cer- ridwen Fallingstar shares profound insight in this charming and wholly unique memoir of meditations on topics such as perception, fear, anger, trauma, healing, magic and gratitude.
—Women Writers, Women’s Books
“With her trademark humor and intellect, Fallingstar shares soul- ful reflections and wisdom gathered through a lifetime of experience … like a Wiccan Soup for the Soul.“
—C.E. Tobisman, author of Proof and Doubt winner of the 2018 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction
“Magic dreams and Wiccan rituals cross into the real world in Cerridwen Fallingstar’s latest book Broth from the Cauldron. Her stories spin a spell that leads us on a dance into the mystery of life’s wonders and synchronicities. “
Lisa Alpine, author Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe and
Wild Life: Travel Tales of a Worldly Woman.
“Many of us will find our thoughts and instincts confirmed within these pages, from a writer who beautifully articulates the journey.”
Ellen Evert Hopman, author of Being a Pagan: Druids, Wiccans and Witches Today
“Broth from the Cauldron is a delightful, mesmerizing, and potent healing brew. While you can certainly sip these short chapters slowly, you’ll probably find yourself drinking in chapter after chapter because the writing is so profoundly nourishing … you’ll find a rich blend of the experiences and stories that helped craft Cerridwen from a powerful young girl into one of the most inspirational and wise warrior goddess priestesses you’ll ever encounter.”
—Heather Ash Amara, author of Warrior Goddess Training and The Warrior Heart Practice.
“These deeply personal stories from the life of a true modern shaman and Pagan Priestess will tear your heart out and lay it on a griddle — in a good way. These are tales of wonder, of power, of magick … and of love. Each of them brought tears to my eyes, and I guarantee they will touch you in the same way.”
—Oberon Zell, author of The Wizard and the Witch, Founder of The Church of All Worlds, Green Egg Magazine, and the Grey School of Wizardry
Praise for Cerridwen Fallingstar’s first book:
The Heart of the Fire
“Ms. Fallingstar’s writing style is so captivating that you find your- self totally engrossed by the first chapter. I simply could not put this book down. I felt not so much as if I were reading a book, but that I was experiencing Fiona’s life with her, as she did. A MUST READ! Highly recommended.”
—The Index
“The author brings us an exciting novel filled with edge of the seat adventure which is hard to put down.”
—Omega New Age Directory
“The Heart of the Fire is an unforgettable book, compelling the reader, arousing passionate emotions on every level. Read it and you will laugh, love, cry and remember.”
—Green Egg Magazine
“Fallingstar is a consummate story-teller who brings her charac- ters to life in all their fullness and complexity. She lets the characters define themselves through their relationships, especially those involving Fiona and her lovers — Annie, her young gypsy friend; Sean, the son of the village laird; and Alain, the magical wandering minstrel. I cannot remember the last time that a book moved me so deeply.”
—Fireheart Magazine
“The Heart of the Fire is a gripping and disturbing look at a vanished world and way of life. The story of Fiona and Annie, their families, Alain the minstrel, the dour priest, the half-pagan nobility and the other people of the village is a story that deserves to be heard.”
—Rave Reviews
“In the business of writing, few authors can successfully write about their own experiences and have them accepted by the reading
public. Very little has been published by authors who were actually writing about experiences they had in another life-time. Taylor Cald- well claimed to have lived her own novels, but nobody really believed her. Fallingstar, on the other hand, augments her past life experience with meticulous research into the period and a stunning use of detail. There are no anachronisms in The Heart of the Fire. A vividly written and compelling book that is next to impossible to put down.”
—New Directions for Women
“The characters in this book are rich and full. They cover a wide spectrum and are all completely believable. And the writing is brilliant. The love scenes are the most erotic I have ever read, and the pace and timing of the story are flawless. Highly recommended.”
—Sage Woman Magazine
Praise for White as Bone, Red as Blood:
The Fox Sorceress
“Cerridwen Fallingstar’s second historical novel, ‘White as Bone, Red as Blood: The Fox Sorceress’ is by far one of the best reads to come along in a while, historic fiction or otherwise … the book has what any reader wants in a story: love, deceit, betrayal, murder, passion and even erotica. The ending will leave readers thirsty for the sequel, ‘White as Bone, Red as Blood: The Storm God.’
—Francisco Book Review
“… an intricate tale of treachery and love that is so realistic, it feels as if the reader is actually a living witness to the tale. It is historical fiction at its very best …”
—The Historical Novel Review
“Seiko Fujiwara, a potential sorceress, may just hold the key to the salvation of her country. But fulfilling the prophecy is never an easy thing … an interesting and excellent read.”
—Midwest Book Review
“With superbly crafted characters and riveting action, ‘White as Bone’ is sure to have readers reading and re-reading passage after pas- sage … An engaging, highly recommended offering from a promising new literary talent.”
—Apex Review
“This is such a beautiful book. I started and finished it in one day. I couldn’t put it down. I highly recommend this book … but with the warning to be prepared to be swept away by the excellent narrative all the way to the last page.”
—Goddess Oracle
“Cerridwen Fallingstar is a writer to keep an eye on. I find myself eagerly awaiting the sequel, ‘White as Bone, Red as Blood: The Storm God.’ Very highly recommended.
—Silver Chalice e-zine
Cerridwen Fallingstar
Defying Gravity with Levity,
from the Frontiers of Space …
to the Frontiers of Consciousness
Cauldron Publications
Copyright © 2024 Cerridwen Fallingstar. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, re-cording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
For permission requests, email: c.fallingstar@gmail.com Cover design by Scott A. Jordan
Cover production by www.TheScottJordanGroup.com
Book design and production by www.TheScottJordanGroup.com
Manufactured in the United States of America. This book is printed on acid-free paper.
First printing 2024
Published by Cauldron Publications
Address: Box 282, San Geronimo, CA 94963 Website: www.TheHeartofTheFire.com
Ordering Information:
Sales and special discounts available on quantity purchases. For details, contact the address above.
ISBN 979-8-9903485-0-9
The BISAC category of the book — Memoir
Printed in the United States of America First Edition
14 13 12 11 10 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedication
For my mother, Jane Lesh, Who taught me to love literature.
For my father, Michael Lesh, Who taught me to love nature.
And for my grandparents, Arbie and Edward Farmer
Who taught me to reach for the stars.
Contents
Introduction 1
Rocket Man 3
Nuclear Family 7
Burning Bright 11
A Good Claus 14
Brotherly Love 17
Keeping the “Moron” in Moroni 20
Out of the Mouths of Babes 23
Dizzyland 26
The Princess and the Pea(s) 30
For Crises Sake 32
Coup Coup 35
Cross Your Heart and Hope to Be Blonde 38
Picky Eater 41
The Good Humor Man 47
Lions and Tigers and, Oh, Crap, It’s a Bear 49
The Miracle Worker 53
Jungles of the Amazon 56
Amusement Park 60
xi
xii
Hellfire and Carnation 66
Tortilla Rhymes with Chinchilla 70
Diana, the Pocket Rocket 73
Big Bad Wolf 77
Wasp’s Nest 81
Prolific Tactics 85
A Bisexual Built for Two 88
Freud-ulent 92
Feed Your Head 97
Just like Magic 102
When in Crisis 105
Perfect Love 110
Praise Jesus! 113
Humble and Obedient Serpent 115
You Say Potato, I Say Granola 119
Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? 123
Magic Man 125
Daughter of Genghis Khan 130
Patchwork Kilt 134
Meanwhile, Back at the Plantation 138
Allah Akbar 141
No Good 144
Mad Max and UFOs 147
Crispy Christians 149
Where the Poodles Diverge from the Sheep 153
Hero 156
xiii
The Dead Kennedys Ride Again 161
Horns, Large Horns 163
Waltzing Matilda 167
The Unfriendly Skies 169
Coyote Position 173
Humble Pie 178
That’s Rich 182
Born that Way 185
Christopher Columbus and the Great Wall of Sugar 188
Gobble 192
My Son the Beatle 197
Marvelous Marin 201
Brave New World 205
Invasions and Conspiracies 208
Bombs Away 212
Afterword: Venus and Mars are All Right Tonight 218
About the Author 221
Introduction
People like to say, “It’s not rocket science.” But in my childhood, it was all rocket science. My father worked, first for McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft, then for Aerospace, designing rockets for space travel and warfare. “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” as the famous TV show intoned. My father was a magician of the sky, exploring the unknown. For all I knew, the folks on Star Trek were probably his co-workers.
It was my father who talked John and Bobby Kennedy down from the ledge during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was my father who designed the first big “spy in the sky” satellite that could take enormous, detailed pictures of Soviet military installations. He moved us from Southern California to upstate New York for that covert, top-secret operation in which Aerospace and Eastman Kodak cooperated to make my father’s blueprint a reality, though the cover story was that Kodak simply “made him a better offer.” The Cold War was the core reality of my childhood, immediately followed by the sexual revolution in my teens and twenties, when the rockets became metaphorical fire- works. This led to a lot of fireworks at my house, as my father’s blood pressure shot up like it was Cape Canaveral every time a young swain of mine appeared.
There was never a better time to be young than the 1970s before AIDS, when the new paganism took root and feminism and gay rights were ascendant. There were orgies and demonstrations, there were sweet dreams and flying machines and infinite hope for the future. But my family didn’t see it like that.
1
When I moved abruptly to the left politically, protesting against the Vietnam war, followed by working for feminism, gay rights, and saving the environment, my Republican parents lamented that their lit- tle apple had fallen far from the tree. Or, as my southern grandmother Mimi said; “If you find an orange under an apple tree, it’s not a mira- cle. Something’s not right.”
In 1975, when I was twenty-two and working as a journalist for a feminist newspaper, my editor came in and said, “There’s a witch on trial for fortune-telling.” My hand shot up. “I’ll take that story!” And so, my life of growing up in a scientific household where all religion was held in contempt, took a dramatic swerve.
My life as a political pagan priestess and teacher looked outland- ish to my father, like a refutation of his conservative, scientific views. But, at heart, we wanted all the same things. A healthy planet, a safe world for our children. We wanted truth and justice to be the Ameri- can Way, though we disagreed on whether they actually were or not. He yearned to explore physical, outer space. I spent my life exploring metaphysical, inner space, slipping through the gateways at the inter- section of the betwixt and between.
My father helped save the world once. I’ve spent my life attempt- ing to do the same.
This apple may have rock-and-rolled on down the hill. But it came from this tree. So, get ready for takeoff. The rocket is on the launching pad.
10 — 9 — 8 — 7 — 6 — 5 — 4 — 3 — 2 — 1 — Blastoff!
Rocket Man
My father wanted to be an astronaut. But he settled for work behind the scenes as an engineer designing the rockets for the space pro- gram in the ‘60s. He had only a B.A. — in history of all things — from Occidental, but he had somehow wangled a job with Douglas Aircraft, where his innate brilliance at design landed him a job at Aerospace designing top-secret satellites and rockets for the government during the height of the Cold War space race. Most of Dad’s co-workers had PhDs, often more than one. When they asked where he got his doctor- ate, he would smile thinly and say, “The school of hard knocks.” At company picnics, when the other men stripped down to their T-shirts in the hot sun, my father kept his long-sleeved shirt on rather than reveal the tattoo he had gotten while in the army — a hand and arm holding a sword with “To the Victor” inscribed beneath, something he felt marked him out as a lower-class roughneck among his more educated peers.
When my father was applying for the job at Aerospace, men in dark suits with dangerous eyes came to inspect our house, to inter- view my father and my mother as well, probing for any hazardous secrets they might possess. A man in my father’s position had to have top-secret security clearance, had to be clear of a penchant for drugs or boys or prostitutes or anything which could be used to blackmail or extract information. I remember the pages-long form he filled out with my mother’s help. At the end of the questionnaire was a final inquiry: What else do you think we should know about you? To which my father responded, “I am pure as the driven snow.” My mother argued with
3
him about that answer. Suppose the vetters had no sense of humor? But my father insisted; the response stayed, and my father was hired, he always believed, on the strength of that final question.
Like most men in suits fighting the Cold War, my father fancied himself a James Bondish sort, minus the martinis and loose women, of course. He had a briefcase with a combination lock. He was flum- moxed when I took one look at the lock, dialed the numbers to 007, and popped the case open. Transparent to a nine-year-old! He changed the combination, and I never figured out the new one.
Though I had never seen a James Bond movie (way too risqué and violent for children!), Bond’s dapper image saturated the media and Dad’s workplace reeked of secrets. My father wore a big identify- ing badge with his picture and had to punch in secret numbers to get the Aerospace building doors to open. The security guards seemed friendly enough — to my father! — but any fool could see they were wearing guns. Once inside, I remember ordinary offices, and draft- ing tables where people just got to draw all day — rockets and space- ships! — but coolest of all was the area of my father’s specialty: the computer room.
Computers at that time were huge, floor-to-ceiling affairs, mak- ing pockata pockata queep noises and spewing out reams of paper with seemingly random sets of numbers — possibly code — emblazoned on them. Computers were new technology, and my father was an early programmer, privy to the mysteries of the bulky, wayward beasts.
As my father showed our family around, beaming with boyish glee, I realized that when he went to work he just got to play all day, unlike my mother and all the other mothers I knew, who spent their days changing diapers, mopping floors, and throwing Lipton soup mix onto pot roast and canned fruit into Jell-O molds shaped like garish rainbow palaces.
Was it too late to change into a boy?
I realized how seriously my father took his work after I gave him the mumps. The mumps had been agonizing for me for two days. My brother and sister barely registered fevers. But then my father got sick, and mumps in grown-ups can be a serious malady indeed.
One night, my mother burst out of their bedroom, where my father had been sequestered, unseen for the past three days.
Rocket Man 5
“Your father thinks he’s a computer!” my mother cried. “I have to go to the drugstore to get him medicine! Stay here and take care of the kids and DON’T GO IN THE BEDROOM!”
“What’s wrong with Dad?” my sister whimpered after Mother raced out the door. “Nothing,” I said, thinking quickly. “Just a touch of … computeritis. And mumps.”
I read a couple of picture books to my siblings. “O.K., you guys just lie down on the couch,” I said, tucking blankets around them. “I’m going to take Dad some water.”
My sister objected, “But Mom said …”
“She meant you and Mark couldn’t go in. She left me in charge.
Close your eyes now.”
Annie pinched her eyes shut.
I got the glass of water and walked into the bedroom. My father was thrashing a bit on the bed. His eyes were glassy and his neck was swollen as wide as his head. In between bouts of panting, he was mak- ing familiar noises.
“Pockata Pockata queep! Pockata Pockata queep!” followed by the whir- ring noise of the printout.
My father was turning into a computer!
I walked out, still carrying the full water glass, and poured the water down the sink. Far from being terrorized, I was excited. No one else had a father who was a computer.
Meanwhile, my mother had been pulled over by a cop while speeding on her way to the pharmacy.
“I have to get to the pharmacy before it closes,” she sobbed hys- terically. “My husband thinks he’s turning into a computer and I have three little children home alone!”
Cowed by her sincere hysteria the cop said, “O.K., O.K., ma’am, just go, get home to your kids …”
My mother tore in the door, wild-eyed, and rushed to the bed- room. I don’t know what magic bullet the pharmacist gave her, but by the next day, much to my disappointment, my father was no longer a computer.
Computers were not my father’s sole source of data. He and his friends constantly observed all flying creatures for hints on how to make their flying machines more aerodynamic and efficient. They watched
films of all sorts of birds and insects in flight, slowing them down so they could observe every aspect of take-off and landing.
Bumblebees were a thorn — or maybe a stinger — in my father’s side. He and his colleagues studied them intensively. They were simply too fat, too round, too unwieldy to get off the ground. Their wings were too small, and they didn’t beat enough times per second. Bumble- bees were the most aerodynamically unsound creatures ever. A fat kid with a kite had a better chance of getting airborne. Dad and his fellow engineers ran every possible program and diagram, and they proved it conclusively: bumblebees cannot fly.
Except, of course, they do.
One sunny day, I saw my father sitting motionless in our garden. A bumblebee bobbled around him like a drunken dirigible. With the melancholic air of a doctor informing a patient he has a terminal ill- ness, my father whispered bitterly, “You can’t really do that, you know.”
You’d think he would have been more cheerful. The bumblebee didn’t have a PhD either.
Nuclear Family
“All right, kids! That’s the signal,” Mrs. Adams chirped over the alarm sounding in our classrooms. “Under your desks!” The rest of my first-grade class quickly scuttled under their flimsy plywood-desk chairs.
I stood up. “Mrs. Adams? Um, actually, getting under our desks won’t help in case of a nuclear attack. See, if the bomb lands anywhere close, we’ll be vaporized instantly. If it’s farther away, but close enough to break windows or collapse the ceiling, then we will all die of radia- tion poisoning anyway. You can’t hide from radiation under a desk.”
A wail emerged from red-haired Jenny, followed by snuffling from a few other kids. The alarm stopped. “O.K., you can come out from under your desks now and get back to your work,” Mrs. Adams said with cheerful determination. “Now Cheri …” she took me by the arm and led me outside the classroom.
“Now Cheri,” she said again sweetly, “why would you say those mean things in our class?”
“It’s not mean, Mrs. Adams, it’s just the facts. My dad works for Aerospace, and I heard him and his friends talking. You can’t hide from radiation. The drills won’t work. Even the bomb shelters won’t work.” “Cheri, I understand your father works for Aerospace — such a
fine young man. But we don’t want to frighten the other children, do we?”
“So the drills are just pretend?” “Well, I wouldn’t say that …”
7
“If it’s just pretend, let’s pretend that Superman is going to save us. Then we won’t have to waste time squeezing under our desks.”
“We are not going to talk about this anymore. When the alarm sounds, get under your desk and please do not mention the word radi- ation in front of the other children again, understand?”
I nodded. I liked Mrs. Adams and wanted to please her. She let me sit in the corner and read by myself when the other kids were puzzling over Dick and Jane. I had taught myself to read at the age of four, and could not believe we were forced to go over and over the alarmingly boring Dick and Jane, the most tedious tots who ever cursed literature. I had tried to liven things up by emphasizing the emotions in the paltry script — “Funny, funny Spot!” I would laugh, miming hysterical laughter. This had led to another outside-the-class- room conversation.
“Now Cheri, just read in a normal tone of voice. We are not audi- tioning for a play.”
“I’m just trying to make it more interesting. It’s so boring. They do the same thing every day. Can’t we read Robin Hood instead? The other kids are never going to learn to read if they think it’s all as boring as Dick and Jane.”
Hence my delightful isolation at a corner table where I could read my own library books to my heart’s content.
Mrs. Adams survived the first grade with me, as she had survived forty years of challenging children. But then she switched to teaching sixth grade just as I entered that year, and I was in her class again. It was a fiasco; Mrs. Adams was a perfect first-grade teacher, but in no way equipped to handle the surly, rebellious tweens her little angels had become in the ensuing five years between first and sixth. I, of course, never acted out and did my best to be a perfect student, but in my own way I continued to be a constant trial for her. When my mother was hospitalized for a week, Mrs. Adams called me over to her desk after the bell rang.
“Is your mother having a good rest?” she asked with syrupy concern.
“Oh, she’s not resting. She’s in the hospital for a hysterectomy,” I informed her.
“Well, we don’t say that, it’s not polite.”
Nuclear Family 9
I was flummoxed. My mother had presented the situation to me in an utterly matter-of-fact manner. When she explained that a hys- terectomy involved removing her uterus, I felt two things. One was sadness that my first home on this earth was going to perish. The other was concern. One of the girls in my scout troop said her father had divorced her mother because her mother didn’t have sex with him any- more. “Won’t Daddy miss having sex?” I asked timidly.
“Oh, heavens! We’ll still be able to have sex after I heal. I would miss it too! Don’t worry about that!”
While I did not understand much about the mechanics of sex, I knew it was important to my parents, the mysterious glue that kept our household so much happier than that of most of my friends. When my father would look up at the warm summer sky, grin, and stroke his hand along my mother’s spine, saying, “It’s a mighty sexy day today, pussycat,” I knew that it was my mother’s beauty, not the hot yellow sun that made it a sexy day, and I felt proud.
“Why don’t we talk about hysterectomies?” I asked Mrs. Adams. “We just don’t.”
But the conversation that finally broke Mrs. Adam’s spirit involved mathematics.
While normally a good student, I was hopeless at math. The mul- tiplication tables had been grueling, as it involved memorizing boring numbers. “I shouldn’t have to do this,” I grumbled in a fit of psychic foresight. “We’re going to have computers to do this for us when I grow up.”
My father laughed. “You know how big the computers are at my office,” he said, referring to the huge floor-to-ceiling gizmos he oper- ated at Aerospace. “Are you planning to live in a mansion?”
“They’ll be smaller by then. We’ll be able to carry them around with us.”
“Ha!” my father snorted. “I’d like to see that.”
But horrid as multiplication had been, division was far worse. Especially long division. Mrs. Adams showed saintly patience, but my father had been attempting to teach me “new math” at home and it was a case of too many cooks having totally wrecked the pot. The more my father yelled and screamed that with my I.Q. I could easily do this and I was just refusing to learn in order to drive him crazy, the more
traumatized I became, until the very sight of numbers caused me to break into a cold sweat.
Mrs. Adams was as mystified as my father about why anything having to do with numbers should cause me to collapse into a state of mental polio. One afternoon after school, as she attempted to explain my failures on a math test, I burst out, “I’m going to be a writer any- way. Lots of writers hate division. Swineburne hated division!”
Mrs. Adams regarded me skeptically. “Now Cheri, what makes you think Swineburne hated division?”
Drawing myself up tall, I quoted the passage I had memorized, taking comfort in the fact that a famous poet felt the same way about division that I did.
“Time turns the old days to derision; Our loves into corpses, or wives.
And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives.”
“Division is making my life barren, Mrs. Adams.” She shook her head hopelessly. “Go home, Cheri.”
Burning Bright
Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry.
— William Blake
My paternal grandmother owned a tiger. Unfortunately, the tiger had the run of the immense grounds and home where my grandpar- ents lived. Unfortunately, the tiger hated me.
In one of my earliest memories — I was only about two — I was looking up the brick steps towards my grandparents’ home. The tiger loomed on the ledge above me, fixing me with his wild stare. His eyes were not the friendly green of the “go” light. They were glittering green gems back-lit with devouring fire. In another circumstance, they might have been beautiful. But the message behind his baleful glare was clear: I am going to kill you and eat you. I screamed, and just before his powerful paw could flick out and disembowel me, my mother scooped me up and lifted me to safety.
The adults thought it was funny that I was so afraid of Pinkerton. They perceived him as a large striped tomcat, albeit an exceedingly ill-tempered one. It apparently did not occur to them that, proportion- ately, in relation to me, he was exactly the size of a tiger, with intentions equally malevolent.
As helpless people have done for millennia, I had nowhere to turn, except to a sacred book promising salvation.
11
And thus, politically incorrect as it may seem today, I became a devotee of the text Little Black Sambo. I could not yet read, but my mother read me the children’s book so many times I had it memorized.
Little Black Sambo lived in the jungle with his parents, Mumbo and Jumbo. I was not critical of the illustrations depicting them as the worst of big-lipped, black-faced stereotypes. I couldn’t draw very well, and, presumably, neither could the illustrator. They were only drawings, after all. They were good parents, having outfitted Sambo with a splendid purple jacket with matching pants, purple shoes with curled toes, and a hat with a fez tassel. And they warned him not to go too deeply into the jungle. But Little Black Sambo did not listen. And there, deep in the forest he was ambushed by a pack of tigers.
Naturally, Sambo did not wish to be eaten, so he bargained with the tigers, offering them his finery. One took the jacket, another the pants. One wore the hat, and Sambo mollified the fourth by explain- ing that he could wear Sambo’s shoes on his ears and look very fine. Once adorned in his finery, the tigers declared they would eat little Sambo anyway (which is just what Pinkerton would do!), but Sambo cleverly got them arguing with each other, whipping them into a com- petitive frenzy about who would eat the child, while he scuttled up a nearby palm tree. The tigers did not notice that Sambo was now up the tree and raced ‘round and around the tree, fighting and biting, believ- ing they were chasing him and each other. They zoomed around and round until they turned into a black and yellow blur, and finally they whirled so hard that they dissolved into tiger butter. Sambo fetched a large jar from his mother, Mumbo, and filled it with the melted tiger butter, and then Sambo, Mumbo, and Jumbo enjoyed a delicious meal of pancakes coated with tiger residue.
This was in the 1950s, when mammy-shaped pancake syrup con- tainers graced middle-class tables, and life-size statues of black stable boys holding out an iron ring where you were to tie your (imaginary) horses perched at the top of half the upper-class driveways in Studio City, where our wealthier friends lived (the other half had cigar store Indians). White people had not yet figured out that these artifacts were racist and offensive — they were considered cute. There was even a chain of restaurants called Sambo’s where we occasionally splurged on
breakfast out. I slathered my pancakes with the “tiger butter” served at those restaurants and ate them with triumphant satisfaction, each bite a victory over the terrorist tigers embodied by Pinkerton.
By the seventies, people had either daubed white paint on their “stable boys” or dispensed with them altogether. In my current incar- nation, I abhor horrid blackface ceramics and would never read any child the story of Little Black Sambo, even if the books were still in print. But back then, in the unconscious 50s, Little Black Sambo was my hero — he was the wiliest, cleverest, most cunning and successful kid ever. I wanted to be him, right down to the curly-toed shoes. I learned to climb trees at an astonishingly early age, having learned from Sambo how necessary this skill was for tiger evasion. And I learned to argue.
“You can’t eat me. If you do, my father will kill you and turn you into tiger butter.”
Pinkerton laid his ears back and stalked off, tail switching with impotent fury.
He knew I was right.
A Good Claus
Not to brag or anything, but I am descended from good stock.
Well, actually, the best.
My paternal grandfather was Santa Claus.
On the surface, he was a chap named Harry Lesh, who ran a pharmacy in downtown Glendale, California. A self-made man who passed the pharmacy boards with only an 8th grade education (yes, you could do that in those days; we were just three steps further along than an apothecary in the thirties). An alchemist who could whip up your heart pills or your egg crème soda with equal aplomb. Sure signs of wizardry.
But by the time I knew him, he had morphed into Santa Claus.
Eyes twinkling and merry — check. Cheeks and nose red as a cherry, check. Merry old elf, check. Finger beside nose, yup. Soft, com- fortable belly. Smoking a pipe with cherry-scented tobacco, reclining in his (red!) leather chair, never far from the fireplace, white hair and beard, sparkling blue eyes — all the signs were there. Surreptitiously, I checked each line of my The Night Before Christmas book while spying on the old man from around the corner of the hallway. It all matched up. Yes, he kept his beard a bit short and wore ordinary clothes, so as to pass incognito, as it were, but the signs were all there.
That would make my grandmother Mrs. Claus. She did not wear the white cap Mrs. Claus was shown wearing in ‘The Night Before Christ- mas. But, like Santa’s red suit, presumably that was for special occa- sions. However:
14
Makes Christmas cookies with edible silver beads and colored
sugar sparkles?
Check.
Hot cocoa with marshmallows? Check.
Badgers Santa into getting everything done? Double check.
I watched closely as Christmas rolled around once again, and found my hypotheses confirmed beyond all doubt.
My grandfather was almost never around. Ostensibly, he was at the “pharmacy.” But did we ever go and see him there? No.
Pharmacy or Elves’ Workshop? You be the judge.
At night, my grandfather would light the fire in the hearth. Then, he would amuse us by throwing magic powder onto the fire, making all sorts of colors — greens, reds, violets, and brilliant blues.
Who else does that?
Then, one night, when the rest of us were already seated for din- ner, my grandfather came home late and hurried up the stairs. I twisted around in my chair in time to see that he carried a large bag.
A sack, if you will.
Emerging from the top of the sack I glimpsed a small stuffed wal- rus and a rubber baby seal.
And that self-same stuffed walrus and baby seal peeked out of the top of my stocking on Christmas Day.
And we know who fills the stockings.
Such a massive secret is a burden for a child of only eight. Finally, I confided in my new best friend, Susie.
“Can I tell you a secret?” “Of course.”
“You have to promise never to tell anyone.” “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“My grandfather is Santa Claus.” “All of our parents are Santa Claus.” What? Impossible.
“No, Susie … really. It’s my grandfather.” “No, it’s all of our parents.”
Too late, I remembered that Susie could be a really terrible sport. She was always jealous of me. I had an old red-and-white stuffed horse named Dobbin that had been my mother’s — the stuffing was leaking out in places, but Susie, assessing its value, had offered me her entire herd of thirty shiny plastic horses for it. Naturally, I had refused.
Of course she wouldn’t be able to deal with my grandfather being Santa Claus. She didn’t even have grandparents.
I plastered a fake sympathetic smile on my face. “O.K., sure. It’s all of our parents.”
At least the family secret was still safe.
Brotherly Love
Faint whimpers and thumps drew me to the white wicker clothes hamper. I cautiously opened the lid and peeked in, astonished to see my baby brother Mark squirming and gasping beneath the towels. “Mom! Why is Mark in the hamper?”
My mother rushed over and lifted the baby from the laundry death trap.
“Who put the baby in the hamper?” she asked, glaring at my two- year-old sister. Annie fluttered her eyelashes innocently. “He yiked it.”
Annie was 20 months old when our baby brother Mark was born (I, the early accident, was almost seven). Being the youngest, Mark absorbed most of my mother’s exhausted attention. And being a boy, of course, Mark was automatically the favorite. My sister immedi- ately began a campaign to eliminate him. Her first strategy, dumping him into the clothes hamper to suffocate, almost succeeded. Shortly thereafter, hearing squeaks of terror mingled with grunts of effort, my mother came into the bedroom to discover Annie struggling to keep the window open while heaving our brother over the sill with the other arm. Another assassination attempt foiled. One afternoon a couple of weeks later, my mother received an important phone call while she was changing Mark’s diaper. She tarried too long in the hallway with her phone call, lulled into a false sense of security by the perfect silence emanating from the bedroom. When she returned, she found Mark lying where she had left him, but looking like a snowman from the neck up. Annie had emptied the entire can of talcum powder on his face, filling his mouth and nose. She looked up angelically as my mother
17
came in and said, “Me powder da baby.” Mother was once again in time to clear my brother’s airways and save his life.
The only reason my brother survived his babyhood was his innate sturdiness, and my mother watching like a hawk after these incidents. Nevertheless, his first sentence was, “Annie hit me.” It was what he most needed to say.
Other than eternal vigilance, I think making at least some effort to hide your favoritism, if indeed you do have a favorite, is the best policy for parents. Hell hath no fury like a toddler scorned! My parents, how- ever, made no such efforts. My father, who had previously spent much time with me making model boats, now sat, a silly and besotted look on his face as he tossed soft Nerf footballs into Mark’s playpen, though Mark was too young to catch or even bat them, able only to squeak with pleasure when one bounced off his head and into his wildly grasp- ing clutches. Dad never built another model with me again, preferring to park the baby’s high chair beside his work bench in the garage. I was banished to the doorway into the garage, inhaling the scent of fresh sawdust, longing for the feel of Dad’s strong hands on my small ones, guiding me in how to scrub the sandpaper over our wooden ships to make them smooth.
At first, I hated Mark as well, until one day as I walked by his playpen, he favored me with a huge, toothless grin, and I fell in love. I realized it wasn’t his fault, any more than it was mine, that he had been born with a penis and children with penises were preferred.
Defiantly, I decided I was going to love him anyway. But my sister was too young for such realizations, so her hatred was implacable. One day my sister and I saw my mother changing Mark’s diapers in front of a woman friend, who commented on the birthmark on Mark’s hip, which looked just like a lipstick kiss, only it was a shade of light brown. My mother proudly said that was where she had kissed Mark when she saw that he was a boy. Dejected, my sister and I stripped off our clothes and examined our kissless bodies in the full-length bedroom mirror. “Nope,” I said.
“Nope,” she sadly echoed.
Annie’s campaign to restore herself as the adored youngest con- tinued, though in a somewhat more subtle way as Mark gained heft
and strength. At two, he climbed a small tree that hung over our patio. Annie, then three and a half, danced beneath it yelling, “Jump! Jump!”
Being unclear on the concept of jumping, Mark simply let go and toppled forward onto the bricks below.
To my excited shrieks of “Mark fell out of a tree!” my mother rushed out of the house, moving faster than we had ever seen her move, and scooped him up. He was whimpering slightly. His arm was obviously painful, but there was no blood, so he didn’t understand that he was hurt. A few hours later, Mom returned from the doctor’s with Mark, who was now sporting a huge wet cast between his elbow and his wrist. When the cast dried, it became a formidable weapon. Now, whenever Annie pestered him, he would raise his cement arm threat- eningly, and after having been whacked with it once, Annie always backed down. The balance of power had shifted.
A year later, while Annie and I were getting into our robes on Christmas morning, my brother, clad only in his pajamas, thundered down the stairs at our grandparents’ house ahead of us. By the time we got to the hearth, Mark had already dumped both his stocking and Annie’s out on the floor and was cramming a chocolate bar into his mouth with both hands.
“That’s mine!” Annie shrieked, advancing on him with red- headed wrath.
“No, this one’s mine. I ate yours already,” he said smugly. Horri- ble carnage ensued, ending with my parents dragging the combatants apart and sending them to their rooms with nary a present unwrapped. I sat opening my stocking and presents very quietly until brunch, when my grandparents finally prevailed on my parents to let my siblings join us for eggs, bacon, and coffee cake. My siblings opened their gifts after a mostly silent meal, where the decorum was marred only by murder- ous glances from the aggrieved party and smirks from the other. I took on the role — really, it was assigned — of the mediator trying to distract my siblings from their war games.
Only after I left for college did the two of them, then in high school, become friends.
Keeping the “Moron” in Moroni
From slot machines in every gas station to … well, nothing. We had crossed the border from Nevada to Utah, from a desert full of tawdry souvenirs and one-armed bandits to a desert white with salt, where there was no bottle of wine for my parents to buy at any conve- nience store.
“Takes the convenient right out of convenience,” my father mut- tered. I was happy. I had bought a few postcards with the vast col- lection of nickels burning a hole through my pocket — actually, they would have ripped a hole in my shorts the size of Las Vegas if I had tried to put them all in there.
The last gas station we had stopped at in Nevada, my mother had put a nickel in one of the slot-machines, but the arm had jammed and she couldn’t pull it down. Annoyed, she went to complain to the old guy behind the counter. Ever-helpful and noble ten-year-old that I was, I yanked down on the metal arm and nickels came gushing out of the machine like a silver geyser.
“Kids can’t play those! Kids can’t play those! You want me to lose my license? Want me to lose my license?” The proprietor rushed over, literally tearing at his hair, which explained why there was so little of it left. My mother rushed behind him, explaining that she had put the nickel in, but then the machine jammed — then she started yelling at me, which seemed massively unfair, since I was the hero who had just earned us what appeared to be a fortune in coin that I was now scooping up and stuffing in my pockets as fast as I could, like a panicky Bonnie and Clyde in a bank robbery gone awry.
20
My father stepped forward, talking calmly but firmly. With his Stetson pulled down over his piercing blue eyes, he looked the very picture of western male authority. It may have helped that he was also a foot taller than the wispy- haired station owner.
“Fine, just take the money and get your kids out of here!” the man shouted.
My mother swept the remaining nickels into her purse. We all scuttled back to our VW.
“Hand over the nickels,” my mother said. “But I got them. They’re mine.”
“It was my nickel.”
“But I pulled down the lever!”
“Which was illegal,” my father reminded me. He looked like an
outlaw in that hat. Why did he have to be so danged upright?
My mother, ever fair, pondered the situation.
“You can have half. I will give them to you for postcards and sou- venirs as we travel.”
“Now kids, remember, this is a fluke. Gambling is for fools. You can never win at gambling.” My father never missed an opportunity for a moral.
But clearly, this was a lie. I was already planning my life as a millionaire when I turned 18 and could pull as many levers as I wanted.
I believe my half came to five dollars. But I felt as rich as Croesus with my wealth of nickels rattling around in the glove compartment.
Utah was a different story. Bobbing like corks in the Great Salt Lake was fun for about five minutes, until my brother got the super-con- centrated salt water in his eyes and started shrieking like a banshee. It seemed unfair (as life mostly did) to be herded out of the lake and toward the showers just because my dense four-year-old brother couldn’t float, even in the Great Salt Lake.
So perhaps it was the general lack of kid-friendly fun activities or the simmering mutiny in the back seat after hours of boring driving that caused my father to pull over to the Mormon museum, a small, unpromising-looking building in the middle of nowhere.
It was dusty — but most of Utah was dusty. Huge paintings on the walls told the story of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. I read the explanations below the paintings with a growing sense of dis- belief. Seventeen-year-old Smith, suffering a crisis of faith, had retired to the forest to pray. An angel named Moroni — which even I could see was Moron with an i on it — appeared to him and showed him every- thing about Mormonism on golden tablets, which Smith apparently copied, then reburied, so no one else ever saw them.
If I made up a story like that, I’d be whipped for sure. I knew you should be quiet in museums, but as I read on, stifled giggles and snorts started to emerge. My mother shook her head at me warningly, but I saw an answering glimmer of amusement in my father’s eyes, so I burst into the song that had been formulating in my head to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
“Joseph Smith went to the woods To see if he was phony;
Saw an angel in the tree And called it Macaroni!”
My father dragged me to the car so swiftly my feet hardly grazed the ground, my mother and siblings rushing close behind before the Mormons behind the counter could recover from their shock. We peeled out of the driveway in a cloud of dust.
Once safely away, my father gave into a series of guffaws that left him discreetly wiping his eyes.
“You shouldn’t laugh, Mike. They have to learn not to be rude,” Mother admonished.
“Never laugh at the Mormons, honey. They could be dangerous,” Father agreed.
“Because they’re insane?”
His shoulders shook with suppressed laughter as he glanced toward my exasperated mother.
“Yup. Because they’re insane.”
My mother sighed. “The point is you can’t make fun of other people’s religions. It’s not polite.”
So many morals. So little willingness to comprehend them.
Out of the Mouths of Babes
… comes wisdom. Or so goes the saying. But if you are a mother, you know that mostly, what comes out of the mouths of babes is pure embarrassment. My own mother suffered more than most. When I was two years old, my parents and I were strolling down the sidewalk when a pair of nuns, imperially clad in the floor-length black-and-white regalia most of them wore at that time, came sweeping toward us.
“Daddy! Are those witches?” I stage-whispered.
My father, prickly agnostic that he was, despised all things Chris- tian, referring to the Presbyterians he had grown up amongst as “God’s Frozen People.” His heretic hatred blazed even hotter against Catholics.
“Yep,” he averred loudly, “witches.”
My mother, whose dearest wish was for all to be peaceful, nearly expired of shame.
But worse, much worse, was yet to come.
At seven I befriended the new girl at school, Candy, who was half black, half Hawaiian and as sweet as her name suggests. I had no idea that there were supposed to be different races; I only knew that in in my coastal town of Manhattan Beach, where tans represented beauty and status, Candy and her family were the tannest, most gorgeous people I had ever seen. But soon other children started the mean-spirited chant, “Eenie, meenie, minee, moe, catch a nigger by the toe, if he hollers let him go, eenie, meenie, minee moe.” When I complained to the teach- ers, they reprimanded the kids and told them they could not use the word ‘nigger’. But when the brats changed the rhyme to “catch a Negro by the toe,” the teachers said nothing.
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“The kids are calling Candy a Negro,” I complained to my mother. “Well, honey, she is a Negro.”
“She is not!” I cried hotly. I was not sure what a Negro was, but since the only context in which I had heard the word was on news programs referring to a “Negro suspect,” I thought it meant some sort of thief.
So mother explained.
“So — we stay out all summer trying to get brown, but if you’re born that way people think you’re bad?” I felt like my head was going to explode.
Then mom explained about slavery. “So we’re the bad guys then!”
“No, no.” Mother looked stricken. “We didn’t enslave them, we’re
not the bad guys …”
But clearly we were. I ran to the bathroom to throw up, and lay sick and shivering in bed for three days.
When I arose I was determined to change this evil thing. I had been born a bad guy, but, like Robin Hood, I would be a bad-guy- turned-good-guy. I took out all the kids’ books I could find in the library pertaining to slavery (two) and began reading them to my three-year- old sister and toddler brother. They would not grow up ignorant about this evil, and we would prevail in the Sherwood Forest of Manhattan Beach.
But alas, all this indoctrination on subjects beyond the reach of my siblings’ developing brains had an untoward effect.
One day when my mother was leaving Woolworth’s with my brother and sister in tow, they encountered a black family in the parking garage. My brother pointed excitedly and yelled, “Look Mommy — slaves!”
Immediately grasping that no explanation would be sufficient to atone for such an insult, my mother grabbed each child by the hand and ran pell-mell away from the shocked family. Unfortunately, this also meant she was running away from our station wagon. There was much skulking about in the changing rooms at Woolworth’s before she deemed it was safe to return to the car. Once back at home, she sat me down and calmly explained that I had ruined her life.
“Your brother and sister cannot understand complicated matters like race. You will take those books back to the library tomorrow, and from now on you will read them Mother Goose, a Child’s Garden of Verses, and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. And anything by Dr. Seuss. No more grown-up books!” Mother hoped my dismal karma would return to haunt me once I became a parent, but my experience was far gentler. One afternoon years later, when my son Zach was two, we were eating at Bubba’s Diner. He leaned across the table and whispered con-
fidentially, “You — and me — are the only beautiful people — in here.” I looked around. He was right; it was a sad collection of charac-
ters dawdling over their coffee at the counter.
“Thanks for whispering,” I whispered back. “We don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”
An astonishingly mature look of noblesse oblige flitted over his babyish features.
“Of course,” he said majestically.
Dizzyland
“Dizzyland” is what my brother and sister called it, perhaps believing that it was named for the effect produced by the tea-cups ride. My child-self secretly believed that Disneyland was the first level of heaven; I had recurrent dreams that one could break through into other levels of heaven if one found a way past certain boundaries into hidden entries — my dreams had me threading through low-cut mazes of topiary into a rabbit hole, or slipping past a heavy red-velvet curtain and through a mysterious crystal-knobbed doorway, popping out into ethereal realms. But always, Disneyland was the entry point. This is what happens when you grow up agnostic in Southern California you devise your own religion. Fantasia was my Ramayana, Disneyland was my Mecca, and Walt was my prophet.
I went to Disneyland for the first time when I was four years old, the year it opened. They had me at the Peter Pan ride; I was a convert, a zealot, a true believer. I saw Fantasia that same year. It pushed all my past-life buttons; centaurs, faeries, Greek gods, dancing Japanese mushrooms, the glorification of Nature. A bit short on dogma, but long on enchantment.
My family made pilgrimages to my Mecca once a year, occasion- ally more. One year my father’s employer, Aerospace, rented Disney- land for the day, for their employees and families only — a glorious day with no lines and each ride ridden as many times as we liked. Paradise. Other years, we had a blue Mexican piggy-bank painted with flowers, nearly the size of an actual pot-bellied pig, into which each family mem- ber tithed their spare change, and when the bank was full, we could go.
26
Once, when I was nine, we even met the great man himself, dap- per in a gray suit and tie, with his pencil-thin mustache and a twinkle in his eye that would rival St. Nick. He got down on one knee to speak to us, his young acolytes.
“How do you like my park?” he asked.
“It’s heaven!” I said, basking in the light of the guru’s attention. Walt seemed quite tickled at that. He ruffled my brother’s hair and shook my hand as if I were a grown-up, and just like that I was enchanted into the cult, ready to drink any amount of Kool-Aid required. (Of course, my childhood was already awash in Kool-Aid and Tang. Kool- Aid was our summer drink, cheaper than lemonade, and Tang was what the astronauts drank; since rockets were my father’s business, I never touched real orange juice until I went to college.)
But in my twenties, disillusion set in.
“It’s completely fascist. It’s like working for the Gestapo,” Maureen complained, taking a long drag off our water pipe. A knife twisted in my heart. Disneyland, run by fascists? But Maureen would know. She had actually landed a job impersonating Alice in Wonderland. Her hip- length blonde hair and china-blue eyes must have sealed the deal, though at all times, whether on parade or hobnobbing with Snow White, she wore an enormous blonde wig along with her checked blue-and-white dress, rendering her naturally long blonde hair somewhat moot.
“If you punch in five minutes late — five lousy minutes — you’re fired!”
“But what about the benefits — all the magic mushrooms you can eat?” Jamal surmised.
“One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small,” Donna sang, swaying like a snake charmer.
“If they caught me stoned at work they’d probably take me out back and shoot me,” Maureen grumbled.
“You have to be Alice in Wonderland straight? Awww …” Jamal sympathized. Off-work, Maureen took her explorations of Wonder- land seriously, leaving no pill or herb unsampled.
Maureen was my idol. The whole time I was growing up, my plan for adulthood was to be a mermaid at the submarine ride in
28 Rocket in My Pocket
Disneyland. Though this cushy job had since been eliminated, when the submarine ride first opened, live young women with long hair and latex fins lounged around on the faux coral surface of the ride, waving enticingly to unwary mariners and park-goers alike.
Yes, I wanted to be a mermaid when I grew up.
Explains why I thought growing up to be a writer was a realistic career choice. Not to mention my lifelong gig as a High Priestess.
“I almost lost my job last week,” Maureen continued, jarring me out of my aquatic reverie.
“What happened?”
“I was driving down the freeway, and I was running late so I was going like a banshee, and this cop pulled me over. I was already dressed in my costume, so he looks in the window and does a double-take and says, “Get out of the car.”
“So I get out and I’m standing there in my outfit and this guy walks around me in a circle looking me up and down and then he says, ‘Oh, I get it, I get it: you’re late, you’re late, for a very important date!’ “Then he just starts laughing like hell and says, ‘You go on, girl,
you catch that white rabbit!’ Then he walks off chortling, ‘Wait ‘til I tell the boys who I pulled over today!’
“So you didn’t get a ticket?”
“No. And I was only four and a half minutes late. So I still have the damn job. But do I want it?”
Later that same year, Elie and I took my gorgeous, red-haired sister Annie and our friend Jamal, who was six-foot-two, lithe, and dark as a panther, to Disneyland.
As we were waiting in what seemed to be an interminable zig-zag line for the Matterhorn, Jamal decided he had to have some popcorn and zipped off to procure it. The line moved surprisingly quickly how- ever, and soon we were right at the turnstile, ready to enter our bobsled. Jamal, hurrying to catch up with us, started leaping over the fences like an Olympic track jumper. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a cluster of guards appeared as if conjured by an evil magician, and seized him.
“No! Wait! He’s with us!” I yelled. Elie and Annie and I all waved our arms. The security guards looked over at us with shock and frog- stepped Jamal over to us.
“This guy is with you?” a guard asked unbelievingly. A black guy with white people? Inconceivable!
“Yes! He’s our friend. We’re together. He just went to get some popcorn, and the line moved faster than we expected …”
The guards looked bewildered, but one said — begrudg- ingly — “O.K., but from now on, no jumping over chain-link fences, right?”
We all nodded and the guards evaporated as mysteriously as they had appeared. I had the sick feeling that if we had all been black, we would be cooling our heels in the parking lot by now.
“So much for the wonderful world of color,” Jamal grumbled. My disillusionment was complete.
Giving up being Republican was easy. Even though elephants were so much cooler and smarter than donkeys.
But facing the truth about Disneyland? That hurt.
The Princess and the Pea(s)
Some psychologists believe that fairy tales are an important for a child’s development.
I think my mother might beg to disagree.
Of course, she was the one who had provided me with the Grimm Brothers, and a collection of fairy-tale tomes variously titled the Blue Book of Fairy Tales, the Red Book of Fairy Tales, the Purple Book of Fairy Tales, and so on throughout the rainbow. My mother was no doubt pleased that I learned to read these books so early, making me a very quiet, docile child on the outside, while becoming a mad adventurer in my inner fantasy life. But, then, the law of unintended consequences began to kick in.
The story of “The Princess and the Pea” filled me with wild sur- mise. Perhaps I, too, was a lost, unidentified princess. And, according to the story, there was a way to find out.
Never having seen the hard, pebble-like uncooked peas referred to in the fairy tale, I palmed some cooked (previously frozen) peas from dinner one night and carefully placed one under the center of my mattress.
I was disappointed the next day to wake after having slept soundly, with nary a bruise to reveal my blue blood.
With both my innate romanticism and my spirit of scientific inquiry aroused, the next time I was served peas (which I loathed), I resolved to try again.
This time I stacked the deck by placing six peas at various points beneath the mattress.
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But alas, my childish deep slumber was once again undisturbed.
It took several more experiments before I reluctantly concluded that the blood royal did not flow in my veins.
It is a rare day when one cleans beneath a mattress. So my moth- er’s belated discovery of the mashed peas, their natural green enhanced by an adventurous colony of mold, led to shrieks of horror.
“WHAT … IS … THIS?” she cried.
“Well, I wanted to see if I was a princess, so I took some peas … like it said in the book — ” I stammered, trying to stand on literary authority.
“These aren’t even the right kind of peas! They mean hard peas! And you’re not a princess! If you were a princess, I would be a queen and instead I’m a blasted scullery maid!”
She looked ready to weep. I tried to think of something reassuring to say about how everything turned out great for Cinderella, but then I realized Mom’s prince had arrived — in the form of my father — and Mom was still stuck cleaning house.
Which she seemed to hate as much as I hated peas. “Take your brother and sister and get out!”
I gathered up my siblings and scuttled out of the house. Once at the playground, they began to sniffle.
“I’m hungry,” Annie whimpered. “Me too!” Mark echoed.
“I’m firsty.”
“Me too!”
“I want Mama.” “Me too!”
“Shhh,” I said, gathering them closer. “Once upon a time …”
For Crises Sake
I sat, mesmerized, as the man and woman paced back and forth like caged tigers before the assembly of schoolchildren. I watched the woman especially closely. She was wearing something tailored, a skirt and jacket almost like a man’s suit, but in a beautiful shade of lavender. A woman in authority, not a teacher. A woman of the future.
They were different than any grown-ups I had ever seen. Other grown-ups hushed important talk when children came in the room, warning, “Little pitchers have big ears.” But these adults trusted us. They had come (perhaps from the future, maybe from Superman’s planet — how else could they be so wise?) to warn us of a crisis, a catastrophe looming like a tidal wave about to crash down on our heads.
The crisis was inevitable, and once arrived, it would change everything, and forever. We, the young people of America, would have to be strong, flexible, and resourceful to weather this crisis. Older peo- ple might never be able to adapt to the coming changes, they warned. It would be up to our generation to show the way.
Only the older kids, fourth grade and up, had been chosen to attend this assembly, which we now saw was like no other. I saw the boys stop fooling around, hitch themselves up, sitting straighter. I lifted my own chin proudly. We would face this peril bravely. Our country needed us!
“We are trusting you with this information, because we feel that if you know what is coming, you will be better able to adapt,” the man said. Many of the kids at my school had fathers in aerospace and
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defense industries. We knew the score. Nuclear fallout, the Commu- nist threat, Godzilla. Whatever it was, we could handle it. I glanced around, swelling with pride at the determination etched on every face. We were young, we were small, yet we would do our part!
“The crisis your generation will face — is a crisis of leisure.” The man dramatically intoned. “Progress is happening so fast, that soon virtually all work will be done by machines. Of course, humans will still be needed to build, run, and care for the machines, and there will be a few jobs in the medical field and service industries. But by the time you are adults, no one will be working more than twenty hours a week.”
“Twenty hours at best,” the woman said with a kind smile.
“So you will all need to develop hobbies to keep yourselves occu- pied. Otherwise you might become bored, depressed, and broody. Retired people often become depressed. Your generation, will, in essence, spend most of your lives in retirement. Focus on career will be a thing of the past.”
“But,” the woman chimed in brightly, “there will be many good things about the crisis of leisure. Families will spend more time together. Possibly people will travel more, perhaps learning different languages. But you must be prepared. You will need to develop interests now — do you like golf ? Knitting? Collecting seashells? Only you can best decide how to amuse yourselves for a long, leisurely life of little work.”
“But remember, work is not the only source of reward. With a creative, can-do spirit, we can meet this crisis head-on!” the man exhorted.
As one, we rose to our feet and cheered. No crisis of leisure could frighten us! We had the can-do spirit! Or the can’t-do spirit, as the case might be.
I was thrilled down to my Girl Scout socks. My heart fluttered with childish patriotic fervor. Find hobbies, learn how to keep myself busy? You bet! This was a crisis I could deal with!
Seashells! Monopoly! Trips to Disneyland! Basking on the beach eating fried chicken! Making blackberry jam! Reading everything in the library!
Yes! I could do this. I wasn’t intimidated by the looming leisure crisis breathing down my neck. Heck, let the robots do all the work, see if I care.
I can’t help but be bitter now. I spent the best years of my child- hood gearing up for the crisis of leisure.
There’s a crisis of leisure now, all right. There isn’t any. What the fuck happened to my crisis of leisure?
Coup Coup
When the principal came to the door of my sixth-grade class- room, the troublemakers in the class tensed. But he urgently whispered something to Mrs. Adams in the hallway and rushed off. When she walked back in, her normally ruddy face was the color of chalk.
“Children … something terrible has transpired. The President … has been shot. School … is over for the day. Go back home to your parents.”
The kids whose parents voted Democrat looked as if they had been hit.
But I skipped home, giddy at having been released from school, and even more excited that my prophecy had come true. Three years earlier, when Kennedy had squeaked by Nixon to become president, I had attempted to console my Republican parents.
“Don’t feel bad. Whoever was elected this time was going to be assas- sinated. So Kennedy will die, and Nixon will get to be president later.”
As I said it, cold sparkles like electric ice surged through my body. I did not know how I knew, but I was certain that what I had said was true.
So I skipped home, less than a block away, childishly pleased by my own powers, and hoping my parents remembered my vision and would take my predictions more seriously from now on.
I burst into the house, startling Willie Mae, our housekeeper. “Willie Mae! The president has been shot!”
To my astonishment, she grabbed me and shook me. “Don’t you never say that, child! Don’t you never say that!”
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“But Willie Mae, it’s true! Turn on the T.V. and you’ll see.”
She turned the television on and stood there with her shoulders shaking, tears rolling down her face, murmuring, “Oh Jesus … sweet Jesus no, no, oh Jesus …”
This was far more riveting and disturbing than what the men on television were saying. I had never seen an adult go to pieces like this.
Within a half-hour my father came home early from work, and Willie Mae toppled into his arms. It was like watching a building col- lapse. My dad barely had time to drop his briefcase. I had a new appre- ciation for my father’s strength when he did not flinch or stagger when that mountain of grief collapsed on him. Willie Mae was almost as wide as she was tall, and as my dad maneuvered her across the living room, it was apparent that she was dead weight. “It will be all right, it will be all right,” he murmured as he lowered her onto the couch.
Mom arrived, took one look at the television, and herded my younger siblings into the kitchen. I followed.
“Why is Willie Mae so upset? Did she know him?”
“No, she didn’t know him. He — did a lot for her people.” She handed me a glass of water. “Take this to her.”
I brought the water. Dad was sitting next to Willie Mae, holding her hand, saying, “It will be all right. Breathe. Slower.” I knew my father had no love for Kennedy. But his grim face told me we would not be celebrating this event.
Mom put a cool washcloth on the sobbing woman’s forehead and took my siblings into the bedroom for their nap. I sat on the empty couch closer to the television, but continued to watch the scene unfold- ing on the other couch across from me.
Willie Mae, whom my mother said did not know Kennedy, was distraught.
My father, who did know Kennedy — had known Kennedy — was outwardly calm and reassuring, but inwardly seemed taut as a bowstring.
How many times had I heard my dad grumble, “Jackie’s a classy lady. She deserves better than Jack.” Since children take everything around them for granted, it did not seem odd or extraordinary to me that my father made frequent forays to the White House, talked with the President, and felt free to (privately) express scorn for him.
That’s what daddies did. They went on business trips and chided presidents. They went to Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis and ran from General to General (“Curtis LeMay is a dinosaur!” he growled to Mother afterward) and explained radiation to them.
He had worn that same taut, hyper-alert look after that business trip, angrily saying, “Our lives are in the hands of a couple of spoiled rich boys.” He was about the same age as Kennedy and his brother (“What kind of grown man calls himself Bobby?”) but regarded him- self as a hard-headed, mature pragmatist (i.e., Republican). John Ken- nedy’s father had “bought” him the White House. Bobby Kennedy had nothing better to do than stir up trouble amongst the negroes.
Yet there he sat, speaking softly and compassionately to Willie Mae. I had thought he and my mother would be happy that Kennedy was dead. Clearly, I understood nothing at all.
The next day, as our family sat around the television, we saw Oswald, Kennedy’s suspected assassin, killed right in front of us, as it happened. I felt the slam of the bullet in my own gut, recoiled from the look of pain, shock, and betrayal on Oswald’s face.
“Why did his friend shoot him?” I gasped.
“Ruby wasn’t his friend,” Dad growled, trying to conceal his own shock.
“But they knew each other,” I insisted.
Later that night, I snuck across the hall and pressed my ear against my parents’ door, knowing they often said things to each other in pri- vate that they would not say in front of me.
“What do you really think is happening?” my mother asked. “There’s been a coup,” Dad replied grimly.
My mother’s voice, sounding frightened, asked a question I could not quite hear.
“We’ll be all right. We’re not involved.”
If Dad said we would be all right, we would be all right. But what was a “coo,” other than the sound a dove made? I crawled under the blankets with the dictionary and turned on my flashlight. C-o-o, sound of a dove. K-o-o, nothing at all. Maybe I misheard him. Maybe he said it was cuckoo. Crazy. What a crazy day.
Cross Your Heart and Hope to Be Blonde
As the series Mad Men suggests, advertising agencies were the dark wizards of the fifties and sixties, making the inedible edible, selling house-cleaning as a suitable occupation for college-educated women, and creating desire for products no one had ever needed or wanted before.
As a girl child of that era, I found most television to be boring. But the commercials were riveting. I pored over commercials like an archaeologist studying the Rosetta stone, trying to unravel the myster- ies of womanhood they portrayed.
One of the most disturbing was the Playtex Cross Your Heart ads, which promised a bra with such advanced technology that it was guaranteed to “lift and separate.”
Did breasts need to be separated? Would they get glued together if left to their own devices? I had seen some women displaying such squashed-together cleavage; I thought it possible that their breasts had, indeed, adhered into one bodacious mass. Gazing at my beauti- ful mother as she dressed and undressed, I felt absurdly proud to see that her breasts remained separate and distinct even when her bra was removed. Her breasts showed no signs of being stuck together. I instructed my flat pink dots to observe and grow nicely apart when the time came. Of course, later in the sixties, when women tossed their bras in the trash can and flopped freely about under their shirts, we found out why you need to keep breasts separate. Turns out as soon as they can rub up against each other and chat, they start plotting to send a woman to the House, then the Senate, maybe even into outer
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space. Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, and Angelina Jolie happened all because we didn’t separate the tatas. But back then, not understand- ing the subversive nature of breasts, I took it literally.
The Lady Clairol ads were pure marketing genius. Having “Lady” in the products’ names screamed, “Hair color! It’s not just for whores anymore!” In the past, a woman who dyed her hair was suspect, not a nice girl. By asking, “Is it true blondes have more fun?” Lady Clai- rol made hair color something any wholesome, playful female might do. Hearing “Is it true blondes have more fun?” over and over set me up for a lifetime of happy superiority over lowly brunettes (I was too young to understand the sinister racial implications). I wasn’t that sold on blonde, but if it was the key to an exhilarating life … .
The campaign that flummoxed me was, “If I have only one life to live, let me live it as a blonde.” I was a blonde in this life, yes. But I knew there had been other lives, as a redhead, and with black hair. We all had multiple lives, I reasoned, so why would anyone think this was their only chance to be blonde?
“The hands you love to touch” made it clear that while women might be scullery maids by day, they were expected to morph into prin- cesses by night. Since whatever they put into dishwashing liquid back then apparently corroded women’s hands into reddened claws (unless you used the one so mild you could soak in it), I resolved never to wash dishes. Surely blondes should not have to.
“Ai, ai, ai, ai, I am the Frito Bandito!” a nation of pugnacious little boys sang threateningly to their mothers, demanding snacks. Fri- tos tasted like salty rocks ground into paste and baked back into rocks, but the song was irresistible to my brother and all the other pint-sized Pancho Villas in the neighborhood who felt mighty tough when they talked smack to the snack.
It was amazing what a good jingle could do to convince moth- ers to shovel disgusting canned and dehydrated meals down their chil- dren’s gullets. I, like all the other children in my neighborhood, enjoyed singing, “Beef is the meat we like to eat! And beef ’s in Beefaroni …”
Beef was a meat I liked to eat, in the form of steak or hamburger, but the two clots of grey meat per Beefaroni can hardly qualified as beef, and far from the promise of tomato sauce, “all sunny and bright,” the stuff tasted like garbage. The kids at school had it right; it was
barfaroni. The canned ravioli my mother insisted on feeding us was no better. The slimy texture of canned pasta led me to believe I did not like Italian food. My first bite of al dente spaghetti my half-Italian boyfriend Elie cooked was a revelation. Mamma Mia!
My favorite commercial was the one in which Mother Nature, appearing as a middle-aged woman with obvious power, was inveigled into tasting some margarine, which she mistook for butter. “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” she snarled, hurling thunderbolts hither and thither.
Screw the Biblical stories! This was the Goddess I wanted to fol- low. One who hated margarine and loved butter as much as I did! And butter was her holy sacrament.
Her devoted acolyte, I set myself to persuade my parents to give up their hateful belief (later, not to my surprise, proved utterly/udderly false) that margarine was healthier than butter. My father subjected me to a blindfolded taste test, disbelieving my claim that I could tell the difference, but promising to buy butter if I could actually distinguish between the two.
I could. Butter was restored to the refrigerator, and our house was marked safe from Mother Nature’s wrath. My hands were smooth, my hair was blonde, I knew how to handle a hungry man, my toast was saturated with real butter, and I was right with the Goddess, and the natural world.
Picky Eater
The orange castle shivered and twinkled before me. In response, I shivered with revulsion. With its round dome and stubby turrets, it looked more like a mosque than a castle, but since there were no mosques in Manhattan Beach in the 1950s, the only thing I could iden- tify it with was a sand castle.
I would rather have eaten sand.
Pieces of maraschino cherry, diced peach, and pear tumbled in suspended animation from the turrets into the body of the quivering disc beneath. Most horrifying of all was the layer of canned green beans and carrots at the bottom, resting atop a layer of curdled sour cream.
“It’s savory and sweet,” the woman who brought the monstrosity gushed.
“It’s … amazing,” my mother replied. She sliced into it, deftly scooping up a trembling wad with her silver pie server and setting it on a plate.
“Cheri, will you have some?”
I bolted out of the dining room to my bedroom and slammed the door. I tried to drag the bookshelf over to block it, but it wouldn’t budge.
JELL-O. By itself it was bad enough, but once the women of the fifties started dumping canned fruits and vegetables into the gelatinous mess it was like something out of a Stephen King cookbook.
I hid in the closet.
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The straight-arrow, post-war parents who raised my generation never understood how their wholesome, Howdy Doody, Lassie-come- home offspring turned into drug fiends.
I blame Jell-O. That psychedelic slop is responsible for a lot of subsequent acid trips.
Mostly bad ones.
My mother poked her head in the door. “Cheri, come on out and have some Jell-O ‘two-ways.’”
“I only eat food that is dead. That stuff is still wiggling.”
How anyone could regard Jell-O as food was beyond me. I was pretty sure it was made out of jellyfish. I had seen jellyfish as big as dinner platters on the beach after storms. Heck, I had stabbed them with sticks as they lay there (dead, helpless, who could tell). They quiv- ered just like Jell-O. Ha, they thought a little food coloring could trick me into thinking jellyfish was a dessert. Or a salad and a dessert “all in one.”
You can’t fool a beach brat.
Then I learned the truth, and it was even more horrifying. Jell-O was not made out of jellyfish.
It was made out of horses’ hooves and cows’ hooves.
What kind of sick freak looks at all the cow and horse hooves piled up at the slaughterhouse and says, “We got too many of these things, the glue factory won’t take no more — I’ll be danged if I just throw ‘em out. Let’s make dessert!”
Of course, maybe it didn’t happen that way. Maybe Jell-O was fall-out from the Donner party affair. The Donner party folks are all up there stuck in the snow at Donner Pass, which isn’t Donner Pass yet, since no one knows they’re up there, it’s just, “We’re lost as shit and the snow covered our wagon wheels and froze ‘em in place so we can’t pass,” Pass.
And old Jeb Donner says, “We done ate every horse, oxen, and donkey down the hoofs.”
And Hiram Donner says, “Hey Jeb, I gotta idea — let’s make them hoofs into dessert! I got some red dye #2!”
In that case, it is an understandable tragedy.
The other bane of my existence was canned foods, especially canned vegetables.
Canned foods were designed for earthquakes, tornados — emergen- cies, for when all the local stores have been flattened or you’re pinned down under a thousand feet of snow.
Since when is dinner every night an emergency?
But, fifties women (at least in Manhattan Beach) did not like to cook, and canned, frozen and desiccated dried food took all the cook- ing out of cooking.
I spent much of my childhood staring at canned peas.
I tried hiding them under the potato skin. I distracted my toddler brother and sister and stealthily slid them onto their plates with the practiced misdirection of a magician.
Most innovative of all, I gave them to my dog, who politely accepted everything I slipped her under the table. She received all the canned green beans, lima beans, corn, and peas without complaint (though she would always walk away for a few minutes afterward in dis- gust). When she returned, I would give her a bite of meat as a reward for taking the abhorred vegetables.
I thought she ate them.
Turns out, even a dog of dubious parentage knows canned vege- tables are not edible.
It seems she carefully took the vegetables in her mouth, padded into the living room, crawled under the couch, and spat them out. Then she returned, tail wagging, in the hope that something better would be offered in exchange for her loyal service.
It may have been six months before anyone sought to vacuum under the couch.
It may have been a year.
One day I came home from school to find my mother as close to hysteria as I have ever seen her. She lifted up the couch to show me a massive pile of mouldering vegetables. They were growing a fuzz of white and black.
“HOW DID THIS GET HERE?”
“I don’t know,” I protested. “YOU PUT THEM HERE!”
“How could I? You never let me leave the table during dinner.” “THEN HOW DID THEY GET HERE?”
If only I had the presence of mind to say, “Attack of the vegetable aliens.”
Instead, I blurted the first explanation that popped into my head, which, alas, happened to be the truth.
“Maybe Charcoal put them under there.”
“You gave your dog your vegetables and she spat them under the couch?”
“I — thought she was eating them.”
Thus, Charcoal was banned from the kitchen. And thus began many hours of sitting at the table staring at my vegetable-infested plate until it was bedtime.
I need to emphasize that it was not just my mother who was culinarily impaired. It was the era of “better living through chem- istry”’ — Lipton onion dried soup mix, which was probably entirely chemicals, starred in everything from potato chip dip to pot roast. A whole generation of women, unwilling serfs that they were, embraced “convenience food” — ghastly TV dinners and the like — as their per- sonal and collective savior.
I’m still scarred for life by the Raggedy Ann salad we were forced to make in Girl Scouts.
To get our cooking badge, we concocted an unholy marriage between a doll and a salad. (No, we did not invent this; it was a recipe. In a book.) A canned peach half represented the head. The mouth was a strip of maraschino cherry. I think the eyes were slivers of olive, though that seems depraved, even for my Girl Scout troop. No, no, it’s coming back to me now — they were raisins held on by toothpicks. The fluffy white bodice of the “doll” was a scoop of cottage cheese, and a ragged lettuce leaf formed the skirt. Her arms and legs were carrot and celery sticks. Her blonde hair was a grated mass of American cheese.
I wanted the badge, but it was horribly apparent that:
This was not cooking.
and
This was not edible.
Our dolls completed, our Scout leader, Panky, enthused, “Aren’t they cute, girls? Now we can eat them!”
“Um, Mrs. Neave, it’s a cooking badge, not an eating badge,” I protested.
“Well, yes, Cheri, but don’t you want to eat it?” she wheedled.
Like cavalry storming to the rescue, a phrase I had heard came to mind.
“It’s um, too pretty to eat! I want to take it home and show my mom and share it with my brother and sister.”
Mrs. Neave beamed. “That’s so considerate of you, Cheri!” Saved!
Weirdly, my brother and sister did eat it. But then again, they were in the habit of stealing the dog’s biscuits and hiding behind the living room curtains to devour them.
I finally tried one, just to see what the fuss was all about. Unpalatable doesn’t even begin to cover it. It tasted like com-
pressed ashes.
It was clear that I had inherited all the tastebuds in the family.
Then I went off to college and met a boy with an Italian mother.
All I knew about Elie at first was that he was cute. Devastatingly cute. Black hair, classic native American nose, brown skin, soft mouth, and softer eyes.
Our first date, Elie invited me to a kitchen located in the bowels of one of the dorms. He was going to cook me dinner.
A man who could cook?
Mashed potatoes and grilled steak represented the full extent of my father’s culinary expertise, but what the heck — I’ll try anything once.
I secreted a Mars bar in my purse in case canned peas were on the menu.
I needn’t have worried.
Elie had made me a repast of homemade chicken vegetable soup and homemade bread.
My first taste of the soup was an explosion of savoriness.
“How did you make this?”
“Well, you take a chicken carcass, chop some onion …” He had made soup out of bones and bread out of flour.
I thought such arcane arts went out with the Middle Ages. Where I came from, the bread was Wonder bread, and home-
made soup was two different cans of Campbell’s mixed with a splash of sherry for sophistication.
A pulse started pounding in my throat, the same throat real bread with real butter — not margarine — was sliding down. This boy with the sultry smile held the Rosetta stone of food — actual food made from scratch, full of flavor.
Sexy, gorgeous, and he can cook?
Sold, to the little lady in the back.
The Good Humor Man
“Once upon a time — a dog came!” My two-year-old brother laughed hysterically, then observed that no one was laughing with him. Like a practiced comic, he quickly segued into another piece. “The Farmer in the Dell! Ha ha ha …” Once again his laughter trailed off, as no one joined him.
At nine, I was constantly telling knock-knock jokes, puns, and rid- dles, and often the grown-ups laughed. Mark desperately wanted to be in on this humor thing, but couldn’t quite figure it out.
What was funny?
Then one day, he was lying with his head on my father’s bare stomach. Mark lifted his head up quickly as the cat raced through, and his ear made a loud popping noise as it left the suction of my father’s belly.
“Oh!” my brother exclaimed, startled, “that was an eerie sound!” And we all laughed.
Mark grabbed his ear, his face ecstatic with dawning realization. “An eerie sound! An ear-y sound!”
“Yes!” I beamed back at him. “An eerie sound!”
After that moment of humor satori, Mark never looked back. He became the Good Humor Man.
Not dispensing literal ice cream, no. But providing the clowning that lightens any situation, that makes life sweet.
I was sixteen the first time I made dinner for my family. It was a chicken curry recipe I had learned from my maternal grandmother, Tindy. Afterward, my brother, who had been complaining bitterly
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about my mother’s Hamburger Helper dishes (he referred to them as Hamburger Hinder), regarded me with awe.
“That was a dinner to unscrew the unscrutable!”
I still regard that as the highest compliment I have ever received for my cooking.
Mark needed his sense of humor when we moved to upstate New York and he developed severe asthma at the age of seven. By the time he was ten, we were rushing him to the hospital, the station wagon swaying under my mother’s frantic acceleration as Mark turned blue and I stared into his terrified eyes, yelling, “Hang on, Mark! Hang on! Just relax, you can breathe …”
After one fit, as Mark lay limply on the couch, our paternal grand- mother, Mimi, the only Christian in the family, patted him on the back. “Now remember, God never gives us anything we can’t handle,” she admonished.
A few moments later, as I headed up the stairs with him, he turned and whispered, “How can anyone believe in a benevolent God in the face of mucus?”
Our paternal grandfather, Papa, died when Mark was a senior in high school, and Mimi, our grandmother, moved in with my parents. He was the only child left at home at that time, faced with family crises as Mimi drank and cried and drove her son, our father, completely mad.
I called home from Los Angeles and he answered the phone. “So, how’s it going?” I asked cautiously.
“Mimi’s hitting the bottle. Dad’s hitting the roof. Mom’s hitting the road.”
“How about you, how are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m just hitting the books. No one can blame me if I just stay in my room and study, can they?”
And thus, Mark parlayed the crisis into admission to Stanford University.
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. And if it blows any- body good, it will probably be Mark.
Lions and Tigers and, Oh, Crap, It’s a Bear
Camping in the 1950s and ‘60s was great. The only people who went were people who actually liked being in nature. People had not yet taken the wild life of the cities — televisions and drunken parties — out to the parks, so the only wild life was … the wildlife. Meaning bears.
Yogi Bear and his love of pic-i-nic baskets was a cartoon trope known to all children at that time, but my family braved the wild all over the country, and the bears we encountered were exactly like Yogi: they were all determined to get into our pic-i-nic baskets.
When my brother and sister were toddlers, our initial forays into the wild consisted of cabins around Lake Arrowhead. There was only one form of evening entertainment, and that was going to the dump to watch the bears. Our first foray, when Annie was about two, fared badly. Watching the bears root through the trash, Annie began sobbing, “Bears eat toes!” clutching her small feet protectively. Annie had been born with her second and third toes on both feet partially webbed, and was hence very sensitive about all things concerning feet.
Our first big trip out to Yellowstone National Park and back through Canada was laden with bears. In Yellowstone, the bears (smarter than the average bear!) had taken to forming roadblocks. Bears would sit in the road, stalling a vast line of forty or more cars behind the blockade they created. More bears would then gather at the side of the road hoping for handouts. Mother bears brought their adorable baby bears to show off. Full-grown bears clapped their paws
49
or stood on one leg, then devoured the shower of treats that rewarded that behavior. One could be stuck for hours at a bear-jam, usually until the rangers showed up and shooed the bears off the road.
“No, you may not get out of the car!” my father repeated to our umpteenth plea.
“All the other kids’ parents let them feed the bears!” we complained. “That’s because Darwin was right,” my father cryptically
explained.
“Who is Darwin?” I asked, thinking, What a spoilsport.
“Darwin is the one who discovered that stupid parents send their stupid offspring out to feed the bears and the bears eat them and only the fit children of fit parents who keep their children in the blasted car survive.”
Enviously, I watched unfit parents send their unfit children to hand-feed cubs marshmallows while the parents took pictures. People crouched with cameras everywhere. More cautious people tossed gra- ham crackers and Fritos out their car windows. It was junk food city for the bears.
Then, a man, fixated on getting pictures of a cute, tiny cub, got between that cub and its mother.
The mother bear let out a tremendous roar and charged the
man.
Suddenly, the man was running faster than any human I’d ever seen, pursued by a bear running faster than any bear I had ever seen. The man raced to his car, but with the bear hot on his heels, he could not pause to open a door, so he raced around and around the car with the bear right behind him.
“Get him! Get him!” I shrieked with excitement, bloodthirsty as any Roman child having a splendid holiday at the Coliseum.
Around and around they went, in a tiger butter blur. Finally, the man somehow whipped open the door and catapulted himself inside, headfirst.
The mother bear then dismantled the car. First, she took off the windshield wipers. Then the antennae, the side mirrors, the license plates, and the bumpers, finishing with two of the tires, which she tossed as casually as if they had been frisbees. She then huffed back to her cub, and they headed for the tree line.
Lions and Tigers and, Oh, Crap, It’s a Bear 51
“Smart,” my father mused. “Showed him she could get him if she wanted. She just didn’t choose too. Now you understand why we stay in the car?”
O.K., Darwin and my dad were spoilsports, but they were smart spoilsports.
Later, in Glacier National Park, when my father had what he later described as his duel to the death with a marauding bear, he followed his own advice and stayed in our VW camper.
We realized the extent to which the bears ran the campground that first morning in Glacier. My mother had gotten up at six a.m. and staggered to the restroom. As she entered, she noticed a woman in a fur coat standing in front of the sink. Bit hot for that, she thought, wondering why anyone would take a fur coat on a camping trip anyway. When she exited the stall, the woman was still bent over the sink. But when she straightened up, my mother realized the woman was — a bear.
She rushed back without washing her hands. A couple of hours later, as we were eating breakfast, a bear sauntered into the camp- ground and headed straight for our neighbor’s site, where they had piled all their food onto the table. With the clever air of a magician, the bear whipped the tablecloth out from under the food, causing cans and boxes and fruit to cascade over the bear up to its hips. The bear then proceeded to work its way methodically through each item, beginning with a package of bacon, using its claws as can-openers to effortlessly pry each can open, slurping the Dinty Moore beef stew and corned beef hash within, followed by a chaser of Keebler cookies.
Oblivious to all the people, including the desperate campsite den- izens yelling and clapping to chase it off, the bear gobbled and slurped until the rangers finally drove it away. We got the message: this place is lousy with bears. Following the instructions handed out by rangers, we sang and whistled loudly as we hiked, even when just hiking to the bathroom.
That evening, after dinner, my father stowed every perishable food item into a cooler and locked the latch. Then he carefully wedged it beneath our VW bus.
We woke to the sound of grunting and a slight rocking motion as a bear carefully unwedged the cooler from the underside of the bus and pulled it out. My father slid open the door of the bus in time for us
to see the bear toss the entire cooler up and down like a juggler before hurling it to the ground, where the top broke off. Food scattered every- where. My father leaned out of the car and scooped up some wildly rolling eggs, which he tossed heroically at the bear.
“Get the hot dogs, get the hot dogs!” I shouted. I hated hot dogs. “Get the baloney!” my brother chimed in.
Covered with eggs (my father was a crack shot), the bear retreated.
But he had already eaten the baloney, and he took the hot dogs as well.
Later, describing the scene to friends, my father would always say gloomily, “So, there I was, locked in life-and-death struggle with a fierce forest creature — and my children were cheering for the bear!”
He would finish his complaint with his favorite adage: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have an ungrateful child.”
Well, if he hadn’t bought the hot dogs, maybe I would have cheered for him.
The Miracle Worker
My father bore extreme animus to all things Christian. When we went camping, he would wave his arms toward the gorgeous scenery and say, “Why would anyone go to church to find God when they could go to the woods?”
I could only agree.
His mother tried to inculcate a love of Christianity in me by giv- ing me a series of Bible storybooks for children. The books had beau- tiful illustrations of life in Biblical times, which I spent many hours mooning over, as they reminded me of the clothing I used to wear in other lifetimes. Once I could read, however, I found much about the tales hard to comprehend. It was impossible to imagine how somebody as popular as Jesus (all those hosannas and palm fronds as he came into Jerusalem!) could end up crucified.
“Mimi,” I accosted my grandmother, “if the cavalry is there, why don’t they just save Jesus?”
In the westerns, just when things were looking desperate for the settlers, the cavalry would show up and everyone (well, except for the Indians) would be rescued.
“It’s not cavalry; it’s Calvary,” Mimi tried to explain. “Why don’t the CALVARY try to save Jesus?” “There is no cavalry …”
“But it says so right here!”
She looked rattled. “I need to get back to my cooking.”
My favorite part of the Bible stories was the miracles. I was so convinced of my powers, I tried again and again to walk across our
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friends’ swimming pool. Undaunted by my failure, I would bob to the surface and cry, “I made it two steps that time!” And I was sure I had. There was that first blissful moment when the water wobbled like Jell-O under my foot, almost solid, and the next step it was totally holding me up, until suddenly I was underwater. But I had faith.
My father took to holding me firmly by the neck when we walked past the lion and tiger enclosures at the zoo after my expressed confi- dence that I, like Joseph, could dwell safely amongst the lions.
At seven, clutching a pilfered loaf of bread, I led my three-year- old sister to the upper terrace of my grandmother’s garden, my dog Charcoal eagerly following alongside.
“Want to see a miracle?” I asked my devoted followers.
Charcoal wagged. Annie said, “’K”, having no concept of what a miracle might be, but game for any game her elder sister wanted to play.
Magnificently, I untied the twist tie on the loaf of bread.
“The Miracle of the Loaves,” I intoned dramatically. I had no fishes, but I figured for a first miracle, just the loaves would be enough. I crumbled up the first slice of bread. It did look a lot bigger crumbled up. I graciously gave some to Annie, who crammed it in her mouth. Charcoal snapped up her portion happily, wagging her tail with great enthusiasm. My followers were pleased. I kept crumbling, hand- ing the shreds to my acolytes. Charcoal was getting the lion’s share. A blackbird flew down from an olive branch, turning his head from side to side. I tossed him some crumbs, and three other birds flew down to join him. Rubbing the bread into abundant, ever-multiplying morsels, I tossed more and more to the crowd — just as Jesus had done! A flock of pigeons landed, cooing and walking around, swiftly pecking bits up. Charcoal ignored them, completely focused on the dwindling loaf of bread in my hands. Robins, sparrows, dozens of birds came to partake of the largesse of my miracle. Infinite amounts of bread! Bread for all! “What in the world are you doing?” my grandmother asked, wip-
ing her hands on her apron.
“Feeding the multitudes!” I proclaimed grandiosely, hurling crumbs into the seething mass of feathers, which had taken over my grandmother’s garden.
“Shoo!” My grandmother rushed at the birds, waving her apron.
The multitudes vanished, leaving only Annie and Charcoal as my devoted apostles.
“More!” Annie demanded, waving her hands toward the last remaining slice.
Mimi sighed with exasperation. “I can’t believe you wasted that whole loaf of bread and ruined your sister’s dinner. How are we going to make sandwiches tomorrow?”
Then my mother appeared, and apprised of my actions, sent me to my room.
I’ll bet Jesus’ mother never sent him to his room.
Jungles of the Amazon
Ignoring the fact that her eldest daughter was swinging through the trees, hollering like Tarzan and flying from rooftop to rooftop at the school pretending to be Peter Pan, my mother focused her homopho- bic anxieties on my brother. Girls could be tomboys — the world would crush that uppityness out of them soon enough — but the slightest sign of softness in a boy child spooked mothers in the 1950s worse than the sudden appearance of a cougar would panic cattle.
“When do I have to stop kissing him?” Mother sadly asked a friend of hers who had four sons.
“When he starts hitting you,” Shari replied.
The bizarre yet overwhelming belief of the time was that a boy who was too close to his mother would turn out to be homosexual. Yes, a man who loved women would certainly never marry one. Even as a kid, hearing my mother and her friends obsessing about how hard it was not to sit boys in their laps and hug them and kiss them and com- fort them the way they would with their girls made me feel that some- thing was completely off-kilter about the concern. Wouldn’t someone whose mom kept pushing him away be more angry at women, more likely to defect to the other side, than a guy whose mom had an open- arms policy?
The fathers were even more obsessed with raising boys who were tough, stalwart, team leaders, and warriors. I can’t count the number of times I watched my father sitting, his sharp, hawk features softened with adoration as he lobbed a miniature football (which would ricochet off my brother’s bald head ) into his playpen. Occasionally, my brother
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would start to sniffle if the football landed too close to his eyes, upon which Dad would grunt, “Shake it off, shake it off,” and toss the foot- ball once again. I don’t think he was actually trying to hit Mark in the head; it was just that Mark could not yet lift his arms in a coordinated fashion to deflect the ball, much less catch it. He learned fast, though.
Concerned that our bedtime ritual of Mom sitting with each of us and rubbing our backs while she sang us a soothing bedtime song might prove emasculating to Mark, she began singing him military songs.
“Well, it’s hi hi hee in the field artillery/Shout out your numbers loud and strong” (here my mother would drop her voice to a manly baritone and shout, “ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR” then continue) “For where’ere you go/You will always know/That those caissons keep rolling along.”
This wouldn’t have soothed me to slumber, but my brother dropped off to sleep like a heavy stone falling into a pool, secure in the knowledge that an entire military detachment with heavy artillery was now ranged around our small suburban home.
My sister and I had a collection of international dolls in ethnic dress, purchased during grandparent’s’ travels. Our favorite dolls were our Barbies, with their high-heeled feet and torpedo breasts. But we could not play dolls with our brother, who might be ruined by exposure to so much plastic pulchritude. Playing animals and acting out scenes from Bambi and Peter Pan (ever try coaxing a coherent performance from a couple of young children?) was getting tedious. But we had to play with my brother, and we couldn’t play with dolls when he was there.
Just in time, Mattel came out with a doll for boys: G.I. Joe.
My father examined the toy, frowning. His son, playing with dolls? But G.I. Joe, was a badass.
Helmet; check. Bazooka: check. Big plastic muscles: check. Gnarly feet that had never known nail polish: check. Short, plastic, Marine- style hair: check. Even a scar on his cheek, a nice touch. Grudgingly, my father allowed the Marine to invade our home. But he laid down the law. We could only play dolls provided there was a war going on in Barbie-land. So G.I. Joe could do manly things. Like kill some dolls and rescue others.
58 Rocket in My Pocket
Our international doll collection lent itself nicely to scenes of devastation in WWII. Frequently, G.I. Joe was assigned to protect an orphanage, in which refugees from Hungary, France, Spain, and Greece huddled in terror under a bombed-out bedspread. The male Greek doll, with his fez and dancing skirts, sometimes went on patrol with Joe, but, being unable to move his arms and legs, he was not much good in hand-to-hand combat. My brother specialized in bringing in bombers and making loud whistling and exploding sounds as the bombs fell, tossing the dolls up in the air in gleeful destruction. My sister reveled in the carnage, applying gauze daubed with mercuro- chrome onto the various injuries and whipping out her plastic shots, gruffly admonishing, “Hold still! This won’t hurt a bit,” and carefully fitting arms back in their sockets.
Soon, our international doll collection was looking a bit too real- istically battered and Mom decreed that those dolls must stay on the high shelf, as only Barbie and Ken and Joe were suited to the rigors of war.
This inspired me to switch scenarios. Now Joe and Ken were part of a landing force attacking the Amazons in their island stronghold in the Pacific. My favorite doll, a black-haired, blue-eyed she-devil named Tanya, was the Amazon queen. Joe and Ken were consistently outnumbered and outgunned by the Amazons, whose tip-toe stance implied that they were constantly running around in a stealthy manner. The Amazons specialized in wily traps like pits into which the hapless men tumbled, only to end up in hospital beds with blood-stained rags tied to their heads, victims of amnesia. “I need to change the dressing,” my sister said briskly, “do you remember anything today?”
“I — I think I’m part of the U.S. Army — ”Joe ventured.
My sister smacked him flat. “Hush now, you need to rest.” Then the Amazons went to plan strategy with our two Native American allies (Indian at that point in time) clad in buckskin. These girls had papooses on their backs, but given their small breasts we concluded they were too young to have babies, so they happily tossed their infant brothers to the side and joined the Amazon cause.
Predictably, I, the mistress of plot and dialogue, ended up being a writer. My sister ended up being a nurse. But Mark did not end up as a soldier, nor yet as a homosexual. Don’t think he escaped unscathed,
though. Today he is married to a black-haired, blue-eyed she-devil … um, woman with a very strong set of ideas, who rules the roost. I’ve never seen him argue with her.
Apparently waging a years-long losing war with the Amazons taught him something.
Amusement Park
“I will be your bumper car, bumping.
This amusement never ends.”
— Peter Gabriel
“Mrs. Lesh, I have walked alone through all the major cities in Europe. I will take care of Cheri,” Jay asserted.
My mother, who had seemed uncertain about dropping two ten- year-olds off alone at Pacific Ocean Park — a huge, bustling amusement park situated on an enormous pier protruding out into the ocean for which it was named — breathed a sigh of relief. Of course her daugh- ter would be safe with the son of her best friends. Born only one day apart, they had known each other their whole lives, after all. She would meet us at this sign in the parking lot at 5 p.m. My heart swelled and I lifted my chin with pride to be escorted by my miniature D’Artagnan. Jay and I walked to the admissions booth, and I stood, feeling very feminine as the sea breeze twined the curls of my first “adult” haircut around my neck as he paid for both of us to enter. We could hardly believe our good fortune; him divested of his four younger siblings, me divested of my younger brother and sister, no parents anywhere in
sight. This was romance.
The tang of sea salt, corn dogs, and popcorn flavored the air, but it was too early to eat. First the rides. We mounted horses with mer- maid tails side by side. My knight mounted the one on the outside ring, Lancelot prepared to protect his Guinevere as we rode, not around and around, but through a rich fantasy of nereids and centaurs, fair
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damsels and chivalry, to the organ’s haunting tunes. Dismounting at last, we sauntered past a ride featuring small children mounted on plas- tic sea turtles — too babyish for the likes of us — and came upon the Haunted “Enter If You Dare!” House.
We dared. I shrieked, and he startled, but controlled himself man- fully as a screaming skeleton burst up out of a treasure chest, lit with ghostly green. The park had just opened, and there is nothing more frightening, we discovered, than a deserted haunted house with only two ten-year-olds in it. Spiders the size of sea gulls swooped down on our heads as we ran down a staircase and turned the corner into a pas- sageway that was totally dark. Can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark. We had only shuffled a few steps into the dark, hands outstretched to propel us away from any unseen looming walls, when the dark reached out and grabbed me, yanking me into a pitch-black alcove. Though invisible, the hand gripping my right arm felt huge, like an adult’s, as did the other hand, which now ran down along my body toward my crotch. I had yelped when I was first grabbed, but now, with the silent instinct of a cat, I whipped my left hand up to the forearm that held me and dug in with my claws. A terrible sensation as I felt the long nails on my ring and middle finger pop through the skin into the flesh beneath, which must have felt even worse to my assailant, who yowled and let go.
I ran, hurtling through darkness, bouncing off an unseen turn into a dimly lit — but lit — corridor where Jay hesitated, one foot jittering towards the exit, the other resolutely turned back toward the pocket of midnight where I had disappeared. “Run!” I yelled, and he reached out and grabbed me as we tore past coffins, headstones, and vampires, whose fear factor failed in comparison to the human lurking, waiting for children in the shadows.
We shot out of the haunted house, through the desert-bright sun- light, past pretzel vendors and shooting galleries, cheetah-fast on the high-octane of adrenaline.
“I would have come back for you,” Jay asserted. “If you didn’t get away.”
“I know,” I said, intuiting how much it had cost him to stay, to turn, to start to come back toward stark terror. He was my hero, my Peter Pan, my Robin Hood, his hair as yellow as sunlight, eyes like the bottom of a candle flame.
“I would have kicked him in the shins,” Jay hissed. I ducked into the first bathroom we came to, turned the faucet to high, and held my hands under the river of cold water. A tiny thread of red disappeared into the metal hole of the basin. I rubbed my hands together fever- ishly under the water and scrubbed them dry with about twenty of the rough paper towels, a miniature Lady Macbeth trying to wash and scrub away that terrible sensation of my nails punching through flesh. If my hands were clean, they couldn’t prove I did it. He hadn’t seen me any more than I had seen him. Maybe that was his job, grabbing kids in the haunted house. Maybe I had done something awful, something wrong.
Jay was right there, waiting for me outside the ladies’ room. I con- fided my fear that I had done wrong, that people at the Park might find out, might arrest me for hurting one of their employees.
“Nah, he was a creep,” Jay asserted. “Creeps grab girls. Which is why you need me to protect you. He’s just lucky he didn’t grab me. Ecrasse ton visage,” he snarled, punching the air with sharp feints.
“What?”
“It’s French. It means, ‘I will destroy your face.’”
I beamed at my solitary musketeer, as grateful as if it were his boyish boasting rather than my own instincts (and untrimmed nails) that had liberated me.
When adrenaline subsides, hunger follows. Jay bought himself a corn dog. I lifted the lid of my hamburger and carefully peeled off the nasty shredded green stuff. “You’re a bit of a picky eater, huh?” Jay observed.
Shamed, I looked down at my sneakers.
He touched my elbow. “No, it’s O.K. French women are like that. Slim and elegant. People say they’re the most beautiful women in the world.”
My heart filled with helium. My nickname at school was Super Toothpick. It was a friendly enough nickname, but no one had ever described my bony elbows and knees as being elegant.
We hopped on a pirate ride, a limited precursor to the Pirates of the Caribbean, called “Long John Silver.” A parrot on a perch called loudly, “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” as we slid onto the bench of our very own miniature pirate ship. There were no seatbelts or
restraints, and our craft rocked realistically in five inches of water. The black plastic sail emblazoned with the skull and crossbones belled out in front of our craft as we steered a course to glory and pillage.
Jay leaned far out of the boat to try to grab a gold coin glittering amongst a pile by a treasure chest in the sand while I held his leg and belt. “Glued down,” he growled, as I yanked him back just in time to save him from a watery demise.
“Stay in the boat or I’ll have you keelhauled!” a disembodied voice bellowed. We cowered for a moment, and then Jay defiantly stood up, clutching the mast, pretending to scan the horizon for ships with booty. “Avast ye swabs!” I shouted.
“Man the cannon, Mr. Smee!” Jay ordered.
When the conveyor belt beneath our ship pulled us back into sun- light, we swashbuckled off to our next adventure as the parrot behind us shrieked, “Doubloons! A thousand doubloons!” Its eyes were glassy and its feathers stiff, but it could be a real parrot; possibly just a very tired one. Jay shrugged. “That gold was fake anyway.”
The bumper cars were O.K. until some mean teenagers started ramming our car over and over. Jay fought back as hard as he could, but it was three against one and our car was pushed to the side, our necks snapping and jolting as the electric wires above us crackled blue and smoked.
This was followed by a rickety wooden roller coaster whose snaky curves extended out over the blue Pacific below, crashing into the pil- ings with such force that the pier shuddered with each impact. We screamed like banshees, mad with anticipated drowning, but that was not nearly as terrorizing as the Wheel of Death (not sure if they really called it that or that’s how I remembered it).
This ride/torture device was a large cylinder with spaces marked off where each person stood in a circle facing inward. Again, no seat belts or restraints. Maybe they hadn’t been invented yet. Come to think of it, we didn’t even have them in our cars, much less at the carnival.
Once the riders/victims were in place, the wheel started spin- ning. Fast. The centrifugal force glued us in place. Then the bottom fell out. Literally. The floor slowly receded away from us, leaving noth- ing holding us up but the brute force of speed mad rotation. Which, alas, did not work for everyone. One unfortunately bottom-heavy
young man began sliding down in unwilling pursuit of the vanishing floor. Our screams were of terror and delight; his, just terror. Jay and I, lightweight as we were, did not budge, could not budge, once the Wheel of Death began spinning. But I gazed with increasing horror at the doomed young man, who slid further and further, howling like the damned, a dark spot spreading out across the front of his jeans. I believed, and the unfortunate young man apparently concurred, that when the floor rose back up, he would be crushed.
A young woman threw up, and the next three people downwind of her shrieked and gagged as they were spattered. Though still nom- inally safe, I desperately wanted off that ride, but I could not move so much as my little finger.
At last, the floor slowly rose back up and nudged the utterly demoralized young man back up the sides of the torture device. The spinning slowed and then stopped, and gravity resumed its normal pro- portions. We all reeled out of there like drunks, staggering and grab- bing at railings and each other. Unlike the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster, there was no question of riding the Wheel of Death a second time. We were lucky to have survived once.
Revived by vast amounts of Coke and popcorn and a cord of red licorice long enough to rope a steer, we got into an egg-shaped cage, which bobbed, along with others, on a device resembling a Ferris wheel. But rather than moving in a stately manner, up and around like a Ferris wheel, this ride went around and around at different speeds, while each individual cage also circled around and back and every which way. Again, no seat belts. So Jay and I crashed into each other, thrown about like rag dolls. As his body collided again and again into mine, we started laughing hysterically. Now the helium that had been in my heart filled my whole body, making me daring, aroused, weight- less. When the ride finally stopped, we looked at each other, disheveled, gasping, reckless, amazed, delighted.
“Let’s do it again!” we crowed simultaneously.
We rode that ride six times in a row. It was as close to sex as two ten-year-old Scorpios could get.
The Tunnel of Love proved somewhat sedate after the Ride of Ecstasy. But Jay held my hand and our one closed-mouth kiss in the dark solidified our engagement. My swain went one step further in
proving his devotion. We stopped at a shooting gallery. “I will win a stuffed animal for you,” he announced.
The little metal rabbits and squirrels on conveyor belts were no match for Dead-eye Jay. They went down in strings, and soon I was the proud possessor of a stuffed bear of a somewhat bluish shade, which I carried around like our love-child for the rest of the day before gener- ously gifting it to his little sister, who, after all, would be my sister-in-law soon enough.
Hellfire and Carnation
“The kids want to know what church we go to,” I complained to my parents. We had just moved from Los Angeles, where the angels are — as the name implies — well and truly lost, to a church-laden suburb of Rochester, New York called Chili, which the natives pro- nounced with two long i’s — apparently unaware of its namesake in South America. Frogs were frogs with a long o and dogs were dogs with an equally long o. Nonetheless, I had started high school and was at the mercy of these provincial little fools. That the second question (after “Where do you come from?”) out of these teenagers’ mouths was invariably, “What church does your family go to?” was a source of shock and consternation. What kind of teenagers give a crap about church?
“Tell ‘em we’re pagans, honey. Tell ‘em we worship the trees,” my father suggested helpfully.
Somehow I didn’t think that was going to go over very well. So I started going to church.
It wasn’t hard to choose which one. My appalled parents were not going to drive me to what my father characterized as “a den of stupidity,” and there was only one church within walking distance. It was a Presbyterian church presided over by a kindly, white-haired min- ister and his cookie-baking wife who were thrilled at the opportunity to round up this little lost lamb (me) and ensconce her in their flock. Whenever they saw me, visions of heavenly brownie points danced in their heads.
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Social acceptability was actually low on my motivations for my flirtation with salvation. It was already apparent that the only two kids who would speak nicely to me were the dykey-girl swimmer who lived across the street and a German exchange student who sometimes wore her Sound of Music dirndls to class.
But despite my flat-chested figure and lack of menstruation, the kundalini energy was pounding up my spine like a firehose, so when I wasn’t masturbating, I was ignited to tears of spiritual passion at the sight of a spider web billowing in the breeze or the unfamiliar blaze of crimson hemorrhaging through the maples. The force was strong in this one, and I sought an ideological container for the forbidden lust for spirit that was swamping my frail vessel. Since you had to be born into Judaism to be Jewish, and the only other game in town was various flavors of Christianity, Christianity would have to do.
The Bible, however, was a bit of a disappointment. The archaic language didn’t trouble me — it was just like Shakespeare, which I loved. A little hard to figure out in spots, but I enjoyed the literary sleuthing that it took. But there were passages — I had started with the Old Testament, since I always read books front to back — where Jeho- vah was not looking like someone I would want to have a conversation with, much less worship. I was particularly troubled by the story of Lot. A couple of dudes, who might have been angels, or possibly just charismatic yoga teachers, show up at Lot’s holy house in Sodom. A gang of guys shows up wanting to “know” them — only their way of getting to know someone was to gang rape them (bit of a weird local custom) and Lot says, no, they’re my guests — but offers up his own teenage daughters and the concubine of one of the travelers. The mob rapes the concubine to death, and in an odd show of grief, the trav- eler who owned the concubine chops her body into pieces and sends it by donkey express to “all the tribes of Judea” to rouse them against Sodom and its sister city of Gomorrah. Lot flees the burning city, and after his wife conveniently turns to a pillar of salt, he has sex with the daughters he was so happy to sacrifice to the rampaging mob moments
before.
The disturbing thing was that supposedly the Lord had spared Lot because he was a “godly man.” What kind of God regards this
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guy as godly material? I asked the minister about it, and the almost equally distressing Job story, but he just looked wise and said that God’s ways were mysterious and not to be understood by mortals (or morals, apparently). Well, you could say that again.
But what I did love about Christianity was Jesus. Jehovah might be a bit of a psychopath, but Jesus wore his heart on his flowing white sleeve. My own father was smart, and often funny, but he also went into rages and seemed to have nothing but contempt for his oldest daugh- ter. A kind, unconditionally loving heavenly father was exactly what I needed. Jesus, with his hippie hairstyle and understanding sympathy for sluts like Mary Magdalene, was my dream dad.
My other motivation, which I could never have admitted to myself at the time, was revenge. My parents had kidnapped me from sunny Southern California, where I could have grown up to be a surfer, or a hippie, or a mermaid (or all three!), and brought me to this waste- land where people pronounced the nearby town of Lima like the bean. Probably because they had never heard of Peru. Or Chile, which is why they spelled our new town Chili, but still couldn’t pronounce it even though it was spelled like a dish of beans. My parents had ren- dered me miserable; my journey into religious adventurism returned the favor.
One particularly successful venture into making my parents suf- fer occurred on the first (and only) Mother’s Day I attended at the church. They were giving out red and white carnations at the entry of the church; you chose one and pinned it to your dress or jacket. I chose white, having always preferred white flowers to red ones. Sud- denly, everyone was smiling and nodding at me with misty eyes, and after the service, I was astonished at how many middle-aged women approached me and clasped me to their ample bosoms, crying, “Oh, you poor, brave darling!” and “You always have a family here.”
The people at this church were so friendly. My family might not appreciate me, but boy, was I appreciated here in the house of the Lord.
I came home, humming hymns, reveling in my newfound popu- larity, still wearing my white souvenir flower. My mother met me at the door smiling, but her expression quickly changed to horror. “Did you wear that flower today at church? Tell me you didn’t!”
“They were giving them away!” I cried defensively, “Everyone got one.”
“It’s Mother’s Day! A red flower means your mother is alive!
A white flower means I’m dead!”
Suddenly, the burst of protective affection surrounding me at the church made dreadful sense.
“They didn’t say that! Nobody said white means that!”
“You’re supposed to know! Now I’m going to have to show up there to show everyone I’m alive!”
My mother accompanied me to church the following Sunday, and for a month of Sundays after that, with my younger siblings in tow. After that, we moved to a different, more upscale suburb of Rochester called Pittsford, where the residents, though only a few miles from Chili, could speak English properly. There was no church within walking dis- tance of our country home, but I didn’t miss it much. I had rejoined the Girl Scouts, and found our outings into nature and singing around the campfire a much more rewarding spiritual experience. I continued to read the Bible, but the more I read, the less I bought it. Besides, the minister had told me that neither my father nor my dog were going to heaven. My father may have been a trial to me, but he was one heckuva better guy than Lot. And heaven without dogs? That’s just crazy talk.
Tortilla Rhymes with Chinchilla
One might expect that in a town called Chili, pronounced with two long i’s, (“chai-lie”), the local schools might be a little substandard. I had come from a junior high in Manhattan Beach where the local drug dealer parked his car across from the playground and did brisk business with students throughout the day, a school where I was rou- tinely beaten up for my lunch money by kids looking to procure the pusher’s wares until I started bringing a sack lunch every day and hid- ing a couple of quarters for ice cream in my shoes. I should have been a cynical teenaged woman of the world by ninth grade. Nonetheless, I had pathetically high hopes for my new school.
English was my best subject, so I expected my teacher, Miss Coo- per, to adore me once she saw my writing. We began by reading John Steinbeck’s book, The Pearl. My teacher read a list of Steinbeck’s other books out loud. When she got to Tortilla Flat, she pronounced “tortilla” with hard l’s, like “chinchilla.”
Ever helpful, I raised my hand.
“In Spanish when you have two l’s together, it’s pronounced like a y. And the i is pronounced like an e. So it’s ‘torteeya,’ not ‘tortiLLa.’”
I sat back, satisfied that she would now apprehend that I was her star student.
Instead, she narrowed her eyes in rage.
“Well, this is not a Spanish class, this is an English class, and in
English we say ‘tortiLLa!’”
Then she sent me to the office for being rude.
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The next day she looked at me archly. “So, Cheri, how do we say ‘tortilla’ in English?”
I knew from having checked with my mother the night before that the teacher was wrong, that no one said “tortilla” so that it rhymed with “Manila” and “vanilla.” But I did not want to get in trouble, so I resorted to humor. “You say ‘tortilla,’ I say ‘torteeya’ …” I warbled.
Back to the office.
Two days in a row! A good kid like me? Considering what my father might do if he found out caused me to hyperventilate so hard I had to put my head between my knees.
I prayed Miss Cooper had forgotten all about flat Mexican comes- tibles, but the next day she said with poisonous sweetness, “Cheri, will you please read the list of John Steinbeck’s works?”
I said “Torteeya Flat” as softly and quickly as I could before mov- ing on to The Cannery, but she caught it.
“I guess people from Los Angeles are slow learners,” she said. “I guess people from Los Angeles can’t pronounce things in English. Go to the office.”
Her smug ignorance inflamed my passion for the truth.
“Miss Cooper, have you ever seen a tortilla? Have you eaten a tortilla? Have you bought a tortilla? I grew up close to Mexico, eating Mexican food …”
“Get out of my class!” she thundered.
Back to the office. This time the secretary ushered me in to see the Principal. Though, since I was watching tears splash onto the laces of my shoes, one couldn’t actually say I saw him.
“Why are you antagonizing Miss Cooper?” he rumbled. “Were you a troublemaker in your last school?”
“No. I’m not a troublemaker. I’m not trying to antagonize her. But she’s a teacher,” I blubbered. “Teachers are supposed to know the right answers. I really thought she’d want to know. She’s teaching the kids something wrong.”
“Listen, kid. The teacher is always right, even if they’re wrong.
Understand?”
After a weekend to consider the problem, I approached English class as if I were walking to the firing squad.
“Welcome back to class, Cheri. Did you have a good chat with
the Principal?” she gritted out his title as if it were “Grand Inquisitor.” “Tortilla. Rhymes with Manila, vanilla, chinchilla and — Godzilla,”
I conceded.
“That’s right,” she said with that horrible smug smile, and contin- ued on with her lesson.
“Flat,” I muttered under my breath. “Flat, like the earth.” But I said it softly and remained in class.
Diana, the Pocket Rocket
After a year, my family moved from Chili to Pittsford, a move which, believe it or not, was a tremendous step up. Brighton and Pitts- ford were the two upscale suburbs of Rochester that harbored people who could read and pronounce words with multiple syllables.
But our new house, situated on three glorious acres in the coun- tryside, also harbored mice. Lots of mice. Hundreds of mice.
“You are the cat!” my mother shouted at our striped tomcat, MaPor, pointing at the furry gray streaks darting around our kitchen. “This is your job!”
He gazed at her with a look of indignant disbelief that said, “Lady, I don’t do mice.”
My mother shook her fist. “It’s time for you to earn your keep!”
MaPor surveyed the scene with disgust, wheeled around, and stalked outside.
He disappeared for three days. A neighbor said he saw him bat- tling with another tomcat back and forth across the road one night.
“Tom’s gotta claim his territory,” the neighbor nodded sagely. “They can’t just read the deed like we do.”
On the third day, like Jesus, MaPor returned. One ear had acquired some new fringe. He had apparently won our side of the road; he looked extremely pleased with himself. At his side was a young black-and-white female cat with fetching yellow eyes, another trophy from his victory.
By way of introduction, MaPor cocked his head first toward Mother, then toward the new cat.
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You wanted a mouser. I have brought you a mouser.
The new cat padded into the kitchen. The mice vanished into their holes.
Mom led the new cat to the garage and opened the door. The mice, who enjoyed running relays on the cool cement floor, ran for earnest.
The cat looked up at Mother with an expression of cool confi- dence and gave a slight nod, conveying that she understood the situa- tion completely.
Impressed by her professional demeanor, Mother immediately poured her a bowl of milk.
That night, the carnage began.
Early the next morning, Father called Mother into the garage. The new cat was standing at attention.
At her feet were the bodies of twelve mice, neatly laid out in a pattern of four rows, noses along one edge, tails along the other.
She was a stone-cold killer, but a killer with esthetics.
She received my parents’ effusive praises modestly, then sauntered off to the kitchen, tail waving.
Mother poured her a bowl of half ‘n’ half.
The next morning found nine mice laid out in the same tidy square, heads in one direction, tails in the other. Mom went to the store and bought cream.
Father dubbed the new cat Diana, after the Roman Goddess of the Hunt. Due to her diminutive size, he referred to her as Diana, the Pocket Rocket.
Every morning for the next two weeks, the scene was repeated; nine or ten mice lined up for inspection, bellies up in an attitude of surrender, neatly arranged. There was never anything bloody or messy about them. Each had a small, almost surgical incision in their abdo- men where, presumably with one claw, Diana had extracted some par- ticularly tasty organ, perhaps the liver.
Diana would swagger down one side of the square and up the other like a general offering evidence of a successful battle to her rul- ers. Then she would traipse off to the front porch where MaPor would mount her, sometimes in the bushes, but often right on the front porch in front of God and everyone. Clearly, this was MaPor’s contribution,
Diana, the Pocket Rocket 75
rewarding the mouser for her exertions. It was always Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am, but Diana screamed with savage pleasure every time.
She was always in heat.
I was fourteen, and I can’t tell you how much I admired her. It was sex education at its finest.
After two weeks, the mouse infestation was no more. There was nary a rodent to be seen in kitchen, attic, or garage. No doubt refugee mice were streaming across the road into the fields beyond, carrying their meager possessions, fleeing the terror.
Though her place in our household was assured, Diana continued to scour the perimeter, displaying her catch (which now included the occasional vole or shrew) on the garage floor as if it were her art studio. While both cats paid my mother, the mistress of cans and cream, proper homage, it was my sister, Annie, whom they adored. Annie pos- sessed some feline magic, had some aura of catnip, which all cats found irresistible. When she was a mere tot, cats used to follow her home as
devotedly as if she were dragging a fish behind her.
Diana was no exception, and so she took to worshipfully tucking a dead mouse under Annie’s pillow in the evening. She would stand by the bed, eyes gleaming with love, awaiting Annie’s excited reaction. A worthy cat goddess, recognizing the honor bestowed on her, Annie would lift up her pillow, feign delighted surprise, take the mouse in her hands, bring it toward her mouth and say, “Oh, yum, yum, yum! Thank you for bringing me this delicious mouse!” She would then take the mouse out to the yard and set it down. Diana would follow, quiver- ing with pleasure, and take the mouse elsewhere, no doubt to enjoy the delectable miniature mouse pâté concealed within.
Our ardent huntress accompanied us on walks around the sur- rounding fields and meadows like a dog. She would lead us to fox holes and badger dens, then bounce excitedly up and down on her toes as if saying, Get them! Get them! They’re too big for me, but they’re just the right size for you!
When we would keep walking, Diana would stand by the hole for a moment, staring at us in dismay. Then she would scurry ahead and lead us to the next fabulous opportunity — a glorious gopher
mound — and watch unbelieving as we continued our tramp without even trying to dig the tasty morsels out of their hiding place.
We were so lame, she could not believe it. How were we not starv- ing? But our devoted huntress never gave up on us, convinced that one day we would haul those foxes and badgers out or their dens and we would all feast.
One day, when we were all out in the yard raking up ponderous quantities of leaves, we saw two long, brown streaks whiz by, followed by a black-and-white streak. The next instant, there was a whirlwind of brown-and-white and black-and-white — like a fur tornado. An instant after that, a dead weasel lay like a brown-and-white scarf on the grass while the triumphant Pocket Rocket capered around his body. She pro- ceeded to show us the whole fight in a slowed-down version so we could appreciate her prowess, tossing the weasel about like a limp rag:
So then I hit him with a left! Then I hit him with a right! Then he feinted toward my leg and I jumped out of the way! Then I grabbed him by the neck and threw him over my shoulder and he went for my throat and I jumped up high and got him by the neck again and pow! Pow! I snapped it! Like a twig!
The weasel was twice as long as she was, so she was rightfully ecstatic about her victory.
“That is one tough cat!” my father said. Later, when we entered the house and found MaPor asleep on the couch, Father scoffed, “What have you done lately?”
MaPor opened one eye. I give her reason to live.
Big Bad Wolf
The child screamed, thrashing in the water, as the heroic dog churned through the surf, dragging the boy back to shore. What a dra- matic rescue! What a news story it would have made! Except what my brother was screaming was, “Bebe! Stop it! Bebe! Let me go!” For he was not drowning, but having a fine time swimming in the weirdly warm Nova Scotia current.
After my dog Charcoal died — hit by a car while looking for love at the advanced age of eleven (now that I’m middle-aged I fear I am turning out just like her), my family bought a dog for my brother, whose previous pets were limited to a series of horned toads all named “Horny” for obvious, not ironic, reasons. Our new dog, far from being a mixed-race pound rescue, was a pure-bred pedigreed German Shep- herd named Biatte Von du Brer. Bebe, pronounced like two bees, for short. Bebe quickly grew and claimed her place in the pack. My father was clearly top dog and always obeyed. My mother was the mate of the top dog and reluctantly obeyed.
Allowed to sleep at the foot of my parents’ bed, Bebe quickly ascertained that she could rise to the next-highest female in the pack after my mother, and growled ferociously whenever my sister or I tried to sit on my parents’ bed to talk with them, thus establishing herself as our superior. My brother she adopted as her special charge, her pup, to be protected at all costs. Hence her decision to plunge into the ocean, which she feared and abhorred, to rescue my brother, much against his will. After the third such “rescue,” my father had to tie her to a piece of driftwood the size of a tree to allow my brother to swim unmolested. As
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she strained against the leash, giving her sharp bark, a woman holding the hand of a toddler girl walked by, taking care to give the frantic ani- mal a wide berth. The girl pointed and said, “Woof, Woof.”
“Yes, it’s a nice woof-woof,” Mother said brightly.
The woman narrowed her eyes. “She’s not saying ‘woof, woof.’ She’s saying ‘wolf, wolf.’” She pulled her tot closer and stalked off, reek- ing disapproval.
While liquid water was an anathema to Bebe, winter was her ele- ment and solid water — snow — was excellent romping material. And in Rochester, boy does it snow — feet and feet and feet of it. All that white stuff made an excellent surface on which to play her favorite game with my brother and his friends. It was a wolfy sort of game. The boys would race away shrieking, and after giving them a significant head start, Bebe would tear after them, grab each by the ankle of their winter boots, and toss them over her head into the snow, pouncing on them. After a few minutes of wrestling, they would do it all over again. Bebe never attempted to play this game unless there was a thick, soft snow cover for the boys to fall in and their feet were safely swathed in boots. Perhaps she was teaching them how to hunt, for this is how wolves hunt; they hamstring their prey to bring them down.
The problem was, none of Mark’s friends’ mothers knew about this game. So one day, Carol arrived to pick up her son Jamie, and was treated to the sight of her seven-year-old howling in apparent ter- ror as he ran across the snow, our vicious dog hot on his heels. The dog caught the boy, threw him over her shoulder, and pounced. Her snout descended toward Jamie’s throat, and the boy’s shrieks turned to choked gurgles. Carol ran across the yard screaming, brandishing the only weapon she had, her flimsy umbrella, prepared to fight the wolf off her son or die trying.
When she got there, Bebe was licking her son’s face as he giggled madly.
She staggered into the kitchen and gasped to my mother, “Jane, I need a cup of coffee!”
Mom added some brandy to it.
Owning the next best thing to a wolf came in handy in crowds. When my family went to Fourth of July or harvest festivals, my father would stalk through the crowd, Bebe straining on the leash (she hated
Big Bad Wolf 79
crowds), the rest of us following in their wake. With his reflecting sun- glasses, crew-cut, and military bearing, my father looked every inch the not-so-successfully-undercover Undercover Cop. Hippies and wannabe hippies blanched and scuttled away to cower behind popcorn and cot- ton candy vendors, anxiously passing plastic baggies of contraband from hand to hand. Some would hold their ground, glaring truculently as this incarnation of “the man” strode by, vicious drug-sniffing dog barely restrained. German Shepherds were police dogs, state enforcers, feared the way pit bulls are feared today. Everyone had seen pictures of the police in Selma, in Birmingham, siccing their German Shepherds on civil rights protesters. I trailed as far behind my family as I could, hoping that my tie-dyed shirt and colorful buttons reading (in Tolkien’s Elvish) Go Go Gandalf and Frodo Lives would indicate that my proximity to the omi- nous Nazi-type striding just ahead of me was merely an odd coincidence.
But Bebe’s finest moment of crowd-clearing occurred later, as my family was moving back to California from upstate New York. My mother, brother, and sister had flown out at the end of the school year and moved into the new home in Corte Madera (I was in college in the Midwest). My father remained behind to finish up his project at Eastman Kodak and to sell the house. Two months later, he and Bebe flew out to rejoin the family, he in first class, she, alas, in steerage — in a wood and metal box in the hold, with the other animals, mail, and suitcases, drugged to the nines on animal tranquilizer.
Unfortunately, animal — like human — tranquilizers sometimes have the opposite effect.
Unbeknownst to my father, snoozing in his seat; below, in the freezing noisy baggage compartment, Bebe had gone mad.
It takes approximately five hours for a plane to fly from New York to California. Long enough for a crazed yet determined German Shepherd to rend her way through her sturdy wooden crate.
After the plane taxied to a stop at the San Francisco airport, my father was perplexed to hear panicked yells coming from the ground crew. The passengers were ordered to return to their seats. Shortly after, Michael Lesh was asked to come to the forward cabin.
“Are you traveling with a German Shepherd?”
Dad’s heart shuddered, thinking perhaps the dog had died. “Yes, is she all right?”
A representative from the airlines escorted Dad to the baggage bay hatch, which was firmly shut. “Your dog seems to have chewed her way out of her box. The baggage crew can’t get in there until the dog is out of there. She’s gone berserk; they were lucky to get out alive. Do you think you can get her out of there? Or do we need to call the police?”
“Of course I can get her out of there,” Dad assured him.
The airline rep nodded to the baggage handlers, then walked briskly toward the safety of the terminal.
The baggage handlers cranked the hatch to the baggage bay open, then retreated to the other side of the plane.
Bebe burst from the plane like a Rin Tin Tin /Superman hybrid with an avenging angel complex. She leaped on my father and pro- ceeded to rip his blue silk tie into shreds. My father always maintained that the eyetooth that slashed his chin was an accident, a frantic mis- calculation. But, accident or not, you know how facial wounds bleed. Twenty minutes later, my father was walking through the airport clad in a shredded tie and shirt covered with blood, a snarling, hysterical Ger- man Shepherd lunging from side to side at the end of her leash — liter- ally and figuratively at the end of her rope.
Dad always said he had never had such an easy time getting through the airport. “I was like Moses parting the Red Sea,” he boasted. “People plastered themselves to the walls. People ran for the stairs and elevators. No one got in our way. We had the baggage car- ousel completely to ourselves. Good thing I didn’t have to get a taxi, though. That might have been a little tough.”
Wasp’s Nest
There is a certain type of wasp that paralyzes a tarantula with its sting, then lays its eggs in the tarantula’s flesh. When the eggs hatch, the larval wasps eat the paralyzed tarantula alive.
Similarly, our culture implants romantic ideas into a young girl’s growing brain, which, when hatched into fantasy powered by burgeon- ing hormones, devours their host from the inside out.
I had barely noticed the tall, skinny boy working with me and a dozen other kids on our high school literary magazine. Weak chin, big nose, long, lank, greasy dark hair tied back in a ponytail — he was hardly the sort to make an adolescent girl’s heart go pitter-pat.
But he was brilliant, and often funny. And toward the end of our junior year, he gave me a poem he had written for me. In it, he referred to me as “a poetess in a lavender suit” and likened my hair to spun gold, and my delicate beauty to crystal. The poem ended, “delicately sculptured crystal, crystal, and spun gold.”
I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. No matter that he had writ- ten love poems to other girls at the same time, casting his net wide. I had spent years as an ugly duckling, desperately wanting to believe in swanly redemption. So what if my suitor was an ugly drake?
We corresponded throughout the summer as he interned in Bar Harbor, Maine, at a research facility where his primary job seemed to be torturing and killing lab mice. This should have been a fairly obvi- ous warning, but since he agonized over the mouse massacre, it was not. Over three months of nothing but the (copiously) written word, I fell in love with Kurt’s brain.
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Once he returned, it did not take long for the body to follow where the brain led. As we were necking and petting in the basement of my home one day after school, I started to moan.
Abruptly, Kurt stopped doing what he was doing. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.
“Nothing — keep doing that — ”
His hands returned, as did my response.
“Am I hurting you?” he asked, backing off once again. “No. I’m getting turned on.”
Kurt stopped and pulled back on the couch, eyeing me with alarm. “Girls don’t get turned on. Women have to be married for at least six months before they experience anything like that.”
I laughed. “Where the heck did you hear that? Of course I can get turned on.”
“Who taught you this?”
“I taught myself. Girls masturbate, you know.” “No they don’t!”
Great. I had somehow found the one person on the planet more sexually ignorant than myself to go exploring with.
“Yes, Kurt, we do.”
My other suitor, a boy unpromisingly nicknamed Dale, was equally uninformed. A year younger than me, he declined to do any- thing more than kiss me chastely on the lips, because “he respected me.” When he confessed to me, over the phone, that his father took him to visit prostitutes, I was horrified.
“Please forgive me. I know I’ll do it again, but I’ll stop once I’m married.”
“You don’t have to go,” I chided.
“I can’t help it — you can’t understand — men have different needs than women do.”
“Oh, what nonsense! I’m just as horny as you are. Haven’t you ever heard of masturbation? That’s what I do.”
“Girls don’t do that!” Oh, brother.
I appreciated Dale’s devotion, but he was boring. He insisted on making me a model of “my dream house,” though I protested again and again that I did not have a dream house in mind. My dreams were
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of literary success and travel to exotic lands. And sex, though I knew better than to mention that.
My dream house had many rooms that Dale was slowly furnishing with dollhouse items, some that he carved; others, like a sink and bath- tub, that he purchased. Periodically he would move the walls around, asking if perhaps I would prefer a more rectangular living room to an L-shaped one. Every time I went to his house, he would pull it out and ask if I wanted this room painted pink, or that one painted blue. “I got some wall paper for the living room,” he said, pulling out a sample square of ivory paper with gold fuzz designs. “I’m going to glue it on next week.”
“Dale, really. Don’t go to the trouble. I don’t really have a dream
house in mind …”
“That’s why I’m dreaming it up for you.”
Yes, reader, I know what you’re thinking and now I am thinking it, too.
Dale was probably gay.
Between chaste kisses, dad-sponsored visits to whores, and a fixa- tion on dollhouses, versus a klutzy intellectual with a sincere desire to get into my pants, it was no contest. I wanted romance, not respect. Kurt was a budding cad with three girlfriends, but in his own incompe- tent way, he did seem to like girls. Possibly because I myself had dreams of seducing the myriad of pretty girls around me, I was tolerant of Kurt’s other amours. He had declared himself “an ethical hedonist” and that sounded good to me. The sight of Kurt tonguing one of his other girlfriends at a party caused me twinges of pain, but it did not repulse me like the thought of Dale visiting sleazy, gonorrhea-infested prostitutes.
Myself a cad, or at least a cad-ette, I continued to date Dale, largely to have something to do — and to flaunt — when Kurt was see- ing his other amours.
I’m sorry to say, I was so little invested in Dale that I don’t remem- ber a single detail of our breakup, including who initiated it (probably me, but maybe as a response to an ultimatum). It was sometime after senior prom, where I wore a blue dress that was my mother’s favorite color but whose shade which did nothing for me in terms of hue. I wore it once after for “Trip or Treat,” the Beloit College version of
Halloween, which involved going door-to-door in the dorms harvesting pills, drugs, and snacks of various sorts. I remember wearing the dress, which everyone agreed was truly scary, but for some reason I can’t remember anything else after that.
Prolific Tactics
So, I wanted to have sex with Kurt, but the free love movement of Haight-Ashbury had not wended its way to Pittsford N.Y. (I will always regret having missed Woodstock, only a couple hundred miles away.) Both his house and mine contained watchful mothers. And at my house, my father had trained our German Shepherd, Bebe, to fol- low me and my boyfriends around and bark frantically if they touched me. Retreating to the den and closing the door triggered the same cas- cade of hysterical barking.
Shedding my virginity was going to be tricky.
We finally accomplished the feat May 10 of 1970, as soon as it was (barely) warm enough to hike into the woods behind the school and lie down on our combined coats. A fine mist was sifting through the trees, making it feel like I was floating. Kurt being much at the small end of the male-equipment equation, at first I felt nothing, followed by pleasant ripples of subtle feeling.
Afterward, collapsed on top of me, Kurt said, “Hey, kiddo, you get the better end of this deal.”
“How so?”
“You get to look up at the sky. I have to look down at the bugs.” “That’s ‘cause I’m more spiritual than you.”
The mist eddied through the trees like a feathery grey river. I did have the better end of the deal, and I liked it. I was ecstatic that there had been no pain or bleeding. Of course, that was because I had been raped as a small child and had repressed all memory of it. But igno- rance, as they say, is bliss.
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I picked a doctor out of the phone book. There weren’t that many gynecologists in town. I wanted birth control pills. If I got pregnant, I knew suicide would be the only choice. Abortion was illegal in 1970, unobtainable for a seventeen-year-old with no connections. I had heard about women causing their own abortions with knitting needles, but I was so ignorant of anatomy, I imagined this as a hari-kari maneuver, plunging the knitting needles into the abdomen.
Suicide was looking a lot easier than that.
Kurt dropped me off at my appointment with the firing squad.
My heart was hammering so hard it might as well have been that.
The doctor was a doddering old octogenarian. Well, he was at least 50 — same thing from a seventeen-year-old’s perspective. The speculum was cold, but downright tropical compared to his attitude. He could scarcely stand to touch a teenage slut like myself. I had the impression he was just barely keeping from retching at the thought of my unwed gambols.
“So, I want a prescription for birth control pills.” “What are you using now? Prolific tactics?” Prolific tactics!
“God, I hope not!”
He raised an eyebrow at my response. “Um, right now we’re using rubbers.” “Hmm.”
It was not until much later that I realized he had asked if we were
using prophylactics, a term for condoms I had never heard. This may have tipped the tide in my favor, however.
Clearly, a bimbo this stupid should not be encouraged to reproduce.
“I strongly disapprove of what you are doing, but I doubt I can convince you to stop doing — what you are doing.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You know, it’s very doubtful this young man is going to marry you.”
“I don’t want to marry him! He’s O.K. as a lover, but he’d make a terrible husband.”
I don’t know which of us was most shocked by this revelation — the doctor, who visibly blanched, or myself, who, for the first time
confronted the truth beneath my gauzy romantic portrait of my first sexual relationship.
After the requisite month of being on the birth control pills before they were deemed effective, we were celebrating our first condom-free fuck in the back seat of Kurt’s car. It was a hot east-coast summer night. The lightning flashed and all the lightning bugs in the field next to us flashed in response.
“Do you think the lightning is their god?” I panted, craning my head to look out the window.
“Mmmgh.” Kurt was no longer interested in the lightning.
But I was. Physically, I might be with a fumbling, adolescent boy, but spiritually I was one with the moist air, the lightning, the distant thunder. My consciousness swept out into the summer storm, and as the sky broke into a hundred electric tributaries of light, my body frac- tured into its own incandescent echo.
I tumbled back to earth — or vinyl seats — abruptly, as Kurt slapped my face for a second time.
“Hey, why’d you do that?” I was too heightened for it to hurt much, but I was stunned.
“I’m not finished yet!”
Now I was really puzzled. “So … keep going.” “We can’t keep going after you come!”
I snickered, unbelievingly. “No, sweetie, we can’t keep going after you come. I can have six or eight of these things, so … just keep going.” “Six or …” realizing he was totally out of his league, Kurt put his
head down and kept pumping, doggedly focusing on his own orgasm.
God knows, he was never very interested in mine.
A Bisexual Built for Two
One day, when we were eleven, my best friend Susie and I were walking down the boardwalk in Manhattan Beach, our arms slung around each other’s waists as usual, when some surfers crossed in front of us — sun-bleached blonde hair, red-gold tans gilding their muscles, surfboards like sharp-finned sharks casually slung under one arm.
After they passed, Susie abruptly dropped her arm from its cus- tomary clasp around my torso. “We shouldn’t touch each other like that anymore. People will think we love each other.”
I looked at her as if she had grown two heads. “But we do love each other.”
“Yes, but not like that.”
Yeah, I thought, like that. What the heck was Susie worried about? What could be bad about love? But, I considered, Susie could be silly at times. Always worrying about what other people thought. This concept, luckily for me, was as alien as considering the musings of Martians. It was already obvious to me that most people were far less intelligent than I was, so why in the world would I care what they thought? Assuming they could think.
“But we can keep hugging each other when we’re alone, right?” “Of course! We’re still best friends.”
Our friendship faded in the ensuing years as Susie blossomed quickly into voluptuousness and changed her name to the more sophis- ticated Andrea, while I remained thin as a stick. But the year we turned fourteen and my family moved to New York, I became interesting again by virtue of distance, and our once-a-year visits fell into a pattern of
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her teaching me all about makeup and boys while I secretly simmered in a cauldron of thwarted desire.
But Susie was not my only heartthrob. In tenth grade I met a girl named Kim in Girl Scouts. We promptly became inseparable. Her nickname was “Chip,” short for chipmunk, because of how her cheeks would swell up like an over-ambitious hamster when she was exposed to poison ivy.
During our first campout, which we spent canoeing on a river (me steering in the back of the canoe, swooning over her brown, mus- cled arms powering us forward), she observed me swaggering down the docks and said, “I like the way you walk around like a little skipper, like you own everything. I’m going to call you Skip.” So we were Chip and Skip. At night, lying side by side in our sleeping bags, I would say, “Goodnight Chip,” to which she replied, “Goodnight Skip,” and then, groaning over the corniness of it all she would say, “Goodnight Huntly,” to which I would respond, “Goodnight Brinkly.”
True love.
When we had sleepovers, I would wait for her breath to even, and then slowly inch over until my skin grazed hers — or at least, our pajamas touched — and then lie there inhaling her scent, drifting in a haze of happiness. Sometimes she would roll over and throw her arm around me, which was paradise. More often she would partially wake, mumbling, “Hey, budge over, I need more space.” I moved to the far edge of the bed, but as her breath deepened, I’d inch carefully over until her breath stirred my hair once again.
In eleventh grade, as we lay chatting in my bed, she began talking about dating. “I think Chris is going to ask me out. Jeez, what if I don’t know how to kiss?” she fretted. Quickly I seized the opportunity. “Yeah, that would be terrible. Hey, maybe we should practice with each other. Then we’ll know what to do.”
An endless pause while she considered my proposal. “Nah, we’ll know what to do,” she decided.
In my heart, Snidely Whiplash stomped around, twisting his mus- tache and shouting, “Curses, foiled again!” while I sighed and con- ceded, “Yeah, I guess …”
Yet despite my Sapphic preoccupations, I did not worry that I was a lesbian. I had worried up until tenth grade, because everything I had
90 Rocket in My Pocket
read about masturbation indicated that it was an activity of boys, and I was quite addicted to the vice. When an older Girl Scout, giving us an impromptu sex education class around the campfire, informed us that masturbation was normal for girls, I drew a sigh of relief and worried no more. My father’s old psychology books assured me that it was nor- mal for girls to have crushes on other girls, and that these infatuations, along with clitoral fixation, would disappear as they grew up and had mature feelings for men and vaginal orgasms. So, I was just a kid and determined to enjoy my clitoral fixation and fantasies about girls while they lasted. Besides, some of the time when I fantasized it was about boys, so obviously I was heading in the “right” direction. Slowly.
One week into college I met the love of my life, and he was male. After a month of Catholic guilt deflating his tent pole at inopportune moments, Elie came back from Mass and said, “Cheri, I went into confession and the priest told me I had sinned. But then I realized the love I have for you is the most holy thing I have ever known. And the priest is wrong, because the love we have for each other is not a sin.”
He never went back to church, and our love-makings quickly became incendiary. So I was surprised when I continued to have crushes on girls. But, look how long it had taken me to get breasts and to menstruate. Almost sixteen before I got my first period! I was obvi- ously just a slow developer.
Then, at twenty, I attended a gay rights group forming on campus and heard the word bisexual for the first time, and it was the Fourth of July, Christmas, and New Year’s all rolled into one. I wasn’t going to outgrow my feelings for girls! Hallelujah! I had options!
Walking back to our room in a state of exaltation, I had only one worry. How would Elie react to this news? After a lovemaking so remarkable that little bubbles of crystal light were still floating around the bed I said, “Honey — I think I might be bisexual.”
“Oh, I knew that.”
“What?” I was outraged. “You could not possibly have known that,
because I just figured it out!”
“Cheri,” he said sweetly, “most girls — when a beautiful woman walks into the room at a party — don’t turn to their boyfriends and say, “Hasn’t she got a great ass?”
“They don’t?”
“No, honey. And most girls don’t wake up on Sunday morning and say, “Hey, let’s go girl-watching today!”
“They don’t?”
“No baby, they don’t.”
It was humiliating, but reassuring. Elie knew, and he accepted it.
The stage was set for our journey through the seventies.
Freud-ulent
Like the royal princess that I was not, I was betrothed at birth. The object of my parents’ affections was their best friends’ son, born the day before me, named Jay. My parents and their best friends the Sanders had eloped to Las Vegas as a college foursome. The elope- ments were followed by proper white-lace weddings a few months later. The following year, the four returned to the scene of the crime for an anniversary celebration that apparently involved unprotected sex, as Jay and I were born exactly nine months later, just one day apart.
An impressionable child, I had no objection to my early betrothal and felt a fond infatuation for the boy who was slated to be my hus- band. He was courteous and kind (to me, not to his younger siblings), handsome and bold — much like Peter Pan, my idol for all things mas- culine. My favorite restaurant, Bob’s Big Boy, featured a cherry lem- onade drink called a Cherry O’Jay, which, since my name was Cheri, I was happily convinced had been named to celebrate our upcoming nuptials.
Since the Sanders lived in Northern California and my family was in SoCal, we saw them mostly in the summer when they would come to visit and go to the beach, or we would all camp in cabins together at Lake Arrowhead. On one of these beach occasions, as Jay and I were playing at the playground across the ally from my home, he pulled down his shorts and anointed the concrete wall and sand with his urine. “Bet you wish you had one of these,” he swaggered, tucking his
penis back in his pants.
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Awareness struck like a thunderbolt. Oh my god, I thought, he doesn’t know yet that he’ll never give birth to a baby! For of course, no one would consider a peeing straw to be a reasonable tradeoff for that ultimate power of giving birth.
Fortunately, having heard my mother and her female friends utter the phrase “Men are just big children” a thousand times, and watched how they humored them, I knew what I had to do. I had to distract Jay before he realized he didn’t have a uterus.
“Oh, yeah, wow, yeah — that must be so convenient! You sure are lucky!”
He preened like a little cockerel, and I basked in the power of my womanly wiles. The poor thing, never to be pregnant, never to give birth. A little piss tube seemed a — pardon the phrase — piss-poor con- solation prize. But he was fooled by my faux admiration, as men always are, and I gloried in the exercise of my feminine cunning.
When I arrived at Beloit College, at the age of 17, I discovered that Jay was not alone in his (delusional) valuing of his appendage. That year I read Sisterhood Is Powerful and discovered there was a name for the craziness in our society (sexism) and a solution (feminism). But that first semester, I was still bewildered by the extreme irrationality I kept encountering in what was supposedly a bastion of higher learning and lofty intellect. I had chosen Beloit partly because of its reputation for cutting-edge work in anthropology and archaeology. I attended the introductory evening at that department with great excitement, visual- izing my future self gently lifting a new Rosetta stone from the sands of time and brushing the dirt away, opening a window to the past.
The professor inspired us by showing slides of ancient relics. The Venus of Willendorf came on the screen. “This,” he opined, “was the caveman’s Playboy.”
Something pulled me to my feet before I realized I was moving. “That’s not what that is.”
“Oh, really?” the professor smirked. “Do share your expertise with us. What do you think it is?”
I had no book learning on the subject. But I knew. “It looks like a Goddess. It looks like the abundance and fertility of the earth.”
“Oh, well, perhaps you should be giving this lecture instead of me. Sit down.”
I sat.
The professor continued on through another half-hour of slides, and then started to tout all the advantages of the anthropology department. “Every summer, members of our staff and other illustri- ous experts will take a selection of our male students on an archaeo- logical dig somewhere in the world. Actual, indispensable hands-on experience …”
I rose again.
“Excuse me, did you say ‘male’ students?”
The professor sighed. The willful obtuseness of this girl! “Yes, women can study, but only males can go on the actual digs.”
“Why?”
“Well,” his face twisted into an expression half-leer and half-sneer, “women have — special hygiene needs that cannot be met out in the field.”
Athena rose inside me, sword in hand. “Sir, whatever you’re using to wipe your shit, I can use to wipe my blood.”
There was a collective sharp intake of breath as the other students glanced over at me, appalled.
“Well, Miss … .”
“Lesh.”
“Miss Lesh, please remain after the questions and answers and we will discuss your situation then.”
I nodded and sat. Maybe he was going to reconsider this absurd policy. After all, why should I pay the same tuition as the boys if I wasn’t going to be given the same quality of education?
The question-and-answer period ended. A few students went down to the podium to shake the professor’s hand and ask a question or two. I remained patiently in my seat halfway up the dais.
Finally, the professor walked up the stairs to my aisle seat and leaned down. “Drop any anthropology classes you have signed up for. You have no future in this department. You’ll find all my colleagues will agree with me. There’s no support for you here.”
And so my future as the next Margaret Mead or James Schlieman ended before it began.
My first semester at Beloit College, I, like all freshmen, was enrolled in the Freshman Underclass Common Course. Beloit’s greatest
thinkers had designed the mandatory Common Courses to give each freshman and sophomore student an overview of European culture’s greatest hits in literature, history, psychology, art, etc., exposing us to mankind’s (emphasis on man, of course) intellectual highlights.
The idea was that all students would share in a basic liberal edu- cation. Yet somehow these great thinkers had failed to recognize that the acronyms of Freshman Underclass Common Course and Soph- omore Underclass Common Course spelled FUCC and SUCC — a reality that would cause hilarity amongst students for all the years the Common Course was in place.
To say that these courses were all about white male perspective would be a tremendous understatement. Later, as an English major being taught that Hemmingway and Fitzgerald were two of the great- est writers who ever lived, I asked, how can authors be great if they are completely ignorant about half the human race? Neither of those guys could write a realistic female character to save their lives. The common conclusion of the Common Course would be that women and people of color simply did not exist, as nothing from those perspectives was ever included.
But when I first started FUCC, these realizations were still in the future. I was all ears, ready to absorb the greatest ideas of all time, when my professor started telling us about Freud. When he started talking about penis envy, I started to snicker. This was the funniest thing I had ever heard. Soon, I was laughing so hard tears gathered on my eyelashes. I looked around at the rest of the class, who seemed shocked by my reaction.
“Guys, don’t you get it?” I said. “It’s a psychology course!” I ges- tured toward our professor. “He’s trying to psych us out, seeing if we’ll believe something totally ridiculous because a famous guy supposedly said it. It’s a test, guys! Hey, look at me! I have fleaness envy! I want to jump high, like a flea!”
I hopped around a bit and then collapsed into my chair, overcome by my own giddy silliness.
“Is that true, Prof ? Is this like, some kind of test?” one of the male students queried.
Our professor sputtered, “No! No, this is … this is completely accepted … factual … Freud is the father of psychology and his research
stands. Just read the text, you’ll see …” he shuffled his papers again, giving me an alarmed look. “So … read the assigned chapters … there will be a quiz next time … class dismissed.”
My jaw dropped. Seriously? I had fallen through some rabbit hole and ended up in a college where the professors believed … really?
Then I read the chapters and sobered up. Penis envy was a corner- stone of civilized thought?
FUCC indeed.
Feed Your Head
I woke to the sound of people scratching at my door and giggling; “Cheri! We need your help!”
I slipped on some clothes and opened the door. Tessa and her mother, Corrine, paddled their arms like flailing swimmers as they rose from the depths of the rug by my door.
“The cat knocked over the acid,” Corrine explained. “It’s win- dowpane, and we’re too stoned to see it.”
I followed them back to the living room. Tessa’s fifteen-year- old boyfriend, one year older than she, was already a successful drug dealer. But now, over a hundred hits of windowpane had fallen to the shag carpet, and he was facing a financial loss if we could not comb it out. Paisley Jim, another young man of nineteen or twenty — my age — was there also, already down on hands and knees, moaning, “It’s invisible man, it’s invisible.”
I sighed, hunkering down at shag-strand-level to assist the search. It was 1972, and my innovative college had a work-study program to help students determine if the work path they were preparing for was really suited to them. When a work-study went badly, there was still time to change your major. I was student-teaching at Presidio Hill School, a pioneer of the open classroom model. About half our stu- dents were there because their mostly wealthy and progressive parents thought this was a great educational model. The other half were there because they had already been kicked out of all the public schools.
I’m guessing Tessa might have been in that second group. I had been billeted at her parents’ flat for two months, and it had been one
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long Carnivale of all-night parties. Her stepfather preferred booze; he would drink heavily throughout dinner and then collapse into bed, as he had to work the next day. But her mother, Corinne, liked marijuana and hallucinogens and most weeknights there was a collection of long- haired young men carousing with them until the wee hours.
Much as I had looked forward to a sabbatical in free-wheeling San Francisco, this was all just a little too groovy for me.
Twenty … thirty … forty … I kept grooming transparent chips of acid out of the rug and putting them back in the film canister of their origin. Corrine was lying on her back, following her hands with her eyes. Tessa stared glassily at whatever lightshow was playing out for her on the wall.
Their Siamese cat, Sadie, crouched down, licking at the rug. “No! No!” I shouted, chasing her away.
“Wow! Yeah! We could lick the rug!” Paisley Jim cried. He imme- diately started lapping at tufts.
“Not unless you’re going to pay for it!” Tessa’s boyfriend, Carlo, snapped.
Paisley jerked his head up quickly from the carpet, lips pursed together in an approximation of innocence only marred by a few white and beige strands protruding from his mouth.
By the time we had gathered about seventy hits of acid back into the fold, my worst fears were realized: Sadie the stoner cat began chas- ing imaginary birds, who, no doubt were soaring around the room in fantastic colors. Carlo protectively slapped the lid on the remaining LSD and stashed it in his shirt pocket as Sadie tore around and around the room. Soon she had whipped up so much drug-fueled velocity that she was actually running across the floor, up the wall, across the ceiling and down the wall on the other side of the room. Over and over, like a feline Ferris wheel.
Really, it happened. The cat defied gravity. I was not stoned, and I saw it.
Everyone else found it supremely amusing. Heartsick, I retreated to my room.
I managed to get back to sleep. But in what seemed like a short time later, a naked man was trying to climb into bed with me.
It was Paisley Jim.
I shoved him onto the floor.
“What do you think you are doing?” I demanded.
“I — need a place to sleep — and, you know, it’s like fate, like, you know, I’m here and you’re here and Kismet, man …”
“You can’t sleep here. Ask Corinne where you can sleep.” He perched on the foot of my bed, shivering.
“I’m scared of Corinne, man, she likes the younger guys but I’m like … uh, you know, you’re like, my age and it would be super cosmi- cally significant if we, you know …”
“I don’t give a crap how cosmic it is, I’m not sleeping with you.” “I can’t go back out there,” he whimpered.
Though the term “cougar” had not yet been coined for older women who fancy young men, I could picture Corinne curled up on the couch, watching my door with her green eyes as if it were a mouse hole.
“Here.” I got up and put my comforter on the floor. “You can sleep there.”
I retreated under the covers, searching for sleep. “I’m cold,” he whined.
“Putting on your clothes might help.” “They’re out there … with her …”
I got up, draped my blanket over him. “Be quiet now and go to sleep. I have to work tomorrow.”
“It would really be cosmic …” “Jim. Shut up.”
“Call me Paisley. Things happen for a reason, you know …” “Yes. Like if you don’t shut up I will come hit you over the head
and the reason will be because you didn’t shut up.”
I lay there shivering under my sheet. Now I was cold. Sleep was not on the agenda.
The next morning, Corinne called in saying that she and Tessa had been sick with the flu, throwing up all night, and I had stayed up to take care of them, so neither I nor Tessa would be coming to school. That being Friday, Elie came over after his own work at a school in Berkeley, and we went out to our favorite Indonesian restaurant, and ordered their $3.50 satay skewer dinners — an amazing deal even for 1972.
Saturday evening we spent out roaming the city. When we came back, a party was just getting underway.
A rug-sucking party.
Carlo had generously decided that, since the remainder of the LSD seemed irretrievable, and the cat was growing more insane by the day, there would be no charge for the gathered freaks to creep around the living room, lapping at the carpet.
“Like iguanas,” Elie shuddered as we got back into my room. “You have got to get out of this place.”
Early Sunday evening, Elie went back to his hosts in Berkeley to prepare for his class the next day.
I sat down to dinner with the family, dreading the scene I knew would ensue. Partway through the meal, the parrot started squawking and lifting her tail. Tessa’s stepfather obligingly stuck his index finger in the bird’s egg-hole and began pumping, accompanied by the bird’s excited shrieks.
It is hard enough to choke down tuna noodle casserole with potato chip topping without being forced to witness an avian sex show.
Yes, dinners at this house nearly always included Fred finger-fuck- ing the parrot.
It may not have been animal abuse. The parrot did seem to elicit the attention. But it was most certainly student-teacher abuse.
I was losing weight. Never a good idea if you only weigh 115 pounds to start with.
The next morning, I woke to a terrible smell emanating from my closet. The cat had peed over all of my shoes.
All of them. Even my treasured purple leather boots.
“What did you do?” I wailed, though the answer was all too obvious.
Sadie looked at me and her eyes grew wide, as if I were morphing into a hideous monster. Then she fled, yowling.
I was not the one responsible for her insanity, but it was my shoes that were ruined. I took them to several shoe stores, but in each case, when I opened the plastic bag containing the shoes and the smell filled the store, the proprietor would scream, “Lady, get that stuff out of here, there’s nothing I can do!”
I made an appointment to talk with the school principal and explained my situation. “I cannot be a drug counselor all night and a teacher all day. I’m young and strong, but I have reached my limit.”
He quickly reassigned me to another, more sedate family. The father, a psychiatrist, had just flown the coop to “find himself,” but other than that, they were relatively normal. The mother, at least, took child-rearing seriously.
Thinking back on the rug-sucking parrot fuckers, I was forced to come to an extremely reluctant conclusion: Shit, Dad was right. Drugs do make you stupid.
Just like Magic …
“You’re scaring me,” Elie admitted.
I stopped in my tracks, smoke from the sage resting in my abalone shell billowing around me. “I’m scaring you? How?”
“I remember my mother sprinkling holy water around the house — the incense in the church. This Pagan thing you have gotten into … seems an awful lot like the Catholic church.”
“Whoa.” I ground the sage stick into the shell, extinguishing it. “Um … well, I guess the concept of purification is probably sort of universal — the Christians no doubt stole smudging and purifying from the Pagans — like everything else — ”
“Just tell me you’re not going to confession.” “I am definitely not going to confession.”
Having given up Catholicism to join his agnostic girlfriend (me) in rational-land, my sudden declaration that I was busting out of the empirical playpen because I had fallen head-over-heels in love with mystery came as a bit of a shock to Elie. I was always a mystic waiting for a place to happen, but neither of us knew it at the time. It was per- fectly rational for a young reporter like myself to take a story involving a witch on trial for fortune-telling (not a persecution one expects from the judiciary in Los Angeles in 1975), but when I came home from attending my first ritual with said witch, eyes glowing with spiritual fervor, that was a hairpin turn that Elie had (rationally enough) not anticipated.
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The following spring when I started teaching classes on Wicca, Elie loyally showed up. I was thrilled that he was interested, though in reality, he probably thought that the more rational of the two of us had better keep an eye on the less rational of the two of us. Which was, admittedly, a good idea.
The coven that emerged from that early class was made up of men and women, gay, straight, bi, and trans; black, white, Native American, and Puerto Rican, which was a delightful amount of variety for a dozen people. Given the fact that we were young people largely making up our tradition as we went along (young people who favored marijuana as a sacrament, young people tolerant of a lot of chaos and winging it and experimentation), it made infinite sense that we called our coven Kallisti. In Greek mythology Kallisti, which means “to the fairest” was what was inscribed on the golden apple created by Eris, Goddess of Chaos and Discord. Eris gave the apple to Paris, who then had to choose between three Goddesses — warrior Athena; the Great Mother, Hera; and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love — and give it to the “fairest.” Athena offered him wisdom, Hera offered him power — but Aphrodite offered him the love of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris gave the apple to Aphrodite, and thus sparked the Trojan war. Which was a chaotic event indeed. We always invoked Eris as our founding Goddess in Kallisti — “All hail Eris, all hail Discordia!” and wild humor was a signature characteristic of that coven.
“It’s traditional for Witches to take a ‘magical’ name,” I informed my infant coven. “The name Cerridwen Fallingstar came to me during my first Summer Solstice ritual, when I saw a huge star fall from the sky. Does anyone else here have a magical name, or one they are considering?”
Carol nodded. “I’m thinking — Aradia.” “Hmmm, nice one,” I said.
The talking stick passed from hand to hand as each person shared their thoughts on magical names. When it reached Elie, I expected him to shrug and pass it on. Instead, he held the stick up like a mage commanding silence and intoned, “Henceforth, I shall be known as — Trader Vic, the Wicked Wic!” and wiggled his eyebrows dramat- ically, though in a manner that was more Marx Brothers than dia- bolical. He then rose and brought a pitcher of piña coladas from the
refrigerator. Setting the pitcher down with a flourish in the center of the circle, he declared, “And rum drinks shall be our sacrament!” The coven cheered, and the pattern of spirituality mingled with irreverence and excess was set.
We had a very retro fondness for Trader Vic’s, a chain of bars and restaurants from the ‘40s with a Polynesian theme, pupus, waterfalls, and rum drinks with parasols. Elie took to wearing Hawaiian shirts as his “magical” clothing, which was a refreshing change from the flow- ing robes, heavy pentacles, and leather fringe favored by many of the witches of our acquaintance. That summer, while we were traveling in British Colombia, we saw a large sign in the middle of nowhere tout- ing a character called Louis the Mystic, which really tickled Elie, as his older brother’s name was Louis. After seeing the Louis the Mystic sign, Elie started referring to himself as Elie the Mystic, although Trader Vic continued to make appearances, particularly when rum drinks were involved.
When in Crisis …
“When in crisis, call on Isis”
— bumper sticker
“You need to meet my friend Isis,” Starhawk said. “She lives in
L.A. and she needs to find a coven. I think Kallisti will be perfect for her.”
Starhawk and I met at one of the early meetings of Covenant of the Goddess, the first group to demand legal recognition of Witch- craft/Wicca. Observing that her coven was named Compost and mine was Kallisti, (a reference to Eris, the Goddess of Chaos) Starhawk said wryly, “I think we may be from the same tradition.” We had been in sporadic touch since then. Star was living in the Bay Area, and Isis and I were at that time living in L.A.
When the meeting time arrived, I opened the door to a short, plump, black woman in a long, purple-and-yellow dashiki dress.
Without so much as a “Hello, how do you do”, we instantly fell into each other’s arms, hugging and hugging and hugging as if we would never let go.
After a few moments we held each other at arm’s length, star- ing amazed into each other’s eyes, and simultaneously said, “Who are you?” and then simultaneously replied, “I don’t know,” and began hug- ging again.
Suddenly, Isis pushed me away.
“Where the hell have you been?” she demanded, eyes flashing.
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“I needed a vacation.”
“Oh, you needed a vacation? We all need a damn vacation! I thought you were never coming back!”
“What are we talking about?” I pleaded.
“I have no idea,” she responded. And then the grateful hugging resumed.
Two young Witches, having a soul-level argument, not knowing what we were even talking about, but knowing we had an intricate his- tory of past lives speaking through us. We went into my apartment and I made us some soothing comfrey mint tea. Steam rose from our cups like the mist between the worlds and we gazed into each other’s eyes, each knowing that something precious had been restored to us.
Our relationship continued to be intense as only a relationship between two Scorpios can be. Isis joined my coven, and her presence deepened both the magic and humor that were hallmarks of that group. We began to have past-life flashes of having known each other in different times. One night, she decided to do a tarot reading on the subject. Isis lit the candles on her altar and we smoked some sinsemilla, praying for insight. The Goddess statues on her altar began to smile and shimmer. The whole room started to flicker. As she laid out each card we moved deeper into trance — and suddenly … the cards were no longer cards, but portals, and we both fell through them into the past, and the entire story (that later became my book The Heart of the Fire) was clear to us.
“Do you remember me? I was your grandmother’s best friend. I was Mina,” she said. The ghost of an older white woman, all angles but with a familiarly mischievous smile, superimposed itself on Isis’ dark curves.
“I was Fiona,” I replied. “You were Fiona.”
“I had red hair.” “Yes. In Scotland.”
She had been older and wiser than I in that past life, and she gen- erally remembered things sooner and more clearly than I did. When I went to Scotland to research the book, still proving to myself that it really had happened, Isis told me exactly where the village was that we had lived. Exactly. She had never been there in this life, but she knew.
She showed me on a map before I went. And when I got there and saw the ruins and walked the land, I knew too.
Isis was one of the most gifted psychics I have ever met. She was also wildly, irreverently hilarious.
“Zippity doo dah, Zippity A.
My oh my what a wonderful day!”
Isis loved singing that song from Brer Rabbit.
She relished her saucy defiance of the racism in the movie. She owned the story and spun it to her advantage. When confronted with anything she did not want to do she would cry,
“Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch!”
The first Witch Camp that Reclaiming, a neo-pagan teaching col- lective offered in Mendocino, Starhawk and I were there (among oth- ers) as teachers, and Isis came as a student. Most of the other arriving students were white. Isis, who had gotten there early, took a broom out of the broom closet and, pretending to sweep the patio, started going up to the other students saying, “What’s going on here? There isn’t going to be no black magic here, is there? There isn’t going to be any voodoo, is there? Oh, Lawd, I’m just the maid, when they hired me they didn’t say nothing about no Witchcraft …”
Shaken by their encounter with the “terrified black maid,” the students confronted Starhawk, who swiftly collared Isis and hissed, “If you don’t stop that right now, I will kill you!” The magic students’ eyes were bugging out of their heads. The famous Witch Starhawk was threatening to kill the black maid! What had they gotten themselves into?
Seeing the look of shock on the students’ faces, I walked over and enlightened them. “That’s Isis. She and Starhawk have been friends since high school. She is not the maid. She’s just fucking with you.” Embarrassed and relieved, the new students wandered sheepishly off to their accommodations.
Right off the bat, Isis had let them know that: A. she was a force to be reckoned with, and B. they could take their Witch’s broom and sweep whatever racist assumptions they came with right on out the door, and, C. they could laugh while they did it. Meanwhile, Star- hawk kept Isis in line by threatening to tell everyone that her original name was Becky. Which it actually was. True story. Isis used to claim
she was the only black “Becky” in America. “My mother named me Rebecca after Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm!” she would complain with a tragic-comic look of outrage. She was very relieved to adopt the mag- ical name of Isis. Only her original family called her Becky after that.
By the end of the week, to no one’s surprise, in addition to knock- ing everyone out of their socks with her power, Isis was the most uni- versally adored of all the students.
During that retreat, Isis took the magical name of Oshun Dark Laughter. But Isis’ sense of humor wasn’t so much dark as it was outra- geous. Isis loved toying with white people.
But even Isis’ legendary sense of humor was not always enough.
When Isis’ daughter Morgan was born, Morgan was a gorgeous baby with dark, curly hair, big brown eyes, and creamy white skin. Soon after Morgan’s arrival, Isis was proudly pushing the stroller down the promenade in Venice Beach as I walked beside her. Again and again, white women came up to us and cooed, “Oh, how cute! What’s her name?”
“Morgan,” Isis would say proudly. “Oh, she’s a beauty! How old is she?”
But they were directing their questions to me. “That’s her mom,” I said, gesturing to Isis.
And they would look doubtfully or incredulously at Isis and the ivory baby in the stroller and walk off.
After the third time, Isis was seething.
“They think I’m your fucking maid!” she said, casting me dag- ger-sharp looks. “They think I’m your goddam fucking maid!”
“Hey, don’t blame me! You’re the one who decided to marry the whitest man on the planet.”
“He’s not white, he’s English!” “Yes, but genetically speaking …”
An older woman came up, chucking Morgan under the chin. “Ah, what a little heartbreaker she’s going to be,” she said. To me.
“This is Isis. This is Morgan’s mother,” I said brightly.
The older woman chuckled as she walked off. “Ah, very funny.” “Funny? Funny?” Isis was fuming.
I laughed. Big mistake.
“Oh, you think this is funny, too! You think it’s funny that they think I’m your damn servant!”
“No, look Isis. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to
push the stroller?”
“No I don’t want you to push the stroller! She’s my baby!”
As I recall, we didn’t take too many walks together with the baby after that.
After she gave birth to Morgan, Isis joined a weight-loss program. In the course of 14 months she lost 150 pounds, which was a whole one of me nine months pregnant. But Isis hated being small. “I like taking up space,” she said. At 5’2”, width was her only option for queenly expansion. She needed a form that mirrored the vastness of her per- sonality. She promptly gained the weight back. Built like the Venus of Willendorf, sensual as Izume or Baubo, Isis claimed the archetype that she embodied. In one of my most potent magical dreams, Isis and I were sitting pressed up against each other, touching our fore- heads together (as we frequently did). My third eye opened and Isis shimmered into the Goddess, immense black space, vast as the cosmos, filled with stars; I fell into her and dissolved into ecstasy.
Isis didn’t need to take up space. She was space. Isis died of a heart attack at the age of 61. Now she has all the spaciousness of the cosmos.
Rest in laughter and vastness, beloved.
Perfect Love
Like many young couples in the 1970s, Elie and I opted for a path of non-monogamy, reasoning that it would be insane for us to break up just because we wanted to explore our sexuality with others. Most Pagans during that delightful, pre-AIDs period indulged in sacred orgies and a multiplicity of interwoven commitments. My bisexuality made this a particularly appealing path, and often Elie and I were lov- ers with the same woman, or the same couple.
Otter (now Oberon) and Morning Glory Zell were one such couple (together, we made a fourple). I loved Otter, but I was head- over-heels for his curvy, beautiful wife Morning Glory, and she and I sometimes spent time alone together.
Crazy with love, silly with love, Morning Glory and I danced down the suburban street winding down the hill from where she lived. Though it was summer, all was still green and lush, with throbbing accents of pink where roses sprawled, out of control, across the roofs of several houses. Eugene, Oregon, in the northwest, has a much wet- ter climate than my home in Northern California where all was sere and golden this time of year.
We came to a large roundabout. In the center of the roundabout, a concrete wall a couple of feet high cradled a circular oasis of green grass.
“Look! It’s like a park in the middle of a street,” Morning Glory said. She helped me up the wall and into the miniature park, which
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contained a couple of trees — plum and birch — and a sunny circle of grass.
“This is one of my favorite places in the neighborhood. Nature in the asphalt. It’s my magic circle.”
I nodded. It did have a mystical feel for something surrounded by street.
We sat facing each other and she took my hands in hers. “Let’s cast a circle,” she said.
Together we whispered words that made the roundabout circle sacred; as we conjured the air, a gentle breeze wrapped a strand of dark hair across Morning Glory’s ivory neck. The fire already burned in our touch, and I watched as the ocean thumped its song of love and water in the pulse of her throat. Our breath synchronized, and we felt the rise and fall of the earth breathing up into our hips.
“What of the Goddess?’ Morning Glory asked.
Worshipping the union of Native American and European features, the impossible perfection of her face, I smiled. “She is here.”
Gazing at me in return, Morning Glory took a deep breath. “She is here.”
I placed a hand on her heart, she placed her hand on mine.
A pickup truck, with two young men in the cab and three young men in the bed of the truck, pulled into the roundabout.
“Woo-hoo! Hey ladies, don’t you need a man?”
“You need some dick, ladies! And we’ve got dick, ooh, do we ever.” “We’ve got what you need!”
Glory felt the fear jolt through my body and pressed a restraining hand against my knee.
“There’s no one here but us. Nothing exists but us. Don’t look at them, just at me; look in my eyes. Nothing exists but us.”
My body quivered with adrenaline, but I obeyed. The truck drove around and around our small circle of green, the men snarling, yelp- ing, baying like hounds that have treed a fox.
As they came around again into my line of sight, my eyes strayed from her face, my mind jumping with how we could fight so many.
“Look at me. Only at me. Nothing exists but us. Look in my eyes.”
Again, trusting the absolute serenity and certainty of her voice, I obeyed.
Her eyes. Infinite. Ancient. Wise elder of a thousand years ago. Temple priestess of ten thousand years ago. Sea turtle, a million years ago; Gaia herself. The first thought, the wind stirring the water, caul- dron of changes, blossom of bone.
Nothing but us.
The catcalls circling us faded to crickets, then silence. Nothing exists but us.
Her eyes the grail, the holy chalice, Bridget’s Well. The earth, the sun, and the rainbow that bridges them. She is old, aging, ancient. She is love incarnate. She is the Grandmother of Time.
The circle of grass became the sea of infinity. We disappeared from time and space, Goddesses floating on currents of eternity.
Far below, on earth, a truck gunned its engines and tore off so quickly one of the men in the back bounced out onto the street. He ran after the truck, screaming in terror, “Guys, guys, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”
Perfect love casteth out perfect fear. Apparently, it also casteth out perfect assholes.
Praise Jesus!
Morning Glory’s mother was at the hospital, visiting Glory’s father, who had just had open-heart surgery. We had convened at a hotel room in San Diego, where M.G. and I shared one queen bed, while her mother, Polly, slept in the other. Polly, a very sweet Christian lady from the Deep South, believed that M.G. and I were best friends rather than lovers.
We took full advantage of her absence, so when the door opened I did not hear it, my head muffled by Morning Glory’s delicious thighs, and she herself was calling out in ecstasy. So we did not see or hear her mother until she was sitting on her bed a few feet away, regarding us with her big, dark eyes.
“You two girls really love one another, don’t you?”
Peeking over Morning Glory’s thigh, I could only nod weakly in agreement.
“You know, Jesus said we should all love one another. And I think it’s so sweet the way you two girls really love one another.”
Finally, a Christian I could relate to!
Morning Glory, apparently unruffled, pulled herself to sitting. I was now lying, somewhat more innocently, on her lap.
“That’s right, Mom, love is sacred in every tradition,” she observed.
“Yes, God is love,” Polly observed piously.
I reached down to pull up a concealing sheet.
Polly patted me on the bottom. “Oh, you don’t need to cover that up, sugar, we’re all just girls here. You’ve got the sweetest little ass,
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Cheetah Lily.” (Since I was slim and freckled, Cheetah Lily was M.G.’s pet name for me.) “Doesn’t she just have the sweetest little ass?”
Morning Glory allowed that I did.
“And your breasts are so perfect, too. I always thought mine were too big.”
“Oh, no, if they are anything like Morning Glory’s I’m sure they’re …” I was going to say stupendulous, which is how I referred to the magnificent mammaries that drooped down to M.G.’s waist, but I quickly shifted gears to “perfect.”
“Well,” she confided, “when I first married your father,” she nod- ded to Morning Glory, “he always wanted me to just be naked with a hat and high heels, and he wanted me to lift my arms over my head and I thought, ‘Oh, no, he thinks they’re too big and he wants them to look smaller.’”
“I’m positive that wasn’t what he was thinking,” I assured her. “Yeah, probably not,” Morning Glory opined.
“Well, what do you think he was thinking?”
Randy Newman had already been playing in my head, so I went with it.
“You know that Randy Newman song, ‘Baby, take off your dress/ Yes, yes yes — ’”
“‘You can leave your hat on,’” chimed Morning Glory. “‘You can leave your hat on!’” Polly joined our chorus.
“‘Put your arms over your head — now shake ‘em,’” Glory and I sang together.
Polly clapped her hands in delight, “That’s just what your father used to say!”
“‘You give me reason to live, you give me reason to live — ’” I glanced at Morning Glory, letting her know I meant it. Polly joined in happily, and by now we were all dancing, arms in the air, shaking them. “‘You give me reason to live, you give me reason to live!’”
If this is how the holy rollers roll, count me in. Cuz ‘I know — what love is’.
Humble and Obedient Serpent
“These — are mine!” Morning Glory scowled fiercely, waving two kittens under Ananda’s nose. Ananda narrowed his eyes in return, looking put out as she waved the remaining four kittens under his nose. “Mine!” she explained, pounding her chest for emphasis. “Mine.”
“Do you really think he can understand?” I asked doubtfully, regarding the eleven feet of coiled python whose flickering tongue was evaluating the potential tastiness of kitten.
“Oh, he understands,” Morning Glory asserted. “I know you understand,” she addressed Ananda sternly.
“But they are pretty much the exact same size as the rats you feed him.”
“He can smell the difference, and I am explaining the difference.”
It seemed her explanation worked; Ananda ignored the kittens prancing all around him, like a dignified monarch who cannot be both- ered by petty matters. But his tail, twitching like a metronome, soon attracted one of the kittens, who started batting at it.
Ananda turned and hissed loudly.
The kitten startled and retreated, for a hiss means the same thing
in snake or cat language: back off!
But, temptation once again won out, and the kitten danced back, sparring at the python’s tail like a pugilist with a punching bag.
Again, Ananda lifted his head and hissed with indignation.
The kitten hustled over to the edge of the bed. Ananda looked at Morning Glory. Are you kidding? Do you really expect me to put up with this? his look said.
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“No eating the kittens,” she admonished sternly.
The kitten — regrettably, a slow learner — leaped and pounced on Ananda’s quivering tail. Instantly, Ananda slid his tail under the kitten’s body, and launched it like a catapult across the distance of the school bus, which was both home and transportation. The kitten landed at the far end of the bus, and sat, legs askew, head lolling back and forth. You could almost see the cartoon stars and cuckoos whirling around her head. Ananda drew himself up, gazing furiously, nose to nose, at Morn-
ing Glory.
You said I could not eat them. You did not say I couldn’t throw them.
“All right,” Morning Glory sighed, “she was baiting you beyond endurance. But I think you are going to have to go back in your cage.” She picked up the first third of the python, while I, huffing, hoisted the second third, and he oozed back into his glass enclosure, joining the six-foot boa who was lying in her water dish, grouchily shedding her skin, which was peeling off in tatters. Otter and Morning Glory had traveled across the country several times in their bright-red painted school bus, which they had dubbed “the Scarlet SuccuBus.” Police in virtually every state had pulled them over and searched the rolling den of iniquity for illicit substances, yet, despite their hippie attire and cos- mically adorned vehicle being literally one massive red flag, they never found their stash.
Not because they didn’t have one, but because Otter had hol- lowed out a compartment beneath the snakes’ enclosure, which could only be reached by lifting up the snakes’ water dish.
And though the police searched them thoroughly, no one ever, ever tried to reach into the snakes’ enclosure to find the marijuana and hallucinogens tucked safely in the compartment underneath.
As I developed a friendship with Ananda, I began to see why the supreme Oracle of Delphi had been called “the Pythoness.” When he coiled around me, he the Great Serpent, I the World Egg — the Minoan Priestess — and he flickered his tongue in my ear, everything modern dropped away, leaving a primal awareness, the space between the worlds opening into a boundless present. Clearly he did not “think” the way that I did, but there was a sense of timeless nobility and wis- dom, and a sensitivity to the emotional states of the humans around him that made being in his presence a rare privilege.
Humble and Obedient Serpent 117
Otter and Morning Glory moved to Greenfield Ranch — not a commune, but a patchwork quilt of hippies, pagans, survivalists, and marijuana growers. So many of the males on Greenfield had taken a variation on the name Eagle — Golden Eagle, Standing Eagle, Flying Eagle, et cetera — that one of our friends began referring to himself as Pig Eagle, much to the annoyance of the other Eagles, who took themselves more seriously.
One day, we boarded a raft with perhaps twenty other long-haired types and began crossing a large pond that was on the property to get to a party at the communal center. The boa was coiled around Morn- ing Glory’s neck and shoulders. Ananda, the python, who was almost a foot thick at his widest, was by now a three-person snake, so Elie, Otter, and I all held a portion. A woman with an almost newborn baby was on the raft, and she began freaking out when she saw the python.
“Oh my God, oh my God, he’s going to try to get my baby, he’s going to try to get my baby!” she shrieked.
Unfortunately, snakes being very sensitive to human emotion means that when a human panics, the snake panics. Ananda started thrashing around. The woman and her friends became hysterical, believing that Ananda was struggling in order to hurl himself, jaws wide, on their hapless infant. They stampeded from one side of the raft to the other, and the frail craft began to wallow.
“I’ll swim with him to the other side,” I volunteered. I leaped into the water, and Otter and Elie poured Ananda into the water beside me. Snakes can swim, of course, quite gracefully. But what they cannot do is regulate their own body temperature. The water in the pond was a bit cold for a tropical reptile, so Ananda began swimming power- fully for shore as I swam beside him. We reached the other side and he began hauling himself up the steep, grassy slope. But the hill was so steep, and the grass so slick, that he could not get a purchase on it with his belly muscles, and kept sliding back into the water, which was still quite deep. I tried to coax him to another bank that seemed more gradual, but in the middle of the pond, growing dangerously colder, he panicked. Then he did what any drowning person would do in the same situation. He grabbed me around the neck. And the waist. And the legs. Completely enspiraled by eleven feet of muscular, heavy python, I sank.
We both sank.
Ananda, I silently spoke to his mind, You have to let me go. I’ll get you out of here, but you have to let me go. You have to let me go or we will both drown.
I willed myself to total calm, sending calm energy to him. If I can stay calm, he’ll calm; if I can stay calm, he’ll calm …
Ananda let go. We both bobbed to the surface. Otter was run- ning down the steep, slippery slope as quickly as he dared, Elie right on his heels. Ananda swam desperately toward his owner, I hot on his heels — or tail, as the case might be. Otter grabbed Ananda’s neck and pulled, while Elie grabbed Otter as if they were in a rope-pulling con- test. Both men slowly dragged the serpent up the slippery grass, while I attempted to brace myself and push at his tail end, being shoved under water several times by the flailing tail for my efforts. At last Ananda was pulled to safety, and Elie rushed down to help me out of the water as well.
We all sat at the crest of the hill overlooking the pond, Ananda spooling around all four of us, absorbing our body heat and the warmth of the sun.
“I think this guy is getting a little big to be a party snake,” Elie
said.
“Mmmmph,” Otter responded.
You Say Potato, I Say Granola
Elie and I had enjoyed a wonderful ritual at our favorite Malibu beach. The beach was accessible only by a steep, narrow goat-path of a trail leading down to it, so tonight, as usual, we had it all to ourselves. But now the tide was coming in rapidly, and knowing that when high, it covered the beach right up to the edge of the cliff, we packed all our candles, wands, and food into a couple of bags and headed back to the path.
The tide was not the only thing running high. Witchcraft is an extremely satisfactory religion for twenty-somethings, as drugs and sex are all just means of getting closer to God. The sinsimilla we had been smoking was almost hallucinogenic in its intensity, so when I slipped on the wet stones we were clambering over and fell full-length, I was hap- pily struck by how beautiful everything was down here — the rounded stones, polished by the sea, the swirls of crushed sand and shell between, the gardens of algae clinging to the grapefruit-sized boulders that now populated my horizontal landscape.
Elie, somewhat less altered, became alarmed that I was lying immobile amidst the rocks while the tide rolled inexorably closer.
“Is everything all right?”
Regretfully, I remembered the sound of crunching glass when the bag I had been carrying had hit the rocks.
“I think I broke something.”
“Broke something! What did you break?” “I don’t know,” I said dreamily.
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“Well, does it hurt?”
Does it hurt. Wow, I thought, what a sensitive guy he is, wondering if this glass candle or bottle or whatever it is hurt when it broke. Wanting to be equally sensitive, I strained to sense if whatever had broken in the paper bag felt hurt.
The contents of the bag seemed placid enough. “No,” I replied.
“Then what makes you think you broke something?” “I heard it break.”
Unbeknownst to me, my sweetheart, enrolled in nursing school, was now wild with fear. I had heard a body part break, but I could not feel it. This meant spinal cord damage. This meant I would not be able to walk. This meant he would have to carry me on a path only inches wide up a steep cliff face in the dark before the tide swept in and drowned us both. The foam was hissing just a few feet away. Yet moving me might cause permanent damage.
Swiftly, Elie knelt beside me, touching my legs. “Can you feel this?
Can you feel this?”
“Of course I can feel it,” I laughed. So playful! I love this guy!
“Cheri! Focus! What do you think you broke!”
Wow. That was a quick shift from playful to anxious. Who knew he would be so emotional about a glass ritual object. It’s not like there’s anything that incredibly expensive in there.
“I don’t know. Probably a glass candle …”
“A glass candle! A glass candle! That’s what you broke? Why are you just lying here!”
Abruptly, I realized how terrified he had been.
“Oh! I’m sorry — it’s just so beautiful down here …”
Of course, you don’t have to be stoned to have misunderstandings with your beloved. No matter how close you feel — at times seeming to intuit your beloved’s innermost thoughts, at other times, though both parties ostensibly speak English, communication deteriorates to the point where one might be speaking Swahili and one Urdu for all the good it does you.
You Say Potato, I Say Granola 121
Shortly after our Three Stooges routine on the beach (O.K., maybe just one stooge, namely me), Elie and I began having commu- nication problems.
Typically, Saturday night would roll around and I would start dressing up. “Uh, Cheri, what’s with the dance outfit?”
“We’re going to Jamie’s party, remember? She’s going to have that Chinese band, the Raging Aardvarks, remember?”
“No, I don’t remember, because you never told me about it.” “I did tell you about it! You were excited! You wanted to go!”
“Cheri, I don’t know who you are telling about these parties, but it obviously isn’t me. You have to tell me about these things in advance; you can’t just spring it on me.”
“I do tell you! And you always say yes. Then you say no. If you don’t want to go, why don’t you just tell me up front?”
“Because there is no ‘up front.’ Because you never told me in the first place.”
“Look, if you changed your mind, just say you changed your mind, but don’t act like you never heard about it.”
That time, I went to the party by myself. But the scene repeated itself, again and again. Occasionally Elie would come with me, seething with grumpiness at first, but having fun once we got there. Sometimes I would simply call and cancel and we would go out to the movies.
I knew Elie was an introvert and I was an extrovert. We both accepted that he did not want to go to as many parties and gatherings as I did. So why did he have to pull the rug out from under me like this?
One day I was complaining to our friend Cynthia about Elie’s behavior.
“Do you think he’s afraid to say no?”
“No, it would be fine if he said no in advance. It’s this pretending he never heard about it that drives me crazy.”
Cindy frowned. “I don’t think Elie would lie about this. Is he for- getful about other things?”
“No. Just our plans together.”
“When do you usually talk about stuff — is it at night when he might be tired?”
“Hmm.” I had never stopped to consider whether there was a time pattern to our communications.
The next time I brought up a party it was after making love. I asked Elie about it as we lay cuddling. He agreed that it sounded like fun.
And when the time for the party came, he insisted he had never heard about it.
I realized that we often had what I considered to be our best and closest conversations just before drifting off to sleep. So I decided on an experiment.
Lying together naked and warm (we had skipped the party), I tenderly asked, “Sweetie — are you a giraffe?”
“Um-hum.”
“Oh. I see. Shall we cross the Rubicon and dine with Genghis Khan on Friday?”
“Yeah. O.K. Fun.”
“Great. I’m looking forward to it. Think I should wear my croco- dile mask? The one with the purple scales?”
“That’d be nice.”
Instinctively, I had been asking Elie about activities I wanted to do when he was most agreeable. Turns out he was most agreeable in his sleep. He wasn’t just tired and forgetful, as Cindy had suggested. He was talking — sometimes drowsily, sometimes animatedly, but always most agreeably — in his sleep.
I smiled ruefully at the ceiling. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” he sighed happily.
Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
Hiking down a desert arroyo fragrant with summer heat, dust, and pinyon pine, our thoughts turned amorous. We had been hiking for hours on this hard-pan dirt trail without seeing a soul. We turned off the trail, looking for a lover-friendly space, but it was all rocks and cacti, and neither of us had any enthusiasm for pain or masochism.
Elie went back to the trail and spread his arms, rockstar-style. “‘Why don’t we do it in the road?’”
“‘Why don’t we do it in the road?’” I sang back.
He pulled his sweatshirt out of his backpack and laid it lovingly in the dust, Sir-Walter-Raleigh style. “‘No one will be watching us,’” he sang reassuringly.
Twenty minutes later, I was making so much noise that we didn’t hear the motorbike until it was almost on top of us. Fortunately, the driver swerved and wiped out, skidding into a cactus. He jumped up quickly, cactus spines bristling from his leather jacket, making him look like a wild-eyed porcupine. “What the fuck!” he cried, summing up the situation with admirable brevity.
“Sorry, man,” Elie said, slipping into his shorts with record speed. “Do you want us to help you get those prickers out?” I asked. “Stay away from me!”
He wheeled his bike around us to the path beyond, gunned it, and disappeared in a haze of dust and exhaust.
“Guess that answers that question,” Elie said, pulling on his shirt. “Why don’t we do it in the road?”
“Motorcycles.”
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“Motorcycles.”
We resumed our hike.
“Think we should write to the Beatles and let them know the answer?” I suggested.
Elie shook an admonishing finger at me. “‘Love is the answer,’” he sang.
“‘And you know that,’” I responded. “‘For sure,’” he finished.
I came by my love of outdoor connubial bliss naturally. When I was thirty-one, I went into a trance state in order to view my concep- tion. In my vision, I saw my young (nineteen- and twenty-one-year-old) parents making love in a beautiful, manicured garden. My spirit-self watched their ecstasy and though, They’re having so much fun! This will be perfect! I didn’t consider the fact that my baby self was going to get in the way of their pleasures and be resented for it.
After this trance experience, I asked my mother if she remem- bered any time around my conception when they were making love in a garden.
“Oh, honey, that public garden was right near our house, and your dad wanted to make love over there all the time!”
Suspicions confirmed.
Their own love of outdoor pursuits survived three children and a long marriage. In their late forties, they were making love on Mt. Tamalpais when a ranger, gun drawn, appeared, yelling, “Get off her, Mister! Get off her!” under the mistaken impression that this sil- ver-haired, middle-aged lady was being raped by some ruffian.
“Oh! Officer! It’s my husband!” Mom gasped. “Your husband! Why aren’t you home in bed then?” Cause that’s just not how we roll.
Magic Man
“Try, try, try, to understand … he’s a magic man.…”
—Ann & Nancy Wilson
My husband and I had a lot of respect for each other. Part of our respect had to do with this simple mirroring fact: he thought I had the worst job in the world, and I thought he had the most hid- eous of all possible gigs. He thought my work was horrible because it often involved being up on stage speaking, or in the center of a large circle, guiding ritual. Like many Americans who believe death com- pares favorably to public speaking, the very thought of walking up to a podium made Elie turn green. Elie could hardly bring himself to attend any of my lectures, sitting near the back, writhing inwardly at the horror of it all.
Elie was a psychiatric nurse who worked on a ward with severely disturbed people — bouncing-off-the-wall crazy people. I know, polit- ically incorrect. Fine, they were reality-challenged. Some were unap- preciated Jesus Christs; others had been abducted by aliens; others had chips in their brains forcibly implanted by the CIA. They scared the crap out of me. Whenever I went to pick Elie up for dinner at the locked crises unit at Langley Porter, I would stand outside the steel doors warning against “elopement” — a calming term for escape — ring the buzzer, and breathe deeply to try to ease my pounding heart.
Like many women, crazy people scared me because most of the crazy people I had encountered were men whose crazy involved
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wanting to hurt me. And, like most creative people, I also harbored the suspicion that my creativity burned on crazy fuel, and I feared that I would spiral into suicidal depression like Sylvia Plath or Vincent van Gogh. Crazy was, as they say, a little too close to home.
When Elie and I met our freshman year at Beloit College, the drinking age was 18 in Wisconsin, and the scant entertainment avail- able in Beloit, Wisconsin consisted of a variety of scuzzy bars within walking distance of campus. I already knew Elie was adept at culinary magic, and I had been thoroughly seduced into a life of pasta that did not come out of a can labeled ‘Chef-Boy-ardee’. But at the bars, I discovered something amazing: I had fallen in love with a boy wizard. A familiar pattern developed: Elie and I would be drinking — him usually a beer, me more often sipping something like a Grasshopper or a Pink Squirrel (in Wisconsin, they made them out of ice cream — perfect for beginning drinkers). A belligerent drunk guy, older than us, would shamble to our table, sit down uninvited, and start hitting on me and making threatening gestures toward Elie. I would prepare to abandon my drink and flee, gazelle-like, toward the door. Elie, on the other hand, would get up and sit on the other side of the guy and start talking to him quietly, often so quietly that I, on the other side of the guy, could not hear their conversation. Then, slowly, the guy’s angry shoulders would relax, and the next thing I knew, he would be crying (often literally) on Elie’s shoulder about his crappy childhood and how nobody — nobody but his best buddy Elie — understood. And then he would buy us some drinks. And I would look at Elie and think, Who are you? Only when I met Elie’s family several years later did the origins of Elie’s power with
the reality-challenged become clear to me.
Elie’s mother was crazy. She frequently broke down in tears, tell- ing me of the twins she had lost, who had died at birth, of the time she was kidnapped and taken back to Italy — tragic stories. And the rest of her family would shake their heads sadly and inform me that none of these stories had ever actually happened. I think Mary was a frustrated writer — but having left school in the sixth grade, her only creative outlets were cooking and a distorted form of storytell- ing that everyone saw as crazy. She became increasingly fearful with age, eventually becoming so agoraphobic that she would not leave the house.
When I called to tell her we were bringing her infant grandson to see her, she said, “I don’t think you should come.”
“Why not, Mary?”
“The Koreans might shoot you down.”
Appalled pause. “Um, Mary — the Koreans hardly ever shoot people down between California and Massachusetts — we’re not flying over Korea.”
“What about the Russians?” Oh, Mary.
Elie wasn’t afraid of crazy because crazy was home. Crazy was Mom. And he loved his mom, and he had learned (sometimes) how to guide her back to consensus reality. And though I didn’t want to dwell on it at the time, his crazy Scorpio mother had prepared him for how to deal with his crazy Scorpio girlfriend.
The only time Elie’s juju with aggressive men didn’t work was in a large stone building in the Sierras whose historical marker proclaimed it the oldest bar in California. Surely we should have guessed from the number of Harleys in the parking lot that it was now a biker bar. But we were 23 and thirsty in the mountains and who knew how long to the next? Up a long staircase, I scooted into a bathroom, then joined Elie in a huge, raucous room with high-beamed ceilings — where we were instantly joined not by one aggressive guy, but six. Motorcycle jackets, chains, large steins of suds gripped in massive paws. There seemed to be a rule in this particular motorcycle club that you had to be well over six feet tall, with shoulders to match.
“Well, who’s the pretty girl?” one asked, reaching out to stroke my hair.
“This is Cheri, I’m Elie …” the men batted away Elie’s out- stretched hand.
“Cheri … Cheri baby …” one crooned to me. He sat on my left. Another guy pushed Elie off his chair and sat on my right. Then he knocked over Elie’s beer.
“Aw, your beer’s gone … I think you should leave,” he advised.
Another biker pushed Elie’s shoulder, staggering him. “Yeah, we think you should leave.”
I stood. “O.K., we’ll go.”
The man on my left stood and clamped my shoulder in an immense paw so strong it felt like metal.
“Not you, doll. You stay.”
“I’m not leaving without her,” Elie said.
A vision of Elie in a pool of blood flashed through my brain. “Actually, I think you should,” I said.
A flicker of surprise and approval flashed through the crowd. “Just let me give him a hug goodbye,” I said airily.
They parted to let me approach Elie and hug him. “There’s a window in the women’s bathroom. Get in the car, motor running. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I whispered into his ear.
Scowling, making a show of his reluctance, Elie retreated.
I sat back down, hoping they couldn’t see how my knees were shaking, and started sipping my beer, trying to make conversation. For the life of me, I can’t remember anything that was said. Mostly they just talked to each other. They were not interested in me as a person. Just as a future piece of entertainment.
Their idea of entertainment was not going to be entertaining for me.
I tried to keep smiling as the man on my left wrapped his hand possessively around my thigh. After a long twenty long minutes of try- ing to lull their suspicions, I removed his hand, smiling as I stood.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
Bart gripped his hand tightly around my bicep. “I’ll take you.’
He escorted me to the bathroom, leaned against the wall, arms crossed.
“I’ll be here when you get out, doll.”
The window in the bathroom was a small rectangle high against the ceiling.
I stood on the sink closest to the wall and stretched as long as I could to crank the pane of glass open. Then I cantilevered myself over, grabbed the sill, and pushed my face and shoulders out.
Oh, shit! This window is three stories up! Fuck!
Jump three stories or stay and be gang-raped? Easy choice. But if I get badly hurt going down I’ll be helpless …
I dropped down into the bathroom, then scuttled back up on the sink, praying that Bart wouldn’t open the door to check on me.
This time when I heaved back up on the sill I faced sideways, kick- ing one leg, then the other out. I needed to land on my feet.
I bit my lip as I writhed my hipbones through the narrow opening. Fortunately, I was a skinny girl, 115 pounds soaking wet. But for a bad moment, it seemed my bones alone might be too big. I stifled a scream as my hips popped out and my breasts dragged over the metal window frame. I tried to grab hold of the metal so I could position myself for the drop, but slithered helplessly out.
I hit the ground standing, felt a jolt of pain in my left ankle. But I was free, I could run — and I did, toward our Volkswagen wreathed with exhaust, where Elie was faithfully waiting, poised to escape at the parking lot exit.
I leaped into the car and yelled, “Flee!” and he peeled out (as much as a Volkswagen bus can peel out). We drove off, laughing like loons, crazy as foxes, crazy in love, wild and crazy together.
A magic man needs a magic woman. And crazy isn’t always a bad thing.
Daughter of Genghis Khan
While pursuing a graduate degree at UCLA, I worked as a wait- ress at the Golden Dragon. It was run by a middle-aged Chinese couple who shouted at each other in Chinese when things got hectic (there is no scarier sound than angry Chinese, especially when being screamed by people chopping celery and water chestnuts with fast-moving cleav- ers). I hated asking for any change in the menu on behalf of a cus- tomer, such as could they have green beans instead of broccoli with the black-bean beef. This would always set off a whirlwind of recrimina- tions and a frenzy of cleaver waving. Let’s just say, “special orders don’t upset us” was not their motto.
When things were slow, I alternated rolling up egg rolls and help- ing their ten-year-old son with his homework. Not that the kid needed help. He was brilliant, and completely stressed about his grades. His older brother had dropped out of school, disgracing the family. It was up to the second son to reclaim their honor and live up to his parents’ dreams. He suffered from ulcers.
There was one other non-Chinese — a tall, beautiful young Thai woman. I was the only white person working there. All the other wait- ers were young Chinese men.
“How much you get for tips?” one asked jealously, after our shift was over. My forty dollars was three times what he had made.
“Because you are a woman!” he hissed bitterly. “No, because I am nice to them.”
Most of our clientele was white. When they asked about a dish, I would explain what was in it, smile, and make suggestions. My Chinese
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coworkers, to a man, would respond to the same inquiry by folding their arms, regarding the diners with a haughty look. They spoke per- fect English, but you would never know, since they rarely spoke a word to the customers.
“If you would just smile and talk to them …”
“I cannot act like a woman!” He bristled. “I have a college degree!
I am an educated man!”
“Yes, well, I’m working on a master’s degree at UCLA, that’s why I work here part-time. You’re smart, so use your smarts — stop insult- ing the customers.”
“You think I insult?” he gasped
“Yes! When you just stand there with your arms crossed, saying nothing, looking at them like they are bugs …”
“Bugs!” His eyes blazed. “Stupid woman! I show them my pride! I show them I am a man of quality, an educated man. This flatters them!”
“How can that possibly flatter them?”
“Because it shows I am a man of quality, and a man of quality is waiting on them!”
Stunned, I contemplated the cultural gap looming jagged and empty between us like the Grand Canyon.
“So when you act … um, supercilious …” “It does them great honor, of course!”
The rude behavior of Chinese waiters the world over suddenly fell into place.
“Well, um, most of the people who come here are white. I guar- antee they don’t understand that you are honoring them by refusing to talk to them. Just do what I do: be nice.”
He folded his arms obstinately. “I cannot act like a woman.” “Well, then you can’t get tipped like one, either.”
One day, shortly after, another white woman was hired to handle the cash register, Chang, who had by then been working with me for six months, came into the kitchen area where I was constructing egg rolls. He squinted and hesitantly asked, “Cheri?”
“Yes?”
“Ah.” He shook his head. “You and the new girl — look so much alike! Hard to tell you apart.”
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I burst into laughter to hear the racist stereotype turned on its head. The new girl was four inches shorter than me, and her straight brown hair, cropped just below her ears, looked nothing like my blonde curls.
At first I thought Chang was joking, but he was just being honest.
I was far too amused to be offended.
It was the customers, who did think they were funny, who irritated
me.
Again and again, a customer (always male, of course), usually at
a large table, playing to an audience, would look at me comically and say, “Funny, you don’t look Chinese!” and burst out laughing at his own witticism.
Not so funny after you’ve heard it dozens of times. Sometimes I heard it every single shift.
Finally, I fought back.
After the jokester would yelp, “Funny, you don’t look Chinese,” I would solemnly look him dead in the eye and say, “Oh, but I am.”
As the faces around the table grew incredulous and perplexed, I would lean down and whisper, “There are thousands of people who look just like me in China. But capitalist propaganda wants you to think otherwise.”
If doubt persisted, I would shrug, allowing a little half-smile at their woeful ignorance to flit across my face. “Haven’t you ever heard of Genghis Khan?”
Of course they had. “He is my ancestor.”
If they were still skeptical (few were at this point; it is amazing what a serious and apparently confiding demeanor will do), I would admit, “The Chinese government generally keeps the white Chinese isolated in ghettos. Foreigners, especially journalists, aren’t allowed anywhere near there.”
This being the seventies, shortly after Nixon’s détente with China, people bought into the exoticism of it all.
“White Chinese — wow …”
O.K., it was wrong to lie like that — repeatedly — but it amused me and I needed the entertainment.
Peculiarly, as I was spinning this tale, the Los Angeles Times printed a remarkable article, which lived on my refrigerator until it fell apart. Archaeologists had unearthed a tomb in the deserts of central China. The four-thousand-year-old tomb, was, they thought, of a High Priest- ess, given the number of gold cult objects found with it, though the elaborate headdress and the gold net set with tiny squares of jade cov- ering her entire body pointed to the possibility that the woman they had found was a princess or queen.
The dry desert air had preserved the mummified body perfectly. So perfectly that they could see that the person who had been given such a fantastically wealthy burial was a blonde, blue-eyed woman of about forty who was the remarkable (for that era) height of 5’4”.
My ancestor!
Talk about life imitating art!
After that, when anyone questioned my story I would say, “Didn’t you see the L.A. Times story about the white woman they found buried in China …”
End of discussion.
Happily enlightened, my customers walked out prepared to amaze their friends and relations with the inside scoop on all the hid- den blondes in China.
Patchwork Kilt
“If you’ve heard one bagpipe tune, you’ve heard them both.”
Being pure Scottish on my mother’s side, with the much-scorned exception of a French courtesan my family referred to dismissively as “Fifi LaRue,” I grew up sporting kilts, pounding out shortbread dough for the holidays, and singing such old Scottish classics as “Lock the Door Larrison:”
Why does the joy candle gleam in your eye? Beware of your danger, beware of your danger! Your foes are relentless, determined, and nigh!
and MacPherson’s Lament
He played a tune/ And he danced aroon Along the Gallows tree.
that Rod Stewart later stole the fiddle riff from and made famous in
Maggie May.
My patriarchal German pater fought my genetic leanings as hard as he could, forbidding bagpipe music in the house “like the caterwaul- ing of tortured cats!” and having us all gather around the piano to sing Du, du, liebst mir im herzen … and Schnitzelbank. “Monday roast beef Tuesday hassenfeffer — everybody happy? Well, I should say!” When my mother bought me a plaid-patterned lunch box, he even went so far as to paint double-headed axes on it from the German family coat of arms, which made me the envy of every little boy in my kindergarten.
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But what can I say? Immediately after World War II German pride was a hard sell, though the German side of my family had come over before the Revolutionary War, and if Germany fell apart after we left, well that was only to be expected. “The German side of the family was civilized back when your mother’s people were still run- ning around painting themselves blue!” my father would huff. But the bagpipes were in my blood. Was there ever a sound sadder, or more inspiring of courage? I like Beethoven. I love bagpipes.
My grandmother, Arbie, so Scottish that her first name (my mid- dle name), was Arbuthnott, the name of a Scottish clan (her last name was Stewart, like Rod, until she married my grandfather, who was a Graham), paid for my mother and me to go and visit Scotland after I graduated from college. Arbie was still in touch with her cousin Ina, whom she adored, so we went to go stay with Ina and her husband Stewart Annand. Ina and Stewart were the caretakers of Branklyn Gardens and lived in a wonderful old house on the property.
I was thrilled to see that Stewart wore a kilt at all times, like a Scottish Laird from a storybook. My only other relative to do so was Uncle Harry, who could (and would!) do the Highland Fling, hopping around like a crazed sprite until he was 99, when he peacefully expired in his sleep after a long life of perfect health. I was awestruck by him as a young child; when I was about four, I remember him complaining bitterly that the hospital where he had been a surgeon for many years had forced him to retire when he turned eighty, although, “Ma hand and ma eye were as steady as ever!” I shared his outrage, ready to march down to the hospital and demand his immediate reinstatement, not considering that perhaps most folks would be nervous having an eighty-year old cut them open and sew them back up. Stewart, broad and tall, bore no resemblance to Uncle Harry, who was more lepre- chaun in stature. I discovered, on this trip to Scotland, that the Scots basically come in two sizes: big and buff, like Stewart, or thin and wiry, like Harry. You might think that cross-breeding would result in some medium size Scots, but nope.
I soon discovered that Stewart’s penchant for kilt-wearing at all times was practical when, on my first day touring and admiring the garden in his company, he sauntered over, expounding about the dahl- ias I was praising, lifted his kilt and proceeded to water the flowers
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right next to me. I quickly averted my eyes, startled, but then admired his casual naturalness, which was no doubt a Scottish attribute. I later learned that this behavior was a new habit, a stalking horse of the Alzheimer’s creeping in, but I still prefer to think of him marking his territory like a great stag, unfazed by the presence of young American cousins or anyone else.
Our second day in Scotland we all hopped in the Annands’ motor car and tooled about looking at scenery. After a few hours we pulled into a field and Ina took out enormous wicker baskets from which she extracted delicious lamb sandwiches and a silver teapot wrapped in a tea cosy with piping hot tea which we drank out of dainty china cups also brought along for the occasion. It was an exceedingly civilized picnic. Then we went to the Woolen Mill and picked out cashmere sweaters (I got a gorgeous cranberry colored one for Elie, who was man enough to wear pink).
Then we pulled into a pub. “Lunch time!” Ina sang out. “Um … wait … didn’t we already have lunch?” I asked.
“Oh no!” she looked horrified at my gaffe. “That was elevenses.”
So we had a pub lunch at 1:00. Then we stopped at a tea shoppe for high tea (another whole meal involving miniature sandwiches, scones and a delectable dessert known as trifle) at 4:00. Dinner was at 7:00. And of course, one had to have a wee something before bed. Then, the next morning, the whole cycle began again. This was exactly the way I liked to eat, constantly! These were my people! I was a thin and wiry Scot! I ate six meals a day because it was my nature! I was genetically pre-disposed to greed! I had found my roots. And my root vegetables.
The only thing that perplexed me about my Scottish cousins was their rejection of the ancient side of their history, the very thing that I, as a shallow-rooted and history-deprived American, found most charming. On one of our drives through the countryside, I spotted the remains of a castle, beautifully situated in the moors. “Oh, oh — could we stop and look at that castle?” I asked.
Ina looked genuinely embarrassed. “Och, that’s not but a ruin … we’ll take you to one that’s still in shape.” And Edinburgh Cas- tle, which we visited later, was magnificent, but I longed for the atmo- spheric ruined ones, with their ghosts and silences.
When we visited the cousins closer to my age near Perth, as they were showing us around their cottage, my mother and I were both astounded at the number of priceless antiques — every desk, dresser, table, chair, and bedframe gorgeously carved, all of it hundreds of years old. “There must be twenty thousand dollars worth of antiques here,” my mother whispered in my ear.
“Your furniture is just amazing,” I said to Amy and David.
Amy looked just as mortified as Ina had when I asked to visit the castle. “Och, when we got married, we were so poor, we had nothing but hand-me-doons.”
Hand-me-doons. A bloody fortune in hand-me-doons. As they led us out to their garden, I pulled my mother aside and urgently whis- pered “Would it be ethical to buy this stuff from them and sell it in the
U.S. for a massive profit?”
“I don’t think so,” she whispered back regretfully.
“But they could buy some nice Swedish modern furniture and we could be rich! Everyone would be happy.”
“They have no idea what it’s worth. We can’t steal from family.”
I sighed, watching twenty thousand dollars in ill-gotten gains evaporate, but then I brightened up. It was almost time for elevenses.
Meanwhile, Back at the Plantation
My paternal grandmother, Jane Lesh, nee Jane Topping, was from the South. As such, she was the mistress of colorful expressions. My personal favorite was ‘swansandicular’ for when something was all f**ked up. Not to be confused with ‘I swan’, which could be substituted for I declare, or ‘swanning about,’ said disapprovingly of any woman a little too convinced of her own charms.
Because my mother’s name was also Jane, my parents referred to my grandmother as ‘Mama Janie’, which I, as a toddler, shortened to something I could say, which was ‘Mimi.’ Mimi was a name that French children used for their grandmothers, so Mama Janie was delighted and adopted Mimi as her name within the family henceforth. “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me; guess I’ll go eat worms!
Big fat juicy ones, little skinny wriggly ones, guess I’ll go eat worms!” Mimi would threaten when things weren’t going her way. I believe I was not alone amongst her grandchildren with a morbid desire to see our grandmother, in a fit of pique, down some worms like spaghetti. During one visit when she threatened to eat worms, I went so far as to go and dig some worms out of our garden, placing them on a plate. But as they wriggled pink, pitiful and helpless on the plate, I felt sorry for them. “Stay away from my grandmother. She’s in a mood,” I warned, carefully reburying them under a protective blanket of dirt.
Mimi was justly proud of her luxuriant, beautiful hair, and all her other threats had to do with hair. Her two most common threats were “I’ll snatch you bald!” and “I’ll scalp you like a red Indian!” which were very exciting threats indeed.
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Mimi was a true daughter of the Confederacy, eager to pass the bitterness of that defeat onto the next generation. I remember vividly her showing me a picture of the four boys in the family, taken in 1860 (we were descended from the youngest child, a girl, of whom no pic- tures exist.) She named the boys, my great-uncles, pointing them out to me. “Two of the boys were killed at Shiloh. We never recovered the bodies,” she said huskily. I stared at those young men with tears in my eyes, feeling gypped. Because of those damn Yankees, now I would never get to meet my great-uncles. I was not yet old enough to do the math and realize that it was now 1960, one hundred years later, so I was never going to meet my great-great-great uncles from 1860 any- way. Two years later, examining the picture with Mimi again, I pointed to the four young men in the picture and said, “These four are our great-uncles?” Yes, Mimi confirmed, it was those four, standing with a few of their classmates. I looked at the four closely, and this time an amazing fact stood out to me. These people were not white. Two of them looked straight-up Native American. The other two looked more white, or mixed. I stared at the two who looked the most Indian, then gazed at my grandmother. Brown skin, deep-carved cheekbones, sharp, prominent nose. Her blue eyes were her only real claim to whiteness. My plantation-dwelling, slave-owning ancestors, the Toppings and the Blues, like many Southerners, were part Native American. There were Indians in the woodpile, as people of that era so indelicately described any family that was not lily-white.
“Were they part Indian, Mimi? Are we part Indian?”
Her blue eyes flashed. I thought she would smack me with a fan and cry, “Fiddle-dee-dee!” But instead she just said, “Of course not! Where would you get such a tom-fool idea as that? I swear, you are such a peculiar child sometimes!”
A peculiar child, with eyes.
Suddenly, all of Mimi’s threats about scalping began to seem a teensy bit more sinister.
Mimi’s identification with her Confederate ancestors was so pow- erful, I now wonder if she actually was there during the Civil War, rein- carnating along the same familial line. Waking up after surgery at age 50, she became very agitated, convinced that General Lee had arrived and no one was taking care of him or his horse. “Someone has got to
take Traveler to the stables!” she cried “Won’t someone take General Lee and escort him to the parlor?”
To calm her, my father (her son) said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” He went out into the hospital hall for a few minutes and then came back. “Traveler is in the stables being rubbed down. He has plenty of oats. General Lee is seated in the parlor. He has his tea and cake.”
“What about his boys? Did someone take them to the kitchens?” “Oh yes. I took them around to the cookhouse, cook is fixing them
a nice supper now.”
Then and only then, believing that General Lee, his horse and army were being cared for, could Mimi sleep.
Allah Akbar
The scorching scent of burning plastic is one of the last things you want to smell on an airplane 35,000 feet above the ground. I twisted around in my seat to see a young Saudi Arabian man just a few rows behind us attempting to set the seats on fire with his cigarette lighter. Luckily the seat backs were melting and smoldering rather than combusting.
Before I could call out, several male flight attendants came thun- dering down the aisle and tackled the miscreant. Unfortunately, the narrow aisles made it impossible for more than one to engage with him at a time, and the young man fought with the manic intensity of the deranged.
“Allah Akbar!” the young Saudi shrieked, hurling himself against the first male flight attendant. A sickening crack as the flight attendant’s head smacked against the baggage compartment and he collapsed. The next attendant stumbled over the body of the first to grapple with the madman, who was still screaming “Allah Akbar” while pressing his lighter against one seat back after another.
“Grab him!
“Get the lighter!”
Grunts, gasps, thumps, men struggling in a haze of toxic blue
smoke.
“Allah Akbar!”
“He fucking bit me!”
“We’re never making it to Saudi are we” my brother Mark observed grimly.
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I had just been thinking the same thing. Three days ago we had gotten word that my parents had been in a catastrophic car accident. My father was dead, my mother possibly dying. All three of their barely grown children were on this flight, so if it went down, it would be a clean sweep of the whole family.
Being the eldest, I tried to say something encouraging.
“The plane isn’t really on fire. And the stewards seem to have the upper hand. But who let this wacko on the plane in the first place?”
“They’re all like that,” my sister said bitterly. She and Mark had visited my parents in Saudi Arabia the previous summer. My father had been offered vast numbers of camels by several different suitors in exchange for his voluptuous red-headed daughter. My sister had not appreciated his on-going pretense that he might accept one of the offers.
“They can’t all be insane,” I said. “Just wait.”
At that juncture, the Captain’s voice came over the intercom.
“If there is a doctor on board, would you please step to the for- ward cabin,” he asked calmly.
A now horizontal pile of writhing men squirmed in the aisle like a football scrimmage.
“If there is a nurse on board, would you please step to the forward cabin,” the Captain requested, his voice as smooth and soothing as caramel.
“Allah! Allah! Allah!”
“Put something in his mouth for god’s sakes!”
The calm voice emanating from the intercom resumed.
“If anyone has any tranquilizers, would you please step to the forward cabin.”
After a pause punctuated by whimpers in the aisle, the captain came back on with a final request;
“If anyone has a strait jacket, would you please step to the forward cabin?”
“A strait jacket. Sure, never leave home without it,” Mark whis- pered. I pretended to search in my purse. “Shoot, I left mine at home.”
Apparently no one was forthcoming with the strait jacket, leaving the flight attendants to pull off their belts and hog-tie the wild man.
A handkerchief stuffed in his mouth, secured by a tie completed his ensemble as they dragged him off toward the back of the plane.
“This is madness,” I said. “Just wait,” my sister replied.
No Good
“No good!” The Saudi customs officer tossed my sister’s docu- ments contemptuously down on the dais before him.
“No good? Why not? What’s wrong with them?” I asked, my hys- teria barely contained.
After finding out three days ago that our father was dead and my mother critically injured, after twenty-four hours of travel, without sleep, part of it with a maniac who tried to set our plane on fire, I was, understandably, a bit overwrought.
He tapped my sister’s form in which she had, among other things, sworn that she was a Christian. Saudis believed that westerners came in only two flavors: Christian and Jewish, and Jews most certainly were not allowed into the Kingdom. Witchcraft was still punishable by death in the Kingdom, so my Pagan affiliation was certainly not going to cut any ice. Or sand. I had swallowed my pride — and honesty — reasoning that saving my mother’s life outweighed telling the truth in this instance.
Yet it was not the form of the black-sheep Witch he had singled out. It was my sister’s.
“Green ink. No good. Must be blue ink.”
“O.K.” My reasonable twenty-one-year-old brother, taking responsibility as the man in the family in a country where only men counted, stepped up to the podium. “So, can you give us another form and a blue ink pen to fill it out with?”
“No.”
A dangerous look came into my brother’s eyes as it occurred to all of us that this guy might be detaining our beautiful red-headed sister for reasons other than bureaucratic.
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“Why not?” I heard in the slight edge to his tone that Mark, too, was on the brink.
The customs officer made a sweeping gesture with both hands, indicating the obvious. “No pens.”
“So,” Mark asked, gritting his teeth in a way that reminded me of our father’s excessive politeness just before exploding, “where can we find some blue pens?”
“Over there.” The official dismissively indicated the far end of the airport.
Mark strode across the airport, his six-foot-two figure growing smaller and smaller, finally disappearing behind a swirl of men in robes who looked like they were auditioning as extras in Lawrence of Arabia.
After a few anxious moments, Mark returned, six blue ink pens clutched in one hand. He tossed them onto the podium. “There, now you’ll have some for next time.”
The customs officer raised his hand and snapped his fingers. In the next instant, two security guards seized Mark and were dragging him off. “Oh my god!” I made a move toward the trio. My sister grabbed
my arm. “Pretend nothing is happening.”
“Pretend nothing’s happening! They got Mark! They — ”
Annie pulled me away from the podium. “We are now two unpro- tected western women in an airport full of Saudi men. Pretend nothing is happening!”
“But … we can’t just let them take Mark …” My terrified brain conjured pictures of rubber hoses, toothpicks inserted under finger- nails, dank Saudi prisons.
“Mark knows what to do. He just has to apologize and abase him- self for a while and they’ll let him go.”
“You think so?”
“Well, either that or they’ll kill him and sell us into white slavery.” The grim set of her mouth told me she was not joking.
“Maybe we should go hide out in the bathroom for ten minutes,” Annie calculated.
“O.K. Peeing sounds like a good idea.” “You won’t want to do that.”
In the German airport where we had stayed during our layover, the bathrooms were so spotless you could have eaten off the floor with
a sense of complete impunity. The tiles had been scrubbed until they literally gave off their own light.
To say that the Saudi airport bathroom was the opposite would be simply inadequate.
There were stalls, but no toilets, simply holes in the floor. That did not bother me; at twenty-eight I was a flexible yogini who could squat for hours. No, holes in the floor did not bother me.
It was the shit piled around the holes. And smeared on the walls.
And the bloody sanitary napkins piled in the sink. “Still want to use the bathroom?”
“I’ll … wait.”
I held my breath as long as I could, then pushed out of that place, carefully examining the door for feces before putting my hands on it.
After an agonizing fifteen minutes, Mark reappeared. He expressed regret for his rudeness to the customs officer and handed him some folded-up money. The officer stamped our passports.
We were in. Almost.
At the next station in customs, officers opened our suitcases and pawed through them in a leisurely way, holding up various items and laughing about them to each other. My legs were shaking so much from stress and exhaustion, I thought I would faint or go mad. One of the officers was leering and exclaiming over all my vitamin bottles, opening them, sniffing them, pouring them out into his hands and examining them. “Drugs? Drugs?”
“Just vitamins. No drugs.” “Drugs? Drugs?”
Mark unobtrusively stooped and casually dropped a few notes in Saudi currency onto my open suitcase. The customs official scooped them up and waved magnanimously. “O.K., O.K., you go.”
“You bribed him?” I whispered as we walked through the sliding airport doors into the hot night air.
“Baksheesh. You can’t get anything done in Saudi without it.” Filth. Bribery. The threat of violence.
“Welcome to Saudi Arabia,” my sister said bitterly.
Mad Max and UFOs
Seldom have I been as glad to see anyone as I was to see my father’s friend and coworker John, who came to pick us up at the Daha- ran airport. We threw our suitcases into his trunk as if we really were smugglers, and we hightailed it out of there. Right away, as we moved at warp speed along a highway leading out of Daharan, something struck me as wrong. There were wrecked cars lining the road like a scene out of Mad Max. “What happened? What’s with all the wrecked cars?”
“People just abandon their cars after an accident. The Saudi gov- ernment doesn’t tow the cars away; they just push them to the side.”
Soon, we were out of the city and there was nothing but sand dunes — and wrecked cars — as far as the eye could see. It was not like the deserts I was familiar with in the American Southwest, which are full of cactus and succulents, and various forms of miniature life. Here, there was nothing but sand. Dusk began gilding the scene red and gold. A string of camels, apparently on their own, plodded across the skyline. “Can we stop and get a picture?” my brother asked.
John obligingly pulled over onto a narrow slice of wreck-free shoulder.
“It’s weird that nothing grows,” I said. John reached down, scooped a handful of sand, and poured it into my palm. It was greasy. “There’s so much oil nothing can grow,” he said.
“What are those fires?” I asked. Fountains of fire shot from mul- tiple distant pillars.
“Refineries. Burning off the extra gas.”
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Night fell all at once, like a black curtain backdrop in a play. Doz- ens of refinery flares lit up the night, dimming the riot of stars over- head. I felt like Lawrence of Arabia in hell.
As we drove through the night toward Jubail, a town built to house western workers in the Kingdom, we passed a truck stop. Each truck had crazy patterns of colored lights moving and changing along its sides, and each truck’s geometric pattern of flashing lights was unique. Disco meets transportation.
“They drive like that? Isn’t it distracting?” “You don’t get it,” my sister said.
My question was answered as a behemoth truck bore down on us, red-and-green lights dancing in ever-changing shapes like Las Vegas on wheels. On LSD. “Holy shit!” I exclaimed as our small car rocked in the wind left in the disco-truck’s wake.
“You can’t have stuff like that on the roads! Aren’t there any laws against these nutty disco trucks?”
“All the laws in Saudi are derived from the Koran,” John informed me. “And there were no cars, or traffic, when the Koran was written. Therefore, there are no traffic laws.”
“No speed limits,” my brother Mark chimed in.
“Why do you think our parents were in a car accident in the first place?” Annie demanded.
“That’s why I blasted through those stoplights in Daharan,” John said. “You don’t dare stop, because the guy in back of you is going to plow right into you. Better to try to dodge whoever’s coming through the intersection.”
“Nobody bothers with turn signals,” Mark added. “People must get killed all the time.”
“Fifty thousand a year,” John said. “See, the Saudis are fatalistic. They think that if Allah wants you to live, you live. If Allah wants you to die, you die. So why bother looking where you are going, or stopping at stoplights, or driving a sensible speed? It’s all in God’s hands.”
“But — this is crazy.”
“God, you are a slow learner,” Annie muttered.
Crispy Christians
John dropped us off at our parents’ tiny one-bedroom cottage in Jubail. I opened the mirrored cabinet over the sink to put my vitamins inside and froze. There, like a lovely mirage of an oasis, shimmered a full bottle of my father’s tranquilizers. “Eat me, eat me,” they cooed like the mushrooms in Alice in Wonderland. “You’re so stressed out … you have to sleep … no one can deal with something like this without help …”
My mother’s response to the dramas of my adolescence had been to dose me with my father’s tranquilizers whenever I seemed upset. By the time I went off to college, I had my own prescription. At twenty, I took one of those pills, but instead of calming me, it revved me up so much I dashed back and forth across the entire campus three times before retreating, angry and freaked out, to my room. I realized I had never developed any way of coping with difficult feelings other than drugging them away; I was a slave to a pharmaceutical. I flushed the contents of the bottle down the toilet and had never taken another one in the ten years since.
Thirty hours without sleep, I swayed in front of my parents’ med- icine cabinet. My father was dead, my mother possibly dying in this hellhole of a country …
My hand shot out like a striking snake. I grabbed the bottle, twisted the top off, poured the pills like a pink waterfall into the com- mode, and flushed, watching all hope of chemical help swirl away. I dropped the bottle in the waste-basket and collapsed onto the cool tile floor. I was going to have to handle the worst acid trip of my life straight as a board.
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The next morning, we arrived at the hospital where my mother was being kept (it would be a stretch to say “treated”). She had ban- dages on her face. Her left arm had been shattered too grotesquely to be repaired by Saudi technology. Her pelvis was broken in a couple of places; several ribs were cracked. She had a severe concussion. She was conscious, but confused.
“Hey kids, what are you doing here?”
“We came because you were in an accident.” “Oh, really? Where’s your dad?”
“Um … just a minute.”
We scurried out into the hall and collared a nurse. “Hasn’t anyone told her Mike is dead?”
The nurse fidgeted nervously. “We thought we should wait until you got here … we thought she should hear it from family …”
My brother and sister looked at me. It sucks being the oldest.
“That doesn’t make any sense!” my mother cried when I told her. “Your father is so much bigger and stronger than I am! If anyone would survive it would be him!”
“I know …”
After that trauma, a nurse took me aside and told me my mother was not eating. An aide arrived with lunch. It was goat stew. The goat meat was so tough and fibrous, Hercules would have had a hard time chewing it.
“My mom needs a liquid diet — soup, smoothies — can you get her something like that?”
“This is all we have. Everyone gets the same.” Twentieth-century hospital, twelfth-century ideas.
We went to the souk and I picked up all the fresh and frozen fruit I could find, plus yogurt and ice cream. I began making smoothies for my mom for her meals morning, noon, and night. Each time I arrived at the hospital bearing a smoothie, a guard intercepted me. Taking the tall blender from my hands, he would take the lid off and sniff. “Drugs … drugs …?”
Mark would step forward and hand the guard a small wad of bills. Baksheesh tucked safely into his robe, the guard would smile and wave us through.
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I soon wished I had brought drugs. Apparently the Koran forbids ingestion of “the fruit of the poppy,” and no exceptions are made for people in hospitals. For a shattered arm, broken ribs and pelvis, head injuries, and lacerations, they were giving my mother Tylenol. As she came out of shock, Tylenol wasn’t cutting it.
Back at “home,” we had no time to recover from the horror at the hospital before three women who identified themselves as Mother’s “friends” came to the door with cookies. Annie seated them on the blue couch in the living room that was doubling as Mark’s bed while I went to make coffee. After doling out the coffee, I perched on the arm of my sister’s chair, as all the furniture was now in use. The blue curtains were drawn to keep the violent late-afternoon sun from conquering the air conditioning. Outdoors it was 115 degrees with 95% humidity. For someone who had never believed in hell, I was swiftly learning the error of my ways.
Coincidentally, hell was the very topic on these women’s minds. After inquiring about our mother’s health in treacly voices, the lead woman cut to the chase. “We know … your mother — such a nice per- son — has a Christian heart. And what a tragedy it would be if she should die before being saved …”
They wanted to go to the hospital and pray with her so she would convert and die Christian. Their sort of Christian. They weren’t on the visitation list (because they weren’t really her friends, I now realized). But we could get them on it …
I felt a snarl vibrating in my throat. “Our mother isn’t going to die. And, other than the country we are in now, we don’t believe in hell. So, thanks for stopping by, but …”
Annie rose swiftly, took me by the arm, and dragged me to the kitchen.
“They’re Mom’s friends!” she hissed angrily. “Don’t be rude!” “They’re not Mom’s friends! They’re just asshole fundamentalists
looking to make a conquest!”
“We won’t let them visit her, but we’re going to be polite to them while they’re here!”
“Fine. You be polite to them. I’ll start fixing dinner. I’m going to cook those steaks Harvey brought us.” Dad’s expat friend Harvey was
making sure we were provisioned with the best imported food available in Jubail.
Annie closed the door to the kitchen behind her. I started scrub- bing the carrots and zucchini with bleach, a vital step in the Kingdom, where most produce was grown with human feces as the most available fertilizer. I put the rice on the stove, then the two vegetables, each in their own pot. I arranged the steaks — incredibly well-marbled beau- ties from Australia — on a broiler pan and set them under the broiler. I could not make out words from the low hum coming from the other side of the door, and for a few moments, domestic peace reigned.
Then the beautifully marbled steaks caught fire. And, like a hor- ror movie, the broiler burst into flame as well. Greasy smoke billowed up. The fire alarm exploded in a shrill cacophony of emergency.
I flung open the door to the living room. “You need to leave!” I shouted to the Christians. “I need help! The steaks are on fire!”
The Christians scuttled out the door. Mark grabbed a couple of potholders and yanked the broiler pan with the steaks on it out of the oven, tossing it with a clatter onto the tile counter, where I stood slapping the flames with a dishcloth, which promptly ignited. I hurled the dishcloth into the sink as Annie screamed, “I know you set those steaks on fire on purpose! How could you do that! Just because you hate Christians!”
“I’m terrified of fire! I would never set anything on fire on pur- pose!” I yelped as Mark smothered the fire with tin foil and turned off the oven. The flames flickered blue and died. He pushed a chair over to the wall and tried to shut the shrieking fire alarm off, to no avail. Enraged, he ripped the whole thing off the wall and hurled it to the ground. He then picked up the chair and smashed the fire alarm into tiny fragments, slamming the chair again and again until fire alarm bits were scattered all over the floor and the only sound was of my brother’s ragged breathing. He slid to the ground, shaking. Annie and I followed suit.
I picked a small, squashed gear out from under my butt, and sur- veyed my siblings.
“Do you think we might be the teensiest bit stressed?”
Where the Poodles Diverge from the Sheep
“It’s your fault I’m alive!” Mom sobbed bitterly. “If it hadn’t been for you and your Witch friends doing spells I could be happily dead with your dad! See what you did!”
We had returned two weeks before from Saudi Arabia, where my dad had been killed in the car accident that had also severely injured my mother. Mom had recovered enough from the concussion she suf- fered during the accident to be able to assess her situation, and, clearly, I was the one at fault.
Stung, I retorted, “Hey, you had all those miracle-working nuns at the convent praying for you.” My mother was librarian at Convent of the Sacred Heart School in San Francisco. “You had all the Mormons in Jo’s church praying for you — and they’re all related, so probably all the Mormons in Utah were praying for you too. And Jo’s Mormon husband is the one who flew you out of Saudi Arabia. For an agnostic, you know an awful lot of religious people.”
“That’s true,” Mom whimpered.
“It’s not my fault you’re the most popular person on the planet!
You have no one to blame for being so damn loveable but yourself.” Mom sniffled, considering.
“I have been a bit of a social butterfly.”
“A butterfly with the wingspan of a condor.”
Mom wiped her eyes with the tissue I handed her. “Maybe it’s not all your fault. You did warn me that something terrible would happen
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to us in Saudi Arabia. But your dad had made up his mind, and if he was in danger, I wanted to be by his side.”
“And you were,” I said softly.
“And I was …” She burst into tears again as my sister walks in. “I’m sorry,” Mom gasped. “When my father died, my mother
never did this to me …”
I take her in my arms. “Mom, whatever you’re feeling is O.K. You’re not hurting us with your feelings. Grief is sacred …”
“Cerridwen likes crying! She likes all that …” Annie shuddered,
“all that real stuff.”
“That’s true!” my mother marveled.
“It is true! I’m a fan of intimacy and … truth. And real stuff.” My mother and sister stared at me with a mixture of horror, relief,
and disgust.
“So — I’ll be out getting groceries, and Cerridwen will stay here with you,” Annie said brightly, bolting for the door.
“Don’t forget to get more tissues …”
“I will, I will — ” Annie slammed the door behind her, followed by the sound of her gunning the car down the driveway.
For someone who used to hold her breath until she turned blue and hurl herself, shrieking like a tin whistle, to the floors of grocery stores when thwarted, Annie had developed a remarkable phobia of emotional expression.
Later that evening, after Mom was in bed, I came downstairs to see Annie unpack several bottles of sherry. She and Mark clinked glasses.
“Do you like that stuff?” I inquired. Sherry didn’t taste as wretched as that gasoline-on-fire called whiskey that my grandmother used to drink, but it vaguely reminded me of marzipan, which I loathed.
“No,” Annie admitted.
“It’s gross,” my brother agreed, tossing his glass back and pouring another. “But there’s a lot of it in the pantry.”
Alarmed at their intake of the sticky stuff, I countered, “But you wouldn’t drink the cooking sherry, right?”
Mark looked appalled. “Jesus, we’re not animals.”
He got up and started rummaging through our parents’ rap- idly dwindling liquor cabinet. “I found some vodka in the back!” he exclaimed.
My sister opened the freezer of the refrigerator. “Oh thank god!
There’s orange juice!”
“Screwdrivers! We’re saved!” Mark cried.
Having recently discovered that orange juice — and, for that mat- ter, alcohol — trigger my migraines, I just shook my head when the others offered me this concoction.
My sister doled out one of Mom’s pain pills to herself, and one to Mark.
I sipped my water.
“Back to school tomorrow?” I asked Mark.
He nodded. “Yeah, sorry to run out on you all, but — academia calls.”
“That’s O.K.,” I murmured.
“It’s totally not O.K.,” my sister snarled, “you coward.”
I sighed. “We’re all going to need a lot of therapy to get through this.”
Mark poured another dollop of screwdriver into his glass. “Ther- apy in a bottle, that’s my solution.”
He picked up his glass and swirled it. “Get it? It’s in a solution.” “Totally,” my sister agreed.
“If you had taken chemistry, you would understand,” he smirked at me patronizingly.
Little did I know, this was the fork in the road where the poodles diverged from the sheep in my family. The poodles went to therapy to deal with their feelings. The sheep bought alcohol to annihilate them.
My father died instantly in the car accident. The shattering of our family unspooled in slow motion.
But it was just as thorough, in the end.
Hero
I don’t know if my father was always destined to become a rocket engineer, but I feel confident that he was always destined to be a hero. He was fierce, fearless, and wired for instantaneous, instinctive response. His mother, Mimi, lamented this quality, as “Mike just doesn’t have any sense,” while recounting to me the time when Mike (not yet my father) was in the army, marching along behind a truck loaded with live ord- nance. The truck hit a pothole and a bomb bounced out of the truck bed. Mike ran forward and caught the bomb, saving his platoon.
“He could have been blown sky-high!” Mimi groused.
I stood up for my father. “Yes, but if he hadn’t caught it, wouldn’t he have just been blown up with everybody else?”
“He could have let someone else catch it,” she sniffed.
Dad’s heroic instincts came in handy during our frequent trips to the beach, where he would scan the waves with his ice-blue 20/20-vision eyes, always prepared to lope out past the lifeguard station — where the young, tan guard was frequently distracted by giggling bikini babes — and fetch a drowning soul to shore. On one occasion, when I was six, my heavily pregnant mother became caught in a riptide. Shad- ing his eyes with his hand, Dad gazed at her struggles for a moment, then turned to me.
“Your mom’s having tiny bit of trouble out there. Watch your little sister for a minute while I go get her.”
I put my arm around my eighteen-month-old sister, proud to be entrusted with her care. “O.K. Don’t worry.”
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“Good girl,” he said and raced across the sand, plunging into the water like an arrow.
Safely back on our blanket, a bit grumpy about having to be res- cued, my mother said, “I could have made it, but this kid here,” she thumped her enormous belly, “was swimming in the wrong direction.”
Dad nodded sagely. “Must be a boy.” (It was.)
I myself required my father’s lifeguarding skills when I was eight. Being a beach brat, I had learned to body-surf early, and my father had taught me how to dive through the glassy belly of a wave too big for me to ride, to emerge snorting like a triumphant dolphin on the other side. But this time when I swam through the wave, the subsequent wave crashed down on me before I had time to catch a breath. I strug- gled to the surface, only to be submerged by the next wave without even a moment to gasp. I struggled upward, but was pounded back down without even a sip of life-giving oxygen. As I swirled around in the churn of foam and sand like a limp sock in a washing machine, I
thought, panicked, I’m going to drown!
But the instant after that thought, my body and mind relaxed. Oh, well, that’s O.K. then, was my last thought before I lost consciousness. I woke up on the sand, my father patting me between the shoul-
der blades. “Cough,” he advised. I coughed, but nothing came up. For some drowning people, their epiglottis seals shut and they never breathe in any water. My fabulous epiglottis and Dad had worked together to save my life.
Once my dad was convinced that I had not inhaled the blue Pacific, he nodded back toward the waves. “Ready to get back in, tiger?”
I shook my head.
He smiled, but it was a small, tight, army-recruiter type of smile. “You have to get back in right away or else you’ll get scared.” “Actually, I’m kind of scared now.”
“No time to waste then.”
My feet left skid marks on the sand as he dragged me unwillingly back toward the hungry maw of the sea. He picked me up and held me on his hip.
“Come on, you just have to get wet. I’ll hold you.”
I clung to him like a monkey, shuddering as the cold foam nibbled at my skin. When we were just past the breakers, Dad plucked me off. “Now just swim around me. I’ll be holding on to the back of your bath- ing suit the whole time.”
I dog-paddled around him doggedly as he held the back of my suit. I slurped the salt water, delicious as always. The water was the perfect temperature; it held me up easily; I was safe with my dad; this was fun! Finally, I looked up to tell him he could let go now. He was fifteen feet away, smiling broadly. He waved and I waved back to my hero, who had not just rescued me from drowning, but had saved my relationship with the sea.
It was another sort of aquatic experience that almost did me in while we were camping.
My father, being an engineer, created a camper van out of a green and white VW bus. He built a narrow table between the two back seats that could fold down, providing a platform on which he would place a detached seat back, making a bed where he and Mom and my brother Mark slept. The other two back seats folded upward, creating a mat- tress for my sister and me. If he had sold this design, he could have made a fortune.
The following year, to accommodate his growing children, Dad built a car-top carrier. Nothing of the sort was available commercially in 1962. He built it from wood and painted it green to match our van, which he had dubbed “Waltzing Matilda” after an Australian outback song he was very fond of. The front of the car-top carrier was pointed, like a nose-cone, for aerodynamic excellence. The top, lined with tent material and mosquito netting, raised up to form a sleeping area for me and my sister. My brother now slept on the shelf in back of the van while my father and mother luxuriated in the whole bed formed by the rest of the interior.
Dad declared me “Captain of the Fore-top.” One of my duties when we were camping was to clamber up on the six-inch-wide shelf of the car-top carrier, release the latches that held the top down, and insert the interior poles into position, propping the whole thing open.
One night, when we pulled into our camping spot we were greeted by a deluge of Noah-esque proportions. Dad put on his rain poncho and helped me into mine. He stood in the splashing mud and scooped
me onto his shoulder. From there I scrambled onto the wooden shelf. I could barely make out the picnic table to my left through the grey veil of water. Good thing we had gone out to dinner. The rain was coming down so hard it was sheeting along the shelf. The next thing I knew, I was hydroplaning off that thing as if I had been thrown from it like a frisbee.
Dad caught me. Effortlessly. He held me, soaking poncho to soak- ing poncho, until my heart stopped pounding, then lifted me back up to finish the job.
“Pretty lucky you caught me,” I marveled over bacon and eggs the next morning after the storm had passed.
Dad looked affronted. “Lucky? I’m always right under you, watching every time you go up there. Can’t let a kid go up in a crate like that without backup.”
Sometimes being a hero takes planning.
No matter what the emergency, my father exuded confidence. In another camping disaster — which my father’s friend, Jim Jennings, who was camping with us at the time, referred to as the “Night of the Mormon Maidens” — a bunch of young Mormon women camping in a group site next to us became ill with food poisoning. Their desper- ate leader came begging for our help, and Mike and Jim went to see what they could do. Jim collapsed into laughter whenever he recalled Mike kneeling beside one retching teenager, taking her by the hand and saying, “Don’t worry, little lady. It will all be all right. My father is a pharmacist.”
While he had no medical training (he frequently regretted not having become a doctor as his mother had wished), his soothing words and aura of calm certainty defused many a crisis. The man who would go into screaming fits if any of his children brought back report cards with less than straight A’s, was steady as iron when it came to pulling bleeding people out of a car accident and calmly applying pressure to spurting arteries until an ambulance arrived. On one occasion when a gasoline tanker collided with a car, my father broke the side window of the burning car and pulled the unconscious man to safety moments before the car exploded.
Ironically my father, who always stopped at car accidents, who told us obsessively, repeatedly, “Never accept a head-on collision; go
over a cliff rather than accept a head-on collision,” died in a head-on collision in Saudi Arabia.
On his tombstone it reads, “Not farewell, but fare forward, voyagers.”
Above that, if it had been up to me, I would have put one more word.
Hero.
The Dead Kennedys Ride Again
We brought my mother home from Saudi Arabia in late Decem- ber of 1980. She went back to her job as the school librarian at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in San Francisco in late August of 1981. She was forty-nine years old, as thin as she had been at 20 — delicate and frail from her ordeal. She had scarring on the left side of her face, and her left arm, where she had endured surgery to pin together her fractured bones, looked Frankensteinian. She looked as precarious as a ragdoll.
Halloween came around. Every Halloween, both teachers and students attended a costume ball that was one of the most popular events of the year. The students would vote on which teacher would win best costume. Mr. Hartley, one of Mom’s coworkers, boasted that he would win this year’s contest in a walk, with his bumblebee costume that enhanced his naturally plump build.
My mother — whose appearance was that of the classic brainiac, conservative-appearing Marion-the-librarian type — assessed her rag- ged appearance in the mirror and decided to go as a punk rocker.
The afternoon of the costume ball she stood, fidgeting before us, a Twiggy-like waif with a wild orange punk wig, a chain of safety pins dangling from one ear, and a vinyl mini-skirt revealing knock-out legs in torn fishnet stockings.
“I look ridiculous, don’t I?” she lamented. My sister and I shook our heads in unison. “Oh nooo — you look amazing!” I said. “You’ll knock their socks off!” Annie agreed.
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We waited up. Mom returned, flushed with success. She described how a couple of the girls had walked up, not recognizing her. Suddenly, Virginia, one of her favorites, did a double-take and cried, “MRS. LESH!” All the girls gasped, thrilled and breathless and scandalized at Mom’s transgressive (and utterly out of character) get-up.
“What’s the matter, Virginia? Haven’t you ever heard of the Dead Kennedys?” Mom quipped airily. All the students crowded around, agog, as word spread of their librarian’s metamorphosis.
Mom won best costume in a walk. It wasn’t even close.
“I did feel bad for Mr. Hartley,” Mom said smugly. “He was so certain his bumblebee costume would win.”
I stared in awe as my mother glowed in triumph. First Day of the Dead after my father’s demise, after nearly dying herself, she was on her feet, looking tough and defiant, bloody but unbowed. Marion the Librarian was not carrion.
She had succeeded in shocking students and teachers alike. She was still a force to be reckoned with.
Somewhere in the ethers, no doubt my father felt vindicated that one of them, at last, had triumphed over the bumblebee.
Horns, Large Horns
My father got long vacations when he worked at Aerospace. We would launch out of L.A., drive our VW bus (which Dad had modified into a camper) as far eastward as three weeks would carry us, then turn around and return, often back through Canada.
During these trips, my father, normally an upright, white-collar, clean-shaven citizen, reverted to his more primal state. His hair and beard grew out, he wore jeans and a fringed leather jacket. He fre- quently sported a toothpick between his teeth — much to my mother’s distress, as toothpicks were undeniably common — and was never seen without his cowboy hat and boots. The cowboy hat and boots were not fancy touristic models, but plain working-class gear.
Somewhere in Idaho — or was it Montana — we entered a shop redolent with saddle soap and gunpowder. Saddles, spurs, horse blan- kets, and tack were all on sale. But my father soon had something else in mind: a magnificent rack of antlers, still attached to a portion of the stag’s skull. The proprietor spun the story of the hunt that had bagged the magnificent animal, and a deal was struck.
“Where are we going to put this?” my mother asked. “There is no room in Matilda (our van) for that.”
Dad tied the antlers to our front bumper.
“People are going to think we are a bunch of hillbillies.” Dad’s blue eyes gleamed. “Yep.”
The VW bus of the 1950’s was a creature of very little horse- power. Loaded down with three children and a slew of camping gear, it could barely climb a hill, and the engine threatened to go into cardiac
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arrest while scaling anything that could be labeled a mountain. VWs frequently stalled on hills.
But we had a secret weapon.
My father named our VW Matilda, after the Australian Outback song “Waltzing Matilda.” When we came to a hill and our vehicle slowed and started to wheeze, we would all burst into our van’s theme song.
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me. And he sang as he watched and waited to His billy boil:
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Up came a jumbuck to drink beside the billibong
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee. Here’s a jolly jumbuck to fit inside my tucker bag, You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
As the van slowed and sputtered, my father would shout, “Louder, sing louder, children!” and “Lighter, think lighter, children!”
We sang loudly and imagined ourselves floating inside the vehi- cle like tethered astronauts, and slowly, infinitesimally slowly near the crest, Matilda would labor up the hill and we would all cheer lustily as we accelerated down the other side.
It worked every time.
While we were traversing Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas, no one paid our stag-mobile much mind, nor did my father’s cowboy hat and scruffy beard strike anyone as sinister.
But Illinois was different.
Shortly after entering a small town, my father stopped at a cross- walk and motioned the older man waiting there to cross.
The man with the cane looked at our dust-covered bus. Then he looked at the antlers with alarm.
Then he looked at my father — scruffy red beard, cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes.
The man waved my father on. My father waved him to cross.
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The man waved my father to go ahead. My father waved back. Oh no, I insist.
The old man looked at my father, then at the antlers, then back at my father. He folded his arms and shook his head.
Bemused, my father trundled our vehicle on to the next stop sign, the next crosswalk. He waved the woman with the stroller to go ahead. Her eyes widened as she took in the grimy antlered bus, and my father’s steel-blue eyes glinting under his cowboy hat. Abruptly, she wheeled the carriage around and headed in the other direction.
Four weeks into our vacation, our cowboy-hatted, unshaven, sharp-featured father was not a man to be crossed. Or, apparently, crossed in front of.
Flash-forward thirty years.
“Horns, large horns A large pair of horns
He lived the life that his father lived With a large pair of horns.”
A hundred pagans in a circle at Limantour beach chant lustily as two men clad only in fur and leather loincloths, holding antlers to their heads, spar in the center. They paw the sand, charge, and clack the antlers together like two stags battling for supremacy. One finally kneels, conceding, then trots over to a young man in the circle, handing him the horns, choosing him as the young stag. The chosen youth cau- tiously approaches the elder stag, retreats, then advances. The chosen maiden trills her approval and the young stag catches fire, charges, and engages the more experienced “stag,” driving him out of the circle as the group chants:
“Hoof and horn, hoof and horn All that dies will be reborn.
Corn and grain, corn and grain All that falls shall rise again.”
The triumphant young stag dances with the maiden in the center of the circle. After a brief interlude where the men go off to polish the phallically carved Maypole and the women adorn each other and the Maypole hole with flowers, the men arrive and plant the Maypole to
shrieks of excitement from the women. All choose a ribbon and dance together, under, over, under, over, assertion and surrender until the pole is covered with a rainbow sheath of ribbon, the world tree is rooted, the web of life is rewoven, and the passion of spring has reawakened in every heart.
Once a stag’s pride, then an instrument of Wild West terror on a VW bus, now a Pagan symbol of the passionate power of the Horned God. My father’s antlers, that once terrorized people in crosswalks from Downers Grove, Illinois to San Francisco, California, are now mine. They cradle the crystal ball on the altar at Samhain, strut and prance around the circle at Beltane.
I remember my father teasing me to respond to the kids asking what church we went to “Tell ‘em we’re Pagans, honey. Tell them we worship the trees.”
Somehow, I do not think my father would be displeased.
Waltzing Matilda
Years after we sold Matilda, we were in a campground gathering wood and preparing dinner, when an old green-and-white VW bus drove by and pulled into a campsite around the bend. My father stood, dusting off his hands. We walked down the dirt road, following the dust stream until we came upon the site where the green-and-white VW had parked. Could it be … ?
A young couple was lifting a camping stove and some groceries out of the open sliding door on the van’s side. They set them on the camping table and eyed us, their dusty welcoming committee, curiously.
“Nice camper,” my father said, holding out his hand.
“Oh, hi!” the young guy shook dad’s hand while the young woman beamed. “I’m Jackson, this is Sylvie,” He nodded toward his partner.
“Yeah, take a look.”
They proudly demonstrated how the table folded down and the back seat folded up, creating an upper and lower bed — the design my father had built.
“The guy who sold it to us said it was designed by some rocket scientist …”
My father nodded, trying to look modest. “An aerospace engineer, actually.”
“Wait … that was …” “Yep.”
“My dad built it,” I chimed in proudly. “Far out!” Jackson exclaimed.
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My father stiffened slightly. But then he sighed and his shoulders dropped. The young man did not have long hair. They both looked clean and were not bedecked with tie-dye or fringe.
“Well — that’s what aerospace engineers do. We make things designed to go — far out.”
“We called her Matilda.” I explained. “So if you want her to go up a steep hill, here’s what you do …”
I sang the Waltzing Matilda song. The young couple laughed, delighted. We all shook hands again, laughing.
“What a trip to meet you!” Jackson exclaimed.
My father nodded. “A … trip.” He cleared his throat. “Right.
Yes.”
Back at our campsite, Mom had dinner simmering on a pan on
the Coleman stove.
“Not more Hamburger Hinder,” my brother groaned. He had taken to calling the Hamburger Helper meals my mother favored as easy camping food, Hamburger Hinder.
He was not wrong.
“You can cook the next meal.” Mom sniffed. She set a plate of noodles and hamburger bits in front of my father. “So was it really Matilda?”
My father was not one to say grace. But when he nodded, satis- fied, and said, “Matilda has found a good home,” his tone was grateful, and not that far from prayer.
The Unfriendly Skies
“Do you have something sharp in your handbag?” the scanner asks. “Nope, nothing sharp,” I reply, starting to sweat. Ever since the terrible day when I had placed a backpack with a .32 revolver I had forgotten about on an airline scanner conveyor belt, I’m always inse- cure about what instruments of mayhem I may have somehow spaced while packing.
“How about pointy?” the scanner persists. The only thing sharp and pointy is your tone, I thought but said only, with faux cheerfulness that would have fooled no one, “Nope! Nothing pointy!”
“A comb?” she says edgily, trying to give me the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t have a comb, but I have a brush — think it could be a
brush?”
“Definitely not a brush.” She stares at me and I see her breathing has become more shallow.
“Has anyone handled this purse but you?”
Only my evil twin.
“No. Well, except for you, of course.”
She takes my purse out of the x-ray and carries it gingerly by the edges over to a stainless-steel table, where she sets it so gently no hair-trigger explosives could possibly be activated. She nods to a male security guard, who approaches the bag with a bowlegged John Wayne step. The woman eases back a few steps, trying to shelter behind the guy’s bulk without being obvious about it. The scanners at other machines start ducking and crouching behind their machines, trying to look as if they need fiddling with.
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The four soldiers standing at the end of the x-ray maze tighten their grips on their extremely large guns and walk toward me.
Two weeks after 9/11 and the collapse of the twin towers, I thought, what a perfect time to fly! The airports will be deserted!
And SFO is deserted. Except for all the soldiers. They watch as the guard bravely unzips my purse.
“It’s in the top zippered compartment,” the woman whispers over the guard’s shoulder.
Did I look away from my purse for a few minutes? Could someone have slipped a very sharp, compact, pointy bomb in there? My muscles tense, anticipating the explosion as the man slides his hand into the leather slit and pulls out …
… a small packet of acupuncture needles. “Something sharp!” the woman shrills triumphantly.
With one swift, decisive movement, the lead soldier reaches out and grabs the needles.
“We’ll handle this,” he says gruffly, nodding for me to follow the soldiers over to a bank of windows where they can examine this con- traband in the best possible light.
Once in the light, the soldiers turn them over and over, passing them from hand to hand.
“They’re just acupuncture needles, sir.”
“They’re just ack-punch — what the heck is that?” the lead soldier asks with a broad Midwestern accent. The other soldiers look equally bewildered. Four tall, blonde nineteen and twenty-year-olds from Dubuque, Macon, or maybe even Poverty Flats, Missouri. None of whom has ever heard of acupuncture.
You don’t realize how completely bizarre acupuncture is until you try to explain it so someone with their finger on the trigger of an M-16. “See, the acupuncturist feels your pulses, then they stick these needles — they’re very thin needles, as you can see — into various
places and … it makes you feel better.”
“You stick needles in yourself … and you feel better?”
O.K., right, I wouldn’t have bought that explanation either. “Yeah, it’s kind of bizarre, but it does work, Chinese medicine …” “Chinese.”
The soldiers regard me sternly.
The Unfriendly Skies 171
China is not in the Middle East! I want to shout, but it’s amazing how four M-16s can make you extra polite and discreet.
“What else can these needles do?” The lead soldier’s eyes flash steel as he steps up the interrogation.
I am definitely on the ropes.
“Well, you, uh, can’t sew with them or anything …” “Can they paralyze people?”
Suddenly I see myself through their wary eyes — a Mata-Hari- China-loving-Crouching-Tiger-Hidden-Dragon ninja warrior who, with a few well-placed needles, can disable the crew and take the plane!
I am Angelina-fucking-Jolie!
“Well,” I say coolly, “these needles are for healing, but, maybe with the right training …”
“I can’t permit you to take these needles on the plane, ma’am.” Was that “ma’am” really necessary?
“Of course not. Can’t be too careful. I completely understand.
Use them in good health.”
With an airy wave over my shoulder, I pick up my purse and head for the gate, half-expecting a few warning shots to plow up the indus- trial-strength carpet around me.
They would fire warning shots, wouldn’t they?
Nothing. I brazenly saunter down the corridor while they huddle, still passing the packet back and forth behind me.
A dozen yards from the plane a different group of soldiers have caught up with another potential evildoer. She too has been caught carrying something sharp: a tiny pair of travel-sized nail clippers, with an inch-long nail file of shining steel cunningly concealed under the clasp.
“Gentlemen, I am eighty-two years old, and as you can see, I am in a wheelchair. Is it really necessary to confiscate my clippers?”
“Sorry ma’am, but these are the new rules, and they’re for your own protection,” the teenage sergeant declares sanctimoniously.
I board the plane and settle in my seat, relieved to not be cooling my heels in jail, waiting my turn at the waterboard.
As the plane takes off, I search through my purse for some gum to ease the transition into hyperspace. And what do I find, undetected by a scanner, a guard, and four soldiers?
Tweezers. Not just any ordinary tweezers.
Oh, all right, they were completely ordinary, but they were stain- less steel and at least three inches long. They missed my tweezers! I can still fulfill my mission and take down the plane!
After we achieve altitude I slip, undetected, into the coffin-sized bathroom. There I stare boldly into the mirror, though it may conceal a hidden camera, and slowly pluck three eyebrow hairs.
They don’t really need plucking. I do it because I can.
Then admire myself as a slow, superior, sneering, hidden-dragon grin spreads over my face.
Coyote Position
At eight months pregnant I could barely fit in the “pocket” kitchen in our Mill Valley apartment. I poured three cups of tea, but then faded back behind the sliding door when I heard Elie’s friend Jeb ask a most personal question:
“So, with Cheri being so — you know — can you guys still — do
it?”
Elie sighed. “Well, around five months we switched to doggie
position — but then that stopped working and we had to switch to rear-entry side position — which was O.K. with enough pillows — but now we’re pretty much reduced to coyote position.”
“What’s coyote position?”
“That’s when you just sit by the hole and howl.” Pregnancy is, by its nature, a bizarre and humorous state.
By six months pregnant I definitely felt like an aquarium, my unseen dolphin twisting and banking off the sides of his enclosure. Most unnervingly, I was so short-waisted that at times the child would reach up and grab a hold of my lower ribs as if it were his own per- sonal jungle gym.
There is nothing weirder than having a small being within you reach up and grab a rib from the inside. The first time it happened I was driving on a narrow, winding road overlooking the sea in Scotland. I yelped with surprise and almost drove over the cliff.
No one warns you about these things.
By eight months, the kid had turned over, head down, preparing for birth. No more rib-grabbing, but now I could distinctly feel his little
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hands patting around my cervix as if looking for the opening. Says right here in the instructions — the door must be somewhere around here …
Close to eight months pregnant, I went with Elie to a pumpkin patch to stock up for Halloween. He set a couple of pumpkins in a wheelbarrow the patch purveyors had provided. As I walked toward the checkout, distended belly leading the way, I suddenly felt dreadfully conspicuous. I was carrying so high, and so round, it looked exactly as if I were trying to smuggle a pumpkin out of the patch. Would they stop me at the entry? Make me take off my dress to prove I wasn’t a pumpkin thief ?
To my relief, no one shouted, “Stop, thief !” and forced me to disrobe.
Back at the car, I looked down at the mountain I had become. “It’s not going to get any bigger, is it?” I whined plaintively.
“No,” Elie stoutly lied, “it’s not going to get any bigger.”
When Zach was three years old, we were paging through the photo album showing the pregnancy and birth. Elie pointed to a pic- ture of me with my swollen belly.
“Was it tight in there?” he asked.
“No, it wasn’t tight,” Zach replied. Then he thought. “Well, it was kind of tight.” Then, as if remembering the progression of the preg- nancy, he looked at me apologetically — not wishing to complain about the accommodations — and confessed, “Actually, it was very tight.”
The stomach goes back down to flat after you have the baby. The heart never returns to the size it was. It just continues to inflate, bigger, prouder and more grateful, every day.
The surprising thing is, the love was there from the start.
Elie and I were in Hawaii when we found out we were pregnant. The night before, I had performed a ritual that Victor Anderson, Witch and Hawaiian Huna practitioner, had told me how to do. In the Hawaiian language, I offered my services to Pele, then tossed a bottle of gin wrapped in the red scarf I had usually worn when I was men- struating, into the steaming crater.
Kiliuea Iki had just erupted, for the first time in many years, and plumes of flame rose from the crater below.
The next day, standing in the hotel Volcano House at a pay phone by a bank of windows overlooking the caldera, I called home only to
hear my mother say, “Oh, by the way — your pregnancy test came back positive.”
Looking out over the still-smoking crater, I thought, Dare I take this as an omen? And then, you idiot, you gave Her your moonblood scarf ! When my son was born with six planets in fire, the nature of the service I had offered to Pele became clear.
Elie and I were in shock at the news. The pregnancy was more than unplanned; it was supposed to be impossible. Three different doc- tors had all opined that the amount of scar tissue on my fallopian tubes from infections caused by my IUD had rendered me infertile. Any pregnancy would probably be ectopic, growing in one of the blocked tubes, which would rupture if not removed, potentially killing me. I had been in therapy for three years trying to accept my childless state, and I had finally accepted it, looking forward to a life of continued travel, romance, and writing. We were very careful with birth control; the only times I did not use my diaphragm was when I had my period.
And now?
Have a child? Or, more likely, have a surgery to save my life? Because of the potentially lethal nature of the pregnancy, I went to the Hilo hospital for an ultrasound. The nurse rubbed icy jelly on my stomach and the technician rolled the cold instrument over my trem- bling belly.
And there it was — not in a tube, but right in the center of my womb. So small it was nothing on the screen but a bean with a pumping heart. And in that moment, seeing that pulsing heart, I fell in love — insane love, ludicrous love — an instant, overpowering pas- sion vaster than anything I had felt for anyone except my beloved Elie. What the Italians describe as the lightning bolt — love at first sight.
Except I hadn’t even seen him. Did not know whether it was a him or her. How can you love someone who doesn’t even have a body yet? But some combination of hormones and who-knows-what hijacked my brain and heart for a mystery guest the size of a fingernail.
Back in the car with Elie, I sobbed. “It’s so small! And it has only me to protect it.”
“We haven’t prepared for this … we need to think of our options — ”
“There are no options, we’re keeping it.”
“You can’t just make this decision unilaterally — you have to include me in the process.”
I looked at him. “Nobody included me in the process. There is no process. I saw that little heart and I fell in love. It can’t be undone. There is no process.”
Elie was grumpy for a while, feeling cut out of decision-making. For him, this whole thing was an idea, a concept, and a frightening one at that. He had rational considerations. What about the money? My maternal instincts had been instantly switched on like a spotlight, and they made mother bears and mountain lions look like maternal ama- teurs in their intensity. Rational was a thing of the past. Things were prickly in paradise.
But one day, he turned to me and said, “If it’s a boy, let’s call him Zach or Zeke.”
“Zach or Zeke! Sounds like eighteenth-century farmers! We are not calling him Zach or Zeke.”
Later, I realized that it was Zeke I objected to. Zachary started sounding more and more like the person I was carrying, and it ended up being his name. Somehow Elie intuited that right off the bat, so I am guessing he had some psychic daddy voodoo kicking in, bypassing all his rational fears.
The ice was broken. Elie conceded, though he still worried. About everything. “What if we have an ugly baby?” he said one night as we lay in our double sleeping bag.
My worries so far had all been confined to health.
“We’re both good-looking — why would we have an ugly baby?” “Do you really think our genes will blend well?”
“It doesn’t matter. Even if we do have an ugly baby, we’ll think it’s
beautiful.”
I called home to talk to my mother. If there’s anything a moth- er-to-be needs, it is reassurance from her own mother.
It was sweltering in the phone booth. I opened the door, wishing for a tropical breeze. Flat-bellied though I was, pregnancy had already raised my temperature by what felt like ten degrees.
“We’ve decided to keep the baby,” I told her. I omitted the fero- cious inflexibility I had felt, and Elie’s doubts, making it seem as if a rational decision had indeed been made.
“Oh! Oh! That’s wonderful! I — I applaud your decision!” she cried.
After a week of snarling certainty with Elie, I broke down. “Mom — I’m terrified.”
“Oh, of course you’re terrified. I was terrified with you.” She paused for a moment. “Actually, you still terrify me.”
“Oh, really?” Instantly I was immensely cheered. If terror was the norm, I could handle this. I had been afraid that my fear marked me as an unfit mother. But if my own mother, who always seemed so breezy and confident, was terrified, then there was hope.
Humble Pie
There are many traditions that believe that the best way to sur- render your ego is to retire to a monastery and stare at the walls for hours at a time. Some recommend chanting, some silent meditation.
But of course, they are both wrong.
If you really want to shred your ego, try having children.
Sure, when they are little babies at the breast, they look up at you adoringly like you’re the Mother Goddess.
But that all changes once the terrible twos set in.
Being a precocious walker and talker, Zach entered the terrible twos at about a year and a half, and soon his disenchantment with me became apparent.
As we were walking down the path by the canal to Ross, we encountered a tree with fluffy pink flowers. I later discovered it was a Chinese Silk Tree, but at the time I had no idea what it was.
“Whazzat?” Zach asked, pointing to the tree. “Hmm, I don’t know, it’s pretty …”
“I sink it’s a wubarb twee!” he cried with excitement. Rhubarb was one of his favorite pie ingredients.
I was impressed by his powers of observation. The pink blossoms on this tree were the exact shade of rhubarb.
“It does look like that, but it’s not a rhubarb tree — ” “I sink it’s a wubarb!” he insisted.
“No, because rhubarb doesn’t grow on trees — ”
“I sink it’s a wubarb!” Zach eyed me with a mix of exasperation and desperation. I could see what was in his mind. Of all the mothers
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he could have gotten, he landed the one who was a total failure at hunting and gathering.
“We’ll keep an eye on it. If it starts growing rhubarb we’ll pick it,” I conceded. Zach nodded warily, still clearly thinking that he could easily starve with an unobservant mother like myself.
Not long after that, walking the same path, Zach looked at me solemnly and decreed, “You are a Witch. And you will fall in a ditch.” I laughed so hard I stumbled, tripped, and fell in the ditch run-
ning alongside the path.
Clearly I had met my match.
We had been happy to move from our Mill Valley apartment to the house in Larkspur, partly because a construction project had started near the apartment, necessitating constant visits to the bulldozers and cranes on weekends and after hours.
But within two months after moving to Larkspur, our peace was shattered when the empty lot across the street swarmed with jack- hammers and all sorts of yellow vehicles emitting thick black smoke. Zach wanted to watch for hours, and after the men went home he insisted in going to the lot and sitting in the seats of the tractors and “dozers.”
“Zach,” I asked wearily, “did you manifest all this construction equipment to come here?”
“Yes, I did,” he admitted happily, pretending to steer the tractor with his feet while gripping the gear shift with one hand.
“Zach, you must use your powers for good,” I cautioned. “But I wike destwuction!”
Yikes.
Not long after, sitting naked on the edge of the swimming pool at Orr Hot Springs, Zach pointed to a heavy-set woman entering the other end of the pool. “Mom! Her tits are even bulkier than yours!”
Of all the terms one could use to describe buxomness, “bulkier” is probably the least flattering. And how does a two-year-old even know a word like “bulkier”?
“We don’t point and talk about other people’s bodies,” I whispered. “And when we do, the proper term is ‘stacked.’”
No, of course I didn’t say that last bit! I just sat there, feeling a little deflated about my bulky breasts.
180 Rocket in My Pocket
Not that I didn’t deserve my comeuppance — my son’s doubtful assessments of my intellect and pulchritude. My own childish insights had been quite a trial to my parents.
Driving along the L.A. city streets, our family was listening to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. giving a speech. It may have been his “I have a dream” speech, or maybe a different but equally rousing one. I lis- tened, exalted and enthralled. Never had I heard such brilliance and certainty, in such cadences, in such language. When the speech fin- ished, I burst out, “Martin Luther King is the most intelligent man in the world!”
“That’s ridiculous!” my father spat. “Negroes are not as intelli- gent as white people.”
“Yes he is! Weren’t you listening to that speech? Everything he said made perfect sense! And it was like poetry.”
“Dr. King is part white. He gets his brains from the white part, not the African part.”
“But — didn’t you agree with his speech? Everything he said was true.”
My father turned the wheel a bit harder than was necessary. I could see he was getting more and more angry, but couldn’t under- stand why.
“What that two-bit preacher is talking about will lead to inter- marriage! I just don’t want to see a bunch of putty-colored people!”
My father being a handy sort, I knew what putty looked like. It was gray.
“Are there putty-colored people?” I was intrigued. I hadn’t seen them, but if no one liked them, perhaps the gray people were hiding.
No answer.
“Candy and her family aren’t putty-colored. They’re tan. They’re the best-looking people I’ve ever seen.”
My father, foreseeing (accurately) years of miscegenation on my part, growled, “Mixing of the races will degrade the white race and result in idiocy.”
“But — you just said Dr. King was smart because he had white mixed in. And Candy and her whole family are really smart and they’re part black, part white, part Hawaiian …”
The conversation ended soon after, as I realized my father was moving into rage. But I was perplexed. How could someone as intelli- gent as my father have such stupid ideas about people?
My father’s prejudices lasted until he was in Saudi, working closely with a coworker named Harvey who was onyx-black and completely brilliant. Unable to credit white blood with the obvious intelligence of the man, my father dropped his old ideas as if he were shedding a jacket. Of course, if he had listened to his oldest daughter, he could have saved himself years of silliness.
That’s Rich
When our rich, greedy, crazy landlords doubled our rent in Mill Valley, we moved to a little yellow house in Kentfield, just over the border from wildly expensive Ross. Our house was a small, modest three-bedroom with old fig, apricot, and walnut trees and grapevines in the yard, all courtesy of the original Italian settlers. They had also bequeathed us with a lemon, a loquat, and a persimmon tree. We promptly put in a garden, which quickly turned into a treasure hunt as we unearthed rusty shovels, gutters, hammers, lengths of chain — even a toilet.
“Did this place used to be a dump?” we asked the remaining Ital- ian neighbor.
“No, no,” he said, clearly offended. “A dump? No, never. Tony lived through the Depression, you know. So he knew the value of things. He never threw anything away. Case he needed it later, you know?”
Well, we didn’t know, but soon we had enough deteriorated mer- chandise to open a hardware store specializing in rust. Most pack rats don’t bury things in the back yard, but maybe he was an especially paranoid pack rat, or perhaps his wife, screaming choice Italian curses, forced his pack-ratting ways underground.
Tony may have rolled over in his grave when we carted away a lifetime of preparing for the worst, but I like to think he would have been happy with the beds of tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, peas, and pumpkins left thriving in its place.
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We soon discovered that our neighbors in Ross were acquisitive at a level poor Tony could never have aspired to.
When six-year-old Mariposa and her mother moved in with us, Mariposa quickly made friends with a girl her age, Chelsea, who lived down the street in Ross. The first time Chelsea came over, she quickly ran to the back of the house, opened the back door, and surveyed the back yard.
“Where’s your pool?” she asked, indignantly, as if we were hiding it from her.
“We don’t have a pool,” Mariposa said desperately, sensing the social gaffe this represented. “But we have a vegetable garden.”
Chelsea’s look of disgust could not have been more vivid if we had been harboring a yard of quicksand and slime. There was no sec- ond visit.
Though Mariposa could easily have walked to the Ross school, and the Kentfield school was a ten-minute drive away, she was denied entrance to the Ross school based on our substandard address (or, maybe they found out about the vegetable garden). This may have been just as well, for at the Kentfield school she found a couple of other low-rent kids who did not object to our straightened circumstances. Only a couple, however. Even at six, children with pools and tennis courts did not consort with children without.
I joined the Ross Pixie Park, a private playground for kids six years old and under, located in the Ross Art and Garden Center. It was a small amount of money plus several bake sales a year, and I could bake. I liked the idea of a playground where my toddler son could race around without being mowed down by the older, bigger kids. Plus, it was an easy walk. Zach loved the playground, as did Mariposa, and I hoped to meet other mothers with kids of a like age that we could socialize with.
But there were rarely any mothers in the park. The children came with their au pairs, beautiful young women from Sweden or Germany as blonde and blue-eyed as their charges. Never did I see a black or Hispanic woman caring for the young scions of Ross. I liked the au pairs, though. A typical conversation would go something like this:
Helga: “Americans are all crazy!”
Me: “Well, all Americans are not quite as crazy as the ones around here.”
Helga: “They have everything! But they’re always angry.” Me: “Yeah, who knew too much money leads to insanity.”
One day a mother with a boy Zach’s age — about fifteen or six- teen months — came into the park. I had a moment of hope as the boy made a beeline for the swings that Zach was on and climbed into the swing next to him.
“Jason! Get off those swings! They’re filthy!” his mother screeched.
The child then headed for the slide. “No, Jason, don’t go down the slide, you’ll get dirty — don’t touch that sand!”
“Ma’am — your kid is at the playground. He thinks he’s here to play,” I said.
“Well, this little Gucci outfit cost three hundred dollars!” the woman huffed. She placed her child on a blanket and handed him some plastic toys. “Just sit there! Don’t touch the grass!”
Another woman entered the playground with a little girl swathed in a riot of lace. She and the other mother admired each other’s chil- dren’s status outfits while my son climbed to the top of the slide, crowed triumphantly, and slid down into the glorious sand.
Born that Way
“You stand here and watch when I come down.” My ten-year-old son skied off toward the lift.
Fifteen minutes later, I saw Zach hurtling down the slopes toward me. He zoomed into a patch of woods, darting in and out of the trees effortlessly, then soared off a ski jump, airborne for a seemingly end- less instant before making a perfect landing. He turned in a half-cir- cle to face me, an Olympiad greeting his adoring audience. I waved enthusiastically.
“Wow! That was great!”
Inside, my heart was thundering like a jackhammer to my brain’s refrain of “Oh god, oh god, oh god!”
“I’m going to the lodge to warm up,” I called, thinking that sounded better than “I’m going somewhere crowded to have a heart attack so someone will call an ambulance.”
Back at the lodge, I ordered a coffee with brandy. Normally I drank neither, but this occasion called for all the drugs I could get. I’d have followed it with a chaser of opium if it had been available. “What am I going to do, what am I going to do, what am I going to do?” my brain whimpered over and over.
Of course, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to keep supporting Zach in testing his limits and exploring his path, even when his path included moguls, obstacles, and ski jumps. Even when my fears were flaying me alive. Other than a rough stint with a babysitting pedophile, my parents had over-protected me — well-intentionedly stamping out every flare of drive, passion, or independence in my spirit
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before it could turn into a conflagration. I was determined not to do the same. But smiling and waving instead of screaming, “Stay on the baby slopes!” was making childbirth look like a cakewalk.
I smiled and waved as Zach went off on a middle-school trip to Guatemala and Belize, and bought him the equipment he needed to indulge his desire for rock climbing, which quickly turned into moun- tain climbing. I smiled and waved as he flew off to Europe after high school, and then I smiled and waved as he flew to Bolivia to scale 20,000-foot peaks.
Then I went home and plunged into a dark night of the soul.
Why had I taken him river rafting, scuba diving, and skiing? Why had I fueled this thirst for adventure instead of squelching it? Why had I filled his head with confidence instead of caution and doubt?
Then I remembered coming into the living room when Zach was thirteen months old. He had climbed to the top of the big, wooden rocking chair, which was rocking madly as he clung to the top edge and shouted, “I did it! I did it!”
“You can’t do that!” I cried, meaning both that he could not climb to the top of that chair, nor could he speak in sentences (his previous utterances had been limited to hi, bye, dada, mama, light and iris). If he hadn’t repeated the sentence twice, I would have thought I had imagined it.
Then I laughed at myself. I hadn’t made Zach the adventuresome soul that he is. This was the nature of his spirit, and that spirit had made itself quite plain from the beginning. I had responded to his spirit with encouragement. But while a parent can damage a child too badly to fulfill its destiny, they can’t make that child someone completely dif- ferent anymore that you can will a pine tree to become an apple tree.
When Zach was around three years old, my mother handed me a notebook wherein my grandmother Tindy had written down many of the “cute” things I had said when I was first learning to talk. Every other sentence was about Witches. I was especially amused at the line, “I want to be a Witch someday. Not Tuesday,” as my coven at the time always met on Tuesdays.
After I finished reading it, my mother said, “You see? You were always like this. You would go out in the garden and come back and tell us what the birds were talking about. And we would laugh at you and
then you would get this disgusted look and go back out in the garden. We never encouraged you in the slightest, but you were always like this. So I believe in reincarnation now, because there is no other explana- tion for how you turned out.”
“No, Mom, you never encouraged me in the slightest. It’s not your fault.”
The religious right/blight continues to believe that you can make a straight adult out of a gay child, in spite of experience making it clear that homophobic programs and attitudes can only make a gay child into a self-hating gay adult who pretends to be straight.
But things are changing, as more and more parents strive to see their child for who he is, rather than change him into what they want.
Soon after moving into Marin, I was at the health food store, in the cosmetic section. A woman with a toddler sitting in the grocery cart was trying on some organic makeup in a mirror. Her son’s hand streaked out toward a display, and in an instant he was smearing bright lipstick on his lips.
“Justin! No, no, no, no no!” the woman exclaimed, taking the lip- stick away and scrubbing the child’s mouth clean.
Ah, I thought sadly, homophobia starts so early.
Then the mother took me completely by surprise.
“That color is just awful on you! Try this one,” she said, handing her son a shade she deemed better for his skin tone.
She knew he was — born that way.
Christopher Columbus and
the Great Wall of Sugar
“They want us to design a space capsule that will help an astro- naut, who happens to be a raw egg, land safely on the moon. Or the playground, whichever comes first.”
My father’s eyes lit up. Talk about an eighth-grade school project after an Aerospace engineer’s own heart.
We sat down right away on my parents’ bedroom floor. “So,” he asked, eyes shining, “what do you think we need?”
“Well, I was thinking of putting the egg in a well-padded box, then wrapping it in a whole lot of blankets and stuffing that into a bas- ketball — for bounce — ”
My father’s shoulders drooped at this woeful demonstration of ignorance from his spatially spastic daughter.
“The box idea is good.” He fetched an egg, rustled up a small box, and cradled the egg in Kleenex and tissue paper inside the box.
“You want the egg to fit tightly in the box, right? If it rattles around it will break. The capsule surrounding real astronauts is small, and they are belted tightly in their seats.”
I nodded. This much I could understand.
“But let’s say we do it your way. The capsule is diving toward the sea at hundreds of miles per hour. Is there any way we can pad it enough not to kill the astronaut when it lands?”
I mentally upscaled my capsule from basketball-size to the size of the kitchen table. I held my arms out, indicating size. “Yeah, we just have to pad it really, really well …”
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“No.” My father struggled to conceal his disappointment. “That will not work. We need something that will give on impact. We need suspension.”
“The suspense comes because we don’t know how many eggs will break and how many will survive when we throw them off the school roof.”
“Suspension. Not suspense,” he said through gritted teeth.
He grabbed a plastic wastebasket with a basket-weave top, toss- ing the used tissues it contained on the floor. He fetched some rubber bands and an X-Acto knife. Carefully extricating the egg from its box nest, he drilled holes on each side of the box, then knotted rubber bands, with the knot inside of each hole. Then, he stretched out the long elastics and anchored them to the plastic weave of the wastebas- ket, leaving the box suspended perfectly in the center. He slammed the wastebasket down in front of me. I flinched, but the box in the center barely moved.
“You see? When the box is suspended, the suspension takes the
brunt of the impact. The astronaut is barely jostled.” “Wow!”
The egg restored to its carefully taped box, the plastic wastebasket in the bathroom tied to the bedroom wastebasket to form the exterior of my plastic space capsule, and my eggstronaut was ready for a crash landing. We tossed it up and let it crash again and again on the brick patio, until my father was satisfied that it worked.
My science teacher was ecstatic, and did not ask too many ques- tions about whose swell idea this really was. When the time came, my egg sailed triumphantly from the school roof to the asphalt below, cheered on by excited eighth-graders. The actual moon landing a few years later was, frankly, anticlimactic.
Two years later, Dad helped me build a miniature guillotine for world history class.
O.K., I helped him build it. Well, I watched while he built it.
I held things while the glue set. I stained the wood. It was a work- ing model, but initially Dad wasn’t happy with how the razor-blade axe slid up and down in its compartment. He weighted it down with a cou- ple of magnets on the top, and then it fell with a much more satisfying
190 Rocket in My Pocket
thunk! I made a clay aristocrat, but the razor blade tended to get bogged down halfway through the neck, so we decided it was classier to present the guillotine sans victim.
But soon there were volunteer victims galore.
The boys in my class could not resist putting their fingers in the victim position, then tripping the mechanism to see if they could pull their fingers out in time.
Like the champagne-addled aristocrats of France, they were not very fast.
By the time the sixth blood-gushing boy in a week made an emer- gency trip to the school nurse, my teacher had had enough.
“Cheri, this is a splendid project, but we’ve all seen it now, so I think it would be best if you took it home.”
“It’s their own stupid fault …” I groused. I had been preening all week as if I had made it myself.
“Take it home today and I’ll give you an A-plus.” “Done.”
Though my father died in a car accident two years before my son Zach was born, Zach clearly inherited my dad’s clever hands and cleverer ideas. Informed that he had to make a project commemo- rating the European discovery of the Americas, we went to a model shop and obtained a kit for making the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria (all three in one kit!). Zach painted the component parts, but declined to assemble them. Instead, he painted a cardboard and clay base blue, representing the Atlantic Ocean. He then made an enor- mous squid out of pink clay, using a ball-point pen to make the suckers on its diamond-shaped legs. The squid was seen boiling up out of the sea, brandishing broken pieces of all three ships in its clutches. Broken hulls and masts were sinking all around it. Zach, honoring his Native American blood by rewriting history, labeled his project “Christopher Columbus Attempts to Discover America, but is instead eaten by a Giant Squid.”
I knew we were in the right school when the principal stopped in front of Zach’s project, read the legend, and broke down into helpless guffaws.
The following year, Zach embarked on something even more ambitious: he decided to construct a model section of the Great Wall of China using sugar cubes as the bricks. I tried to talk him out of it.
“When you try to paint or glue the cubes together, they will melt,” I cautioned.
“No they won’t.” Zach was utterly confident in his plan.
The cubes survived being glued together. Zach daubed clay around all the edges for authenticity. He also showed a cross-section of the wall that had been filled in with straw, broken pottery and — the bodies of the workers who died during construction. Some broken chicken bones and small ivory skulls bought from the Tibetan shop gave verisimilitude to this grisly depiction (based, unlike the giant squid, on historical fact). But before inserting the dried grass and bones into the cross-section, Zach needed to paint the whole thing so the sugar structure would look like clay-fired bricks rather than a dream gift for a horse.
I winced as he placed his wall on newspaper out on the lawn and readied his gray spray-paint gun, trying to brace myself for the hysteria that would surely follow the horrific melting of the Great Wall of China. Perhaps another historical rewrite involving Genghis Khan with flame-throwers would be in order.
The paint flowed on, making a gentle hissing noise as it came through the nozzle.
The sugar held. Not so much as a corner melted. It looked amazing.
“I told you it would work,” Zach said, and though my son’s eyes are the darkest brown, and my father’s were ice-blue, I saw, for an instant, the exact same sparkle.
Gobble
It is wonderful that American culture has a whole holiday devoted to gratitude. And family. And of course, with all the pressure to be happy and grateful and abundant, like most family affairs, Thanksgiv- ing is a sunny, beautiful field pocked with land mines.
The turkey — ritual food, symbol of abundance — is an IED wait- ing to explode all by itself. It is not, let us face it, the easiest food to prepare properly. I grew up believing that the breast meat (which I preferred!) was supposed to be as dry and tasteless as sawdust. It was just a substance to anchor the stuffing and gravy, wasn’t it? It was the Wonder Bread of meats.
One Thanksgiving, when I was nine, my mother left the turkey out to defrost on the sink while she went to the store to purchase the shrimp for the shrimp cocktail appetizer.
When she returned, the turkey was gone. But not without a trace.
A large swath of grease meandered across the kitchen floor and into the laundry room. There, the turkey had been skillfully wedged between the washer and dryer. One leg had been ripped off and was missing.
My mother wrestled the turkey out from between the washer and dryer and set it in the sink. Then she marched out to the back yard to confront the dog.
But the dog was happy to see her, entirely guilt-free and, more tellingly, grease-free.
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And, of course, she had been in the yard the whole time with no way to get in the house.
And, she was a small dog who could not have leaped up to the counter.
But there was another suspect who was nowhere to be found.
MaPor, the tomcat. A year before, my then three-year-old sister had staggered into the house, the front half of a half-grown, emaciated, tiger-striped cat folded over her arm, the back half dangling almost to the floor. “This is MaPor kitty,” she announced, explaining that she had dragged him out of the garbage can. MaPor Kitty remained his name, and he, forever grateful to have been rescued from a life of trashcans and alleyways, followed my sister around his whole life, devoted as a dog. But how could a ten-pound cat wrestle a twenty-five-pound tur-
key to the floor, crush it into a space between two appliances, and sur- gically remove a drumstick?
None of us will ever know, but a snail trail of grease across the bottom of the back door and through the cat door left by the purloined drumstick established his guilt.
That night we were greeted by the oddly unfestive sight of an amputee turkey. “You bought the discount bird?” my father rumbled. “We’re eating a cripple?”
My mother did not find this funny.
Normally, my sister and brother each got a drumstick, but that night, my sister was only offered white meat.
“If your cat had not stolen the other drumstick, you would have one,” my mother said darkly. She had not enjoyed her Thanksgiving Day of washing and drying the turkey, and scrubbing the floor and appliances.
“I don’t care!” Annie said loyally. “He can have my drumstick! He is my good boy and he deserves it!”
“He’s lucky we didn’t roast him,” my father quipped. Enraged, my sister beaned him with a dinner roll.
However, the amputee Thanksgiving was not our grimmest.
In 1967, we moved to Pittsford, New York. My father’s parents, Mimi and Papa, arrived from southern California for Thanksgiving. Mimi had brought my father a present. It was an electric carving knife.
“You always make your wife cut the turkey. That’s the man’s job!
Now you have no excuse!” Mimi crowed triumphantly.
Muscles as big as pigeon’s eggs appeared, throbbing on either side
of my father’s jaw.
How could my spatial-genius rocket-engineer father be bad at slicing turkey?
I didn’t know, and perhaps, his mother could not imagine it either. I want to give Mimi the benefit of the doubt, but she had a long history of criticizing her son harshly, and that history was now pulsing at either side of his clenched jaw.
“Mom likes cutting the turkey!” I said, trying to ward off disaster. “That’s true!” Mother chimed in, “And I like gadgets! I’d love to
try this electric knife!” She went to plug it in.
“No! You cooked the turkey; the least Mike can do is slice it. The man is at the head of the table, it’s his job!” Mimi was obdurate.
Glaring at his mother, my father took the knife and set it whirring.
Mother prudently took a step back.
Shards of breast meat and skin went flying onto the tablecloth.
My father tried manfully to slice, but no matter what he did, the dry breast meat crumbled like sawdust into a pile of shreds and powder under the electric onslaught.
By the time half the breast had been reduced to powder, my father exploded. He hurled the knife, still buzzing fiercely, to the floor. It was quickly followed by the turkey, platter and all.
He stomped upstairs.
My mother retrieved the knife, turned it off, and carried it to the sink. She gathered up the platter and set the turkey back on it. “The floor was just vacuumed,” she softly assured us. The dog and cat rushed to assist with the powdery bits.
Mimi looked down at her plate. “I’m sorry, Janie,” she apologized to my mother, “I didn’t raise him right.”
It was a very quiet dinner, though later my siblings and I referred to it as the Turkey Chainsaw Massacre.
While not gourmand (canned green beans smothered in canned mushroom soup with canned fried onions on top were a staple of our Thanksgivings), and despite the adventures we experienced, our family
dinners were not culinary disasters. Innovation was frowned upon, so everyone had lots of time to perfect the dishes they brought.
It was left to Kit, an acquaintance of mine in Los Angeles, to succumb to the ultimate Thanksgiving culinary disaster. Though twen- ty-six and newly married, she had never really learned to cook. Her husband’s mother was a wonderful cook; she felt the need to impress her. So, she insisted on making Thanksgiving dinner for the whole fam- ily. Then she got cold feet.
“Don’t worry! You have a great cookbook!” I reassured her. “Just follow the directions. You can’t go wrong. Just don’t forget to remove the giblets.”
Thanksgiving morning, she pulled the turkey out of the refriger- ator, where it had defrosted overnight. Carefully she removed the neck and giblets and discarded them. She checked the recipe. It said to wash the turkey thoroughly, inside and out.
So she did.
Thoroughly.
With a whole lot of dishwashing liquid.
Then she patted it dry and rubbed butter into its skin and placed it in the oven.
A couple of hours later, with the stuffing and yams prepared, she opened the oven to check on the turkey’s progress.
It was browning nicely.
It was also blowing enormous soap bubbles from its unstuffed cavity.
They went out for Chinese that night.
When my son was nine, we spent Thanksgiving in Hawaii with some friends who were staying in jungle-style lodging — palm frond ceilings and open walls upstairs. My friend had a nine-year-old niece, and the two kids quickly bloomed a mutual crush and became insep- arable, playing in the waves, gathering shells. Watching my son care- fully combing his blonde hair and putting on his best Hawaiian shirt to impress the girl gave me previews of coming attractions. Our friends were vegetarian, so our main course on Thanksgiving was butternut squash with stuffing. I made vegetarian gravy. The food was good.
But the kids were disgruntled. Thanksgiving without turkey? What a travesty. The girl, Liza, had been warned by her mother not to complain, but she looked sulky as she pushed the food around on her plate. Overhead, a drama unfolded as a huge moth bumbled near the paper lamp hanging from the palm frond ceiling, and an enormous cane spider leaped from the lamp and grabbed it. As the spider quickly subdued its prey and began winding it up Liza burst out, “Spider got a turkey and we didn’t!” Zach quickly joined her, and both kids chanted in unison, “Spider got a turkey and we didn’t! Spider got a turkey and we didn’t! Spider got a turkey and we didn’t!”
It was an extremely politically incorrect moment.
So when we give thanks at our house on Thanksgiving, we have much to be thankful for.
I give thanks that the bird on the table is not the stumpy, amputee turkey, or the chainsaw massacre turkey, and most especially, not the soap bubble turkey.
Zach, of course, now grown, is grateful that we have a turkey. Everyone is grateful that he, our family chef, is the one who brines it and cooks it so it is never dry, but always perfect. Unlike his grandfa- ther, he is happy to slice it, and he does so perfectly.
My Son the Beatle
The slut in the miniskirt, who must have been at least 22 or 23, looked my tall thirteen-year-old son up and down appreciatively as she sauntered by. Instantly, I wanted to grab her by her non-existent lapels, slam her up against the nearby Cinnabon stand, and shout, “That’s a child you were looking at!”
In shock, I merely exclaimed, “Did you see how that woman looked
at you?”
Zach laughed. “Mom, get used to it.”
My own mother, still bitter about my picky eating as a child, was dismayed that I birthed a child who would eat anything (providing it was well prepared; Zach, destined to become a chef, was a food snob from the beginning). She expressed her frustration many times that I had not received my just desserts by having — and being tortured by — a similarly picky, thin, and sickly kid.
But I got my karmic comeuppance when Zach moved into sexual maturity. The Age-of-Aquarius, bisexual, pagan orgy queen ran smack into Mother Bear. Mother Bear won.
It started innocently enough. Driving by the pastures near our house where congregations of wild turkeys fed, I noticed that all the visible turkeys seemed to be female. “Huh, I wonder why no male tur- keys are out today,” I commented.
“How can you tell males from females?” twelve-year-old Zach asked.
“The males are the big, fat ones with the fan tails and the goggles under their necks.”
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“What do you think happened to them all?” Zach asked worriedly. “Well, there’s usually only one male per flock of females.”
Zach digested this information for a moment. “I want to be him,” he concluded.
Ah. We have hormones now, I thought.
My conclusion was bolstered two months later when the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue arrived. For years this issue had met with dis- may (“No sports! Shoot!”) and Zach disgustedly tossing the magazine aside. This year, the swimsuit issue promptly disappeared into his room and was never seen again.
But I thought I had time. I had been a late bloomer, physically and socially. My husband had been eighteen when we met and I was his first real girlfriend.
Zach, having always been tall, mature-looking, and mature-sound- ing for his age was on a different trajectory. He began dating fifteen-year- old high school girls when he was a fourteen-year-old eighth-grader.
Driving him to one of these dates — naturally, he could not drive — Zach tried to prepare me for meeting this girl with the name of an exotic Caribbean island.
“So, Mom, don’t freak out, O.K.? She has a shaved head.” “She’s fifteen and she has a shaved head?”
“It’s so you can see her tattoo.”
“She has a tattoo on her head? What kind of parents let a fifteen- year-old girl get a tattoo on her head!”
“Mom, Mom, you’ll love it; it’s a Celtic knot.”
After picking him up from another date — an afternoon date, involving three boys and three girls … what could go wrong? — Zach confided over dinner, “Marissa sure does like to be massaged a lot.”
“You were massaging? On a first date?” “Well, sure, we were in the hot tub.”
“In the hot tub. Massaging. On a first date.”
“Mom, there were four other kids there. What do you think, we’re going to have an orgy?”
So, dear reader, at this point do you mention all the extremely plentiful orgy genes you have probably passed on to your (hopefully) innocent 14-year-old, thus opening a can of (wriggling and orgiastic) worms?
My Son the Beatle 199
No. I thought not.
Shock piled upon shock as Zach began high school.
Zach rolled on his back after doing a hundred pushups. “That’s twenty more than Alyssa can do,” he said.
“Who’s Alyssa?”
“She’s a girl in my gym class.”
“What? You have girls in your gym class?” “Of course.”
“Girls and boys in the same gym class?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking at me like I was some sort of prehistoric
relic.
“Do you share the same showers?”
“No, Mom, of course we don’t share the same locker rooms or
showers.”
“Oh, uh, good. But the girls don’t do the same things, do they? Like, wouldn’t Alyssa be doing girls’ pushups? I demonstrated a “girls pushup” with knees bent.
“No, Mom, the girls do all the same stuff we do. Girls are tough!”
Working doggedly to change society my whole life, suddenly change had knocked me down and sprinted ahead of me.
Zach had signed up for a special, high-pressure, very creative program called ROCK (maybe because it was as tough as rock? I for- get the acronym), which involved a lot of group projects. Parents were allowed to come to the auditorium to see some of the more dramatic projects presented.
Several groups presented their materials to a smattering of ap- plause and the occasional cheer. Then Zach and his group took the stage. All around the auditorium, teenage girls stood up and screamed, “Yay Zach! Go Zach! Woooo, Zach!”
My son is a Beatle?
On the way home, I cautiously broached the subject. “So … I noticed when you got on stage, all these girls started cheering … what was that all about?”
Zach ducked his head, looking abashed. “Well, Mom, I am one of
the more popular guys.”
I had a popular kid? Smart kids can’t be popular kids. Turns out, in this school there were so many brilliant, high-achieving kids that
they had no choice but to regard the smart kids as popular. I had been prepared to deal with adolescent angst, being sidelined, wall-flowering, being an outsider — in other words, my own adolescence revisited. I had no idea how to help Zach deal with instant popularity bordering on stardom.
Luckily, he didn’t seem to need any help.
Marvelous Marin
Driving along a beautiful country road with Zach, aged seven- teen, I asked him about the new girl he was dating.
“Tell me about her. What is she like?”
“Well, she’s a Witch.” He paused for a moment. “Huh, all the girls I date are Witches. Why do you think that is?”
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing at the genuine look of puzzlement on his face. He clearly hadn’t considered that hav- ing been brought up by a Witch mother, and attending Wiccan cere- monies from conception onward, might be influencing the sort of girls that attracted him.
Of course, only in Marin would there be so many junior sorcer- esses to choose from.
Probably nowhere on the planet is there such a concentration of shamans, sorceresses, pagans, meditators and new-age seekers as there is in the Bay area of Northern California. Hawaii has more interracial marriages, but we have our fair share of those, and our gay population is notoriously vociferous and huge.
Two incidents occurred shortly after I moved to the Bay Area that showed me I “wasn’t in Kansas anymore,” or even in L.A., where my husband and I had spent the last six years earning our graduate degrees.
Summer of 1980, I was walking in the Castro District of San Francisco when three men in black-leather motorcycle regalia, heavy with chains, came walking toward me. They approached three abreast, taking up the whole sidewalk. In Los Angeles, a group of Hell’s Angels,
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Sons of Satan, or some other motorcycle club was not what any woman alone wanted to see bearing down on her. Heart hammering, I looked around for which shop, if any, might be safe to take shelter in. Then, two more men, similarly dressed, on motorcycles, turned the corner, gunning their “hogs” as they pulled even with us, cutting off one of my avenues for escape.
One of the men on the sidewalk shouted joyfully to one on a bike, “Oh Maurice!” in an ear-splitting falsetto.
“Oh, Sheila!” the man on the bike squealed back, waving his arm so that his chains jingled.
I almost collapsed with relief. They were gay! I was invisible! I love San Francisco!
I quickly became involved with Starhawk’s new Wiccan/political organization called Reclaiming, and formed a coven with some of the other members, which we dubbed the Holy Terrors. We had discov- ered in our shamanic explorations that there is a sort of terror that accompanies transformation. Unlike normal fear, which means, “get the hell out of here,” this fear signaled, “hang on; it’s going to be a wild ride.”
This element of fear of the unknown is supposed to be a part of Wiccan initiation, so we were always trying to create a series of situa- tions for each initiate that would “unsettle” them enough to help them shed the old ego contractions and emerge the stronger for it.
As part of one of the first initiations in the Holy Terrors, we took Bridget blindfolded to a playground in Golden Gate Park, sent her headfirst down a concrete slide into a hammock waiting below, bun- dled her up like a caterpillar in a cocoon, and carried her off, chanting.
It was night, and the playground was almost as deserted as we had hoped. But there was a white-haired couple sitting on the swings, rocking gently as if on rocking chairs, watching.
As we passed close by the swings carrying Bridget in the ham- mock, the man turned to the woman and said, “Yup. They’re Witches, all right.”
I couldn’t believe I was now living in a place where our M.O. was commonly known and calmly accepted.
Of course, in Marin, Witches are the most rational, least “out
there” of all the 31 spiritual flavors in the ice cream store of consciousness
Marvelous Marin 203
(actually, the Buddhists are kind of boring, too). We’re like, vanilla. We honor nature and the seasonal celebrations. We observe natural pat- terns and take an inquisitive, “science of the sacred” view of magic. Does it work? What’s the theory? How are any two shamanic traditions similar, where do they overlap, how do they differ?
Contrast this with the “‘new age” woman who insisted to me that we didn’t have to worry about species going extinct because they were all being taken to the center of the earth, where they would stay until it was safe to come out again.
Or the woman who, in all sincerity, showed me a photograph purporting to show an angel’s foot as it was landing on the earth, thus proving that angels existed.
It was a very human-looking foot.
There exists a wide swath of spiritual practitioners who feel that critical thinking would be … well, critical. And they don’t want to be critical; they want to be accepting, and loving, like … sponges.
Sea sponges are cool-looking. But they are not very bright.
The level of psychological awareness in Marin is somewhat more encouraging, even if it becomes oversimplified psychobabble.
At least people are trying to understand themselves and others.
Late one night, some of my apprentices were driving home when a policeman pulled them over for exceeding the speed limit down White’s Hill.
The cop looked in through the window at Shakti, took her identi- fication, and said, “Follow me.”
Shakti followed him back to his cop car. He opened the door and leaned in to get something. Obediently, she followed him. Startled, he barked, “No! Other side of the door!”
She quickly backed up, positioning herself on the other side of the police car door. The officer looked up apologetically and explained, “I have personal space issues.”
Only in Marin do the cops know they have personal space issues. Even Marin children absorb the terms of psychological assessment.
While commiserating with my then-sixteen-year-old son on his on-again, off-again girlfriend’s cheating tendencies, he sighed and said, “She’s commitment-phobic.”
“You know,” I replied, “she’s sixteen years old. It might be a little soon to peg her as commitment-phobic.”
All of which helps to explain why, when my son expressed puzzle- ment over his habit of dating Witches, I just smiled and said, “Hmmm. Interesting.”
Brave New World
“Mom, it’s just sage!” My son and his friend stood nervously in the bathroom, trying to look innocent despite the telltale bits of herb floating in the toilet bowl.
Hard as I was trying to be the stern parent, a strangled giggle escaped. “Oh, come on, kids, that might have worked with my parents’ generation. You think I can’t tell the difference between pot and sage? Really?” Zach and his best friend drooped perceptibly.
“I don’t want to bum you out when you’re high, so we’ll talk about this tomorrow morning.”
Calm on the outside, screaming on the inside — my life as the parent of an adolescent had begun.
Back in my bedroom, I began consulting with my husband.
“So, what do you think we should do? Zach’s only thirteen; he can’t be starting with marijuana now.”
My husband, being dead, remained silent. And of course, that was the source of much of my consternation. Having been through the terrible tragedy of losing his dad only a few months before, how would that affect Zach’s decisions about drugs, alcohol, and sex?
Luckily, he stayed smart. But I could not have known then that that would be the case.
“So, I assume there’s alcohol at these parties you’ve been going
to.”
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My now-sixteen-year-old son continued happily dissecting his trout. He might not like my line of questioning, but he wasn’t going to abandon a delicious brunch at the Two Bird, our neighborhood café. “Of course,” he said genially. “Some of the parents leave it out for us.” I smiled and chewed quietly for a few minutes while my brain rounded up and shot each of the alcohol-providing parents in question. “How much have you experimented with it? Do you know your
limit?”
“Yeah. A six-pack of beer is my limit. I’m tipsy after that.”
Six? It takes six beers to get him — a little drunk? I sipped my ice tea, practicing the slow-breathing Zen of emotional Botox.
Of course, at sixteen, he was six-foot-two, bordering on six-foot- three. Body size does affect tolerance.
“Sounds like you got your dad’s high tolerance for alcohol. That’s good. Even when I was drinking, two beers or cocktails were my limit.”
Zach chuckled, shaking his head. “Girls can’t hold their liquor.”
“Do the girls get in trouble sometimes at parties because of that?
Do stuff they don’t really want to do?”
“Well, they would, but see, the designated drivers are there for that, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“The designated drivers make sure kids don’t do stuff they’ll regret later.”
“Really? Like what?”
“Well, I was one of the designated drivers at a party a couple of months ago. This girl got really drunk, and a guy — he was drunk too — took her in a bedroom and closed the door. Her friends were all, ‘She doesn’t know what she’s doing; you’ve got to save her!’ So, we knocked on the door, but it was locked and he wouldn’t unlock it. So, we had to go around and take a screen off the window and climb in through the window. He was really mad and fighting us. So, we had to hit him on the head with a shovel.”
“You hit him on the head with a shovel?” At this point I’m not even pretending to eat.
“Yeah. Then we took him to another room to sleep it off.” “He must have been pretty mad when he woke up.”
“Oh no, Mom. He was grateful we kept him from doing the wrong thing.”
Zach lifted the delicate skeleton of the trout to his bread dish and
beamed at me reassuringly.
Oh, brave new world that has such people in it.
Invasions and Conspiracies
“Die, Frenchie!” Snarling, the German hurled himself on his ancient enemy.
“Die, Kraut!” the curly haired Frenchman responded, equally enraged, prepared to sell his life dearly.
Weapons flashed in the sun.
Quickly, family members moved to pull the combatants apart as they bellowed and slashed at each other.
Still, they struggled, howling insults, baring teeth, each deter- mined to leave the other in a pool of blood.
With France and Germany in the European Union now, cozy as pie, you’d think everyone could let bygones be bygones.
Someone really should notify the dogs.
My adult son, Zachary, has the most wonderful dog in the world, a black standard poodle named Cooper. His previous name was Nep- tune, but he was a rescue dog, and Zach’s wife Loryn felt the dog needed a manly sort of a name (very important when you’ve been gelded). Cooper — light, yet masculine, and American, seemed perfect.
And he really is nearly the perfect dog. Polite, obedient, never begs for food, loving and affectionate, yet never slobbery, smart as a whip with an enormous comprehended vocabulary. And beautiful. Cooper trots, snorts, and pirouettes like a Lipizzaner stallion. He can outrun and out-maneuver any other dog (except, perhaps, another poodle).
All this and hypoallergenic too?
Mon dieu!
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Oh, and Cooper is friendly. Friendly and playful. Loves other dogs.
Except for German Shepherds.
These he hates at first sight, and they return the favor.
In Cooper’s defense, the German Shepherds always attack first.
Which figures. The Germans always attack first. But Cooper responds with equal fury.
I blame past-life trauma.
Whenever Cooper sees a German Shepherd, he regresses into Lucky Pierre, dog of the Resistance. From the scornful way he eyes his approaching enemy, you can almost see a beret dipping rakishly over one eye, a Gauloise cigarette dangling insolently from his mouth, a certain je ne sais quois; a certain “never say die” air animates his entire being.
And through the mists of time you see him, Lucky Pierre, a crit- ical communiqué attached to his collar, dashing through withering machine-gun fire, his human companions covering him as best they can with old hunting rifles.
But Pierre! So fast! So swift! An impossible target.
Once again he cheats death, and soon he is lapping up a little
cognac in his water at the Resistance’s makeshift headquarters.
But alors! As Pierre lopes back to his companions, another message affixed to his neck, suddenly a Boche dog, eighty pounds of muscle to Pierre’s slender fifty, launches out of the shadows and bears Pierre to the ground, fangs ravening toward Pierre’s slender throat.
Will our plucky hero survive?
Ha! They don’t call him Lucky Pierre for nothing. Lucky he has me to drag him out of the fray …
I try to talk sense into Cooper.
“Times have changed, mon ami,” I whisper. “Now we are in a time of peace.”
He eyes me fondly, and I hear him thinking, Ah, Cherie, how charm- ingly naïve you are. His eyes glint mischief, though their darkness hints at untold depths of sorrow.
He reminds me that Pierre was not always a warlike dog. He had a good life, before la Guerre, eating his red-wine-scented kibble, admired and petted by stylish women. A debonair dog, one who once trotted
210 Rocket in My Pocket
around a show ring, one who once wore a red rose in his collar. A classy thoroughbred, a lover, not a fighter …
But submit to the Nazi leash? Never, mon ami!
German Shepherds are the running dogs of fascism, the canine collaborators of repression. The dogs of the S.S., torturing prisoners, stalking around the concentration camps, charging through the fire hoses to mangle the civil rights protesters in Selma and Montgomery.
Have they changed?
Mais non.
But there are worse threats.
For there are forces — perhaps worse than those Nazi dogs of terror — more insidious, more subtle, but no less committed to world domination. It is a conspiracy, and the evildoers are everywhere, hiding in every tree, every bush, watching with their beady little eyes. Mas- ters of the arboreal landscape, they attack with guerilla swiftness, then disappear.
Squirrels.
Cooper is convinced there is a great squirrel conspiracy, vicious rodents set on robbing all of us of our nuts, and driving our dogs nuts. Stealing dogs’ sanity — dogs who want to have a nice, quiet walk in the park, but are then goaded beyond all endurance!
“Cooper,” I remonstrate, “Now it is you who are being a fascist.
Squirrels are harmless, adorable creatures. They deserve to live.” Cooper snorts with disdain.
Ah, did they fool you then, with their soft, alluring tails? Look at them twitch-
ing, first one way, then another — could any creature that twitchy be truly innocent?
And what do they do with their lives?
Constantly hiding things! And taunting their betters!
Humans worry about rats in the garbage, mice in the house, rab- bits in the garden. But squirrels? Who cares?
Dogs care. Dogs know. Squirrels are the anti-Christ, or, worse, the anti-dog, plotting evil like cats, but even faster, never staying to fight like a dog, always racing straight up the nearest tree (and there’s always a damn tree) and then sniggering — sniggering! — at the dog frothing and yapping below.
Tooth-teasers, looking so soft and helpless and killable and then bam! Up the tree, leaving a dog’s jaws snapping at thin air, looking fool- ish, looking like a failure as a hunter …
A poodle’s work is never done. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
My toddler twin granddaughters, under Cooper’s tutelage, learned barking as their first language. Any time a rabbit or squirrel came into view, they would chase it. Once, when I was watching them at the park without Cooper, they saw a squirrel and chased it up a tree, barking ferociously. A couple of older women walked by, eyeing me pityingly at this bizarre display. Ruby and Zoe jumped like wild pup- pies, gnashing their teeth at the rodent chittering above them.
“Looks like it got away. Let’s go to the playground,” I suggested.
They turned away from the tree. Zoe ran ahead while Ruby took my arm. “We don’t like squirrels,” she informed me disdainfully.
Another convert to the Resistance.
Fortunately, Cooper — a.k.a. Lucky Pierre — will never surrender.
Bombs Away
“Once the rockets are up Who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department Says Werner von Braun.”
—Tom Leher
January 18, 2018. I’m in my condo on the Big Island of Hawaii when the emergency message comes through on my cell phone: Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.
Well, shit. Fucking toddler Donald Trump called toddler Kim Jong Un fat, and now, instead of flinging sand, Un is flinging nuclear weapons at Hawaii.
Where Trump is not.
But where I, innocent bystander, unfortunately am.
Is there a bomb shelter nearby? A quick search online reveals a tsunami shelter at an inland gymnasium. Compared to a nuclear holo- caust, a tsunami now seems like the most charming of threats.
Unfortunately, once we’re talking nuclear blast and subsequent radiation, a gymnasium in back of the high-water mark isn’t going to cut it. I start filling the bathtub and bathroom sink with water. The bathroom is the one room in the condo without windows. I can shelter there without worrying about a cyclone of glass shattering in on me. The worst of the radioactive particles will settle in a few days, and I will have water and shelter for those few days.
Assuming the town of Hilo doesn’t take a direct hit.
Water supply secure, I haul blankets and pillows into the bathroom, along with a notebook in which to inscribe my final thoughts. Then I take out my cell phone and call my son, Zach. He answers on the first ring.
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“Hey Zach, I have some — bad news. The Hawaiian state emer- gency line sent a text. Bombers have been sighted coming from North Korea to Hawaii. They will be here in half an hour. I filled the tub with water. So — if I survive the initial blast — I have a chance. I’ll do my best to survive, Zach. But — in case that doesn’t work out — I wanted to call and say goodbye.”
“Mom — Mom — it’s gotta be a hoax.” “It looks really official,” I whisper sadly.
“Maybe somebody hacked the site,” he insists.
He needs to hope. Let him have twenty-five minutes of hope. “Yeah, maybe. But just in case — thanks so much for being my
son. You and your dad have been the best parts of my life. And, what- ever happens, love doesn’t die.”
“Mom, I’m going online to research this. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s fake. Just hang on; I’ll call you back.”
He hangs up. I gather a few food items and put them under the sink in the bathroom.
Zach calls back. “I can’t find anything yet. Read the warning to me — what does it say exactly?”
I read the ominous text to him. Fifteen minutes left.
“I’m going to look again.”
“Oh sweetie — just stay with me for a moment. I love you. It’s O.K., I’m not afraid. As long as you and Loryn and the babies are O.K. in Seattle, I can manage. Love doesn’t die. I’ve had an interesting life.”
Zach stays on the phone while using his computer, determined to research my fate into something survivable.
Ten minutes left.
I have to hang up when there are three minutes left, I decide. I don’t want him to hear me dying.
I stand out on my balcony lanai, gazing at the lagoon. If I’m not killed in the initial blast, but develop radiation sickness, it is comforting to think that I can walk to the lagoon and drown myself. There is an out, an easy out, right there, sparkling in the sun. It’s a beautiful day to die.
And it’s possible the bombs are just heading for Honolulu to wipe out our navy and the big population center there, and are not directed
at this island at all. Depending on how the wind is blowing, radiation might not even reach us.
Of course, it’s equally possible that a demented sociopath like Kim Jong Un would be thrilled to drop a nuclear bomb down the throat of an active volcano like Kilauea, only half an hour away from here, to see what would happen.
No one knows what would happen in that instance. But we can assume it wouldn’t be good.
The only thing worse than lava racing toward you at high speed would be — radioactive lava hurtling toward you at high speed.
Five minutes left. Four …
“Mom! I found it!” Zach cries jubilantly. “It was an accident, Mom! The officials sent it, but they sent it by accident!”
“Are you sure?”
My phone beeps. Another official message: There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. False Alarm.
“You’re right — they just sent a message saying the original one was in error.”
“I knew it had to be fake!” Zach rejoices.
“Well, thanks so much for helping — and being there. Looks like I will live to fight another day.”
I say goodbye and walk out onto the lanai again. All the colors of the lagoon and its surrounding trees and vegetation become saturated and bright.
Being alive is exquisite, I think, breathing in the flower-scented
air.
Well, it’s Saturday morning. Now that I’m not dying, I might as
well go to the farmer’s market in downtown Hilo.
When I get there, only about a third of the stalls are occupied, but slowly the vendors trickle in. I go to the stall where I always buy their delicious lilikoi drink. A local woman in her sixties hands it to me with a smile. A boy of about six is with her. “Tutu,” he says, “are we not going to the gymnasium to be safe now?”
Her eyes crinkle as she smiles at him. “No, we don’t need to. It was a false alarm. Everything’s fine now.” Then she cups his chin in her hands and says, “Oh, that little face …”
White-hot rage explodes through my body. The only reason I could calmly face my own demise was because my family was three thousand miles away, safe. What of this woman, what of all the moth- ers and grandmothers who believed their children and grandchildren were about to die?
To think that the most dysfunctional, unloving males on the planet have the power to murder us all. Males who have never cupped a child’s face in their hands and murmured, “Oh, that little face.” Sociopaths who care for no one but themselves and their own egos — the Putins, the Trumps, the Jong Uns of the world.
I walk, shaking, to the nearest restaurant. It is thronging with old white tourists, and it is all I can do not to scream, “Which of you ass- holes voted for Trump? Who voted to kill us all?” I want to drive them into the sea; I want me and all the Hawaiian people, all the parents and grandparents, to chase the Republicans into the sea, deeper and deeper until they drown.
Fuck, I want to hold them under.
But I’m not Kim-Jong-Un-type crazy, so instead I sit down and order an iced tea.
I realize I must be experiencing what my rocket scientist father experienced when he went to Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis to try to avert World War III.
Unlike most engineers, my father was very socially adept, hand- some, and charismatic. With his “hail fellow well met” impish sense of humor, he was the perfect emissary to explain technology to politicians. He made many trips to the White House and the Pentagon to demon- strate to politicians and generals alike how superior our rockets were, both for winning the space race and for nuclear deterrence.
Then, on October 16, 1962, an American U-2 spy plane photo- graphed secret nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. President Kennedy called the Executive Commit- tee of the National Security Council together. They called for experts. My father packed his bags.
My Republican father was no pacifist. Once, at a dinner party, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” playing in the background, my Ger- man father clapped his nephew Chris on the shoulder and said, “Ah,
Chris — music to invade Poland by!” He was only half-joking. He had painted the double-headed axes of our German family crest on my kindergarten lunch box, partly to counter its deplorable Scottish plaid pattern, and partly to show the little boys I was not to be messed with. But my father understood that nuclear capacity had changed everything. There was no courage or nobility in setting fire to the atmosphere. He understood that war now could mean the annihilation of our species — and most of the others. So he found himself racing from general to general, trying to persuade them out of their hardline insistence that war was the only solution. “So, General LeMay — see which way the wind is blowing? Let me explain to you how radiation
works.”
The generals (“those brass-hat dinosaurs,” as my father called them) continued to call for war. “We’ll bomb Cuba back to the stone age,” LeMay threatened. We had more nuclear bombs than Russia. We’d show them a thing or two!
My father began to despair. He would die alone on the East Coast, and his family would die three thousand miles away. He would not be there to hold and comfort his beloved wife and children at the end.
But Jack and Bobby Kennedy listened. My father privately held the Kennedys in contempt as a pair of spoiled rich boys. But when he was with them, he showed nothing but respect, patiently explain- ing everything he knew about nuclear warfare. And whatever else he thought of them, the Kennedys had young children that they loved. They, like my father, had held their children and thought, Oh, that little face. And my father played that card, that “leave a world for our chil- dren” card, with everything he had. And in the end, although every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff continued to insist on war, Ken- nedy held firm on taking the path of negotiation, and the world was saved.
When I was in college, I broached the subject with my father. “What was it like, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, trying to persuade the generals and feeling like you couldn’t get through to them?”
“No one will ever know how close we came,” he whispered.
My father helped save the world once. I’ve spent my life, in my own small way-- trying to do the same.
Laughter — sarcastic, silly, rueful, delighted, joyful, pure — is one of our greatest weapons.
It is also one of our greatest medicines. There’s more than one way to rock it.
Afterword:
Venus and Mars are All Right Tonight
Recently, I asked my six-year-old twin grand-daughters what they thought about rockets, and space travel.
“You mean like when people went to the moon?” Zoe asks. “Yes.”
“They needed space suits.” Ruby says.
“There’s no oxygen because there are no trees,” Zoe informs me. I had actually never thought of it that way.
“I want to go. I always wanted to see the moon,” Zoe says, “I want to be in the rocket ship and press all the buttons.”
Ruby shivers with distaste. “You’d have to wear a space suit.” Her sartorial taste, like mine, runs more to flower-faery goddess dance costumes.
“I’m not going,” Ruby grimaces, “We can see the moon from here.”
Twins, but decidedly different.
Zoe immediately ran to get a library book on Mars that she had just borrowed. Many of the photos in the book had been sent by the Mars Rover, a robotic emissary who could visit the place humans could not.
“The water on Mars is frozen,” Zoe informs me.
“You could ice skate,” Ruby says. Ice skating is a new skill for her.
She adores it.
“But I’m still not going,” she hastens to add.
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“I’m going to Mars when the space station is complete. But it will be cold.” Zoe acknowledges.
Zoe may never have heard the song Rocket Man by Elton John (‘Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid/In fact, it’s cold as hell …”) but she knows the score.
She turns to the page in the Mars book that shows the not-yet built space station in all its hypothetical glory.
“I’ll dress warmly,” Zoe promises.
My father would have loved this so much. Genetics. What are you
going to do?
I always thought the lyric of Rocket Man that runs, “Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone,” was, “Rocket man, burning through the blue of heaven’s dome.”
I like my lyrics better.
That’s how I thought of my dad after he died; “Rocket man, burning through the blue of heaven’s dome.” Fifty and gone, moving through life fast as a rocket.
My grandchildren have recently become aware of death. They know their father’s dad died when their dad was just thirteen, and they know my dad is dead too. They know death is often associated with old age, so they worry about me.
“So, you’re old, but not very old, right? Ruby queries me. “Right. I’m old, but not very old.”
“How old are you?” Zoe asks.
I flash seven sets of ten fingers. My twins appear shocked.
“That’s a lot of fingers,” Zoe finally says.
“So how much longer do you think you will live?” Ruby asks, cutting to the chase.
“Well, um, hard to say … I think another ten or twelve years, probably.”
Ruby nods, mollified. Ten or twelve years sounds like a long time to a six-year-old.
“How long do you think I will live?” Zoe challenges.
220 Rocket in My Pocket
Before I can hazard a guess, she says, “I’m going to live to be 99.
I plan to take care of myself.”
And given that a year is 687 days on Mars rather than our measly 365 days here on earth, a sojourn spent at the Mars space station might render Zoe a very old 99 indeed.
My father worked with rockets to put humans on the moon.
I made a career of ‘drawing down the moon’, bringing pagan ways back to earth.
My son runs an ice cream company called Molly Moon, selling joy in the present.
What will my grand-daughters be?
Priestesses, or rocket scientists?
Will they live in a world blown back to the stone age, or in a civi- lized hub on Mars?
No telling yet.
Reach for the stars, my dears — it runs in the family. Reach for the stars.
Cerridwen Fallingstar
Cerridwen Fallingstar is a pioneering Priestess in the feminist spir- ituality movement she helped ignite in the 1970’s. She is a renowned lecturer and teacher of magic and shamanic spiritual development classes. Cerridwen has appeared on programs including AMLA Morning Show, the Oprah Channel, and National Geographic, in addition to many films and literary anthologies. She is the author of three historical novels based on her past lives: The Heart of the Fire, set in 16th century Scotland, and White as Bone, Red as Blood: The Fox Sorceress, and White as Bone, Red as Blood: The Storm God, set in 12th century Japan. Her first memoir, Broth from the Cauldron: A Wisdom Journey through Everyday Magic, was published in 2020. She lives in Marin County, California.
Author photo copyright Susanna Frohman
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Books by Cerridwen Fallingstar
Fiona McNair is a peasant girl in 16th Century Scotland. Her grandmother, the leader of the village coven, is teaching her herbcraft, healing and magic, as she follows the visions that lead her in a path of shamanic powers known as Witchcraft. Fiona grows to be beautiful and falls in love - with her wild Gypsy friend Annie; with Sean, the youthful, wealthy and potentially dangerous son of the village Lord; and with a minstrel who still dares sing the old songs of magic and power. Then, the Witch-hunter comes.
The Heart of the Fire is a suspenseful blend of magic, romance, danger and eroticism. Even more, it is an authentic past-life chronicle, a unique and revealing window into the lives of historical Witches from their own viewpoint: who they were, what they believed, what all of us lost as the magical web of life was torn asunder.
$15.95, Kindle $8.99
Book One of the White as Bone, Red as Blood saga. In twelfth cen- tury Japan, Seiko Fujiwara, a young woman believed to be a sorceress, is caught in a deadly conflict between the Heike and the Genji, two clans battling for control of the throne. The peaceful Heian period is giving way to the rise of the Samurai; Japan teeters on the edge of a time of darkness. Seiko’s mother, priestess of Inari, the deity of abun- dance and sorcery, predicts that if Lord Kiyomori’s daughter Tokushi’s closest friend, becomes Empress and gives birth to the next Emperor, their world will be saved.
If he lives …
It is Seiko’s responsibility to make sure the prophecy comes true. Journey with Seiko as she navigates through a world of assassins, pal- ace intrigue, warfare and enchantments, struggling to honor her giri, her sacred destiny, while longing for the fulfillment of love.
$19.95, Kindle $9.99
Book Two of the White as Bone, Red as Blood series brings the saga to its shattering conclusion. In twelfth century Japan, Seiko Fujiwara, a young woman believed to be a sorceress, is caught in a deadly conflict between the Heike and the Genji, two clans battling for control of the throne. The peaceful Heian period is giving way to the rise of the Samurai; Japan trembles on the edge of a time of darkness. Seiko’s mother, priestess of Inari, the deity of abundance and sorcery, pre- dicts that if Lord Kiyomori’s daughter Tokushi, Seiko’s closest friend, becomes Empress and gives birth to the next Emperor, their world will be saved.
If he lives …
It is Seiko’s responsibility to make sure the prophecy comes true. Journey with Seiko as she navigates through a world of assassins, pal- ace intrigue, warfare and enchantments, struggling to honor her giri, her sacred destiny, without sacrificing the passions of her heart.
$19.95, Kindle $9.99
Broth from the Cauldron is a collection of “teaching stories” a lit- erary Wiccan soup for the soul. It is a distillation of the wisdom Cerrid- wen Fallingstar has gathered from her journey through life, and from her 40 years as a Shamanic teacher and Wiccan priestess. At turns poignant and humorous, it chronicles her trajectory from a Republi- can Cold War upbringing to a Pagan priestess, offering a portrait of a culture growing from denial to awareness. Accessible to any audience interested in personal growth, Broth from the Cauldron is for anyone who ever stood at the crossroads wishing a fairy godmother would come along and show them the path.
$16.95, Kindle $8.99, Audible (read by author) $19.98
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