Beginning at the Beginning

13 June 2007

I was born in Chicago at the ragged end of the baby boom in 1953. My mother's family were dirt poor and her father lost almost all of his farm in the Depression, except for the bit he kept as a market garden growing vegetables for his family and sweet corn which he sold at a stall on the roadside. My mother was a bright child, and a schoolteacher came to see my grandmother to tell her she should be allowed to continue her education and go to college. My grandfather was totally opposed to this, but my grandmother, who had had to leave school at fifteen to support her mother and disabled sister, defied him on the issue as she did on every other issue. And somehow, with the help of a scholarship, my mother went oft to study at the University of Illinois.

For my mother, this was the door to opportunity, but also to her downfall. For it was there she met a handsome artist from a wealthy Chicago family, who was studying architecture and could dance like a dream. He was the family renegade and I think there was an element of rebellion in bringing my mother, a poor Irish Catholic, home to meet his family.

His mother and father had emigrated from Sweden and had built a small business empire on Scandanavian furniture and property rentals. They had a number of nice houses in Skokie which they rented out to nice middle-class families, and were also, unashamedly, slumlords. The family prided themselves on their sophistication; his mother was a sculptress, and after family dinners, my mother said, they would play string quartets in the living room. My mother, who was studying accountancy and who valued artistic talent more than anything, was rapt.

The Second World War intervened, however, and the man who could dance like a dream joined the Navy and served in the South Pacific on the USS Pensacola, an unlucky ship that was hit repeatedly during the war (and, to complete its bad fortune, was sent to Bikini Atoll to guard the area of the first nuclear tests afterwards). Following a serious hit, the ship was returned to port for repairs at Mare Island near San Francisco. My mother got on a train to meet him there and, in a hastily arranged ceremony at the base chapel and wearing a borrowed wedding dress, she married him. My father shipped out four days later.

As the war was ending, the ship was hit again and again by kamikaze pilots. In one raid, his best friend, who he had been standing next to at the time, was incinerated. My father did not return from the war the same man who had left. Maybe none of them do.

They settled in Chicago and had four children in six years. My father was drinking heavily and couldn't hang onto money. "If he had five dollars in his pocket," my mother would say, "he would spend ten." He could still dance like a dream, but now he was dancing with women who were not my mother - and doing a lot else with them besides. He and my mother would split up every couple of years. But they were crazy about each other and my father would always come back. And make her pregnant again. And then feel compelled to stray. When he was not drinking, my father was warm, funny and charming. He would be unable to stop working or to sleep because he was on top of the world. Other times his moods were dark. He would drink and change, Dr.Jekyll like, into someone my mother didn't know. What she didn't realise until my brother was diagnosed many years later, was that my father was suffering a bipolar illness; manic depression as it was then called. But it was never spoken of. These things didn't happen to respectable people.

His mood swings went untreated and, as my aunt confessed to me after my mother's death, he became abusive to her. And violent. One day my four year old brother told my mother that, when he was grown up he would be able to hit a mommy as well. Still desperately in love with the man my father was when he was sober, she nertheless knew that this could not go on.

A few months before I was born, my father moved out of the family home, which was owned by the Swedish property empire that was his mother and father. He had a girlfriend, a woman who owned a bar and who didn't give him a hard time about his drinking, mainly because she was an alcoholic herself. Although my father apparently saw their liaison as a casual affair, as he was still in love with my mother, things got rather complicated when the girlfriend got pregnant. His mother was horrified of scandal and insisted that my father divorce my mother so that he could marry the girlfriend before she gave birth. When he refused she threatened to cut him off, and that seems to have persuaded him. It is painful to say it, but my father was a weak man. Unlike his mother who had never suffered from sentimentality.

When my father was about nine, his mother found his wild behaviour intolerable, and sent him to a childless couple in Iowa to be adopted. They loved my father and he loved them and he settled well there. But three years later, before the adoption was final, his mother changed her mind and took him back. As far as I know he never saw them again. His sister once described her mother to me as "A very good mother. She just had no maternal instinct."

Since my mother was Catholic and bound by her religion not to get a divorce, the problem now was how my father could achieve one in time to marry his girlfriend as his mother had ordered.

It was the dead of winter, snowing and ten below zero when my mother came to the door of our Skokie house to find a heating engineer, employed by her landlords (the in-laws!), come to service the boiler. After bangng around for a bit, he pronounced the boiler in need of repair. He turned it off and promised to return shortly with the needed parts. He left and didn't return. My mother, smelling a rat, gathered up her four small children and moved into her mother's place, proclaiming that she would not come back until it was sorted. My father then sued for divorce on the grounds of my mother's desertion from the marital home.

It was a messy divorce by all accounts. My mother, contesting it, sat with her Church appointed lawyer; and on the other side were four lawyers who worked for my father's family business. All my father's assets were moved to other members of the family and my mother got no alimony and only a pittance in child support. Within a couple of years, that would dry up too.

My father married his girlfriend and they had a daughter. Another daughter followed a couple years later. They split up some years later and my father's mother, thinking the bar-owning daughter-in-law was unfit to raise children and my father unsuitable, got custody of his two daughters. Finding them troublesome, as she had found my father before him, she put them in a children's home eighteen months later where they languished until my father's death, at the age of 44, in 1967.

Despite the ideal of the stay-at-home mother of the 1950s, my mother had to go back to work when I was six weeks old. We lived with her mother, my sainted grandmother who took over the mother role, and my disabled great auntie who talked constantly to herself in whispers which, cruelly, my brothers and sister and I found exceptionally funny. But my grandmother's house was small and, when I was two and a half, we all moved to California so that my mother could be near her sister and brother. My grandmother sold her house so that my mother could buy one big enough for all of us.

But, despite her heroic efforts to keep the seven of us in clothes and food and under a roof, she was broken. She slid into a catastrophic depression from which she never fully recovered and used to walk up and down the railway tracks behind our house trying to get up the courage to throw herself in front of a train. And even though I could not have been consciously aware of it at the time, I can't hear a train whistle at night now without a shudder.

Her dark and desperate moods coloured my childhood. She had no interest in cuddling me as a baby. And as I grew to bond with my grandmother, running to her and not my mother when I was hurt, my mother became more and more resentful. She took little interest in whether I brushed my teeth or was clean when I went to school. I remember streaks of dirt down my arm and my classmates laughing at me because I had "cooties". The worst thing the boys could do to another boy they wanted to victimise was to overpower him, drag him to me and force him to touch me.

Isolated and desperate and seeking some sort of escape, I swallowed a bottle of children's aspirin at the age of eight. Of course I only made myself sick (inexplicably to my family who I hadn't told!) and decided maybe I wouldn't try that again. There had to be another way to escape.

And there was. A magical one.

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The Convent House

14 June 2007

We came to live in a blue collar suburb of Los Angeles in one of those endless tracts of stucco houses that sprung up after the Second World War to house all those servicemen from all those cold states who shipped out through California and promised themselves that, if they survived, that's where they would make their homes.

I remember being stuffed, seven of us, into the battered green Plymouth that Mom called "Brutus" because it was always betraying her by not starting, and heading off to find a house. I was the youngest and had to sit on Grandma's lap which I thought was unfair and I grumpily wondered if I would still be expected to do this when I was a teenager! Fortunately, by the time I was teenager, a car carrying seven people who were not wearing seat belts would soon find itself pursued by red flashing lights.

My mother was a devout Catholic so the first place she enquired was the local church and it turned out the priest knew a house directly across the street from the church and the school that was for sale. My mother thought it sounded perfect and didn't even bother to look at another house before she bought it.

When I walked into the empty house for the first time, I knew that this was no ordinary suburban home. For a start there was an altar in the living room! The house had been a convent for the nuns from the school across the street, and before we could move in it had to be "deconsecrated".

And so I grew up in an ex-convent. Which did have its advantages. Exploring the new house, I discovered abandoned on a high shelf in the garage reams and reams and reams of school drawing and writing paper and stacks of exercise books. They were slightly yellowed with age and the nuns didn't want them back as they had no use for them. But I certainly did.

I wrote stories and more stories and more stories gripping my pencil so furiously that huge callouses appeared on my middle finger. When I was nine years old I wrote on that yellowing paper my first novel. It was a ridiculous childish story about two girls who find themselves alone in the South Pacific during the Second World War who are rescued by the crew of a US Naval battleship. Thinking back I wonder if I was trying to picture the father I never knew as a hero who would even now come back and rescue me. It ran to over a hundred hand-written pages of descriptions of a world that existed only in my head, that was entirely my own and in which nothing happened or failed to happen unless I ordained it. Suddenly it didn't matter that I was the kid with cooties, the last one to get chosen for teams of dodgeball or volleyball (I was entirely uncoordinated and useless at any kind of sports), the girl who picked her nose and probably smelled if you got too close, which no one did! I was God of my own Imaginary Universe!

My grandmother had a book called "Connie Bell MD" about one of the first woman doctors, which she tried to get me to read. She was always trying to get me to read one sort of book or another. Classics like "Little Women" were big favourites, but they were all about stuff that happened a whole long time ago and anyway I was more interested in shlocky romances and pulpy Man from UNCLE spinoff novels (using the term as loosely as it is possible to use it). Nothing she or any of my family could say or do could impress me. My family was dull and uninteresting, the house I lived in (despite having been a convent) was identical to every other house in the tract, the place I lived was flat and gray, even in the California sunshine, and anything exciting on the planet must exist beyond those borders.

I don't know what made me finally open "Connie Bell MD" and, though I can't remember much at all about the story, I will never forget how it felt to find the handwritten inscription on the flyleaf: "To Loretta, a wonderful human being, beloved of her family and friends, and a credit to her Church! With love and best wishes, her friend the author, Helen Tann Aschmann". 'Loretta' was my grandmother! My grandmother knew an actual published writer! And what a eulogy! To somebody who wasn't even dead yet!

And then I thought that if in this flat, gray place, in this dull tract house my unexceptional grandma could know an actual published writer, then surely it could be possible to become one too!

My grandma warned me that Helen Aschmann had had countless rejection slips before her work was published.

"I don't care," I said. "I'll string the rejection slips together and make a necklace!". The arrogance of extreme youth. But rejection was going to be a central theme in my life. And it was going to be, and remains today, a lot tougher than I thought.


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The Heelykididdlywatt

15 June 2007

Mr and Mrs Anderson lived next door to us. They were childless, which made them pretty exotic. Particularly being Catholic, I simply didn't know any grown ups without kids who weren't nuns, priests (little did I know!) or my great Aunt Irene who rarely talked to us but talked to herself constantly. (I was always told it was because she'd had polio as a child, but suspected she was just rather mad; a thread, I would discover, that was woven into the fabric of both my mother's and my father's families. What hope did I have? I used to think. As it turned out, none whatsovever.)

Mr and Mrs Anderson did not find children endearing. They didn't smile when we blurted out something undiplomatic, or broke something in our overexcitement, or screamed just to see how loud we could do it. The only thing that Mr Anderson loved, as far as I could tell, was his dichondra lawn.

A dichondra lawn was, as everyone knew, almost impossible to achieve. But Mr Anderson was no average gardener. He had created in his front yard domain a rich carpet of velvety green made up of tiny clover-like blades of something that was surely not grass. You couldn't call it grass any more than you would call a sharp-finned shiny Cadillac a car. To keep it in perfect condition, he never even walked on it unless he was weeding, mulching, feeding or watering it; and even then only in his bare feet.

He scowled at our parched patchy front lawn and quietly cursed the weeds in it whose seeds blew onto his precious dichondra. Mr Anderson was constantly weeding his dichondra and keeping a jaundiced eye on the comings and goings of the band of renegades who were the children of his next door neighbour, a woman who wasn't even respectable enough to have a husband. Although he complained to my mother and grandmother on a number of occasions about our cutting across his front yard, he failed in his attempts to get us to act like anything but the kids we were. And so he erected a fence made of a few short sticks with string run between them, to make it plain that trampling his dichondra was not to be tolerated.

We didn't take nearly as much notice of Mr Anderson as he took of us. I was five and my sister seven at the time; and we reasoned that Mr Anderson simply refused to appreciate that my brothers were not beholden to the kind of rules mere mortals must adhere to. Because they were geniuses.

My brother Steve was some kind of Einstein and I was in awe of him. He was an inventor of rare talent in my view. Having watched a fairground ride astutely, he attempted to create a ride at home that I could sit on and be carried round and round as long as I wanted without paying for a ticket. Unfortunately, the only motor he had to power it was from the Erector set he got for Christmas. But any genius, surely, has to experiment with prototypes first! When he was given a small tape recorder, it was his pride and joy and he couldn't wait to find out how it worked. I was profoundly impressed by the deftness with which he took it apart and removed it innards to examine them; and just because he then couldn't put it back together again, it didn't make his experiment any less impressive. He had an intellectutal curiousity that I thought was breathtaking. Once he wanted to know how it felt to be locked in the trunk of a car, so he went inside the trunk of our battered old Plymouth, Brutus, and had us close it and then open it again to let him out. He said it was thrilling and each of us four had to try it then. Wow. Pitch darkness like I'd never known! We continued to do this over and over until Steve suggested we all get in at once and see what it was like. So we enthusiastically climbed in and slammed the trunk closed. One minor hitch was that there was now no one outside to let us out again. I started to yell for help but my sister Nancy, always practical and having seen a lot of movies on this theme, told us we must save our oxygen. I tried to hold my breath. But my brothers found that the parcel shelf behind the back seat was accessible from the trunk and pushed through it to save the day! I was so proud of them, but they had great humility, I thought, because they told me that on no account should I tell Mom.

And Steve did have another very useful and unique talent. It involved going to the annual church fair and standing at a stall where there was an uprght homemade wheel with numbers on it. People were encouraged to place bets on what number it might land on when it was spun, so it was a lot like the poor man's roulette. (And at a church fair? Was gambling not on of the Seven Deadly Sins? Maybe not.) The prizes were bags of groceries, donated, as were all the prizes, by parishioners. Now my brother knew than no homemade wheel could be perfectly balanced. So if he observed it long enough, he figured he could make a fairly accurate prediction of the most likely numbers to come up. After watching for a very long time, arousing the unease of the volunteers manning the stall, my brother took out a roll of dimes and started to bet. He invariably came home with bag after bag of groceries until the Church stepped in and made him stop betting. My mother was embarrassed by his cunning, but very pleased to have the groceries.

There was a woodpile in the backyard that I think was there from before we moved in. I never went near it because I was convinced there were black widow spiders in it, which there probably was. My brothers thought some good use must be made of it.

Roller-skating was very popular then. But it wasn't like roller blading. The skates were metal, with four wheels, one in each corner, and designed to attach to your shoes. You used a roller skate key to open them, put them on, and the tighten them to fit your foot. We all had roller skates, but there are only so many times you can fall down on the hard concrete sidewalk or run into a lamppost before the thrill is gone. My brothers Steve and Keith had a brilliant idea about what to do with the unwanted skates. They would build a car for us to ride around in from the old wood and the wheels from the roller skates.

This, I thought, was the most creative and ingenious plan they had come up with yet! Imagine cruising around the sidewalks in our homemade car!

They set about making it, fearless of the black widows that I knew were in that woodpile, using hammers and nails and looking incredibly impressive as their design took shape. In the end it was huge! The four of us could sit in it, two in the front and two in the back! There was only the wheels to put on now and we'd be cruising. There was a minor hitch though. The car was so spectacularly heavy and the roller skate wheels so pitifully small that our beautiful car would not move an inch. My brothers were undeterred by this small setback. The wheels were taken off the car and it was left in the backyard and now called a "clubhouse".

They now had an alternate plan. If the car was too heavy they would need to make something lighter. There was an old wooden door on the woodpile and genius took its course. They attached the roller skate wheels to the door and a small rope which they would use to steer it. I looked at it sceptically.

"That's not a car!" I said.

"Of course not," Keith said, "It's something much better. It's a heelykididdlywatt."

Now I had never heardof a heelykididdlywatt before, and I suspect my brother made this up on the spot, but it did look promising. Much lighter than the car.

The street we lived on was on a hill, so we dragged our heelykididdlywatt up to the top and prepared to take it for its maiden run. The door was big enough to accommodate all four of us and my brother Keith sat in the "driver's seat" in front and held the steering rope, and Steve, Nancy and I sccoted up behind him. I looked around to see who might be watching us because I was sure they would be very jealous when they saw our beautiful heelykididdlywatt careening down the sidewalk.

We set off from the top of the hill and I was delighted to discover that, this time, the vehicle they'd created was not too heavy and we gathered speed at a terrific rate as Keith steered us down the hill! The thrill was unbelievable and I screamed at the top of my voice with excitement. What an invention! Surely we could market this and become rich!

Now unfortunately, despite the steering rope, the heelykididdlywatt had no axle. So the concept of actually steering it, as in making it go the way you wanted it to, was really not a part of its design. So when the thing started to veer to the right, there was really no way to steer it back. And, also unfortunately, the heelykididdlywatt had no brakes. My brothers had been thinking more about how to get it going than how to stop it.

As Keith struggled for control, it became obvious that the only thing to do was to bail out! But we were going so fast! And what if we ended up in the street and got run over by a car? The door on wheels finally veered off the sidewalk and hit something soft and then tipped us all out violently on the ground, but at least in one piece.

As I lay there on the ground, the first thing I saw was dichondra.

When we got up, shaken, we saw the deep ruts the roller skate wheels had driven into the ground, churning up carefully mulched soil and pulling those little clover like blades of Cadillac grass up by the roots; and the squashed dichondra where we had all been pitched out. Mr Anderson had run out of his front door but, by instinct, still didn't tread on his dichondra, choosing to shout angrily and with tears forming in his eyes.

"What have you done?" he shouted, "What is that?"

Steve brushed the soil and bits of dichondra from his patched jeans.

"It's our heelykididdlywatt!" he said proudly, "What do you think?"

Yellow Dog Democrat

16 June 2007

My mother was a Roosevelt Democrat in the 1930s and a Roosevelt Democrat the day she died. They used to be known as Yellow Dog Democrats because, so it was thought, that they would vote for a yellow dog if it was running on a Democratic ticket. Her mother before her was a yellow dog Democrat, married to a small farmer who was as stauchly Republican as it was possible to be. Even when the policies of Herbert Hoover ("You don't work, you don't eat") drove him to lose his farm and eventually forced him to work in a GM factory, he remained as Republican, hating the United Auto Workers union with a vicious passion and fervently believing that what was good for General Motors was good for the country. God knows how they stayed married.

Fortunately, my grandmother was a lot smarter than her husband, and managed to perpetuate a matriarchal dynasty in the family that started with my great-grandmother who was widowed at the age of thirty, and continuing through to my mother who, as a single mom, called the shots in our family. It never occurred to me that there were things women couldn't do simply because they were women, with the exception standing up to pee. (I still wish I could do that though. It would save a lot of time in public restrooms! And what about the ease with which men can pee at the side of a country road without drawing attention to themselves while a woman has to simply hold on or suffer the indignity of a highly noticeable squat? God is indeed a man.)

I grew up in a world where the fear of communism was all pervasive. Athough the infamous McCarthy hearings took place before I was born, there was a terrible sense that, at any time, soldiers might storm the Nubel movie theatre in downtown Bellflower and make us all learn Russian. The nuns told us horror stories of how, in communist countries, there were no crucifixes hung in classrooms! (Of course, there were no crucifixes hung in American pubic schools either, but let's not let facts get in the way of a good story!) We we were told that in Russia children are abducted from their parents and brainwashed and forced to spy on their parents. (I never got that one. How did they spy on their parents when they had been abducted and never saw them again?) Every time I heard an airplane flying overhead I was reminded of the countless war movies I'd seen; and I was sure we were about to be bombed. Once a month, on a Friday, the Civil Defence siren would go off and we had to rehearse for a nuclear attack at school by dropping under our desks and curling into a ball with our hands on our heads. (I'm still not sure how this was going to protect us from a nuclear strike.) Because most of all, we were terrified of World War Three. Nuclear War.

When I was eight years old we were told that the "drop drills" that we had rehearsed all those monthly Fridays, might at last be due for a live performance. It was high noon. A showdown with the Russians ninety miles from the US coastline was in progress, and Nikita Krushchev and President Kennedy were standing in a sun-baked street, staring into each others' eyes, hands ready to draw and shoot, resulting in the annihilation of the human race.

Now I thought this was unlikely, probably because my brain could not take in something as catastrophic as a nuclear war, but plenty of other people thought it very likely indeed. Our parish church was full of people who I'd never seen at Mass before. On weekdays even! People were belatedly building shelters in their backyards. The shelves of the grocery stores were being stripped of canned goods (and I thought how funny it would be if they, in their hysteria, forgot to pack a can opener) and enormous supplies of peanut butter. Now, much as I loved peanut butter, I did think being down in a hole in the backyard eating copious amounts of it might be worse than just being annihilated. But the Russians turned their ships around, the churches became pretty empty again and hundreds of thousands of people wondered what they were going to do with all that peanut butter.

That climate of fear permeated everything when I was a kid, and dissent, which I had learned in school was the Constitutional right of every American, was at every turn associated with the communists. Opponents to a war that was going on far away in a place called Vietnam were communists. The Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement's voter registration campaign were communists. Gay Liberationists were communists trying to bring down the family. Martin Luther King was a communist. Women agitating for equal pay were communists. I did think that, with all those communists everywhere, they must be pretty inept to not have ensured we were all speaking Russian by now.

My mother never set out to be a campaigner against injustice. I think in an ideal world she would have stayed home, baked cookies and looked after her kids while worrying about what washing powder would get her whites really white. But when she had to go out to work to support a household of seven, injustice kind of found her. She got a job as an accountant in a big company, with access to all the company's books. She had been an innocent in the real world, and when she discovered that the starting wage for men doing the same job as she was doing was the top wage for women, she assumed (in her innocence) that this was a mistake. So she brought it to the attention of her boss who told her that this was the way of the world.

"Why..?" my mother asked.
"Because women don't have families to support," he replied.
"But I have four children and two dependent adults to support!"
"Yes, but generally women don't."
"But I'm not 'generally'" she insisted, "I really do have six people to support!"

My mother got nowhere, of course, and went on earning less than a man and burning with injustice.

She was an odd "campaigner". She was fairly quiet usually. Not at all strident. But had a natural aversion to privilege which made all rich people suspect until proven innocent. Her passion about injustice became part of our lives as a family. I came to never argue politics with my mother because she always won. She simply knew more about any subject you want to name than I did. As a teenager, it infuriated me! Who wants their Mom to win an argument?

She was a pacifist (who nevertheless supported the aims of the Second World War) and one of the bitter ironies of her life was that she unknowingly worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge Tennessee during the war, assiting the top secret develpment of the atomic bomb. When she worked for North American Aviation, she asked to be transferred from working on the Hound Dog Missile project and joined the team working on the space program which she was convinced had only peaceful purposes.

She opposed the war in Vietnam and turned a blind eye when my brother's draft dodger and deserter friends slept on our couch on their way to Canada. She agitated for equal pay as the Women's Representative at North American. Both she and my grandmother were ardent supporters of the civil rights movement. And as the gay liberation movement sarted to gather pace and I told my her that I thought that homosexuals were sick, she drawled thoughtfully, "You know, I think the only really sick people are those who can't love anyone."

The kids in my family were raised, without our really knowing it at the time - the way kids always think their own experience is typical - to be passionate about injustice, and that is how we still are. My husband says we are the only family he's ever seen who can shout while agreeing with each other.

She was shrewd and wise and knowledgeable and articulate and never cared if anyone thought she was a communist or a communist dupe or a communist sympathiser. She was a Roosevelt Democrat in the 1930s and a Roosevelt Democrat the day she died. And I miss her.

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Wild Child

17 June 2007

When my mother brought me home from the hospital, a tiny, squalling bald blob, and laid me out on the yellow chenille bedspread for everyone to see, my brother Steve said, "What do we want her for?" Relations between my brother and I went downhill from there.

He teased me mercilessly throughout my childhood and nothing pleased him more than the impotent rage he could inspire in me without having to work at it very hard. My mother and grandmother, when they furnished our house, bought a coffee and end table set with the latest "no mar" finish so that, under the onslaught of four small children, the tables might still remain pristine. This lasted until I chased Steve with a scissors in my hand and, because he could outrun me, ended up throwing it at him with all my pathetic might. It missed him and bounced onto the "no mar" coffee table, taking a small gouge out of it. My mother was furious and I said I was sorry, but mostly I was sorry the gouge hadn't come out of my brother instead.

My mother never changed her furniture throughout her life and that gouge remained, forever reminding me of the troubled relations between my brother and me.

Nevertheless, I looked up to my brothers and desperately wanted them to accept me and include me in all the terribly interesting and exciting things they used to do. They only included me, however, when I was of some marginal use to them. I knew this, but didn't mind. Better that kind of attention than none!

So when they played "pickle" they let me be the runner. They each stood on a homemade "base" (usually a bare patch of lawn) in the backyard and threw a baseball to each other. I was supposed to run between the two bases at random intervals and they had to try and catch me out. After a while this became pretty dull and I whined and pleaded for them to let me throw the ball for a bit, while one of them tried to steal bases instead. Fearing I would strut off in a huff and they would lose their runner, they decided to let me do it for five minutes. On my very first throw I hit my brother Keith with the baseball and he came crashing to the ground, writhing and groaning in pain. I couldn't believe he was being such a baby over a little thing like a ball hitting him between the legs! They never let me throw the ball again.

The only time I can remember my brother Steve treating me with real concern and affection was once when I was about nine and he was practising his archery. I watched admiringly for ages as he shot bulls eye after bulls eye, until Steve finally decided to let me join in.

"Here," he said, taking the target off the washing pole where it had been hanging and handing it to me, "You hold that up and I'll shoot at it."

I was so delighted. My big brother was letting me do archery with him. I stood about fifteen feet in front of him and held up the target. It was just like William Tell without the apple. As he prepared his shot and brought back the bow, his hand slipped (or so he said) and the arrow flew wildly off the string. The next thing I saw was something dangling from my head; the arrow had hit my head at the hairline and gone under my scalp. When I realised what it was I started to cry. My brother rushed to me, pulled the arrow out, looked at me with great brotherly tenderness and said, "Don't tell Mom!" He took me to the sink and cleaned the cut on my scalp and told me that this would be our secret. After nine years my brother Steve and I had bonded.

Steve was asthmatic and dyslexic and struggled at school, where the nuns branded him stupid. He was badly bullied by the other boys, arriving home more than once with blood down the front of his white shirt. Of course back then nobody thought bullying was a problem; in fact they tended to think it was character forming. If that was true, Steve must have had the best formed character in Bellflower.

But when he hit his teens, he became a Wild Child.

The first inkling that my brother was going to be a "problem" was when I came home at dinnertime and there was no dinner on the table. My mother was in a terrible state and had to go out, she said. Steve, at the age of fourteen, two years before he had a driver's licence, had secretly taken the Galaxy station wagon Mom had bought to replace the now deceased Plymouth, and gone joy-riding with his friends until he was stopped by the police. He wasn't charged with anything, but Steve's teenage rebellion was only just beginning.

My mother had placed both my brothers in a boys Catholic school run by Salesian priests and brothers, in the hope that the male culture of the school would be good for her fatherless sons. My brother Keith was a quiet and studious boy, a bit of a geek really, and caused no trouble. Steve, who hated the school and everything about it, was determined to find a way out.

My brother was an atheist at an early age and he saw the opportunity to get his wish during a routine religion class - a usefless subject, he thought, of no value in the school curriculum - run by a priest who had little tolerance for bad behaviour. Steve had put his head down on his desk for a little nap during the lesson, which he must have known would be an act of extreme provocation.

"Hey!" the priest demanded, "What are you doing?"
"I'm sleeping," my brother answered.
"Why are you sleeping in my class?" he asked, rising to my brother's insolence.
"Cause I don't consider this a class," Steve replied defiantly.
"Well, maybe we don't consider you a student!"

My brother shrugged and the priest ordered him to leave the class. Steve picked up his books and loped to the door, unconcerned. The priest finally lost it, wheeled my brother round and slapped him hard.

It was an instinctive reaction to slap him back (or was it?) and the priest exploded, punching Steve in the face – whereupon Steve punched him back. The boys in the class were out of their seats in an instant, the desks were pushed back, and there at the front of the class the priest and my brother fought it out until a couple of teachers arrived on the scene to pull the two apart.

My mother was, naturally, called to the school and Steve was now sure that, in the wake of this incident, he had a ticket out. The principal, however, decided that Steve was disturbed rather than "bad", and the best thing for him would be to remain at the school where he would benefit from the discipline and pastoral care that would be on offer.

The discipline and pastoral care didn't take, though, and my brother seemed more and more like a runaway train headed at great speed to the edge of a cliff. His friends included hippies and bikers and petty criminals; and there was a lot of drugs in there too. My grandmother had always believed in him, insisting he had a heart of gold (he did) and my mother prayed that somehow he would come out of all this alright. But it didn't look good.

One morning at breakfast my mother was in a foul mood. She banged the dishes on the table, slammed cupboards and kicked the dog out of her way. None of us dare ask what was wrong. It took a long time before she spoke.

"Well, you'll be pleased to hear your brother's in jail!" I didn't know why she thought we'd be pleased. I had yet to discover irony.

My brother had gone out, crashed the car into a bridge and been arrested for being Drunk and Disorderly.

Eventually Steve was diagnosed with borderline schizophrenia and ended up in the psychiatric ward of the local hospital. It was something we were not allowed to talk about outside the family due the stigma and shame it would bring upon our house. “If you tell anyone,” my mother warned, “they’ll think we’re all crazy.” Of course we all were. Absolutely barking in fact.

My brother spent a fairly unproductive summer in the hospital, and was put on a lot of drugs that looked like their ultimate purpose was to turn him into a zombie. He became adept at not taking them and eventually, because he got intensely bored, plotted and carried out a number of daring escapes from the ward. He would then hitch-hike back to our house, have a quiet lunch with my grandmother and then hitch-hike back to the hospital. When he knocked at the front door, it didn’t half piss them off. Like I said, though: My brother was a genius.

It was a long time, and a very hard road, before my brother's genius was finally recognised. He got in at the beginning of the computer hardware boom, got a job drafting the circuitry of silicone chips (which, at that point I had never heard of before), worked for people who weren't as smart as he was but who had gone to college, eventually lied about having a degree, advanced quickly to the top of his profession, designing hardware for cutting edge systems and sharing in the patent of a number of inventions.

Ironically, Steve, despite his eccentricities (of which there are many!), turned out the sanest of all of us. He has been happily married over thirty years.

Many years ago I was sharing a bottle of wine with his wife and, as women do sometimes, we were swapping stories of how and when we'd lost our virginity. She had met this deadbeat when she was a teenager and decided that, as all her friends had lost theirs, it was time she got rid of her virginity. (This was the Sixties, you know.) The next morning, the guy was up, out of bed, pacing and trying to explain the situation to her.

"Last night was good, but you have to understand you can't hold me. I am a free spirit. I am like the wind. Trying to hold me is like trying to catch a moonbeam." (Okay so he probably wasn't anywhere near as poetic as that, but you get the idea.) She thought this guy was really a jerk.

"And do you know who that guy was?" she asked me, "Your brother."

Ageing Children

18 June 2007

A lot of my brother’s friends had nicknames: Bear, Gypsy, Dirty Dave, Squirrel. This wasn’t surprising since Bear’s real name was Saferino and Gypsy’s was Kevin; and these were hardly suitable monikers for guys who claimed to be bikers. Bear was a former member of the Cossacks motorcycle gang, despite the fact that he didn’t have a motorcycle all the time that I knew him; and his best friend Gypsy rode a Honda 50. Nevertheless, they wore biker “colours”, Levis jackets with the sleeves ripped off over leather motorcycle jackets.

Though my brother (whose nickname was, occasionally, Stephen LeFreak) was adamant that he didn’t want us to on any account have anything to do with his friends (because he knew them better than we did!), my friends Cathie, Carol and I (who collectively called ourselves the Mini-Skirt Mob) were fascinated.

Bear was from the barrio and had grown disenchanted with changes in gang culture.

“In the old days,” said the eighteen year old, “If someone wanted a fight you put up your fists. Nowadays, you put up your fists, they take out a gun and shoot you.”

The hippie thing had taken hold and he found peace and love ultimately more attractive. And safer. Bear loved my brother like, well…like a brother, and was very protective of him. Peace and love aside, I think anyone messing with my brother would have regretted it.

Gypsy, despite his macho posturing, weighed about 110 pounds. Dirty Dave was a nice boy from a Mormon family who was thrown out by his father for his teenage rebellion. Squirrel was a quiet soul with a timid rodent-like face (he was lucky to be nicknamed Squirrel and not Ratface, I suppose). Crosland (no nickname! How did that happen?) had a old van which he turned into a mobile pad for him and his girlfriend Christa and, though he didn’t qualify as a wild boy, was the gang’s Jester. Rick was one of the sweetest guys I ever met. And Larry, who spoke some sort of pig Latin fluently enough so that no one except his closest friends could understand him, worked on his car longer than was healthy, and explained to his girlfriend, when she asked, that he had to fix the Tripod Pernundal and the Reverse Gonad before he could take her to the drive-in movie.

From the time I was a gawky, awkward prepubescent would-be teenybopper, however; when the last thing I was interested in was politics, something slowly and stealthily was happening that would scar my whole generation: Vietnam.

I don’t know when I was first aware that the United States was involved in a “police action” there. But, as more and more troops were sent and the conflict escalated, it took political center stage. By 1964 there was a full-scale war going on there, but the first stirrings of the embryonic anti-war movement, led by Mario Savio at UC Berkeley, were condemned as the sedition of communists and communist dupes, giving comfort to the enemy.

It wasn’t at all like the war in Iraq, of course. In Vietnam, the US got involved because it wanted to spread democracy to Southeast Asia and counter a threat from a bloc of hostile states in order to secure the interests of the United States and freedom for the Vietnamese people which it hoped to achieve quickly but, unfortunately, resulted in a protracted war with local insurgents that was never defeated. So, as you can see, nothing like Iraq.

Eventually the draft was introduced to supply the ever increasing number of soldiers they told us were required to win the war in Vietnam. Suddenly the issue went beyond politics. And began to directly affect our lives.

My brother Keith joined the Air Force, wanting to get his service, which he thought was inevitable, out of the way. Steve got a 4-F deferment because of his asthma. Dirty Dave joined the Marines in a doomed attempt to win back the respect of his Mormon father. Bear, Squirrel and Rick got drafted. Gypsy, at the age eighteen, was charged with having sex with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend (technically statutory rape)and given a choice by the judge to go to jail or into the army. He went into the army.

Inexplicably, and in total defiance of my brother’s insistence that any of his friends should have more than a passing acquaintance with his sisters, I perversely became almost unbearably besotted and infatuated with Gypsy, the statutory rapist. (What was I thinking!?) To me he was James Dean! He was Marlon Brando! He was a skinny guy on a Honda 50 who wrote a poem about how I was his ideal woman. What sixteen year old couldn’t fall for that? I was a virgin and he got absolutely nowhere with me. I must have driven him crazy!

Just before he shipped out to Vietnam, he asked me to marry him. I said yes. Imagine that? I didn’t tell my mom or my brother though.

He wrote to me several times a week; articulate, even eloquent letters about the life he hoped to build with me. He was surprisingly tender for a statutory rapist, demonstrating an unexpected grasp of modern literature and expressing a desire to study to be an English teacher when he got home. And he ardently expressed his love for me on a regular basis. But, over time, his letters also betrayed a sense of a different sort of war than my father fought. There was cynicism. A lot of drugs. And reports of soldiers running amok and killing civilians. And their own officers. He sent me a peace symbol that I wore around my neck, and black and white photos of his time there. I still have them.

The Vietnam war ground on, despite assurances that we were winning and reports that the body counts of the Vietcong vastly exceeded those of our own troops (reports which, had they been true, would have meant we had killed every man, woman and child in Vietnam twice over). It seemed to me that every week our local paper, the Herald American, had a photo on its front page of another of our hometown boys who weren’t going to be coming home. And, at my high school, we were asked to pray for the soul of the brother of one of our classmates whose helicopter was shot down during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

My mother’s opposition to the war grew quietly, imperceptibly. She was busy raising her kids and working all the overtime she could get, often putting in twelve to fourteen hours days five days a week, plus Saturday and, occasionally Sunday. But events in her own house were about to cause her to have to make a stand.

It all started with Dirty Dave. He was a gentle, artistic soul who had been working as an apprentice carpenter and harboured dreams of one day studying to become an architect. His father seemed to think he was useless and effeminate and, in a desperate bid to win his approval, Dave had enlisted in the Marines. It was something he almost immediately regretted and, as the antiwar movement started to gather pace, Dirty Dave became convinced that the war in that far corner of Southeast Asia was immoral. He was in a terrible way when he came to stay with my brother during a short leave before he was due to ship out to Vietnam; and he agonised over what to do. The short leave turned into a very long leave, and then into absence without leave and then into desertion, which, in law, was a felony.

My mother noticed that he hadn’t left on the day he said he was going, or on the day after that or the day after that. After a while she knew what was going on. By allowing Dave to stay with us, she was aiding and abetting a felony but, faced with the choice of assisting his conscientious resistance or sending him back to fight that useless war, my mother, quietly and without any fanfare, chose to let him stay.

After awhile Bear, who had already travelled from gang culture to the peace and love of hippiedom, was convinced that the war in Vietnam was both immoral and racist. He wrote a passionately argued letter to his superiors making the case for his refusal to fight. And suddenly we had two war resisters sleeping on our sofas.

The antiwar movement was, by then, a vast network of activist organisations across the country, and we were able to make contact with the Unitarian Church in Whittier who were giving resisters sanctuary and helping them get to Canada. Commandeering my mother’s car, Dirty Dave and Bear I drove to the church with Dave at the wheel (I didn’t yet have a driver’s licence) to find out what could be done for them. The church agreed to help them both and we drove back, full of hope that the situation was going to be resolved very soon. But at an intersection on the way home a car turned left in front of us, Dave slammed on the brakes and a moment and a squeal later we hit the other car.

Dave got out and made sure no one was hurt. The woman in the car went to a payphone to call the police and Bear disappeared quietly into a crowd of passers-by. I looked up and saw that Dirty Dave was as white as a sheet in a laundry detergent commercial.

“Okay,” he said, “We’re going to wait till she’s in the phone booth and then we’re going to get the hell out of here.”

In a flash we were racing down the road in a dented car and all I could think was that we had left the scene of an accident! Could we really get away with this? It turned out we couldn’t.

The woman had obviously taken down the licence plate number because it didn’t take more than an hour or two before my mother tapped at my bedroom door and said, “There are some policemen here who want to talk to you.”

When I came out to the alley behind my house where the dented car sat side by side with two police cars, I saw Dirty Dave in handcuffs being put into one of them. He spent ten days in the County Jail for leaving the scene and was then handed over to the Marines where he was court-martialed, put on probation and returned to his unit.

My mother was on the FBI radar now. Our phone made strange noises, leading us to believe, rightly, that it had been tapped. Two men in business suits sat outside our house in a construction worker’s truck. (They couldn’t at least disguise them in work clothes?) But, although her car insurance premiums went through the roof after that, she accepted the situation with grace. It had been the right thing to do and she would do it again.

By the time the war in Southeast Asia was over I was finishing college at UCLA. Although I was out there protesting with the rest of them over the invasion of Cambodia and the secret war, I couldn’t help notice that almost no one that I met there knew anyone personally who had served in Vietnam. What I didn’t know was that this was America’s supposedly non-existent class divide. There were those who were reasonably well off, the ones who got their college deferments and never got drafted in the first place. And then there were the rest; guys like my brother’s friends, who hung out in the graffittied alley behind our house, under the lighted sign that said Welcome to Bellflower, the Friendly City – which someone had thrown a rock through years before and that no one had bothered to repair.

Bear managed to evade military justice for nearly a year before he was arrested and sent to Leavenworth. Sweet, lovely Rick came back with a serious heroin addiction. My brother Keith had a breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric hospital at Travis Air Force Base. And Squirrel never came back at all.

Dirty Dave eventually absconded to Canada, married and had three children. he never became an architect. Years later, unbearably homesick, he returned to the United States with his family and turned himself into the local Marine base. They sent him away without bothering to even arrest him. No one wanted to know about the Vietnam war any more.

When Gypsy came back from the war I met him at the airport. During the year he had been in Vietnam he had grown as passionately pro-war as I had become anti-war. The relationship collapsed before we got to the parking lot. I later burned all his love letters, and the poem he’d written for me.

War scarred my generation in a different way than it scarred our parents’ generation. And we lost our innocence along the way. We went in as idealists, armed with certainties, ready to shape the future in our own image while making an extended party of our adolescence. We came out, in the words of Joni Mitchell, as “ageing children.”

The last time I saw Gypsy was the day I graduated from UCLA. My mother asked me to go and get the car washed (she never wanted anything important to happen in a dirty car). As I stood watching my mother’s car go through the revolving brushes of Flan’s Car Wash on Bellflower Boulevard, a familiar profile caught my eye. We greeted each other cordially and he introduced me to his kids and to his wife: the woman he'd been charged for having sex with years before, and who was now absolutely bursting with their next child. He hadn’t gone to college. He hadn’t become an English teacher.

But then again, I don’t suppose that he, or any of the others, was meant to.


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Popular Girls

19 June 2007

I knew from a very early age that I was a misfit, from a family of misfits, and I have watched with awe and admiration the ease with which some people can be charming, charismatic, attractive, sought after; and belong. More than anything I wanted to belong somewhere, or at least to not be so noticeably a D+ student in the School of Life. But the only times that has happened to me were the magical times that I found other misfits to belong to.

No one else in my family seemed to care whether they fit in or not. Keith never spoke much, attended to his studies, played the piano, went caving and, if he felt stressed, went off on his own to climb Mount Witney. Steve grew a beard and long hair and, inexplicably, wore a top hat wherever he went. (My mother pleaded with him to lose that hat to no avail.) And my sister would burst into operatic song for no apparent reason in the most inappropriate of circumstances. But I was different. I wanted, and still do want if I’m honest, to conform.

And so I was lonely. Though my grandmother insisted that the reason I was teased so cruelly at school was because my classmates were jealous of my intellect (God bless her!), I came to accept the pain of it like a lifelong arthritis sufferer, and escaped into a world of my own making. A world of pretend.

When I was nine years old the eighth grade girls were preparing to put on a school Christmas performance of the operetta Amahl and the Night Visitors. My passion for a pretend universe having been noted, Sister Lydia asked me to play the part of Amahl, the eponymous eight year old (I love that word – I learned it from watching the film critic Barry Norman on TV!) who encounters the Three Kings on their way to Bethlehem and is cured of his lameness. (Yes, I played a boy, and the other girls played the Kings). My character’s lameness, believe me, was nothing compared to that of the production itself, which was performed before the school assembly, standing (not sitting) outside in the playground as we mimed to Sister Lydia’s scratchy record of the operetta as it played over the public address system. At the end, when we took our bow, the whole school erupted into applause, so delighted were they that the performance was over.

The experience gave me an idea, however, and when Easter came I wrote a play about the Last Supper for my fourth grade class. It was a bit of an extravaganza because I had to cast all twelve apostles and dress them up in sheets to look like those robes you see on the statues in the church. The geeky kids were easy to recruit (like me they would d anything for a chance to stand out), although no one wanted to play Simon the Cananite, who nobody had ever heard of, or the villain, Judas. But there were simply not enough geeky kids to go around. That’s when I was approached by Susan Tratz and Patty Scanlon.

Susan Tratz was a brassy, very savvy girl whose breasts, at the age of ten, were already apparent. Patty Scanlon was slightly knock-kneed and skinny, something she hated because this was (if any of us are old enough to remember it) when curves were in and thinness was out, and Jean Shrimpton was considered so much sexier than Twiggy. Susan and Patty were two of the most popular girls in school and they were intrigued by the idea of being in a play, even if it was written by me. They insisted on playing Jesus and Peter (the starring roles) and, though the entire production was a bit of a debacle, everyone involved seemed to have a good time.

Susan and Patty appeared to change their attitude to me after that. When I was asked by Sister Irene to write a Christmas play for the second grade girls, I wrote one about a Christmas in occupied France during the Second World War involving a class of French children and their two teachers. Pandering to their proximity to popularity, I wrote the parts of the two teachers for Susan and Patty.

After that I seemed to be taken under their wings. I started to write stories, in instalments, about Susan, Patty and all their friends, set in the future, when they would marry the guys of their dreams. It was what they wanted and I had yet to discover artistic integrity. These stories, which I wrote furtively in maths, science and history classes (which I really loathed) were circulated around the class among the popular girls whose appetite for them was insatiable.

Susan became my mentor and confidant. She took me in hand and got me to shower every day, stop picking my nose, do something with my unruly hair, find some more attractive clothes and to rein in my conversation. Not everyone, she told me, was as keen on The Man From UNCLE as I was, particularly not to the point of buying a plastic Man From UNCLE gun with plastic shoulder holster. And she told me very emphatically what to do and not do with boys: it was absolutely “making out” only, no tongue, otherwise you were a slut. She was saving her virginity, she told me, as a gift for the man she’d marry on their wedding night.

By the following year, Susan and Patty both had boyfriends. Susan was walking home from school (we were too young to date!) with the gorgeous Jim Frelita and Patty with the ultra-cool Tommy Houlihan. They thought it was about time that I had a boyfriend too and Jim and Tommy had just the candidate: their own geeky friend, Marcel Fischer who, understandably, was only ever called “Fish”. The four of them fixed it up for us and, behind the gym at a nearby boys’ school basketball game, I was kissed for the first time. Fish gave me his green St Christopher medal which meant, as everyone knew, that we were going steady (don’t ask why a St Christopher medal. I didn’t even know why back then and anyway St Christopher has now been demoted from his sainthood by the Vatican). Amazingly, he didn’t ask for it back for another two whole weeks.

As we neared the end of eighth grade, we looked forward to going to high school and entering a more grown up world. My mother wanted me to go to the local coeducational Catholic school that my older sister attended, but Susan and Patty had opted for the single sex Catholic school on the other side of town. They assumed I would go there with them.

My mother had by this time decided that, in light of her experience with my older brother, she would let me choose were I wanted to go. It was the first time I ever had to make my own choice about anything important and I was terrified.

Though I was grateful for her friendship over the previous four years, I realised that she had become the most forceful presence in my life and, though it had never made me one of the popular girls (only a sideshow for their amusement) I had done whatever she told me to do in a desperate bid to ride on the coattails of her popularity. And I knew it was time to break free. She told me I was making a mistake. And in my first year and a half at my new school, as isolated and lonely and bullied as I had ever been, I had begun to think she was right.

We stayed in touch for the first part of our freshman year, but drifted apart after that. A few years later I heard she’d had a surfing accident. A wave caught her the wrong way and she flew into the air, the surfboard twisted over and the scag hit her between the legs. So she was never able to give the gift of her virginity to her husband on their wedding night.

Fortunately she did not give birth to a bouncing baby paddleboard nine months later.


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Run Like Hell

20 June 2007

I couldn’t wait to escape Bellflower. There was a whole world waiting for me out there and I just wanted to get on with it. Within weeks of my graduation from high school, at the age of seventeen, I left home and never went back.

The first stop on my Voyage of Life was a Road Trip. My friend Chris and I decided to spend the summer as hippie vagabonds making our way up the coast of California and Oregon and ending up in Tacoma, Washington where she had a boyfriend, a friend of my brother’s called Mike Bly. (Did my brother supply all the boyfriends to my pals and I? Guess so.) We never got further than San Francisco.

We packed the obligatory backpacks (taking too much stuff as I had yet to learn how to pack light, even when confronted with the prospect of carrying it all on my back!) and boarded a Greyhound bus to San Francisco, a pilgrimage all hippies of the time were obliged to make during their lifetime or forfeit their right to wear love beads and burn incense.

It was a beautiful summer, three years after the Summer of Love, and San Francisco was to me a kind of Paradise. On the very first day, my friend Chris got talking to some people who invited us to stay at their cosy little urban commune while we were in the city. Now Chris was a very beautiful woman. So all it took was a really beautiful man, a charismatic musician (a crap musician I have to add, but who cares if you’re beautiful right?) to ban all thoughts from her mind of Mike Bly, Tacoma or our Road Trip up the coast to Washington.

Peace and love only got you so far, so within a few days I was turfed out of the commune. I was on my own, a very un-streetwise seventeen-year-old with no idea what to do next and determined on no account to return home.

There were a lot of “street people” in the cities in those days; young hippies who chose to be rootless and homeless, whose social life was carried out in soup kitchens, free churches and free clinics and who survived by begging and doing casual work. I was told that anybody could live on the street across the bay in Berkeley so I stuck out my thumb and arrived there with absolutely no idea what was going to happen next. As it was, quite a lot happened.

Berkeley was hotbed of left-wing activity at the time and the Mecca of hippie culture. All I had to do was hang around the UC Berkeley student union and finding a place to stay was no problem. I met a very nice guy from Pennsylvania and we hung out for a few days. He showed me where to get free food, medical care and a place to crash (a burnt out, condemned house on one occasion!); and by the time he left, I knew my way around.

Finding a place to crash was the trickiest task to master, because Free Love was a hippie creed and I was a virgin and determined to stay that way until I was bloody well ready to be anything else. In order to achieve this, I needed to be creative. Fortunately this was when word had got round that a lot of guys were coming home from Vietnam with a strain of the Clap that was immune to antibiotics. I doubt it was true, but it was widely believed. After being taken back to a guy’s pad, all I had to do was confess (tearfully if necessary) that I was in Berkeley to be part of an experimental program to treat this vicious strain of the disease that I had contracted and, even though I really wanted to have sex with the him, it wouldn’t be fair to expose him to a fate like Incurable Clap. Nobody thought of condoms in those days. Nobody wore condoms in those days! (Women were expected to be on the Pill. What liberated times, eh?) So I slept alone and well. I must have been insane to take a risk like that, but I was rarely without a bed. That is, until I acquired a dog.

Walking down University Avenue, I saw a scrawny, mangy-looking animal dash across the street and get clipped by a passing car. I ran over to see if the dog was okay. She was. But she had decided she needed a new owner and I was it. She was the most hyper of animals, in the habit of peeing every time she got excited, which was a lot of the time. And, in the hippie spirit of giving pets inappropriate and unacceptable names, I called her “Methedrine”.

After that, although I managed to get a bed with clean sheets one night by claiming to be a teenage runaway at a runaway shelter, it was obvious that outdoor living was going to be the order of the day for me and my new canine friend. I was told by people at the free church that there was a large porch attached to the Presbyterian church where you could sleep undisturbed with the permission of the pastor. That sounded safe enough to me so Methedrine and I made our way there and bedded down for what should have been a peaceful night.

One thing I did notice about the Peace and Love generation was that not everyone was peaceful and loving, and quite a lot of them, despite their antipathy to anything not organic and natural, were quite happy to put any number of harmful chemicals into their bodies with absolutely no concern about what might then happen to their brains. Well, two of the street people sleeping there had brains that were affected in this way and chose to express their cosmic experience by battering the hell out of each other.

Someone called the police and we all had to scarper and I ended up bunking up with a scruffy teenager called Bill under the awning of the back door of some sort of industrial building where we talked all night about food and how crap the meals at the soup kitchen were and how much we missed having a decent meal.

The next morning Bill wanted to take me to breakfast. I was puzzled because he didn’t look like he could afford to, but looks can deceive and he did insist.

We found a very nice looking coffee shop where he insisted on me having whatever I liked, as much as I wanted; eggs, bacon, sausages, blueberry pancakes, juice, coffee. By the time I’d finished I thought I wouldn’t have to eat again for a week.

The bill came and he looked at it quietly as if checking it to make sure it had been added up properly. He then suggested I take the opportunity to go to the Ladies’ room. I said I didn’t need to go.

“I think you do,” he said charmingly. I wasn’t at all sure what he meant, but I got up to go anyway. More strangely still, he asked me to put the bill in my handbag and afterwards to go untie the dog out front and he’d meet me there.

When I came out of the Ladies’ room, I saw him calmly putting a generous tip on the table. I went outside as he’d asked and untied the dog. When Bill came out a minute later he took my arm and started to walk calmly away.

“Okay,” he said, “we’re just gonna walk real quiet to the corner where we’ll be out of sight and then we’re gonna run like hell.”

We turned the corner and ran like hell.

When we’d run about a block, he stopped as abruptly as he’d started and began to walk calmly again, still breathless.

“Er…you didn’t pay for that breakfast,” I guessed.
“Of course not,” he said, “You think I’ve got that kind of money?”

I thought about this for a minute.

“Why did you leave a tip?”
“If you leave a tip, they think you’ve paid already. And it’s only right. The waitress gave us good service.”

We hung out a lot after that. He was from Maryland, near Washington D.C. and was going to be heading back there soon. He said he was twenty, but was definitely younger. He showed me a scar on his stomach and said he’d got it in a fight, but it looked an awful lot like an appendix scar to me. I couldn’t trust anything he said, but who cared? He was a guy who knew how to get out of a restaurant without paying.

A few nights later we were coming out of the free church, which served as a kind of community centre for street people. Methedrine saw a cat and dashed across University Avenue in pursuit, right in front of a car. I called her back but there was a screech of brakes and I saw her go under the car. The driver pushed on without stopping as I screamed. Methedrine survived the impact, having gone under the chassis, got up and ran off howling into the night, taking no notice of my desperately shrieking at her to come back.

We looked everywhere for her; all the places she’d been with me that she might have gone back to: the student union, the free clinic, the Presbyterian church, the soup kitchen. All the while I was calling out, “Methedrine! Methedrine!” And although we attracted the attention of every addict and dealer in Berkeley, and a neighbourhood full of concerned citizens who were jamming the police switchboard as we walked through the night shadowed streets, that scrawny, mangy mutt was nowhere to be found. (Though I did resolve that if I ever found her again, I’d definitely change her name.) With only the two of us to search for her, the task looked hopeless.

I decided that my only chance of finding her was to put together a search party; so I went back into the free church and pleaded with the street people there to come help me find my dog. But somebody had just lit up a joint and no one was going anywhere. I think that’s when I cried.

Bill looked pensive as we walked down the road, but said nothing. He stopped walking as we passed a large grocery store, looked at me and said, “I’ll just be a minute.”

I waited for him on the corner for almost twenty, until he finally emerged. Inexplicably, he was carrying a case of beer.

“Okay,” he said, “we’re just gonna walk real quiet to the corner where we’ll be out of sight and then we’re gonna run like hell.”

We went back to the free church, where Bill plonked the case of beer down on the counter in front of the gathered hippies. He raised his hand to get their attention, but he’d already got it.

“There’s a case of beer for whoever finds the dog!”

She was found less than an hour later. And I had fallen in love.


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On the Road Again

21 June 2007

I don’t think Bill set out to find a girlfriend, let alone a dog, but he didn’t get much choice. I latched on to him like a limpet, but, though he was a bit nonplussed, he didn’t seem to mind.

When he decided to go back to Maryland, there wasn’t really much question but that I would go with him. So we scoured the notice boards of the Berkeley campus to find somebody with a car that was going back East that wanted to find passengers prepared to help pay for gas, until we found someone going to Pittsburg which we thought was close enough. The only hitch was that we had no money.

Now Bill was a shoplifter not a bank robber, so there was nothing to be done except work for it. And there wasn’t a lot of casual work around that could be accomplished in the few days we had before our ride was leaving. But then someone told us that all we needed to do was turn up on a particular street corner at five in the morning the following day.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. What kind of moron turns up at five in the morning to an address like “street corner” without knowing what the gig is? Well, we were those kind of morons.

When we turned up with the dog there were a few desperate looking hippies and half a dozen Mexican laborers there, smoking cigarettes, speaking Spanish and looking like they did this all the time. This was reassuring. It meant they had come back from wherever it was they’d been taken.

After a while a battered Chevy drove up pulling a U-Haul trailer. A pretty well-dressed guy in an open shirt and slacks got out and I wondered how all of us were going to fit in that Chevy. I needn’t have worried. The guy opened up the back of the trailer, shoved us all in, including the dog, and drove off to God knows where.

Of course eventually God shared this information with us and we got out an hour or so later in the middle of some scrubland. The guy had been commissioned by the Forestry Department to gather seeds for a reforestation project. We were given some burlap sacks and shown how to grab the thin branches with our left hand, put the branch between the fingers of the right hand and pull up, stripping the seeds off it and into our hands. We were given gloves to protect our hands and told that we would be paid by the pound of seeds we gathered.

We quickly discovered that this was going to be a lot harder than we thought. Although the seasoned laborers seemed to be pretty adept at the job and didn’t wear gloves, I watched as my feeble gloved hand pulled through branch after branch yielding only tiny handfuls of seeds. Doing the calculations quickly in my head (actually it wasn’t difficult) I swiftly surmised that the twelve hour day I was facing would not yield many pounds of seeds.

It was summer and a very hot day and, while my dog Methedrine lounged dreamily in the sunshine, panting but apparently happy, I was absolutely sweltering. One of the laborers suggested I strip the branches without the gloves as I would get more seeds more quickly that way. I tried it and he was right. My hands remained scratched, sore and stained with resin for several weeks afterwards.

A second car drove up. A late model Lincoln Continental and another smartly dressed man got out with a stunningly beautiful but bored looking young woman in sunglasses. The man went a ways to talk to the man who brought us while the bored woman, totally unselfconsciously stripped off to the bikini she had under her clothes, laid out a mat on the roof of the car and started to sunbathe! I noticed that the laborers didn’t stare at her and her gorgeous body as I thought they would, but studiously looked anywhere else, stealing glances at the bosses. And I wondered if the bosses had taken exception to their staring on previous occasions?

At the end of the day I proudly brought my sack to the weigh station. The seasoned laborers laid their haul of twelve, thirteen and a half and even fourteen pounds. Mine weighed in at less than three and Bill’s was scarcely more than that. I ended a twelve hour day with about ten dollars in my pocket. After two days of this we thought we had enough money to make a decent contribution to the gas for our journey. And anyway, even if we didn’t, Fuck it; there was no way we were going back there!

We first met our cross-country travelling companions in the early morning of the day we set out. Frank was the owner of the car and he was travelling with his friend Benny. They were in their thirties and had an unshaven, dishevelled appearance. Frank, who rarely spoke, had a thick crop of black hair and a muscular body. Benny, who didn’t talk much more than his friend, was wiry, with thin lips and even thinner hair. They looked like the kind of guys you cold cast in a gangster movie. Also in our strange little party was a kid with long frizzy blond hair who quoted from Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book and babbled prolifically about politics in a way that convinced me that he’d never read a whole book all the way through. Any book. I can’t recall his name because Bill and I just called him (not to his face) The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up. And then there was the strange but oddly vulnerable Darren who arrived with no luggage and only wearing a light jacket, who stared at his hands a lot and laughed at inappropriate moments. Benny wasn’t at all happy we’d brought a dog with us, but he asked us to show him the money and, having seen it, led us to the car. It was an ageing and very battered old Buick with an old-fashioned bench seat in front that didn’t look like it was going to get us to the state line, let alone to Pittsburg.

What kind a moron heads off on a three thousand mile journey under these conditions? Well, I think I’ve already answered that. So we set off on Highway 80 and the car behaved itself and we didn’t start to run out of money until we got to….well, Nevada actually. So when we passed a hitchhiker just outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming on his way to New York, we screeched to a halt and offered him a ride all the way to Pittsburgh if he would help pay for gas. He agreed. We weren’t the only morons in the world.
We scrunched up to be able to fit four in the back (plus the dog!) and carried on into the night.

His name was Paul and he was Canadian; and the first thing I noticed about him was that he was astonishing normal. Frank and Benny drove non-stop in shifts, four hours each, snatching sleep in-between. The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up babbled constantly as if he was on speed which, for all I know, he might have been. Darren stared straight ahead, laughed for no reason and, every fifty miles or so would say, “Can we stop at the next gas station?” because he needed to pee. After four hundred miles, Frank, who had hardly spoke a word during the journey, finally snapped.

“Does it have to be a gas station? What about a restaurant? Can we stop at a restaurant? What about the side of the road?” But Darren didn’t want to stop anywhere but a gas station and was certainly not prepared to use the side of the road. And so we drove on, stopping at a lot of gas stations and, when we hit a city we would stop at a grocery store where Bill would shoplift whatever we needed. My heart was in my mouth then, because I just didn’t know what would happen if he was arrested.

By the time we hit Omaha early one morning, the money had finally run out. We were going no further until we got some. We got directions to the nearest Manpower agency, but it was only Benny who was offered work: half a day at a warehouse on minimum wage. There was only one thing left to do, Frank reasoned, sell blood. So we drove down to Omaha’s Skid Row, where there is always a blood bank ready to spring, vampire like, on the local winos who are happy to exchange one type of fluid for another.

Although we all were prepared to shed our blood in the cause of getting to Pittsburg, the bank refused to take blood from the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up because he was too young, and Bill and I because we didn’t weigh enough. So Frank and Paul were taken through to have their blood taken, (by this time Paul must have been wondering why he hadn’t just carried on sticking his thumb out on Highway 80 back at Rock Springs) while Bill, the Maoist Communist Fuck-up and I sat in the battered Buick waiting for them.

After a while a parking cop came over to tell us that we were illegally parked and had to move the car or it would be towed away. This put us into a serious dilemma because one driver was out working in a warehouse and the other was inside selling his blood. So Frank gave the keys to Bill and told us to move it somewhere else. Easier said than done.

The car was parked on a hill for a start, its nose pointed down to a busy intersection. The three of us talked about who should move the car. The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up didn’t know how to drive, so that left him out. Bill didn’t have a licence, so that left him out. And I had never driven a stick shift before, so that left me out. But somebody had to move the car.

Bill finally decided that it would be him and got into the driver’s seat confidently, shifted gears manfully and pulled out into traffic, immediately clipped the side of a pick-up truck. He panicked, turning the corner and trying to head off.

“You have to stop, Bill!” I cried, “There are witnesses!”

He stopped a couple of hundred yards down the road, grabbed my arm and confidently and manfully said, “Tell them you were driving!”

I walked back to the intersection where the pick-up truck driver was inspecting the (mercifully light) damage to his vehicle.

“I’m really sorry!” I said, “My foot slipped on the clutch.” Having never used a clutch I had no idea what I meant. The man laughed.

“This truck is an old wreck anyway. Don’t worry about it.”

But it was not going to be as simple as that. Because by this time a police car was on the scene and a very tall (well, everyone is very tall to me as I am very short) officer said, “Okay sweetheart, who was driving?”

I told him I was driving, but at this point a public spirited citizen ran up and said, “No she wasn’t! There was a boy! A boy was driving! I saw him!” The officer looked at me a bit more menacingly than I thought necessary.

“Alright, sweetheart,” (I really wished he wouldn’t call me that), “Where’s your boyfriend?” When I continued to insist that I was driving, they put me in their back of the police car and said they were they were taking me in. I’m being arrested, I thought! I’m never going to see Bill again! You’d think I’d have other worries, but I was seventeen and in love.

So when the police car pulled up to the old Buick and I saw Bill and the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up leaning against it, then straightening up fearfully at its approach, my heart broke. The policemen got out of the car, leaving me in the back. There were no handles on the inside of the back but, inexplicably, the window was open and I crawled out to join them. The officers were remarkably unconcerned that I had escaped.

The policemen had asked to search the car, even though they didn’t have a search warrant and the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up permitted this, which I thought was astonishing since we had absolutely no idea what might be in that car! The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up then thought it was very funny to take all the stuff out that he had in his backpack one by one saying, “One smelly sock! One stinky pair of Y-fronts! One sweaty T-shirt!” The officers frowned, knowing our little travelling companion was being sarcastic. Bill and I quietly decided that, if we got out of this, we’d kill him.

As they continued to search the car, Frank and Paul emerged from the blood bank, knowing nothing of what had been going on. When he saw the police car Frank raised his hands as if surrendering, which I thought was a bit of an overreaction.

By this time, of course, the driver of the pick-up which, if you recall, was how this whole episode started, said he didn’t think it was worth the trouble of claiming for the damage to his truck since it was so battered anyway. And he’d gone off!

Frank watched nervously as his licence and registration were examined and the car continued to be searched. The officer seemed to get bored with the whole thing, particularly with the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up’s commentary, and turned to Frank.

“You guys got anything?” he asked.

“No! Nothing!” Bill interjected quickly. The officer looked at his watch.

“You guys got thirty minutes to get out of this state!”

Fortunately the state line was only a few miles away and it took us just nanoseconds to embrace his offer of mercy and jump into the car. We squealed round to Manpower to pick Benny up and headed towards Des Moines. It was then that I realised with horror that I’d left my purse in the back of that police car! And it had my ID and all my money in it!

We did a swift U-turn and cruised the area when, with great fortuitousness, we saw the patrol car that had nearly arrested us. It was going the other way, but it had stopped at a stoplight, and Bill leapt out of the car and ran manically down the street to catch it. Just before the light changed, he managed to throw himself at the driver’s window and said breathlessly, “I’m sorry! My girlfriend! She left her purse in the back of the car! I’m sorry!”
The officer looked at him up and down.

“Haven’t you had enough trouble for one day?” He opened the door and let Bill take my purse off the back seat, then looked at his watch again. We entered Des Moines and the state of Iowa seven minutes later. At least I hope we did.

As we headed off across Iowa, Frank and Benny seemed visibly relieved, and it was not surprising. They were, Frank told us, both wanted for armed robbery in the state of Colorado.


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The Efficiency Apartment

22 June 2007

I wrote a play which premiered in London in 1985. It was set on the receiving dock of a warehouse, and was reviewed by a critic from the Financial Times who damned it as “a typical woman’s view of men’s work”. This both hurt and annoyed me, as it was based on the time I spent working on a receiving dock in 1971.

Bill and I had made it to Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington D.C. after being dropped off in Pittsburgh by the armed robbers from Colorado. We had slept under a bridge where we had watched, with a certain amount of satisfaction, as the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up accidentally dropped his rolled up sleeping back down the embankment, into the Allegheny River, and had to sleep covered only with his clothes. We had said goodbye to him the next morning and hitched to Washington D.C.

We spent the next few weeks sleeping rough or at his friends’ houses when their parents were away. But one night we made camp in a small wood, building a lean-to to protect us from the coming rain, and Bill went off to cadge some food off a nearby friend. While he was gone, the heavens opened up and a huge electrical storm hit. Water was battering down so hard it flowed through the lean-to and I watched, screaming (as if anyone could hear me!) as lighting seemed to be hitting the forest floor. When Bill came back I was a gibbering wreck and we decided we really were going to have to find somewhere to live. Which meant finding a job.

A brand spanking new “Atlantic Department Store” was opening in Langley Park and they were advertising for floor sales and stockroom staff. I turned up to a mass interview in which anyone with a pulse was being hired on minimum wage. I was given a job on the receiving dock where huge trucks dispensed whole loads of varied stock that had to be unloaded, checked, ticketed and sent to the sales floor. It was my first job and paid the minimum wage which was then $1.25 per hour.

The only place Bill and I could afford on that kind of money was an efficiency apartment, one of a set of three rooms, sharing a small kitchen and a bathroom, which were strictly to be rented only to single men with absolutely no pets allowed. So my dog Methedrine and I entered and left the place via the window. (Though, looking back, I wonder why we thought that coming and going via the window was any less suspicious than coming and going via the door!) And it was there, with the cheap headboard knocking against the wall alerting the rest of the residents, that I joyously surrendered my virginity.

It was the height of summer, hot and humid and the dock at Atlantic Department Store had no air conditioning. The trucks came in at the end of a journey of maybe hundreds of miles and, when the doors were opened and you went in to start unloading, the heat would suck the air from your lungs. I was small and spry, so it was often my job to scamper up to the top of the cargo and start handing it down.

The biggest shipments were off the Eastern Toy Company trucks, which came in from New York carrying all manner of heavy goods, not just toys; and usually arrived just before lunch. So we hated them. None of us had ever heard of Eastern Toys and, as the top bosses of the company were in the habit of calling each other “paisano”, we did wonder about them.

It was my job to check the shipments before they were signed for, and to ticket the goods before they were sent to the floor. (This was well before bar codes!) I worked with two other women, Little Betty and Joyce.

Little Betty was a matronly looking single mother with a disabled daughter struggling to make ends meet. I didn’t think she was all that little because she was the same height as me. (I have always been in denial about my size.) Joyce was in her mid-twenties, loud, argumentative and totally outrageous. Joyce had been married to an efficiency expert for the US Army. (Try as I might I could not picture this.) He had done his best to contain Joyce’s exuberance and finally gave her an ultimatum.

“Either you straighten up or you can walk out that door right now!” he said. So Joyce picked up her purse, walked out and never went back. I asked her why she hadn’t taken anything else.

“All I needed was the purse. Because it had all his credit cards in it and I could charge anything I needed!”

Which is exactly what she had done. Her husband was frantic and had been calling Joyce’s mother every time he got a credit card statement to shreik, “You won’t believe what she’s done now!” By the time he managed to get all his cards stopped, she had set herself up and got this job. It didn’t pay much and she missed a lot of the accoutrements of her former life, but she had found a boyfriend called Bobby who was “always good for a free meal” and kept her “in the style to which I would like to become accustomed.”

Little Betty didn’t have a sugar daddy. One day at break time we went to the snack bar as we always did. A turnover was fifteen cents but a piece of toast was ten cents and we deliberated at some length about the advantages and disadvantages of spending that extra nickel on the turnover. The normally mild Little Betty seemed to snap.

“I am so sick of being poor!” she said, “All those rich guys with all the money they have! What do they do with it? Why do they need all that? It should be shared around better!” I laughed.

“Careful!” I teased, “That sounds like socialism!”

“I don’t care what it is!” she replied, “That’s what I think!” It’s a conversation that has stuck with me all my life.

I was in love with Bill the way you can only be once in your life; with total abandon and no insight whatsoever. My plans to start at UCLA that September went out the window as surely as I did in the morning on my way to work. Bill and I settled down to a life of low-income domestic bliss, for all the world like a young married couple; and his mother, a spookily quiet and harried looking woman who looked old beyond her years, used to bring trays of lasagne to feed us up, and we bought cheap clothes on my employee discount at the store. But Bill didn’t find the domesticity as blissful as I did.

He became moody and frustrated with the poverty we were living in. He hooked up with a friend who was growing marijuana upstate and one day I came home from work to discover eighty garbage bags full of freshly cut weed that he had agreed to dry and bag up to earn some money. He was also being supplied with cocaine which seemed to make him increasingly irritated. He would fly into a rage when the dog left her “calling cards” on the carpet when she was left alone in the apartment. Bill eventually made me take her to work with me. I had no choice but to tie her up in the woods while I was there. Although we continued to have some glorious times, Bill was also becoming irrationally jealous and possessive, unable to deal with me going out on my own.

Then one day, when Joyce was at a loose end because Bobby was away on business, she asked me if I wanted to go see a movie. She even volunteered to pay. I told her I couldn’t, though, because Bill would suspect I was sneaking around. She laughed.

“I’ve got the perfect solution to that,” she volunteered, “You tell him you think you’re pregnant and you have to go the free clinic for a test. He’ll be so freaked out, he won’t want to go with you. When you get back and say you’re not pregnant, he’ll be so relieved he won’t ask a lot of questions.”

So that’s what I decided to do. Bill bought it, so I left the dog in the apartment and headed off to see “The Summer of ‘42” with Joyce; the first time I had been out to just have fun in a long time.

When I came home, Methedrine greeted me, wagging her tail, among what can only be described as the wreckage of our apartment. She had torn up the trash, carpet, a pair of shoes and left her smelly calling cards everywhere. Bill had come and had obviously stormed out again, leaving a furious message that left me in no doubt that there was going to be a lot of shouting when he got back. I decided I couldn’t face it, so I packed up a few things and left with the dog, leaving a note.

Except that I had nowhere to go. I walked and walked around the neighbourhood wondering what I was going to do now.

Bill came home at midnight, found my note and felt immediate remorse. He put on his jacket and went out to try and find me, roaming the nearby streets shouting my name like a madman and ignoring complaints from some very unsavoury neighbours that might well have battered him for waking them up. But he didn’t seem to care. When he found me he was in a frantic state. He held me, saying over and over again that he was sorry. And that’s when I realised he was crying.

He wiped the tears away with an unexpected rage and started cursing himself. I didn’t understand. And then it all came out.

Bill was only seventeen. But I’d guessed as much. He was a “push-out”, the name given to kids who are not runaways by choice. His father was a big man who regularly beat his mother. And when Bill, who was skinny and small, realised he couldn’t protect her, he cried. His father was disgusted with him acting so effeminately. And somewhere in the fight they had about it, he was thrown out. He had been homeless since then, living rough and with friends, and still trying to go to school. My God, I thought, he’s still in high school.

We went back to our apartment and he cried freely in my arms. We made love. And I knew it was for the last time.

My dog and I went back to Los Angeles together shortly after that. I started at UCLA and went on to a totally different life. I only saw Bill once after that, on a visit to Washington a year or so later. We had dinner in a restaurant together for the first time since Berkeley, only this time he paid.

He told me he was working with some other thieves and that they were snatching bags which was pretty lucrative. I often wonder what happened to him after that.


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The Wilderness

28 June 2007

When my mother came out to California from Chicago in 1956, there were two things that impressed her about her new home. First, there was no snow to contend with. With four children who had always wanted to go out and play in the snow and who required kitting out in snowsuits, hats, mittens, shoes and galoshes, and who stayed out for a total of twenty minutes before coming back in and requiring that the above kitting-out be disassembled, this was a merciful release. And second, California was not flat.

California had mountains and trees and wilderness that Illinois did not have. It had waterfalls and national parks and mountain lakes and trails that led up steep slopes to one beautiful view after another. My mother fell in love with the California wilderness. And discovered family camping.

I was agnostic about camping when my mother first enthused about it. She had decided to buy a large eight foot by ten foot tent which would be our passport to The Wilderness. Or at least to a national park campsite with restrooms, showers and ranger talks complete with slideshows most nights.

So she packed us up in the Ford Galaxy station wagon with the tent, a Coleman stove and an icebox, and we embarked on yearly vacations to The Wilderness.

The downside of my mother’s passion for all things Outdoors, became immediately apparent. For a start, it seemed to involve getting up at an absurdly early hour (sometimes even eight o’clock!) to have a breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked on the camp stove. If that weren’t enough of a shock to the system, tents, as I discovered, have no heating. So as soon as I got out of the sleeping bag, the icy chill of the morning hit me. And it did not get better on leaving the tent.

Now this was not my idea of a vacation, but what was even less my idea of a vacation was spending the day hiking! I am a short person! I have short legs! Short legs, as anyone with them will tell you, are designed for short walks.

Inexplicably, however, my mother always wanted to know what the top of waterfalls looked like, which invariably involved trekking in an upwards direction. What was the point of finding out what the top of waterfalls looked like? They pretty much looked look like the bottom of waterfalls, i.e. a lot of water tumbling down and making a hell of a spray that drenched your clothes and hair. However this was my mother’s idea of pure pleasure and her spirit was not to be dampened by the whining of her younger daughter.

But, let me make my case against The Wilderness. For a start, my brother Steve always insisted on bringing a snake bite kit, which consisted of a tourniquet, two suckers and a thing that looked like a surgeon’s scalpel. The idea was that if you got bitten by a rattlesnake (you can see my point already, can’t you?) you should use the tourniquet to stop the venom from spreading to the heart, cut into the puncture wounds with the scalpel to help them bleed, and then suck out the venom with the suckers. Now, I really did not want to be anywhere where anyone needed a snake bite kit.

And then there were the bears. Every night at the ranger talks, which my mother insisted on attending regularly, the ranger would show slides of the local black bears and give us useful information about them. Did you know that you must never try to escape a rampaging black bear by running uphill? That’s because they have very powerful hind legs and can outrun you no problem. However, if you run downhill, they have difficulty chasing you because their front legs are thin and weedy. There was no advice about what to do if a bear is chasing you on flat ground. Now, I really did not want to be anywhere that I needed to know what direction to run if I was being chased by a bear. And don’t even get me started on tarantulas!

Everyone else in my family came to love The Wilderness. Keith would later put a few things in a backpack and climb Mount Whitney to reduce stress. (All it would reduce in me would be the use of my legs the next day.) Steve would disappear into the wilds of Big Sur on the California coast. And my sister Nancy would even go to a national park for her honeymoon! In winter! My mother said that it was only when camping that she could sleep soundly. Lucky her.

I never had a decent night’s sleep camping. First of all you’re sleeping on the ground. Why would anyone sleep on the ground when there is a bed back home which does not have rocks that stick into your back? My family thought that air mattresses were for wusses. Secondly, you just don’t know what’s out there and the only thing separating you from IT is a sheet of canvas.

One night when we were camping in Lassen National Park, I was lying awake next to my sister Nancy as the family slept. Soundly. And I heard noises. Not just, “I’m Lying Awake Being Paranoid” noises, but serious noises that really should not be there! It sounded to me like…bears.

“Nancy!” I whispered frantically, “I think there are bears out there!”

“That’s okay,” she said, “Bears won’t hurt you.”

Well I could have launched into asking why it is that we have to remember to run downhill from bears if they won’t hurt you. But I knew she would be unimpressed. Because my sister was asleep.

Nancy and I were as different as you could imagine. She was red-headed, blue eyed and fair, I was brown-haired, green eyed and could go out in the sun without subsequently looking like I had leprosy. She was unconventional, I spent my life trying to conform. She was neat, I was a slob. She could sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, and I liked to talk. So she learned how to carry on a conversation in her sleep, which she was capable of doing for more than an hour and not remember a thing she said the next day.

While the family slept soundly, I had to listen to the heavy footsteps (pawsteps?), unearthly breathing and violent crashing that turned out to be the bears throwing the coolbox onto the ground until it broke open like a stubborn coconut and gave up the sweet fruit inside: milk, bacon, eggs, lunchmeat.

So why, a few years later, I begged my brother Keith and my sister to take me with them on a three day, twenty-nine mile hike up the Ridge Trail in Olympia National Park is, like the Holy Trinity and the limitlessness of The Universe, one of the great mysteries of life.

I have always been completely useless at any sport I was ever compelled to take part it. (Compulsion was usually the only thing that worked.) I was the kid who was the last to get picked for teams, and over which the two team captains would argue. Both of them always thought that having to take me should mean they got extra points. I was the kid who stood on the volleyball court, hands held rigidly in the air and hoping the ball wouldn’t come and hit me on the head causing brain damage. I was the kid who could bowl gutter ball after gutter ball achieving a perfect score of zero at the end of the game. (Although I refuse to recognise bowling as a sport. I refuse to recognise any sport that can be played by fat people drinking beer. You ever seen Pete Sampras downing a beer between sets at Wimbledon? I rest my case.)So I guess you could say I wasn’t the athletic type.

I don’t know whether it was because attachment to nature and all things natural was part of the unwritten Hippie Code (which excepted the ingestion of chemicals knocked up in garage labs that involved your brain in a wholly unnatural perception of the world for several hours), or because I wanted my brother to stop thinking I was a complete wuss (which was a lost cause because I actually…was).

The first six miles of the Ridge Trail were switchbacks up to the first crest. Six Miles! Nothing but up! And me with my short legs! By then end of that first day we finally got to a bit where we got to go in a downward direction (which meant we had to go in an upward one the next day)and made camp. The camping fuel canister turned out to be empty so, in the absence of decent firewood, we had to mix our freeze dried stew and powdered potatoes with stream water and eat it cold. Ice cold. Are we having fun yet?

We rolled out our sleeping bags and my brother proceeded to hang our backpacks up in a nearby tree. This, my brother explained, was because, if the bears smelled your food and decided to come after it, they wouldn’t be able to get at it. I suddenly remembered that I hate The Wilderness. I do not want to be anywhere that requires my backpack to be hung in a tree on account of bears. And here we were, in a small valley where the only way out was uphill.

My sister, well aware of my fear, came prepared (having been a Girl Scout) and gave me a Sleep-Eze. These were pills that you could then buy over the counter, which were supposed to help you to sleep. I don’t know what was in them. Barbiturates, probably, I don’t know. I took one. I took two.

My sister suggested she help me take my mind off the bears by telling me a story till the pills took effect. She had just seen the musical “Man of LaMancha” and started to relate the entire plot to me, including clips from most of the songs and long tracts of dialogue she had committed to memory.

I felt sleepy after about twenty minutes, but my sister was well into the story now and I decided to let her finish. It went on. And on. And on. And on. It went on so long that the pills started to wear off. And then I realised. She was telling it in her sleep!

After a night of no sleep, we made ice-cold oatmeal, broke camp, got rained on and had to complete the rest of the Ridge Trail in one day instead of two, arriving back soaked to the skin. I was never tempted to enter The Wilderness again.


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