tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88930383650609919332024-03-14T14:09:29.647+00:00Memoirs of a MadwomanBayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-16415003560793703822008-06-01T01:36:00.002+01:002009-12-05T23:42:59.401+00:00Beginning at the Beginning<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">13 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />And there was. A magical one.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-77922950494972569722008-05-30T11:18:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:43:45.514+00:00The Convent House<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;"><br />14 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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".<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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!<br /><br />My grandma warned me that Helen Aschmann had had countless rejection slips before her work was published.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on "Post a Comment" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-19535180418354419072008-05-28T01:38:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:46:17.391+00:00The Heelykididdlywatt<div style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: 12pt;">15 June 2007<br /><br />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.)<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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".<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"That's not a car!" I said.<br /><br />"Of course not," Keith said, "It's something much better. It's a heelykididdlywatt."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />As I lay there on the ground, the first thing I saw was dichondra.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"What have you done?" he shouted, "What is that?"<br /><br />Steve brushed the soil and bits of dichondra from his patched jeans.<br /><br />"It's our heelykididdlywatt!" he said proudly, "What do you think?"</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-55451984800678534662008-05-27T01:39:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:47:14.937+00:00Yellow Dog Democrat<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">16 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.)<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"Why..?" my mother asked.<br />"Because women don't have families to support," he replied.<br />"But I have four children and two dependent adults to support!"<br />"Yes, but generally women don't."<br />"But I'm not 'generally'" she insisted, "I really do have six people to support!"<br /><br />My mother got nowhere, of course, and went on earning less than a man and burning with injustice.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-26980102521451765692008-05-26T18:48:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:47:46.304+00:00Wild Child<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">17 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />But when he hit his teens, he became a Wild Child.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"Hey!" the priest demanded, "What are you doing?"<br />"I'm sleeping," my brother answered.<br />"Why are you sleeping in my class?" he asked, rising to my brother's insolence.<br />"Cause I don't consider this a class," Steve replied defiantly.<br />"Well, maybe we don't consider you a student!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />My brother had gone out, crashed the car into a bridge and been arrested for being Drunk and Disorderly.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />"And do you know who that guy was?" she asked me, "Your brother."<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-18841391984272043952008-05-25T23:57:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:48:27.328+00:00Ageing Children<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">18 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Bear was from the barrio and had grown disenchanted with changes in gang culture.<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />But then again, I don’t suppose that he, or any of the others, was meant to.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-51800733159698889172008-05-24T19:15:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:49:07.298+00:00Popular Girls<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">19 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Fortunately she did not give birth to a bouncing baby paddleboard nine months later.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-81370741192549448652008-05-23T20:37:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:49:47.556+00:00Run Like Hell<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">20 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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”.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />We turned the corner and ran like hell.<br /><br />When we’d run about a block, he stopped as abruptly as he’d started and began to walk calmly again, still breathless.<br /><br />“Er…you didn’t pay for that breakfast,” I guessed.<br />“Of course not,” he said, “You think I’ve got that kind of money?”<br /><br />I thought about this for a minute.<br /><br />“Why did you leave a tip?”<br />“If you leave a tip, they think you’ve paid already. And it’s only right. The waitress gave us good service.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />I waited for him on the corner for almost twenty, until he finally emerged. Inexplicably, he was carrying a case of beer.<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“There’s a case of beer for whoever finds the dog!”<br /><br />She was found less than an hour later. And I had fallen in love.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-31194574257306379522008-05-22T20:37:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:50:35.736+00:00On the Road Again<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">21 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br />We scrunched up to be able to fit four in the back (plus the dog!) and carried on into the night.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“You have to stop, Bill!” I cried, “There are witnesses!”<br /><br />He stopped a couple of hundred yards down the road, grabbed my arm and confidently and manfully said, “Tell them you were driving!”<br /><br />I walked back to the intersection where the pick-up truck driver was inspecting the (mercifully light) damage to his vehicle.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />“This truck is an old wreck anyway. Don’t worry about it.”<br /><br />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?”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“You guys got anything?” he asked.<br /><br />“No! Nothing!” Bill interjected quickly. The officer looked at his watch.<br /><br />“You guys got thirty minutes to get out of this state!”<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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!”<br />The officer looked at him up and down.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-48889128190685232372008-05-21T15:54:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:51:15.539+00:00The Efficiency Apartment<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">22 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />“All I needed was the purse. Because it had all his credit cards in it and I could charge anything I needed!”<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />“Careful!” I teased, “That sounds like socialism!”<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Except that I had nowhere to go. I walked and walked around the neighbourhood wondering what I was going to do now.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />He wiped the tears away with an unexpected rage and started cursing himself. I didn’t understand. And then it all came out.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-49704863685828514052008-05-20T11:58:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:51:42.523+00:00The Wilderness<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">28 June 2007<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">IT</span> is a sheet of canvas.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Nancy!” I whispered frantically, “I think there are bears out there!”<br /><br />“That’s okay,” she said, “Bears won’t hurt you.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-24742017420479456682008-05-19T00:08:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:52:25.362+00:00Group Therapy<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">1 July 2007<br /><br />The first time I went mad, I was eighteen years old. I was in my first year at UCLA and taking a full load of classes. I was working twenty-four hours a week on night shift at a twenty-four hour coffee shop. I found I didn't need something as mundane as sleep when there was so much out there to do. I had discovered playwriting and politics and sex. And boy, oh boy, had I discovered sex! Having been a good Catholic girl a year before, I was getting laid as often as most people shake hands, and with as much tenderness or feeling. In fact the whole thing had become no more than a wet handshake to me and, had it not been the era of Free Love, I might have been carted off on charges of Leading an Lewd and Immoral Life. I was on top of the world. I was having the time of my life. I was convinced I could do anything. And I was having a hypomanic episode.<br /><br />Then came the crash. I ended up at Student Health, where they decided I was a danger to myself and referred me to the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute on campus. Who put me into Group Therapy.<br /><br />At first, I wasn't amazingly keen on the idea of group therapy. It seemed like a way to economise on psychiatric care; two shrinks taking a whole bunch of patients at the same time. I wanted my own shrink! To listen to me drone on interminably about my childhood and dreams and that kind of stuff, like you saw in those films like "The Three Faces of Eve". But it was take it or leave it so I took it.<br /><br />Group therapy was taken by two trainee shrinks; Alan and Dave. Alan was a research psychologist retraining as a clinical psychologist. He was intense looking with deep brown eyes that looked bovine enough to make you think he really cared. Dave was blond, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and looked the very soul of sanity. Of course, if you know anything about the kind of people who become shrinks, you'll know this could not possibly have been the case.<br /><br />The group therapy room had a small circle of plastic chairs in it, and one wall was covered by a large mirror. It wasn't a mirror, of course. It was two way glass and Alan and Dave were being observed by their Professors who were also observing us. Weird, huh?<br /><br />But not as weird as the group itself. There was Sasha, a woman in her late twenties who had recently been released after eight years from the Camarillo State Mental Hospital and who suffered from schizophrenia. There was Marilyn, a teenager who told us that whenever she looked into the mirror she saw a fat person. I had never heard of anorexia before and it seemed an odd thing to have as a mental health problem. There was Louis, a balding man in his late thirties who stared at his hands and wrapped his feet around the chair, and who would definitely not have been there were it not 1972. Louis's "mental health problem" was that he was gay. And there was Paul.<br /><br />Paul was just about to turn twenty. He heard voices and had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Paul had done a lot of psychedelic drugs in his life, but no one thought to ask, back then, if the drugs were causing the symptoms. So he was admitted as an inpatient and given a whole lot of Stelazine, a major tranquillizer, which made his eyes glassy, his talk slow, and his limbs shaky.<br /><br />All in all a freaky little group. And I loved it! Here at last was a group of people who I could relate to! Who wouldn't think I was weird! We bonded almost immediately, treating sessions like social occasions and, early on, decided that we wanted to have coffee available to make things cosier. When we were told that catering would not be possible because of bureaucratic hurdles, I brought a coffee pot, coffee, cream and sugar to the next session. The shrinks struggled for control but found themselves overwhelmed by the group dynamics. (Wonder what the Professors behind the glass thought?) Having been desperately lonely in the Outside World, group therapy became my refuge.<br /><br />Paul and I became good friends through the group. He didn't get a lot of visitors, as the hospital was about seventy miles from where he lived. I was on campus all the time, so I took to visiting him every day. His was in a locked ward (which I think they all were then)and they had a pass system in operation. Level 1 meant you had to stay on the ward. Level 2 meant you could go out into the rest of the hospital even, oh thrill of thrills, to the cafeteria and have coffee. Level 3 meant you could walk around outside the hospital and Level 4 meant you could go home on a three-day pass. Paul was on Level 1, so we spent a lot of time hanging around the ward talking and playing music. He was a very fine musician.<br /><br />Paul's previous psychiatrist had committed suicide, which is never a very encouraging situation when this is the person who has been trying to make you better. Paul's case was taken over by a Famous Shrink who made it clear that, because he was a Famous Shrink, he was only taking on Paul's case temporarily as he had other cases to deal with that were much more likely to get him published in academic journals. Okay, he didn't say that, but it seemed to be the subtext… Paul took what I thought was a perverse delight in being referred to a famous person.<br /><br />Meanwhile, group therapy had become like an elaborate and traumatic game of strip poker. We drank the coffee I brought from home (Paul took charge of the coffee pot since he was in residence at the hospital), and bared our souls and occasionally wept and even hugged. (Not me, though. I'm not really much of a weeper or a hugger.)<br /><br />Sasha finally broke down and talked of the terrible abuse she had suffered at Camarillo State Mental Hospital and the damage it had done to her and other patients there. Dave put his hands together as if in prayer in front of his face and gently challenged her to admit that the abuse she believed she had suffered was not real and only "part of her illness". Well, maybe Dave didn't believe her, but I did. Of course, having an anarchist streak in me, I'm a sucker for anything that dishes the dirt on authority. Four years later, three doctors and five other employees of Camarillo State Mental Hospital were indicted by a grand jury in California in connection with the deaths of two hospital patients, and against a background of suspicious deaths stretching back several years.<br /><br />I liked Alan though. He had an incisive mind and was canny enough to know that the bond the patients felt for each other was not a conspiracy against the staff. He took my anarchist outbursts in his stride and eventually described me as an armadillo with a raw and inflamed innards. Yeah. I like to think so too.<br /><br />Paul, I discovered, wrote the most amazing, witty and soulful songs, that could make you laugh one minute and cry the next. He wasn't just a guy with a guitar, he was, I realised, very special. He wrote a song for me, which I never recorded or made him write down. But I do remember this bit of it:<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />She has sympathy and sense,<br />She has calm and confidence,<br />Roses and a barbed wire fence,<br />Payments, mortgages and rents<br />But by and by<br />With the ease of gently washing tide.<br />She'll be fine.</span><br /><br />I started to encourage Paul to take his music seriously. He wrote more and more stuff, his tunes and his wit and his poignant reflections on life hitting home more acutely each time.<br /><br />Paul eventually got to Level 2 and we started to go out into the hospital, hitting the cafeteria and the UCLA Medical Center library. This was a favourite place for Paul because he could finally look up the side effects of all the drugs he had been put on. The last side effect listed for any drug you want to name is "Death". Even aspirin. If you don't believe me, look it up!<br /><br />I had started to worry about Paul, though. He had an easy going personality that seemed all too easy to manipulate, even unwittingly. The nurses on the ward had been used to Paul being on the ward when he had been on Level 1. Now, whenever I came around so that we could go out, there always seemed to be a nurse saying Paul can you clean up your room? Paul can you take this to the pharmacy for me? Paul can you drop this off at reception? He felt he was being treated like a child, but never said anything. Anarchist that I was, I tried to school him in the ways of teenage rebellion.<br /><br />"Look!" I said, "Repeat after me. I am not going to take any more of this bullshit!"<br /><br />I got him to repeat it several times and occasionally he would even say to a nurse, "Would you mind if I do it later? I've got a visitor." It was a start.<br /><br />By the time Paul got onto Level 3 and could walk around outside the hospital, he was in rebellious mood. He even asked me if I could bring a joint for us to smoke on my next visit. Which, in the cause of youthful rebellion, I did; and we got pleasantly and hilariously stoned. I remember that day and everything about it. It was glorious! We walked around in the sunshine, giggling like naughty school kids until it was time to go in. We found ourselves walking down a corridor and realised we were outside the group therapy room. It was empty. We went in and looked at all the empty chairs and decided to make it into a short play! We leapt from chair to chair, impersonating Alan and Dave and Louis and Sasha and Marilyn and the rest; and realised what an absurd proposition group therapy really was! We just couldn't stop laughing.<br /><br />But things were to get serious all too soon. His father came for one of his rare visits and Paul couldn't wait to tell him all about his plans to take music seriously when he got out of the hospital. But his father was having none of it.<br /><br />"Grow up!" he told him, "You're not going to earn a living with all that! Get a grip on yourself, for God's sake!" Paul was devastated. And no matter how much I tried to get him to say, "I am not going to take any more of this bullshit", I got no response. I was furious with him. How could he let himself be beaten down? How could he be such a wimp?<br /><br />And then he went to see his Famous Shrink who told him some good news. He was going to make Paul one of his long-term patients. Just think! Paul might eventually get an article in an academic paper devoted to him! But he didn't want to be a long-term patient. He wanted to be well. And somewhere in there, his spirit broke.<br /><br />We fought a lot after that. And then we drifted apart. I stopped going to group therapy. I felt better, I thought. The ritual of my separation was the collection of my coffee pot which Paul had been bringing to sessions. I never saw him again.<br /><br />A year later I was working on campus at the student union cafeteria, dumping ladles full of hot chilli and soup into bowls; and I looked up and saw Sasha. She was a student now – majoring in psychology.<br /><br />"Do you ever hear how Paul's doing?" I asked her.<br /><br />"Didn't you hear?" she asked.<br /><br />I didn't like the way she glanced away from me when I said no. I didn't like the way she paused before she spoke. Several months before, she told me, he'd taken an overdose. Then, changing his mind, he'd called an ambulance. But he had emphysema; his lungs were not good. He stopped breathing and they couldn't resuscitate him.<br /><br />Paul died of an attempted suicide. He was twenty years old. And all his astonishing talent died with him. I suppose it's natural in those circumstances to wonder if you could have been there, could have done something, could have said the right thing. I certainly thought about that. And for a very long time.<br /><br />Within two years, I would try to end my own life too. But, more by luck than judgment, I would survive. I would fall in love. And fall in love again. I would emigrate to Britain. And buy a dilapidated house and fix it up. And raise a son. I would become a writer. And have successes and failures, joy and grief. Paul would have none of those things.<br /><br />By and by, with the ease of gently washing tide, I'd be fine.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-15407061831372453622008-05-18T16:24:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:52:59.074+00:00The All-Night Coffee Shop<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">3 July 2007<br /><br />The first year that I was at UCLA I worked the night shift at Sambo’s coffee shop three times a week. Sambo’s was a chain named after the story of Little Black Sambo and the restaurant had, at one time, been decorated with scenes from the story, showing Little Black Sambo losing his pants to the tigers. By the late Sixties the Sambo’s management belatedly realised that the black community found this character offensive and replaced him with an a Little Black Sambo from India. You knew he was Indian because he had a little turban in the new depictions now decorating the restaurant. This, as they discovered, wasn’t considered much of an improvement but, before they had a chance to replace him with a Little WASP Sambo, the chain had all but folded.<br /><br />My boss talked me into taking the night shift by saying I would get more tips because I would be the only waitress on, and because I would have a chance to study when the place wasn’t busy. Neither of these turned out to be true. At night the place filled up with deadbeats and drunks who never tipped. And they also caused an awful lot of trouble.<br /><br />I worked night shift with Andres the Mexican chef. He was no more than eighteen I figured, with liquid brown eyes that looked away shyly whenever you met them. He couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Spanish, so I had to just hope he could decipher my erratic writing on the orders, written in the restaurant code I had to learn before I was allowed to fly solo out there among the customers: CHB for cheeseburger. BL Cak n/c for Blueberry Pancakes, no whipped cream, BC spt, for bad customer, spit in food. (Okay I made that last one up.)<br /><br />During the rare slack periods, we would entertain each other by picking up items and telling the other their Spanish or English word. I suppose it would be a very efficient way of learning a language if all you needed were nouns like plate, coffee, toast, customer, food and spit.<br /><br />The drunks and deadbeats flooded in just after two a.m. when the bars closed. They tended to be ugly and fairly vile, and I was young and not unattractive. Their unwelcome and drunken advances made me embarrassed and uncomfortable, but in those days there was no such thing as sexual harassment. Women were, in all circumstances, supposed to find it flattering. Yes, really.<br /><br />Andres was fairly good at recognising when I was being harassed and was a naturally chivalrous soul. If anyone touched me in any way, Andres would be on the spot in five seconds with his cart and start bussing the table. No matter how much the customer might insist that he hadn’t yet finished even half of his Sambo’s Ranch Breakfast, Andres would continue to bus it all away saying, “Sorry no English! No English!” He was my hero.<br /><br />And then one night, inexplicably, a whole busload of customers came in at once! There were only the two of us on and it was a nightmare. I ran around like a lunatic, menus tucked under my arm, carrying trays of water to each table and then bringing the coffee pot around before taking so many breakfast orders I was tempted to ask them to order from the lunch menu instead.<br /><br />In the midst of this, two customers who had been there all night drinking coffee began to assail me every time I went by.<br /><br />“Miss! Can we have some water?”<br /><br />I was trying to get coffee, water and food to each table, once slipping on some spilled water I hadn’t had time to clear up and managing to skid on my knees still holding the full tray of waters without losing a single one! But still they assailed me each time I passed.<br /><br />“Miss! Can we have some water!”<br /><br />Never “please”. I did notice the distinct lack of “please”.<br /><br />I kept putting them off, explaining that I had to prioritise the new customers but they never let up.<br /><br />“Miss! Can we have some water!!” The tone almost threatening now.<br /><br />I was carrying an empty tray that I’d just used to hand out waters. The spillage from the glasses was still sloshing around on the tray.<br /><br />“Miss! Can we have some water!!!”<br /><br />So I gave them water. I tipped the tray over into their glasses, most of it hitting the table.<br /><br />But I didn’t lose my job over it. Because Andres and I quickly realised that Night Shift was a kind of No Man’s Land. We could get away with almost anything. There was no boss there and by the time he came in the next morning, these guys would most likely be sleeping it off somewhere..<br /><br />Two guys came in a few nights later. I poured them some coffee and one of them watched me pour it as if I was stripping off. As I walked away I him say to his friend, “Watch me pick up on this chick!” And I heard them make a bet of a dollar that he could pick me up.<br /><br />When I brought their orders the guy reached out to grab my ass. I instinctively blanched. But then I realised. This is No Man’s Land. So I wheeled around, teeth clenched.<br /><br />“You touch me, you’ll be singing in a high voice, mister!”<br /><br />His friend started to laugh at him and he put his hand back where it belonged. I put their food down.<br /><br />“Looks like you lost your bet,” I said.<br /><br />As I started to walk away I heard his friend laughing and the guy saying, “Hey I don’t need that frigid bitch! I buy my chicks a dime a dozen!”<br /><br />I turned back, finding in myself a voice I’d never heard before. “You gotta buy it honey, ‘cause you can’t get it free!”<br /><br />I stalked off, victorious. And from that night I resolved not to be the delicate flower that Andres had to protect with his, “No English! No English!”<br /><br />First, I though, I needed to equip myself with a husband. Not a real one, of course; a fictional one. I decided on a policeman. When I got the predictable, “What are you doing after work?” I would tell them about how my policeman husband was going to be picking me up after his night shift. This usually worked. But it did not deter Randy.<br /><br />Randy was a regular. He wore sunglasses indoors and had a pockmarked face and greasy hair. He would only ever have coffee and he would hunch over his cup and watch me work. It was extremely unnerving. With Randy I really had to invent a policeman husband who was going to be picking me up after his firearms practice before he went to the gym to do his weight training. But Randy was undeterred.<br /><br />When I came to fill up his coffee cup he beckoned me closer to his face, but I wasn’t to be beckoned. Finally he put his hand on my arm and said, conspiratorially, “Listen, if you ever decide to go out on your old man, I am the world’s best cunnilingus artist.” This time I didn’t blanch. I laughed.<br /><br />“You better be good at something, honey, ‘cause you ain’t got the looks!” I pulled my arm away and left him to stew, pointedly bringing him his check even though he hadn’t asked for it.<br /><br />Randy came to the cash register and paid and, as I gave him his change he moved in closer and said, “Why don’t we play Chair? I squat down and you sit on my face?” I fixed his gaze.<br /><br />“Why don’t we play Scream. You squat down and I kick you in the balls?”<br /><br />Now I know there are some strange men out there, but I have never personally met one who finds the idea of being kicked in the balls sexy. Randy went off and never came back to my restaurant again. I had won.<br /><br />A few years later, I had decided I wanted to be a playwright, which I know was a daft idea, but with a passion only youth can provide, I seized on my dream with both hands.<br /><br />When a playscript of mine accidentally fell into the hands of the director of the National Playwrights Company in LA, a play reading workshop which was an offshoot of the almost iconic Lee Strasberg Institute, he had no idea why or how he’d got it (and neither had I). He phoned me to ask if it had been sent in support of an application to join the workshop. Now, only established writers were supposed to be able to apply, but I said yes, absolutely, that is why it had been sent. A few weeks later the workshop accepted me, and I found that I was the youngest member of the prestigious group. No one ever realised I didn’t belong there.<br /><br />None of the members went to the play readings for the plays, I discovered. Anyway, most of them seemed to be written by middle-aged male writers, and were about middle-aged male writers who realised they had betrayed their huge talent for the filthy lucre of Hollywood. No, they were there for the networking. They were there to get work.<br /><br />One night I was approached by a fairly droopy looking old man. Okay he was only in his fifties, which is the age I am now, but it seemed very old to me when I was twenty-one. He drooled with a dry mouth, the way only horny old men can drool, and told me about how he was a writer and producer of a long-running but crap TV series. I thought, my God, if I were a writer and producer on that series, I’d go to the Bahamas and change my name before setting foot in Hollywood again, but it was obvious I was expected to be awed.<br /><br />“So, are you an actress?” he asked.<br /><br />“No I’m a writer,” I replied.<br /><br />He did that dry drool thing. “Well. I didn’t know they let playwrights be so pretty!”<br /><br />I smiled sweetly. “I didn’t know they let writers be so old.”<br /><br />It made him angry and did me no favours, of course, but it was an old habit that I couldn’t break and I realised I didn’t want to. I don’t get hit on much nowadays (though, when I do, it is still drunk men over fifty!). But I learned not to be a pussycat but a firecat. To not be intimidated. To fight fiercely for my integrity. To play by the rules of my own game.<br /><br />Which is probably why I have been a failure most of my life. But I’ve been a very principled one.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-7175328678340098762008-05-17T16:45:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:53:35.770+00:00Peanut Butter Coloured Hair<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">5 July 2007<br /><br />When we were kids, my sister Nancy ate so much peanut butter, my mother said that one day she’d turn into a peanut overnight. My mother was fond of these flights of fancy, and she also told me, when I toppled over my milk glass, (I’ve always been very clumsy) that The Cow was going to come to the door and say angrily, “Where’s the girl who spills my milk?” I used to say this to my three year old son when he spilled his milk, but I had to stop. It terrified him!<br /><br />My sister did have peanut-butter coloured hair, however. And deep, clear blue eyes and freckles and fair skin that made her, after a spell in the California sunshine, resemble a tomato with leprosy. She had a trusting and unwavering belief in the goodness of people, even when my brother Steve accidentally shot me in the head with his bow and arrow. (At least he said it was an accident.) Her trusting nature got her in a lot of trouble over the years, and I came to be very protective of her, even though I was her younger sister.<br /><br />The taunts our schoolmates hurled at us, that hurt me so badly and made me so desperate to conform, seemed to have no effect on her. I don’t think she even noticed; but I did. Once, when a streetwise toughie demanded a bit of my candy bar and I refused, the insult she chose to throw at me, with all the disgust and disdain she could muster, was that I was just like my sister.<br /><br />“Thank you,” I said defiantly. As she walked away she spat out the Ultimate Parting Insult.<br /><br />“Nosepicker!” In the prepubescent world I lived in, it was apparently OK to shake other kids down for candy, to steal, to bully, to even (like that thug Riccatone who once phoned the house to say that he was going to beat the hell out of my brother for no particular reason) resort to mindless violence. But nosepicking was not to be tolerated.(I am pretty sure that Riccatone must be in Folsom State Prison now. Or at least he should be. Either that or he’s an LA policeman.)<br /><br />My sister and I had a collection of small hard plastic dolls when we were kids. They were a bit smaller than a Barbie, a doll we never owned because it was so expensive and because I was never all that interested in the idea of a doll with boobs and a boyfriend.<br /><br />Among our collection there was a doll with brown hair and brown eyes, and another one with blue eyes and peanut butter coloured hair. The first was supposed to be me. The other, my sister. And we used them as conduits into fantasy worlds of our own creation (from which, it could be argued, I have never emerged), in which I was a successful writer and she was a famous singer.<br /><br />My mother had a huge passion for classical music, and played opera and symphonies on our battered old record player, and bought us an album of “Children’s Classics” for Christmas one year and “Peter and the Wolf” another. Despite her efforts, it never took with me. But it did with my sister.<br /><br />She was a gifted classical singer from an early age, and was always chosen as a soloist at high school concerts. She was, as is the tradition, an introvert with an extrovert inside screaming to get out (whereas I am an extrovert with an introvert outside screaming to get back in) and found getting up in front of an audience terrifying at first, until a professional singer gave her a winning tip. So when she came out to sing, she would acknowledge the applause, not with an inaudible, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”, but with an inaudible, “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.” It seemed to do the trick. We all thought she was destined for greater things.<br /><br />But sometimes Fate has a cruel way of stepping in.<br /><br />In the summer of my sister’s junior year in college, she went to Vienna where she saw an awful lot of opera on the cheap, buying standing room tickets on the day and doing a lot of “second acting” where she milled with the opera crowd when they came out at the intermission, and then went back in to watch the second act. She came home just before Christmas. A few months later an Austrian guy turned up on the doorstep. This was Willy.<br /><br />Willy was about fifteen years older than Nancy, had a big blond beard and wore a beret. His clothes were on the bohemian side, except for the green woollen traditional Austrian jacket that he stubbornly wore everywhere, even in the heat of the California sun.<br /><br />My sister had met Willy in Vienna. They had had an affair and, despite her asking him not to follow her home, he wasn’t the kind of guy to take no for an answer. This turned out to be a major character trait.<br /><br />He was a rare book dealer and an artist. The main theme of his artistic oeuvre was human genitalia. Penises and vaginas, to be blunt. He drew them, painted them and sculpted them in plaster, stone and even stainless steel. He once even constructed an eight foot penis.<br /><br />Now I have made mistakes with men in my time. What woman hasn’t? I lived for nearly five years with a musician who spent almost all that time we were together screwing anything with a hole in the middle. Once I threw him a surprise birthday party and the surprise was that every woman there had slept with him. And the woman I persuaded to take him out to the pub until the guests had arrived did not take him to the pub…<br /><br />But any mistake I ever made was, in the power of its destructiveness, a football though a window compared with the grenade my sister threw into her life when she got entangled with Willy. He was jealous, possessive and domineering from the start. In Vienna, she later told me, she had to stare at the ground every time they were in public or else he’d accuse her of flirting with some passer-by. Nevertheless, inexplicably, she married him, with him insisting she vow to love, honour and obey, not cherish. Alarm bells should have deafened her by now.<br /><br />I was living in a two room guest house at the time. It had no hallway, just the front room and a rear room off of which was the bathroom and kitchen. Nancy and Willy had no money, so I offered to put them up until they got on their feet. I gave them the front room of the house, thinking they would have more privacy that way. Willy took an almost instant dislike to me which, for my sister’s sake, I decided to ignore.<br /><br />One day someone knocked on the front door when Willy and my sister were not at home. I went to answer it, which involved walking through the front room but for some reason the door to their room. There was no lock on it, and yet it appeared locked. Nonplussed, I went out the back door and walked around to the front with a key so that I could let my visitor in. Walking back through the front room from the other side, I saw why I hadn’t been able to open the bedroom door. Willy had nailed it shut! To prevent me from invading his privacy! How he had been planning to get to the bathroom was not clear.<br /><br />But I said nothing about this, and nothing about the evil glances directed at me whenever he was around. Until one night, though the paper thin walls of my room, I heard Willy talking to my sister about what a scheming, manipulative and evil woman I was and I finally saw the red mist. I burst into their room, shouting like a maniac about how I was letting them stay there for free and how dare he!<br /><br />They moved out the next day and Willy decided that something had to be done about Nancy’s attachment to her family and to her friends who, he was sure, were trying to turn her against him. So after that, none of us were allowed to be in the same room with her unless he was present. I did not speak to my sister alone for another seven years.<br /><br />During that time, she gave up any thought of pursuing her music. She worked for the bus company while Willy stayed home and built penises and vaginas, and spent her money on rare books. The family decided not to say anything. If she was happy, that was the main thing.<br /><br />But she was not happy.<br /><br />Now my family, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, is a bit mad. Maybe even a lot mad. We have a streak of bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression, that runs like a seismic fault through our genetic geology. Research psychologists plot schematic charts of family histories, marking a black dot on every member with bipolar disorder. Our chart looks like a Dalmatian.<br /><br />So, when, in the summer she turned thirty, she received a small inheritance from my father’s mother, and went out shopping, coming back with over a hundred pairs of panties and three hundred pounds worth of sheet music of ridiculous stuff she was never going to sing, I thought she was going mad. But when she then enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory of Music, abandoned all her possessions, left Willy and filed for divorce, I knew it. And it was glorious! Manic or not, I had my sister back.<br /><br />We had so much to catch up on and we talked many long nights, both in London when she visited me, and in Vienna where she swiftly became very happily settled.<br /><br />“When did you stop loving Willy?” I asked her.<br /><br />“Oh I never loved him,” she said.<br /><br />“Then why did you marry him?”<br /><br />She didn’t speak for a long moment, then said, finally, “He was so in love with me. I didn’t want to be the bad guy.” All those lost years. Because she didn’t want to be seen as heartless.<br /><br />Nancy was determined to make up for lost time, and she emerged from her music course determined to succeed. She had a one-woman show that made her a cult cabaret hit. She auditioned for anything and anyone anywhere in Europe, including for a theatre musical producer who told her she wasn’t raunchy enough for the part. So my sister came back with a black wig on, pretended to be someone called Gayle, and did a raunchy audition. She still didn’t get the part but the producer, who wasn’t fooled, was impressed by her tenacity.<br /><br />She finally got her break when she was cast as one of the principals in the Hamburg premiere of Cats in 1986. On opening night I watched her on the stage of the Opperettenhaus, singing a mock opera duet that was greeted by an audience of eleven hundred with wild applause, foot-stamping and shouts of “Brava!” I was so unbelievably proud of her. To be here. To be doing this. Against all the odds. And I cried with joy.<br /><br />But, what God gives with one hand, He often seems to take away with another. She confided in my on a visit, just before she went into rehearsals, that she’d found a lump on her breast. And it turned out not to be “nothing”.<br /><br />She managed to recover from surgery before she went into rehearsals, having radiotherapy and chemotherapy during the run. She was fine for a year and then developed secondaries, still staying in the show until she finally had to move in with me in London while she had six months of further chemotherapy. On the 25th of October, 1987, aged thirty-six, she died.<br /><br />When my sister was sick, she heard about a cancer support group which was being held in a classroom at a local school. She got to the school – late as she often was – but couldn’t find the right room and, by luck alone, found herself hurrying down a corridor where she overheard someone in one of the classrooms talking about The Illness. And knew she’d found the right place.<br /><br />She was welcomed warmly with hugs and smiles and cups of tea and was offered a chair. It was only then that she realised that The Illness they were talking about wasn’t cancer, but alcoholism. Nevertheless, my sister stayed for the whole meeting.<br /><br />“Why did you stay?” I asked her.<br /><br />“They were so nice,” she said, “I didn’t want to offend them.” Nancy never did want to offend anyone.<br /><br />The grief of losing her washed over the next few years of my life, and still comes to haunt me every time I hear a joke she would have liked, or something that would have made her cry, or something trivial, like a note on written in a page of a book in her handwriting. But what God takes away with one hand He sometimes gives with another. A few years after her death I was blessed with the most beautiful baby boy. With clear blue eyes. And freckles. And fair skin that would make him, after a spell in the sunshine, resemble a tomato with leprosy. And peanut butter coloured hair.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-2951842670462561742008-05-16T16:57:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:54:10.831+00:00The Mini-Skirt Mob<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">7 July 2007<br /><br />Cathie was my best friend when I was in my early teens. She was Crosland’s sister, and Crosland was a friend of my brother Steve, and Crosland was also called Steve – but let’s not confuse things. You get the idea, though. We were a tight-knit, almost incestuous crowd.<br /><br />Crosland was my first boyfriend, and we went steady for two weeks when I was in seventh grade. He was tall, big-boned, with a wicked sense of humour, and, due to the early onslaught of puberty and testosterone, had the distinction of being the only kid to ever get thrown out of eighth grade for growing a beard.<br /><br />All the other girls in my class had boyfriends and were going steady so I asked Crosland if he would mind going steady for a couple of weeks to improve my cred among the popular girls. It was sweet of him to help me out. It didn’t work, of course.<br /><br />His sister Cathie was also tall and big-boned, with that same wicked sense of humour that seemed to be inherited from their mom who once told Cathie and I that the surest form of birth control was to learn to say,“Cool it, sweetheart!” in a way that showed we really meant it.<br /><br />While I went to the local Catholic school, Cathie had the bad luck to go to Bellflower High, which languished in the bottom two percent for achievement of all the schools in the United States. It was a staunchly blue collar area, mainly skilled and unskilled manual workers, and I guess they thought there wasn’t a lot of point wasting money on educating their children.<br /><br />Bellflower was situated in The Flats, that part of Greater Los Angeles which, unlike Beverley Hills and Pasadena and the San Fernando Valley is, well…flat. It had sprung up on farmland after the Second World War to satisfy the housing needs of all those veterans cashing in on the GI Bill which gave them cheap mortgages. It was relentlessly dull and, outside of the small plots of grass in the backyards of those GI Bill houses, everything seemed to be covered in asphalt. To counter this dullness, the city council voted to cheer the place up by painting some of the asphalt areas green to resemble grass. But it did not look like grass. It looked like green asphalt.<br /><br />Bellflower had only two famous sons as far as I knew: the banjo player from the 60’s group The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and the heavyweight boxer Jerry Quarry who was also known as the “Bellflower Bomber”. I doubt if Beverley Hills can boast a heavyweight boxer among its famous sons.<br /><br />There were two grade schools that sat opposite the street from each other. Saint Dominic Savio, known as SDS, which was the Catholic school, and Ed. C. Lewis, the public school. California was so full of migrants after World War Two, that it was hard to find a native Californian, and Bellflower seemed to be comprised of Irish Catholics from the Midwest whose kids went SDS, and Southern Baptists who came, unsurprisingly, from the South, and whose kids went to Ed C. Lewis. A lot of tribal enmity went on and I remember a public school kid taunting me with, “You Catholic!” as if it were a bad word. Not knowing how to respond, I retorted, “You Public!”<br /><br />The boys from both tribes regularly met up after school to thump each other, and once our school was daubed with graffiti that said: “SDS STANDS FOR SOME DUME SCHOOL!” I refer you back to my previous comment on the standard of education in Bellflower.<br /><br />Cathie introduced me to her friend Carol, whose family had not long arrived in California from the backwater of Big Bay, Michigan. They lived in one of the only really old houses in Bellflower – a former clapboard farmhouse that had a cast iron bath like the ones in the Laurel and Hardy films.<br /><br />Everybody in Bellflower seemed to have a gang or a tribe and we thought we ought to form one too. So we went off to the Goodwill shop to see if we could find some second hand clothes that would make an appropriate uniform for our gang. We found a bunch of old fashioned dresses that had probably belonged to someone’s deceased grandmother at the turn of the century (like 1900 I’m talking about here not 2000). With the proper bonnet, they would have made us look like extras out of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. On the basis of these dresses, we formed a singing group called “The Girls They Left Behind” with the motto, “The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine; and the tongue that drops acid shall never touch mine.” (Acid was LSD, for those who are too young to know that, which is probably just about everyone these days.)<br /><br />The only gig we ever did was for the USO at Camp Pendleton, for a bunch of very horny soldiers who would have wolf whistled and cheered if we’d just got up there and farted. But of course we were total crap, and we were never asked back.<br /><br />At that point we realised that we were “The Girls They Left Behind for Obvious Reasons”, and resolved to find a new image. A movie at the local drive-in would deliver it.<br /><br />The Parmount Drive-In was a local hangout because you paid by the carload, so you could cram in as many of your friends as would fit in your car. You sometimes had to watch the movie with the windshield wipers on and the tinny mono speaker hanging on your car window produced truly terrible sound. But that wasn’t why you went there.<br /><br />I had my first date at the age of fifteen at the Paramount Drive-In, with my brother’s friend Larry, otherwise known as Bandito Bob (for absolutely no reason I can think of!), and another couple. It was there I learned what the B-movie was for. After sitting through “Valley of the Dolls”, an unbelievably crap movie from an unbelievably crap novel by Jacqueline Susann, the B-movie came on. After a few minutes I noticed there was a disconcerting amount of breathing going on in the back seat. When I turned around to see what was going back there, I caught a glimpse of a guy biting a breast which I assume was not his own. When I turned back, I saw Bandito Bob taking his glasses off and getting ready to dive in at the drive-in. Fortunately, Mrs. Crosland had told me how to handle this situation and Bandito Bob was forced to watch the movie all the way through.<br /><br />A few months later the featured film playing at the Paramount Drive-In was a biker/girl gang flick called “The Mini-Skirt Mob”. Full of tough talk and big hair, the movie followed the exploits of a girl biker gang who were bent on revenge against the leader’s ex-boyfriend because he had betrayed Bikerdom by settling down with a “nice girl”. The whole thing ends in a hail of Molotov Cocktails in the desert, and Cathie, Carol and I thought it was one of the worst films ever made. So we decided to call ourselves the Mini-Skirt Mob.<br /><br />This required a whole new image, attitude and theme song, which was duly written:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“The Mini-Skirt Mob,<br />The Mini-Skirt Mob,<br />Caused many a heart to flip!<br />The Mini-Skirt Mob,<br />The Mini-Skirt Mob,<br />Caused many a head to split!”</span><br /><br />No shrinking violets, us! We were now a girl gang!<br /><br />Unfortunately no one took us seriously. Even when we kidnapped Dirty Dave and refused to let him go until his friends came up with a ransom in chocolate chip cookies! They were too stoned and needed to hang onto the cookies in case they got the munchies; so finally, after a night of terror, in which he was tied up and held against his will for four hours by three women in mini-skirts, we let Dave go. For some reason, he pleaded with us to stay and we had to kick him out.<br /><br />We obviously needed to become more frightening, and it was about this time that Cathie had a birthday and was given a Milton Bradley ouija board with a plastic pointer and printed instructions on how to contact the Sprit World. It was our destiny, we realised, to take the Mini-Skirt Mob into the Black Arts and become witches.<br /><br />Our first experiments with the occult were pretty disappointing. The pointer would either not move at all or just fall off the board. After a while, we could just about get it to answer a question by slowly inching to Yes, No or Maybe. (What’s Maybe about anyway? You need to contact the Spirit World to get a Maybe?)<br /><br />The Sprit of the Board was just shy, I guess. Because after a while it moved more fluently; and when I asked it when I would next get a letter from my boyfriend Gypsy, it spelled out "Thursday". And you know what? I got a letter from him the next Thursday! Spooky, eh?<br /><br />Once we got used to the Spirit of the Board, the pointer began to speed up. I asked it if I would marry Gypsy and it said no. I asked it when I would next fall in love and it told me that I would be seventeen and that it wouldn’t work out. It told me that my next love affair after that would be when I was twenty-three! Anything we wanted to know, the Spirit of the Board would tell us!<br /><br />After a while we became quite chummy with the Spirit. He told us he had been a soldier who was killed during the American Civil War. His nickname, he told us, was Banana which I thought was a completely crap name for a Spirit of the Board, but it was his board I guess. We asked Banana about his experiences during the Civil War and if he ever smoked dope. (Okay, this was the late Sixties, right?) He told us that there was no marijuana but that he did do “Nightshade”.<br /><br />For a while we liked being witches a lot, and we spent hours on that board. Carol made herself a red witch's robe and Cathie a black one. We learned about spells and Tarot cards and all manner of fortune telling, just in case Banana didn’t have the full scoop. But then we got bored. And sceptical. Until the Spirit wouldn’t talk to us any more and Banana went back into the box.<br /><br />It was not a wasted exercise, however. A couple years later I had to do a project for Sister Marcellina’s religion class. These were intensely ecumenical times and the assignment was to prepare and give a talk to the class about a non-Catholic Christian religion.<br /><br />Basically, I just couldn’t be bothered doing a bunch of onerous research about something I couldn’t care less about. So I turned for help to my sisters in the Church of the Latter Day Mini-Skirt Mob. And we invented a new religion: Lethenium Mysticism.<br /><br />Lethenium Mysticism was born in New England in the Seventeenth Century, when witchcraft had been driven underground by the Salem witch burnings. A small tribe of white witches had converted to Christianity but continued to practice witchcraft in secret, forming the secret church of Lethenian Mystics which is still in existence today as a tiny Christian sect. The cult does not have priests, but priestesses, since women are considered better conduits to the spiritual than men. A priestess is trained from the age of seven in the White Arts, and wears a black robe until, at the age of sixteen, she is confirmed in a “Witching Ceremony” where she is given The Red Robe, symbol of the Lethenian cleric.<br /><br />See? You’re almost believing this aren’t you? I accompanied my talk with Polaroid photos we had taken, starring Cathie and Carol and even Carol’s unwitting mother, pretending we were at a Witching Ceremony where Carol had been given the Red Robe. I even brought the Red Robe (that Carol had knocked up one bored afternoon on her Singer sewing machine) for the class to examine. What was I thinking of? How could I possibly have expected to get away with that? But I did. I got an A.<br /><br />“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as I child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man (or in this case a woman), I put away the things of a child.” And so we did. By the time we graduated from high school the Milton Bradley ouija board and its plastic pointer had been packed off to some charity shop somewhere (but not a Christian one since such boards are conduits to Satan) along with The Red Robe and the old-fashioned dresses of The Girls They Left Behind. And the mini-skirts. We grew up and grew away, which is the way of things.<br /><br />Though I thought I had my future all planned out, it worked out different, as I guess it usually does. I didn’t marry Gypsy. Instead I fell in love at seventeen, and again at twenty-three. And, some years later, I was reading about soldiers in the American Civil War, and I discovered that a commonly used drug of the time was Belladonna, derived from Nightshade.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-52094770360355767672008-05-15T17:24:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:54:45.443+00:00Grandma<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">8 July 2007<br /><br />It was 1959 when I started school and single mothers hadn’t been invented yet. At least not at Catholic schools where parents were expected to stay together no matter how miserable they were, and mothers wore sunglasses to pick up their kids whenever they had a black eye or two. Fortunately, it was a sunny climate.<br /><br />There was only one other kid in my entire school that didn’t have a dad and that was Peggy Wilson whose day was dead, which was at least respectable. And when, in religion class, Sister Wilma talked of the importance of Jesus’ diktat that “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (which I thought would be a good reason to have all-woman divorce courts), she added that the children of broken marriages are “just a little less favoured in the eyes of God.” She didn’t look at me. She didn’t have to.<br /><br />All my friends had dads, who sat in front of the TV watching football and drinking beer, or built stuff, or fixed broken stuff in the house. Susan Tratz had the coolest dad of all because he had a metal messkit from the Battle of the Bulge, which he showed off with great pride because he’d been a medic and, when supplies weren’t getting through, had to take a bullet out of a man’s guts with the messkit knife. He never said whether the hapless soldier survived, however.<br /><br />Although I didn’t have a dad, I did have two parents; my mom and my grandma. My grandma had had a hard life. Her father had died when she was very young, and her sister had been stricken with polio. This, I was told, was the reason Great Aunt Irene used to talk to herself constantly and resent it if you tried to enter the conversation. I have never read that polio can be responsible for that kind of behaviour, and I was pretty convinced she was hearing voices that weren’t there. When their mother had to quit work because “she became confused”, (the family mental health picture has never looked particularly rosy), my grandmother had to go to work to support them all. She was just fifteen years old.<br /><br />She accepted this with great stoicism and, despite the fact that she’d never been able to get an education, was one of the most well read and well informed people I’ve ever met, with the possible exception of my mother. Unless you had really done your homework, it was a bad idea to try and argue with either of them, or my Aunt Lucille either who once invited a Jehovah’s Witness into her living room, and debated with her so fiercely, the poor woman fled!<br /><br />Grandma bore the lifelong responsibility of caring for her “confused” mother and my Great Aunt Irene. She was married late and widowed young; and was sustained by the intensity of her Catholic Faith.<br /><br />When my mother’s marriage collapsed, my grandma took us all in and my mom went to work in the Ovaltine factory, earning half of what a man would doing the same job. Grandma assumed, without question, the job of looking after us kids until my mom got on her feet. She stayed for the next thirteen years.<br /><br />She must have been only fifty-nine when we first lived with her, just six years older than I am now, so I it’s funny to think how painfully old I always thought she was. She was very short, walked with a slight limp and her white hair, which she always wore under a hairnet, was so thin that it seemed only a dusting of snow on the expanse of her scalp.<br /><br />Having survived poverty, the Great Depression, and the privations of World War Two (when God spared her son by ensuring the war ended before he could be shipped out), she was tough as old boots. I never heard her complain about anything and only saw her cry twice in my life. She was utterly unsentimental about everything except, secretly, children.<br /><br />She loved us with the passion of Mama Tiger! Keith was special because he’d had a hard time during the divorce. Steve was special because he’d had club feet and was asthmatic. Nancy was special because she had such a good heart. And I was special because…well, because I was hers.<br /><br />I was the only one to have been raised from a baby by my grandma, and I was the last one left at home when my brothers and sister went to school. It was probably the only time I ever had an adult’s undivided attention as a child. And I gloried in it!<br /><br />She taught me all the things girls were supposed to know back then; how to do the washing (using bluing for the whites. When did they stop using bluing anyway?), make up the beds, clean, sew, mend, cook and bake. On sunny summer days we went out into the yard to hang the washing out and I handed her the clothes pins. On rainy days we stayed in to make fudge; a recipe I still have burned into my memory and involving such eccentric measurements as: three “bent spoonfuls” of corn syrup. The bent spoon from the drawer was the only trusted measure for her recipe.<br /><br />When I was teased mercilessly at school, she would feed me stories of how they were all jealous because of how smart I was (which made me wish I was stupid!); and when I pretended to be sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school to face them, she would say, “You’re sick of school I think,” wink and let me stay in bed. When I started to write my stories, she would listen while I read them out to her as she ironed. Now I’ve raised a kid myself and I realise this must have been a good way to keep me occupied while she was ironing, but this was beyond the call! I wrote screeds of the most childish drivel, that went on and on and on and on! (Like my blog stories, in fact. So you see what I mean.) But, not only did she listen patiently, one day she said, “When you grow up, you’re going to be a writer.”<br /><br />“I can’t be a writer,” I said, “Girls grow up to be housewives.”<br /><br />“Who says?” she demanded, “Is your mother a housewife?”<br /><br />I looked away. That my mother was not a housewife was surely a source of shame, not pride.<br /><br />“Girls can be anything they want to be!” she insisted, “And you should be a writer.”<br /><br />My grandmother hated anything she thought was unjust. She had hated Herbert Hoover during the Depression for declaring, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” as thousands starved and the Midwest turned into a Dust Bowl. She remembered the signs in the ads as she struggled to find work that said, “No Irish Need Apply” and felt a visceral connection to the Civil Rights Movement and their fight to confront that kind of prejudice. She once admonished me for saying, at the age of nine, “Black and white are equal, white skin is prettier than black skin.”<br /><br />“No it’s not!” she snapped, “You think that only because you’re white, and that is prejudice! Black skin and white skin are both as beautiful in the eyes of God!” (My grandma brought God into an awful lot of stuff.)<br /><br />Most of all she hated that women were such second class citizens,, and that my mother was being paid half of what she was worth because of her gender, which, at the end of the day, meant that we wore hand-me-downs and patched jeans, and ate hash and pot roast, and had lean Christmases.<br /><br />Grandma believed passionately that God had put us on Earth with a mission to leave it a better place than the one we arrived in, no matter how small that effort might seem. We lived across from the school and, when the street inevitably flooded in heavy rain, she would wait on our porch with dry towels so that, when the kids waded across in their bare feet, they could dry them off before putting their shoes and socks back on and walking home.<br /><br />My mother regularly worked twelve hour days, six days a week; and when she wasn’t working she was often crying. Depression hadn’t been invented yet either, except among rich people. But I knew she spent an awful lot of time on the edge and I was sure that, if my grandma ever left, we would all be cast adrift and battered to death on the Rocks of Life.<br /><br />If I came home from school and couldn’t find Grandma, instead of looking in the yard (which was where she invariably was), I would check to see if she’d taken her clothes. I would have nightmares and wake up crying and when she came asked why I’d say, “Cause I’m scared you’re going to die someday!”<br /><br />“Of course I’m going to die someday!” she’d scold, “We’re all going to die someday! Now go back to sleep!”<br /><br />When she was diagnosed with cancer, I was eleven years old. My nightmare fears were finally invading my life as I knew they would one day. So I did a deal with God. I was too young for my grandma to leave me, I told him. And I asked Him if He would just leave her with us till I was sixteen and able to deal with it. God fulfilled his part of the bargain. Grandma went into remission and stayed well for another five years.<br /><br />One day my sister and I came home from school and Grandma was lying on the couch unconscious and twitching and Irene was flapping about not knowing what to do. I knew she must be really upset because she was talking to us.<br /><br />We called an ambulance and they came and took her away to the hospital, reassuring us that everything would be okay. I remember thinking, “How the hell do you know?”<br /><br />She’d had a stroke and no one thought she’d last the night. I visited her with my Mom and my Aunt Lucille and my sister when she regained consciousness. Her speech was very slurred and she couldn’t use her left side. She took my hand and squeezed it, trying to say something to me.<br /><br />“What are you trying to say Mom?” my mother asked.<br /><br />My grandma said it again. And again, becoming more frustrated.<br /><br />“Sorry, Mom,” my Aunt Lucille laughed, “I think we’re too stupid to understand!”<br /><br />But I knew what Grandma was saying. I could decipher it. Why didn’t I say? Why was I embarrassed? She was saying, “I love you.” I should have said I love you back. But I wasn’t used to her being sentimental.<br /><br />Grandma miraculously recovered from her stroke and was ready to be discharged from the hospital when the doctors discovered that her cancer had come back. And that she was dying.<br /><br />It was a pretty cruel trick on God’s part, I thought; and he had obviously exploited the fine print in our contract. My grandma died a few months later, just after St. Patrick’s Day, when I was sixteen years old. I was left wishing I’d done a better deal with God.<br /><br />She died as she’d lived; poor. Her worldly goods consisted of little more than a few knick knacks, religious items and a closet full of old and faded dresses, bar the one she wore at Sunday Mass.<br /><br />I’m sorry she never lived to see me become a writer, but, in any case, I was a late bloomer and she would have to have lived to be 101. But she would like to have been right. She did like being right.<br /><br />Her legacy to me was a recipe for fudge, her bent spoon, a wicker laundry basket complete with clothes pegs, the skills of bed-making, sewing and making do, the secret of good parenting, which is unconditional love, a hatred of injustice, and her conviction that Jesus really did mean it literally when He said:<br /><br />“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. Truly I say to you, as you did it for one of the least of these my brethren, you did it for me."<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-32881332102081841372008-05-14T22:34:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:55:21.416+00:00Turning the World Into A Brothel<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">15 July 2007<br /><br />When I started Pius X High School in 1967, I was used to being a misfit and a geek. I’d had a lot of experience and I guess I was good at it. Nevertheless, I was determined to change my fortunes, and decided it must be possible to reinvent myself.<br /><br />I’d picked up two pieces of advice that I thought were going to turn things around for me: “If you want to have a friend, be a friend,” and “Look up, smile and greet everyone you see with a great big hello.” So I prepared myself to be the bestest friend anyone ever had, and I looked up and I smiled and greeted everyone with a great big hello. The strategy failed miserably. Nobody wants a geek and a misfit meeting their eyes, smiling and saying hello. It’s embarrassing. So I never got to be a friend or have one.<br /><br />In the food chain of the school hierarchy, I was plankton. At the top of the chain were the jocks, mainly the football players. They had short hair and wore red lettermen’s jackets and amused themselves by bullying the smart kids. Under them were the cheerleaders. (But not always literally. There was still a lot of virginity around.) To be a cheerleader you had to be well-scrubbed looking, preferably with blond hair, know how to giggle and shriek, and be very good at bullying the smart kids. Below them was the drill team, a group of about fifty girls who came out and did little semi-choreographed routines during half-time at the football games. It was okay to be ugly on the drill team, but I still didn’t make it past the first round of auditions.<br /><br />I was not the only geeky misfit in the school of course, but the nature of being a misfit meant we were isolated. We were so busy trying not to attract too much attention, that we never noticed each other. For that, we would need a catalyst.<br /><br />There was a part-time French teacher at our school called Mr. Ford. He was supplementing his income as an actor and director at a small shop front theatre in Orange County called the South Coast Repertory Company. It eventually became one of the most important theatres in Southern California.<br /><br />Every year for the previous four years, the school had asked Mr. Ford if he would start up a Drama Department, and every year he said no. He took theatre very seriously and was not about to take on a bunch of snot-nosed kids to stage another badly acted version of "Oklahoma", in front of cardboard scenery, with Sister Therese Martin, the music teacher, coaching them to sing “The Farmer and the Cowman Can Be Friends”. Finally, Mr. Ford made them an offer they could only refuse. He would start up a Drama Department if they would give him complete <span style="font-style: italic;">carte blanche</span> to run it in his own way. Astonishingly, they did not refuse.<br /><br />Now, Pius X was a liberal Catholic school in liberal times, just a few years after the Second Vatican Council shook up the Church and brought in the English Mass which had us singing during the Eucharist, “Eat His body, Drink His Blood, And we’ll sing a song of love. Alleluia!” (It was hard at those times not to yearn for the Latin Mass and the comfort of not knowing what we were singing.)<br /><br />Maybe because, or maybe in spite of, the fact that it was an overwhelmingly working class high school, we were part of the Model Schools Program which attempted to address the problem of youthful lack of motivation by having individually tailored curricula. Students still had required courses, but they were in charge of “booking in” their own class “modules” each term in order to meet those requirements. This didn’t proceed without hitches, however, and in my senior year I realised that I could not take both my required PE and my required Biology as they were scheduled at the same time. I had to go to the Head of Studies to ask for an exemption from PE. He shook his head.<br /><br />“Why didn’t you plan for this possibility?” he asked me.<br /><br />“Because I didn’t think it would happen,” I protested. He looked at me conspiratorially.<br /><br />“Did you know,” he said quietly, “that the United States has a plan to invade Canada?” No, I did not know this. “Now who would think we’d ever be at war with Canada? But they have a plan for that eventuality.”<br /><br />He was bonkers of course, but he did give me my exemption which I was delighted about since I hated PE (ironically, I could not have played it better if I’d planned it). My friend Richard DeAtley thought it was so funny he started singing: “Look at Montreal, Nothing left at all! Smoke gets in your eyes.”<br /><br />We even had a Preparation for Marriage class which included sex education, complete with films of fish-like creatures approaching what looked like a Sun God (nothing on birth control, though, for obvious reasons). It was taught by a Catholic gynaecologist called Dr. Plymouth who had great faith in the value of sex education and pronounced himself satisfied that such mature students as ourselves wouldn’t be tempted, armed with said knowledge, to “go out and experiment.” His trust was a bit misplaced, however, and every time I passed Ron Shaheen’s desk I would pass him a note which read, “Hey, want to go out and experiment?” We didn’t, of course, but it would have been fun to see what Dr. Plymouth thought if he’d ever intercepted one of the notes.<br /><br />I feel bad about it when I look back, because he seriously didn’t deserve it. I remember when he was talking about the Wedding Night (the first time the man and the woman have ever had sex, of course), he advised the boys, as discreetly but unmistakably as possible, that their future wife might not achieve satisfaction with intercourse alone and that a sensitive husband will ensure his wife achieves this beforehand. I mean this was before feminism hit the bedroom! Before the Hite Report! If those boys were listening that day, their wives and lovers should be lobbying the Vatican to make Dr. Plymouth a saint!<br /><br />And so the new Drama Department was born. It held no attraction for the jocks or the cheerleaders or the drill team or anyone who’d found their niche on our little campus. It attracted the misfits.<br /><br />There was Mike Chapman who was slightly built and uninterested in sports. There was Lari Pittman who “crossed over” from the Art Department. There was Ron Shaheen who was of Lebanese extraction, Glenn Thompson, one of the only black kids at school, Kitty Felde who was flaky and intense at the same time, and my wonderfully kooky sister, Nancy. There was Phil Alvin who was a misfit by choice as he aspired to be a blues musician and had to look after his cred, the motherless Joe LeChuga, the neurotic Julie Palardy, and even John Shepard who had been a misfit in the football team. And there was Richard DeAtley, a gauche, nervous boy who always looked uncomfortable in his own skin, was incredibly bookish, and tried to flirt with girls (including me) by reciting lyrics from the Mothers of Invention:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“His wife’s attending an orchid show<br />She squealed for a week to get him to go.<br />Now he’s in bed with his teenage queen,<br />Rocking and rolling and acting obscene.”</span><br /><br />Richard never managed to have a girlfriend all though high school.<br /><br />I suppose when we signed up for Mr. Ford’s drama class, we thought we’d be rehearsing "Oklahoma", building cardboard scenery, with Sister Therese Martin coaching us to sing “The Farmer and the Cowman Can Be Friends.” But Mr. Ford insisted we were going to create something called “Art” and that we were going to be “artists”.<br /><br />Mr. Ford must have been in his early thirties then. His clothes were clean but dishevelled looking, with a studied air of bohemian casualness (which was probably nothing of the sort. I suspect he just was the kind of person who didn’t know how to wear clothes). He was worldly wise, passionate, and intensely charismatic. Within months, we would have done anything for him.<br /><br />The secret of reaching teenagers, which few grown-ups ever remember past the age of twenty-one, is to treat them like adults. No quarter was ever given because we were technically “children”. Our first production was Friedrich Durenmatt’s “The Visit”. We rehearsed almost every day after school. We built proper sets with flats; and we were allowed to make mistakes before we got things right. (Richard DeAtley spent weeks trying to work out how to make a two-fold, a corner flat unit, that wouldn't fall down.) We made or own cyclorama, a screen that surrounded the whole stage and could be lit, with cheap muslin sewn together and dyed light blue. Mike Chapman did a proper lighting design with dozens of lighting cues.<br /><br />When some of the parents became seriously irritated that Mr. Ford was demanding so much of our time (which was freely given), he was called onto the carpet by the school administration and forced to curtail our hours. We drove down in a convoy to his house in Santa Ana out of solidarity; and he cooked spaghetti for the whole lot of us. We adored him!<br /><br />On opening night of our two night run, it was standing room only. Every parent, grandparent, friend, uncle, auntie and godparent of every one of us was there. The school administration was now boasting about how hard we’d all worked and couldn’t wait to see the result.<br /><br />The lights went down. The play opened. The train arrives with the millionairess Clare Zachanassian on board. She promises to save the impoverished town on one condition. She demands the life of the lover who once betrayed her: Anton Schill. The villagers refuse, but little by little they start to spend money on credit. Anton Schill becomes increasingly uneasy. Clare is unrepentant and, as she leaves the stage just before the first act curtain she cries, “The world turned me into a whore, I shall turn the world into a brothel!” "Oklahoma" it wasn’t.<br /><br />I think a lot of the parents, grandparents, friends, uncles, aunties and godparents were not expecting this. And to this day I’m not sure how we got away with it.<br /><br />Mr. Ford had huge enthusiasm for European as well as American theatre, and told us that the most exciting theatre was happening in London. We went on to attack ever more difficult texts, Albee’s “The Zoo Story”, Giraudoux’s “Intermezzo”, Van Itallie’s “America Hurrah”, Sartre’s “No Exit”, Pirandello’s “Six Characters In Search of an Author”, Genet’s “The Maids”. We forged a unique identity, calling ourselves “Theatre Tech”, and built ever more complex sets, staged ever more complex productions, and even made a film, a collection of short scripts we’d each written, called "Let My People Go". (Don't ask me. I don't know why.)<br /><br />In my senior year I wrote a play called “The President is Dead" which I directed. It was about seven people who get trapped in a bunker under Washington after a nuclear war: a general, a nuclear physicist, two militant war protestors, a secretary, a National Guardsman and a sociologist. They eventually start a war with each other. The experience of writing it, of seeing it performed, was life-changing.<br /><br />But Mr. Ford was strangely less encouraging about my writing than he had been about my acting. Watching a rehearsal of the play he said, “I know what this play reminds me of! Gilligan’s Island!” (a popular sitcom) I desperately craved his approval, and his remark crushed me.<br /><br />Nevertheless, writing for the theatre became more and more important to me, and I became more confident about expressing my aspiration to do it.<br /><br />“You can’t be a writer!” he laughed one day, “You haven’t got the temperament for it. You’re a people person!” I was beginning to think he was abusing the charismatic power he held over me, but I never said anything.<br /><br />Eventually, of course, we graduated from high school and from “Theatre Tech” and went our separate ways. A lot of us stayed in touch for a long time after that, though, and we’d visit Mr. Ford from time to time. He told us to call him Paul, but we could never bring ourselves to do it, really.<br /><br />One night he took me and another of his former students to a Theatre Restaurant (which was then very novel) where, for the entertainment of guests, women were made to assume second class status and to act as serving wenches. My mother had had to fight that second class status all her life and I just didn’t think it was funny.<br /><br />“Oh come on!” he said, “You’re not the feminist type!” It rankled. Again, I said nothing.<br /><br />By this time a lot of the guys who had been part of “Theatre Tech” began coming out; Lari, Mike, Ron. It’s no wonder so few of the girls in the drama department had boyfriends! When Ron came out to Mr. Ford, he became uncomfortable.<br /><br />“Why,” he asked Ron, “under the circumstances, did you let me undress in front of you when we were in the dressing room?” I was shocked that Mr. Ford could take that attitude, not just politically – he was supposed to be some sort of bohemian artist after all – but as Ron’s friend.<br /><br />The last time I saw Mr. Ford was maybe ten years later. He had moved to the Bay Area and owned a flower shop. I had arranged a stopover to see him on my way back to Southern California for Christmas.He picked me up at the airport and before we even left the terminal he told me he’d directed his first play in years.<br /><br />“What play?” I asked, intrigued.<br /><br />“The Birth of Jesus Christ.” Our charismatic, bohemian teacher had become a fundamentalist Christian.<br /><br />I could understand where he was coming from, I suppose. All the time we had known him, he told me, he’d been an alcoholic. One day, he asked for God’s help, even though he didn’t believe, and God touched him. What I didn’t understand was that he now seemed to have the need to renounce who he’d been back then, and the incredible influence he’d had on all of us.<br /><br />“I was very cynical,” he said to me, “I’d hate to think I passed that cynicism on to you.”<br /><br />This made no sense to me. He passed on passion to us. He passed on determination. He passed on a belief that, despite our unprepossessing backgrounds, we could be “artists”; we could go out and do something amazing.<br /><br />Nevertheless, we stayed in touch for years and always exchanged Christmas cards. He could never bring himself to be all that encouraging about my writing, even when I became an “award-winning” writer. I once sent him a video of my TV serial, and he sent me a critique, damning it with faint praise.<br /><br />He eventually went back to semi-professional theatre, acting in musicals, of all things. Like "Oklahoma". He never did serious theatre again.<br /><br />Over the years our contact grew more infrequent until I didn’t even get the annual Christmas card any more. A few years ago his wife emailed me through my agent. She’d been trying to track me down for two or three years – to tell me that Mr. Ford had died of a brain haemorrhage.<br /><br />News spread quickly through his former students. But there was no funeral to attend. No memorial service to go to. And maybe most of us wouldn’t have gone anyway, I don’t know. But, whether he’d valued it or not, he’d left us a precious legacy; the courage to dare.<br /><br />Lari became a well-known artist. John became an actor and worked on Broadway. Richard became a successful journalist and worked at the Associated Press in New York. Kitty became a radio personality on NPR. Mike worked in the costume department of Hollywood movies. Phil and his brother formed what was arguably the hottest band in Los Angeles. And I went to London and became a writer.<br /><br />It’s a very lonely job though. And I’ve discovered that I’m not that well suited to it temperamentally. I think I’m too much of a people person.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-31603936753786722512008-05-13T13:32:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:55:56.493+00:00Not Quite James Bond<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">22 July 2007<br /><br />If there was anything my mother missed about Chicago when she moved us to California in the Fifties, she never expressed it to me. Chicago was a beautiful city of great architecture, but she seemed unmoved. It was the home of jazz. So what? And it had seasons. California only seemed to have one season. Round about January, the leaves would abruptly fall off the trees and quickly grow back before anyone noticed their embarrassing nudity. My mother, when pressed, would concede that, yes, California did not have real seasons, without the slightest sense of regret. Mainly because, in Chicago, they had real winters.<br /><br />I understand that in Chicago, there are winter days that are so cold that the hairs in your nose can freeze before you walk fifty yards. This impresses me because my nose hairs have never frozen under any conditions and I am left to wonder what that feels like. And apparently in Chicago it also snows a lot.<br /><br />The one thing my mother seemed to miss the least about Chicago was snow. She had had her fill of shoveling the stuff, putting chains on the car, falling on her ass on the ice, and dressing kids up in snowsuits, galoshes and mittens only for them to go out for ten minutes and want to come back in again. So, when her brother Gene offered to take my mother, my brothers, my sister and I up to the “snow mountains” to play, my mother told him she was washing her hair that year, but he was welcome to take us if he wanted. So he did. Four kids. My uncle is a saint.<br /><br />It is one of my earliest memories, but I can remember getting kitted up in the Chicago snowsuit and galoshes (that I probably grew out of by the end of the day) and going off to build a snowman, have a snow fight and then want back in the car after ten minutes. (Some things, as my mother could have told Gene, never change.) I think it must have been on this trip that my brother Keith embarked on his love affair with mountains, snow and ice.<br /><br />As soon as Keith got his license at the age of sixteen, the call of the wild, the proximity of mountains covered in snow and the availability of my mother’s Ford Galaxy station wagon was irresistible.<br /><br />Skiing, of course, was out of the question; and was about as likely for a group of ragged kids from Bellflower as yacht racing. (In any case skiing has always seemed to me a very expensive way to break your leg. It is so much cheaper to buy a ladder and then fall off. If you borrow a ladder, it’s even cheaper.) So one day my brother brought home a four-man toboggan.<br /><br />For the price of a tank of gas, we could kit ourselves up in layers of ordinary clothes and shoes, putting plastic bags around our socks to keep our feet dry (which never worked), drive up to Wrightwood and stop by the side of the road wherever we spotted a good toboggan hill, climb to the top and careen down the hill at a speed that would have made my mother, had she seen us, call a halt to the whole thing. But she wasn’t there. Obviously. Theoretically, you can steer a toboggan by lifting the curl. And theoretically you can brake it with your feet. Neither of these things are true. We ran into a lot of trees.<br /><br />One evening, as we were returning from a particularly good run that we’d found that day, that required us to bail out at the bottom before we hit a road full of passing cars, there was a major hitch. It was starting to snow and a ranger, anticipating a heavy snowfall, had closed the road and there was a locked metal gate preventing us from getting out and getting home.<br /><br />For some reason, this didn’t alarm me at all and I thought it would be a great adventure to sleep in the car all night. Keith was not enthusiastic about the idea. First of all, the heat in the car would run out as soon as the engine was switched off and the engine would switch off as soon as the gas ran out. And secondly, if the snow reached the tailpipe, exhaust would enter the car and we would all be found dead the next morning. Keith always had to ruin everything by being practical.<br /><br />So he got out of the car and hiked down to the ranger station to get someone to come and unlock the gate. The ranger station was closed, however, so he hiked back again and had a good look at the gate.<br /><br />“Well,” he drawled quietly, “I think we’re going to have to break through the gate.”<br /><br />Finally! An exciting climax to the adventure. We were going to accelerate into the barrier and smash through it at great speed like in a James Bond film. Sadly, this was not what my brother had in mind. He inched up to the gate until the bumper touched it. Then he revved the engine gently until there was enough force on the padlock to break it. And we were on our way. Not quite James Bond.<br /><br />I didn’t discover the meaning of the words “laconic” or “taciturn” until I bought a dictionary and I didn’t own a dictionary for a very long time. My mother-in-law once asked me how I could be a writer and not own a dictionary.<br /><br />“I use short words I can spell,” I replied. (I wouldn’t mind that being written on my gravestone. I still use short words I can spell. It’s just that I also do crosswords now and, as everyone knows, you can’t do crosswords without a dictionary.)<br /><br />Keith, I discovered from the dictionary, was both laconic and taciturn. He was quiet, self-contained and kept his own counsel. Another way of looking at it was that he was uncommunicative, unemotional and stubborn. That’s kind of how I looked at it as a kid anyway, particularly when I was having a tantrum at him and he just quietly went into the bathroom, closed the door in my face and locked it.<br /><br />So when he announced at the age of eighteen that he had signed up for the Air Force, it came completely out of blue – or out of the Wild Blue Yonder, as it were. (Alright, I can hear you groan at that one.) I guess, with the Vietnam war escalating, he figured he’d join the service before he got drafted.<br /><br />He was the first of us to leave home and it was quite a shock. The prospect of there not being seven of us living together in our house in Bellflower had not occurred to me before.<br /><br />The Air Force soon realised my brother was a very smart kid and started training him intensively in electronics. My brother Steve, who knows about stuff like this, said he achieved the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in electronics in less than eighteen months. So intense was his training, in fact, that he was not given Christmas leave that first year.<br /><br />We were a very close family and the idea of a Christmas without Keith was unthinkable. So my mother, my brother Steve, my sister and I boarded a Greyhound bus for the fifty-two hour journey to Biloxi Mississippi where my brother Keith was stationed.<br /><br />It was a trip that could only be described as a modern reinterpretation of Dante’s journey into Hell. We were woken at three o’clock in the morning to get off and sit in a freezing terminal in San Antonio so the bus could be cleaned. Steve got food poisoning from one of the Greyhound cafes on route. And Texas just went on and on and on and on and on.<br /><br />We spent Christmas in a Biloxi motel in the warm glow of a small, spindly tree decorated with paper ornaments, and had our dinner in one of the only restaurants in New Orleans that was open on Christmas Day. I had coffee for the first time to show how grown-up I now was. (I was twelve.) It was half milk and I shovelled about half a cup of sugar into it. My brother seemed subdued that day, but he didn’t talk about it. He never talked about it.<br /><br />We were delighted when we heard that Keith wasn’t going to be sent to Vietnam. He was being sent to the Middle East which, to us then, was just a place where there was a lot of sand and camels. I didn’t even know there was oil there; I thought that was all in Texas.<br /><br />I was never clear about what happened next. He was apparently recruited into Intelligence and was given a Secret clearance. I guess if anyone knew how to keep secrets it was my brother Keith.<br /><br />Then, about a year later, my mother packed us all in the Ford Galaxy station wagon and told us we were going up to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California to visit my brother. He was in the hospital. And what I discovered when we got there was that he was in the psychiatric ward. Something had happened and my brother had snapped.<br /><br />The person we visited was my brother but not my brother. He talked even more slowly than usual, when he talked at all, and his eyes looked glassy, the quick intelligence having disappeared somehow. He was drugged up to the eyeballs on Thorazine.<br /><br />He was eventually given a medical discharge and came home and never talked about what happened. But there was a lot that was not right. After getting the equivalent of a college degree in electronics, Steve told me, Keith couldn’t even get past Ohm’s Law. Whatever that is. Sounds like something you’re supposed to know. Like the definition of a sentence if you get your degree in English. (That wasn’t a sentence by the way. No verb.)<br /><br />He seemed to crack up on a regular basis after that, and at those times his stint in the service seemed to haunt him. He would be convinced that the CIA was after him and that the Red Chinese had broken into his house and taken things.<br /><br />My brother, we later discovered, was bipolar, manic depressive as it used to be called; just like my father and like my sister who once stayed with us when her marriage was breaking up and bought a hundred pairs of panties over a period of a few days and the sheet music for about three hundred songs she was never going to sing. (Why does a classical singer need the music for the Whiffenpoof Song? “We are poor little lambs who have lost our way. Baa, baa, baa!”) By the time I was diagnosed as bipolar there was no denying that mental health was not my family’s genetic strong point.<br /><br />When I brought my soon-to-be husband Richard home to meet my family many years later, I was more than a little worried what he would think. He was from a nice middle-class English family and I could only hope that my family would appear sane for a couple of weeks, or at least house-trained.<br /><br />Shortly after our arrival Keith asked Richard if he’d seen John LeCarre’s spy mini-series “Smiley’s People”. Rich said that he had and then Keith asked, more quietly, if he remembered the “scene in the bank where they do the switch”. Well, he didn’t remember the “scene in the bank” but said he did because he was a polite middle-class English boy. My brother leaned over to him conspiratorially.<br /><br />“That’s how they really do it,” he said.<br /><br />Between my sister’s panties and my brother’s “scene in the bank” there was now no hope of convincing Rich my family was sane. He was later to discover I was a raving lunatic myself. He seems to have taken it all in his stride however and adores them. (Quite right too!)<br /><br />My brothers were always close but, though I dearly loved Keith, I never knew him. He was always distant somehow and had seemed to like it that way. This grieved my mother. She really wanted us to be close.<br /><br />“He’s got such a good heart,” she’d say, “He feels things very deeply.”<br /><br />My brother’s love of all things icy continues to this day. He ice skates and has done competitive ice dancing all over the States. Just after my mother died, Keith fell badly on this ice, broke seven ribs and ended up in intensive care.<br /><br />When he came out of the hospital something very strange started to happen. He started to talk about his life. He started to talk about his feelings. He came over to Scotland for my fiftieth birthday and we sat talking over a pint in the pub until my son phoned to ask when the hell we were coming home. He helped me through my breakdown and we talked often, one bipolar bear to another. And then one day I realised that, for the first time in fifty years, we were close.<br /><br />I guess he realised, as we had to realise, that, out of the seven people who made up our household, only three of us remained; and the absence caused by my sister’s death would always cast a shadow over us. We were all we had left of the family we’d grown up with; the only ones who could remember, could understand. And we really needed each other.<br /><br />I talk to my brother Keith every week now and we have commiserated as I have fought my battles with my failing career; and as he has fought his against his bouts of unemployment, his inadequate health insurance and his cancer. One night I told him I loved him. I think it was the first time.<br /><br />“I love you too,” he said, also for the first time.<br /><br />It was time for him to give up his secrets. Even though it was not quite James Bond.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-86309157770963611452008-05-12T18:37:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:56:27.897+00:00The Old Country<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">29 July 2007<br /><br />My father’s parents were Swedish, which made him Swedish and that makes me one-half Swedish I guess; despite the fact that I am as far as it is possible to be from being blonde, blue-eyed, tall, leggy, busty or any of the other enviable attributes associated with that race as it is possible to be. My maternal grandmother had two Irish parents which made her Irish, my mother half Irish, and me one-quarter Irish.<br />I take after the short, small-breasted Irish side. God sure has a sense of humour.<br /><br />Like most Americans, I was quite interested in my hyphen. I think we tend to be Swedish-Americans or Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans or Afro-Americans because ours is such a young country by world standards (if you’re Greek your race goes back thousands of years!). We need a bit of help knowing exactly who we are. My family identified with being Irish-American.<br /><br />One day, while paging through my mother’s Catholic weekly newspaper, looking up the Catholic Legion of Decency movie ratings for a laugh (“Never on a Sunday” was a Condemned Film. So that’s another Mortal Sin I chalked up!), I found an advertisement for a two week summer course in traditional Irish music at University College Cork in Ireland.<br /><br />My brother had just returned from backpacking around Europe, and had been entertaining us with stories of panhandling in Spain, drinking Mateus in Portugal, and a riding a motorcycle with a sidecar through the Pyrenees. I desperately wanted to go and have a similar adventure before I settled down in a couple of years with my fiancé, who was due back from Vietnam that summer. The problem was that I was then sixteen years old and my mother was never going to let me. (She wouldn’t have let me get engaged either, but she didn’t know about that…)<br /><br />I instantly realised that this advertisement was my Big Chance. Surely she couldn’t refuse me the opportunity to go the Old Country on a traditional Irish music course advertised in a Catholic newspaper with my mature and responsible eighteen year old sister. So the first thing I had to do was persuade my mature and responsible eighteen year old sister..<br /><br />We had just been sent eight hundred dollars from my father’s estate, which was a lot of money then, and I challenged my sister to think of a better way to spend it. It was important not to let her think too long about that, and I didn’t, so she caved in immediately and so did my Mom.<br /><br />Now I am the kind of person you should never give an inch to, because I will always take the proverbial mile. By the time my mother knew what was happening, we had discovered the existence of Youth Hostels and had decided to spend seven weeks touring around Ireland, England and Scotland, and had even planned a trip to Paris for Bastille Day. (When I say “planned”, I use the term loosely. We arrived on the biggest day of the Paris Tourist Calendar without reservations and ended up sleeping in a park where we had our Polaroid camera stolen.) She didn’t put her foot down until we started talking about renting motorbikes! (She might not have been quite so adamantly against this had she realised we were going to hitch-hike instead.)<br /><br />Word spread through school that I was going to Europe for the summer. I’d never had so much cachet at school. And when my eccentric high school history teacher, Mr. Drake, heard it, he insisted that we absolutely had to drop in on his Uncle Michael who had a small farm in Connemara. This was turning into quite an adventure and we hadn’t even left yet! Mr. Drake gave us a map and I asked for his uncle’s phone number. He smiled.<br /><br />“Oh, they don’t have phones there.”<br /><br />As a teenager who was never off the phone, the idea that there could be a place in the universe that didn’t have phones was beyond my imagination. So when we landed at Shannon Airport and realised that Connemara was only a short distance away, we had no way of warning him we were coming. But we were coming.<br /><br />We took the airport bus to Galway and then searched for a bus that would take us to Michael O’Sullivan’s house. We discovered two things: no buses went there, and that the bus that went near it only ran twice a day. So we started to hitch-hike.<br /><br />By the time we got our last ride (from a tractor pulling hay) we were on a small dirt road with high hedges on either side. The driver dropped us off and pointed the way to Michael O’Sullivan’s house which he said was about a mile away. Of course it was a whole lot further than that. In Ireland they tell you something is a mile away when it's five, two when it's ten, because they don’t want you to get discouraged about your journey.<br /><br />After a couple miles, we encountered a man of about sixty who was striding purposefully down the lane in the opposite direction, his Wellingtons splattered knee high with mud.<br /><br />“We’re looking for Michael O’Sullivan,” my sister said. The man started and looked us up and down.<br /><br />“I’m Michael O’Sullivan!” he said, “Who are you?”<br /><br />As soon as he realised we were friends of his nephew, we were welcomed with open arms. He insisted that we stay with him and his wife, Ann, and that he would lay on the best he had to offer.<br /><br />They lived in a remote two room cottage with only the most basic furnishings and a peat fire for heat. Dinner was lunchmeats, bread and butter, and tea. There was no television, only a small radio. When I asked where “the bathroom” was, I was shown to a door – that led outside – and Ann handed me some toilet paper. There was no running water. And yet the hospitality shown to their unexpected guests was warm and almost over-generous. A precious tin of biscuits, obviously given as a Christmas present six months before, was opened in our honour. I found it hard to believe that in 1970, in what was supposed to be a first world county, there could be this kind of poverty.<br /><br />By the time we set off for the course in Cork, we had hitched to Dublin, staying in a hay barn on the way. The farmer had asked repeatedly, “You don’t smoke do you? You don’t smoke, right?”, before bringing us a hot supper. We had seen the O’Connell Street Post Office where the bullet holes from the Easter Rising remained in the plaster, and I thought it odd that no one had got round to fixing them yet. The rising had been in 1916 after all. We got a lift to Cork from a crazed salesman who drove ninety miles an hour on narrow roads with hedgerows on either side, and stopped for a pie and two pints of Guinness on the way.<br /><br />Our accommodation for the course, at St. Kilda’s Guest House on Cork’s Western Road, was luxurious by comparison to the very wet camping we had been doing. We got to eat a huge cooked breakfast every morning, an afternoon tea of sandwiches, tea and scones; and a huge dinner in the evening. At lunchtime, we went to a hotel in the centre of Cork and were served by the same loquacious waiter every day, who drew us into conversation about the wonderful Common Market Ireland had just joined (we hadn’t a clue, having only just heard about it), his American relatives (everyone has them) and our bizarre habit of ordering custard with nothing for dessert. (Well, we liked custard!) All included in the price of the course. What a deal!<br />Two other people on the course were staying at St. Kilda’s. There was a middle-aged blind man who talked like W.C Fields and sat in the front of the class, pontificating about Irish traditional music in a way that suggested he knew more about the subject than the esteemed teachers. (This drove at least one of them mad. I thought at one point he was going to say, “Do you want to get up and do this?”)<br /><br />His carer and sidekick was a awkward, weedy-looking guy who knew nothing about Irish traditional music, but told us he was famous throughout Minnesota for being able to do a perfect imitation of a Hawaiian guitar. He told us it was indistinguishable from an actual Hawaiian guitar if you closed your eyes, and demonstrated on a number of occasions. If only I had been able to close my ears as well. I could only guess that not a lot went on in his part of Minnesota.<br /><br />What my sister and I discovered when we took the music course was that we had an entirely different idea of what folk music was than they did. Their idea was music played on tin whistles and uilleann pipes to the beat of a skin drum called a bodhran , sung in an incomprehensible ancient language called Irish. Our idea was anything you could play on an acoustic guitar. When we were asked by the teachers to sing an American folk song for the group, we got up and sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” from a Peter, Paul and Mary album. It did not get the rapturous reception I had hoped for.<br /><br />The first sociology class I ever took taught me that, “In some ways we are all alike, and in some ways we are only like others in our group, and in some ways we are only like ourselves.”<br /><br />It took me a while to understand the middle part of that; to realise that, between what we, all of us, are, and what we uniquely are, is culture. America is such a huge country. We can travel three thousand miles and still see American flags flying on buildings, still buy the same foods, still shop at the same stores and complain about the same government.<br /><br />Until I went to Ireland that summer, I had no more understanding of the cultures of the world than can be gleaned from the “Small World” ride at Disneyland.<br /><br />Despite its poverty, I discovered, Ireland had a rich literary and musical heritage. There was a cultural revival going on in those days. The composer Sean O Riada was writing music for orchestras of traditional Irish instruments, The Chieftains were touring traditional music around the world. People were speaking Irish, the language that had been nearly lost by centuries of English occupation.<br /><br />So my sister and I learned songs in Irish, and did some ceilidh dancing, and listened to the uilleann pipes, and learned a bit of Irish from a book that should have been retired decades before. (Did you know that “Ta capal an tsagairt bacach” means “The horse of the priest is lame? Just a handy phrase in case you ever need it! (And, if you’re an Irish speaker and I’ve got the spelling wrong, please leave a comment correcting me.)<br /><br />On the day of the final concert of the course, my sister and I were on our way to get some batteries so we could record it on our cheap and nasty cassette recorder. We ran into the composer Sean O Riada, one of our lecturers, who insisted on taking us to the pub for a pint. I had never had a drink before so I asked my sister how she thought I could politely refuse. She told me to tell him I was a Quaker.<br /><br />“What’ll you have?” he asked us as we entered the pub.<br /><br />“The thing is,” I said, “I’m a Quaker.”<br /><br />“Alright, you Quaker, “ he shot back, “What’ll you have?”<br /><br />I tried to explain. “See, the thing about being a Quaker…” but he wasn’t listening.<br /><br />“Okay!” he said, “Pint of Guinness!”<br /><br />A few minutes later he returned with the largest glass I’d ever seen full of a completely black substance with a cream-coloured top.<br /><br />“Slainte mhaith!” he said, raising his glass. I smiled nervously, raised mine back and sipped. It was awful! Really bitter! Who could drink this stuff, I thought? But I drank it anyway and by the time the glass was empty I thought it tasted pretty good. The detail of the rest of the afternoon is a bit fuzzy.<br /><br />That night Sean O Riada came up to me after the concert.<br /><br />“Well?” he asked, “Are you drunk or are you sober?”<br /><br />“I don’t know,” I admitted.<br /><br />“If you don’t know,” he told me, “then you’re drunk.”<br /><br />My course in Irish Culture was now complete.<br /><br />We flew back to California at the end of the summer. My fiancé came back from Vietnam. He had changed a lot and the engagement didn’t survive the walk to the airport parking lot.<br /><br />But I’d changed too I guess. My horizons had shifted. There was a whole big world out there beyond the green-painted asphalt of Bellflower, I’d discovered, and I wanted to explore it.<br /><br />A few months after I got back from Ireland, a friend brought me a bottle of Guinness that he’d bought at a store selling exotic beers. It was a lovely thought. But it didn’t taste the same as it had in Ireland.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-80459049938911309942008-05-11T01:37:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:57:04.370+00:00Juanita Gonzales<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">5 August 2007<br /><br />Juanita Gonzales was shorter than I was, which was pretty damn short. I don’t think she could have been more than four foot ten. She was the pastry chef at the ASUCLA (Associated Students of the University of California, Los Angeles) cafeteria; and I hope I am not being disrespectful when I say she certainly looked like she’d sampled a few of her own pastries over the years.<br /><br />I’d started work on the steam table there in my second year at the university; doling out ladles full of chilli and soup into cups and bowls, and pouring copious amounts of a brown glop called gravy, not just onto mashed potatoes, but onto all the meat and vegetables that were passed to me on plates by my steam-table partner Carol. This was an attempt to disguise the fact that the meat was dry and the vegetables soggy. It failed.<br /><br />Carol was a spinster of about thirty-five, whose top half always seemed to be walking faster than her legs. She had an intense expression most of the time and explained to me the finer points of chilli, explaining that a cup held one ladle of chilli, and that the bowl (which cost quite a bit more) held exactly…one ladle-full as well. She had never questioned this and was meticulous to the letter in carrying out her duties. It was what she got up in the morning for.<br /><br />I worked there twenty hours a week while taking a full load of classes. It was a friendly group. There was the irrepressibly cheery Teresa, who brought baked goods of all kinds in to share with us, the popular and handsome fast food chef Raul, the scatty dyed-blonde Paula, the laconic and almost severe Dolores, Big Red the dishwasher, Barut from Lithuania and Edna who would always take her shoes off in the break room, oblivious to the odour, and secretly complain to me (as one white person to another) that the Mexicans weren’t as meticulous about hygiene as “we” were. As is often the case, though, her racism didn’t stop her from backing up her fellow Latino workers when they were harassed, and offering her shoulder to anyone going through a hard time.<br /><br />I hadn’t worked there long when I discovered that ASUCLA Food Service used non-union lettuce. It might seem a small thing now, but this was the early 1970s and Caesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers Union had been fighting to defend impoverished agricultural workers in the vineyards and lettuce fields of California for years; and it had become a cause celebre of the time. The farmworkers had voted to be represented by the UFW, and the growers had responded by doing sweetheart deals with the Teamsters Union, who sent an army of big, surly goons to protect the growers from the small band of protesting workers who picketed outside their gates. Those picket signs can be dangerous weapons, I guess. Only the smaller growers signed contracts with the UFW, and, in those highly charged political times, it was a point of principle to boycott non-UFW produce. Which was how I began my letter-writing campaign to the Daily Bruin.<br /><br />The Daily Bruin was the UCLA student newspaper and just about everybody on campus read it – mainly because it was free. I wrote passionate letters, not only about the scandal of the non-union lettuce, but also about the fact that the male food service workers had their uniforms laundered for them by ASUCLA, but the women had to wash their own (being natural domestics!); and I even blew the whistle about the Great Chilli Rip-Off. The whole student body was shocked by my revelations, then outraged, and finally demanded action – about the chilli at least. Management had to order in new bowls to placate angry diners.<br /><br />We did eventually get action on the uniforms (the president of the Student Union was a woman that year and unimpressed). And after a short campaign, the cafeteria was forced to switch to union lettuce, which was greeted with jubilation by the largely Hispanic workforce. When the kitchen workers opened the very first box of union lettuce, they tore off the cardboard panel with the UFW logo on it, and hung it victoriously on the kitchen wall.<br /><br />My letter writing campaign had not gone unnoticed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers (AFSCME) Local 2070. They had been trying to get a foothold at ASUCLA Food Services for a number of years, so they sent an organiser out to talk to me. He bought me a cup of coffee and by the time it was finished, I’d agreed to help unionise the cafeteria. It took over my life for the next three years. I should have asked him to buy me lunch as well.<br /><br />One thing I have discovered about the injustices of the world is that the reason most people don’t do anything to right them is not because they don’t notice or don’t care, it’s because nobody thinks anything can change. The ASUCLA workers knew that the wages they were on put them below the poverty line; and that it was unfair that the semi-skilled workers were on minimum wage; and that workers seemed to be fired, laid off, moved or have hours cut without explanation. They knew that there were safety issues that needed to be addressed: like uncovered drains that we regularly tripped on and refrigerator fans that didn’t have guards on them that were certain to result in lost fingers sooner or later. When people start to believe, however, that something can be done, things can change fast.<br /><br />Juanita Gonzales was one of the first to join the union. Teresa filled out her card the next day. Dolores joined. And Carol. And even Edna. Some refused: like Paula who said she didn’t need a union (even though she would be fired while on sick leave less than a year later), and Barut who said she didn’t believe in them and thought that, though she found it almost impossible as a single mother to keep her kids in shoes, it was not her place to challenge the management’s God-given right to do whatever they wanted. Nevertheless, management were about to have that God-given right challenged.<br /><br />The first time they had to take notice of us was when Dolores was called in for a disciplinary meeting by Sandy Hammer, the Head of Personnel. Dolores had been moved to the breakfast shift and started to be late because the first bus of the day to get her to work couldn’t quite get her there in time. I had just been elected shop steward and Dolores exercised her right to have a union representative present. I had never met Sandy Hammer before, but within a very short time she was going to wish she’d never set eyes on me.<br /><br />Dolores was taken off the breakfast shift, and word started to get around that the union was worth joining – and many more did. Management were not at all happy with the direction this was going and started to do whatever they could to turn the tide. They moved me to the fast food bar to get me out of the cafeteria. They tried (and failed) to cut my hours down to eight. They even confronted me with an accusation that I was threatening to pour scalding hot soup on anyone who didn’t sign up. (I was appalled by this libel, but I had an airtight defence. ASUCLA soup was never hot enough to scald anyone.) But by then the organising drive was so much more than one person; and we even had another shop steward: Juanita Gonzales.<br /><br />Juanita turned out to be a fantastic shop steward. She was sharp, clear-headed and spoke Spanish, the language of the majority of the workers. She inspired trust and hope; and she put paid to any idea management had that the union organising drive would end with my graduation.<br /><br />Several months later, Juanita needed major operation. She had been working for ASUCLA for ten years at that point and she asked for ten weeks (unpaid) sick leave to travel to Mexico for the surgery and then to recuperate with her family in her tiny hometown in the remote south of the country. She was told the management would give her six weeks, but that there would be no problem if she needed more. She only needed to write to let them know what was going on. So off she went with our best wishes for a quick recovery.<br /><br />Ten weeks later I was delighted to see her back, dressed in her uniform and sitting in the break room. In a moment, though, I sensed something was very wrong.<br /><br />“I have no job,” she told me. She had turned up for work only to be told to go home. She handed me a letter they had sent her while she was in Mexico. She couldn’t read English and she didn’t know what was in it.<br /><br />When Juanita was not well enough to return to work after six weeks, she had written to her Hispanic boss to say she couldn’t come back for another four weeks. Her letter was in Spanish, and she apologised for this, explaining that she was staying in a small, remote place where there was no one to translate for her. The letter she received in reply was in English and she had assumed it was simply acknowledging her letter. She didn’t know that it said she was fired.<br /><br />I immediately filed a grievance for unfair termination and they immediately refused to consider it. A termination, they explained, had to be grieved within four weeks. It did seem that responding to her letter in English, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to know what was in it, had been a stroke of genius on their part; one less shop steward.<br /><br />It was something we had to fight and we did. The union demanded a meeting with us and a member of the ASUCLA Board of Control for Sandy Hammer to explain why Juanita Gonzales’s job could not have been kept open for another four weeks. It was, Ms Hammer explained, because there were simply no jobs that she would have been able to come back to. I countered that the Food Service had been advertising in the Daily Bruin in the same week they had fired Juanita. She insisted the only jobs that had been advertised at that time were hot dog sellers for the UCLA football games, which obviously weren’t appropriate. The Board of Control member was satisfied; I wasn’t.<br /><br />The next day I went to the Daily Bruin office and I bought back issues for the week Juanita was fired. When I discovered that they had been advertising for at least four ordinary full-time jobs in the cafeteria, just as I’d claimed, the red mist descended. I stormed up to Sandy Hammer’s office, the paper in my hands, rushed past the secretary (who, just like in the films, said something like, “You can’t go in there!”) and interrupted a meeting she was having.<br /><br />“There!” I said throwing the paper down and stabbing my finger at the ad, “Right there! Full-time cafeteria workers!Sometimes I think you lie by reflex action!” I spat (which I thought was a pretty good line considering I hadn’t had any time to prepare it), before storming out as suddenly as I’d come in.<br /><br />This accomplished nothing, of course, and it was obvious that if we were to save Juanita’s job and the accrued benefits (including medical!) of her ten years employment, something drastic was going to have to be done. So we decided to occupy a meeting of the ASUCLA Board of Control.<br /><br />Leaflets went out to the employees of the Food Service and to the university students. We were to gather for a short rally after work and then march to the Student Union building where we would burst into the meeting and refuse to leave until Juanita got her job back. It did occur to me that, as the “ringleader”, I was going to spend that night in jail. Now I am not a courageous person. I run away from bees, for God’s sake! And I remember working that day and repeatedly having to excuse myself to go to the restroom. For the first time I knew that the expression “scared shitless” can actually be literal.<br /><br />When Juanita and I and several of our co-workers arrived at the rally, I was stunned to see that there were almost a hundred people there. The union organiser spoke to the crowd. Then Juanita spoke. And then I spoke. It was the first time I had ever done anything like that and apparently I spoke well. I have no memory of it. It was November 20th, 1973; two days short of my twentieth birthday.<br /><br />After our short rally, the group headed off for the short march to the Student Union building where the Board of Control meeting was taking place. I was terrified. My thoughts were racing. What the hell am I doing here? And it did occur to me, with my hand on the doorknob, about to go in, that I might look behind me and discover no one was there with me. What would I do? Pretend I had been looking for the restroom and opened the wrong door? I opened the door. The Board of Control were sitting at a long table and looked up, startled, as I entered. The room filled up behind me.<br /><br />“We’ve come here to talk about Juanita Gonzales,” I said.<br /><br />I didn’t get arrested, the occupation was a success,Juanita Gonzales’s case was referred to Arbitration and she was put back on full pay pending the outcome. We had won our first battle, but there was still a war to win.<br /><br />Arbitration is a formal procedure, like a court hearing, and the union employed a canny and passionate young labour lawyer called Hirsch Adell.<br /><br />At the very beginning of the arbitration hearing, the lawyers from both sides exchanged their copies of the same key documents in order to agree that they were “Joint Exhibits” (i.e. papers they were both going to use in presenting their cases). Among the papers exchanged was a copy of the translation of Juanita’s letter in which she asked for her sick leave to be extended. Our copy of the paper was handed over to their lawyer, who then handed it on to the arbitrator. This left their copy of the letter in our hands. During a short recess, Hirsch came over to us, holding the paper.<br /><br />“We’ve just won this,” he said. It took half the afternoon for us to see how he knew this.<br /><br />Management’s case rested on their sincere attempt to keep Juanita in her job, as evidenced by a meeting they said they had on August the 3rd 1973. At that meeting various proposals were made about how they could keep Juanita on, but, sadly, it just could not be made to work and they had been forced to terminate her employment.<br /><br />I watched as Sandy Hammer was cross-examined by Hirsch Adell after she had given her sworn testimony. He asked who had been at this meeting? She replied that no fewer than two other managers were there (since they were taking the matter so seriously!). He asked how long it had lasted, what options had been discussed and how the decision had been reached. And he also asked about Paula.<br /><br />I had forgotten about Paula. She hadn’t asked for union help when she was fired under very similar circumstances while on sick leave a few months before. When pressed, Sandy Hammer “couldn’t recall” if a similar high-level meeting had been called to preserve Paula’s job.<br /><br />And it was at this point that he handed her the copy of the translation of Juanita’s letter that had been in their side’s hands only that morning. There was, Hirsch pointed out, a note written in the margin. He asked whose handwriting it was. I saw Sandy Hammer’s face go white.<br /><br />“It’s mine,” she said.<br /><br />“And can you read it for the record?” he asked.<br /><br />“It says, ‘Send her the letter we sent Paula.’”<br /><br />Hirsch moved in for the <span style="font-style: italic;">coup de grace</span>. “And what date is on your note?” She must have known it was all over then.<br /><br />“The 21st of July, 1973.”<br /><br />“So,” he said, reeling in the fish he knew he’d hooked that morning, “You were instructing the manager to send the standard termination letter, the ‘letter we sent Paula’, to Juanita Gonzales two weeks before you had the meeting to try and save her job?”<br /><br />Their case collapsed. And, irked by their apparent lying under oath, the arbitrator ruled completely in our favour, compelling ASUCLA to permanently reinstate Juanita Gonzales with full back pay and full benefits. We had won!<br /><br />There was a real sense of euphoria when she returned to work, and returned to her duties as shop steward for AFSCME Local 2070. But it didn’t last.<br /><br />Very conveniently, a few weeks later there was an immigration raid at the cafeteria and INS officers arrested and deported about two dozen of our workers. Though most of them were back within a week, the workforce was reminded just how precarious their livelihood could be; and euphoria had turned to uncertainty.<br /><br />A few months later Juanita collapsed at work. She was hospitalised and eventually diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis; and she was never able to return to the job she (and we) had fought so hard to keep.<br /><br />I went to see her when she was recuperating at home in West L.A. It was a three bedroom stucco house, not unlike the one I grew up in; except that maybe twelve or fifteen members of her family were living there, including children in hand-me-downs and wearing zorries (flip-flops); the shoe of choice for parents who can’t afford shoes. Two or three of her family were in work and just about earned enough to pay the rent. The living room had sheets hung up dividing it into three separate spaces. Behind one of those sheets was Juanita’s “bedroom”.<br /><br />Her condition had deteriorated a lot since I’d last seen her. The cruelty of this twist of fate, after such a long struggle, tasted bitter in my mouth. But not in hers. She said that, if it hadn’t been for the union, she wouldn’t have the medical benefits she now needed so desperately. Which was a point, I guess.<br /><br />She said she wanted to give me a present. To thank me for everything I’d done. And she handed me a brown plastic folio with a zipper at the top.<br /><br />“To keep your papers in,” she said, “You have many papers!”<br /><br />Raul replaced Juanita as the main steward at ASUCLA Food Service. He was dedicated and passionate, but fear had begun to replace hope among the workforce. And as I drove away that day with the brown plastic folio that would become one of my most treasured possessions, I wept.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-73871228990750753022008-05-10T21:02:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:57:31.566+00:00Ian Paisley and Me<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">10 August 2007<br /><br />In June of 1972 I got on an airplane in Los Angeles and flew to Dublin, and then took a train to Belfast. I walked from the station to a small alleyway off a busy street in the centre of the city and rang the bell at Number 2, Marquis Street. The door was opened and I walked up two flights of bare, ageing stairs, passing two floors of light manufacturing workshops. On the top floor, I walked into a seedy office. The carpet was an indeterminate colour and was worn through in patches. A man called Kevin McCorry got up and asked me what I wanted.<br /><br />“I want to volunteer,” I said. He looked at me, not knowing what to make of this slight American girl, so determined to join the struggle. We talked for a bit and I told him what I felt I had to give to the organisation – mainly my willingness to do the donkey work.<br /><br />“Do you want to start right now?” he asked me. And that is how I ended up working for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association that summer.<br /><br />I was studying sociology at UCLA and the field I had decided to concentrate on was Irish social history and politics. I had got quite a lot of help from a graduate student at the university called Seamus Thompson, who was from Belfast and who suggested that the best way to get to know the place was to go there. So I did.<br /><br />The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) put me to work typing up reports and press releases, filing and doing errands. It didn’t matter to me that I could have been doing that kind of work in any office anywhere. It wasn’t any office anywhere. I was in the presence of History in the Making.<br /><br />When I first arrived in Belfast, I stayed with Seamus Thompson and his parents. He was spending the summer doing research on his doctoral dissertation about the Protestant community of Northern Ireland.<br /><br />He was a Protestant himself. His real name was Lawrence, but, as he had been born in the Republic of Ireland, the kids at his school gave him an Irish nickname that stuck. Anyone who knows anything about Northern Ireland knows that Protestants are not called Seamus (which is as Irish Catholic a name as you could imagine); and Catholics are not called Lawrence. I guess these conventions make it easier to know who to hate.<br /><br />Seamus’s father was a retired minister, and he and his wife lived in a leafy upper middle-class area of the city across from Ormeau Park, just a short walk from Ian Paisley’s church. He was a quietly spoken man who was just that bit eccentric under his conventional veneer.<br /><br />Every day at breakfast there would inevitably be one tomato or rasher of bacon or piece of toast left over.<br /><br />“Does anyone want that tomato/rasher of bacon/piece of toast?” he would ask. We all would say no, but this was never the end of it. He would turn to me, “Won’t you have this tomato/rasher of bacon/piece of toast? Please do have it! Don’t you want it? No?” Then he would turn to Seamus. “You’ll have this tomato/rasher of bacon/piece of toast, won’t you? There’s only the one left! Are you sure you don’t want it? Sure? No?” Then he’d turn to his wife. “How about you? Won’t you have the last tomato/rasher of bacon/piece of toast? Do have it! Don’t you want it? No? Are you sure?” Eventually he would be convinced that no one else wanted it. “Well, if no one else wants it, I suppose I’ll have it!” he would say. And you could tell by the way he tucked into it that he had wanted it all along. This happened every morning. It was a ritual. If I was his wife I would have throttled him.<br /><br />His mild, deferential nature extended to his politics as well as his breakfasts. He was a member of the then newly formed Alliance Party. It was composed of moderate unionists who sought to attract Catholics who were happy to remain in the United Kingdom, and Unionists who were happy to accommodate the civil rights demands of Nationalists. It went the way of all the moderate parties over the coming years. It sank without trace.<br /><br />He was an innocent who couldn’t really take in the horror that was around him daily. He was only mildly annoyed that car theft had become so common that, as he didn’t have a garage at his house, he had had to rent one that was a full ten minute walk away. He owned a Ford Cortina and this made him particularly vulnerable, he was told, because Cortinas were the cars most often hijacked by the IRA for use as car bombs. Seamus’s father wondered why this should be so. “It’s probably because they’re so easy to service,” he reasoned.<br /><br />Seamus dissolved into fits of derisory laughter. “Easy to service??” he practically shrieked, “I can picture it now! A terrorist cell emerges from the shadows, swoops down on the Ford Cortina! Lifts the bonnet! Checks the filters! Checks the points! Changes the spark plugs! Fills it full of Semtex! And then blows it up!”<br /><br />His dad dismissed this. Seamus obviously just didn’t know about cars.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the horror was there. Seamus took me with him to talk to his auntie who lived in the Unionist Protestant neighbourhood of Chief Street. A Peace Wall had been erected across it. The wall was an impressive brick and concrete barrier topped with barbed wire which closed off Chief Street and separated it from the Catholic Nationalist neighbourhood of Ardoyne. Every house between the Peace Wall and Seamus’s auntie’s had been burned out.<br /><br />Chief Street was a stronghold of the Protestant paramilitary UVF and Seamus told me I must under any no circumstances call him anything but Lawrence. I was so terrified of blowing the gaffe, I hardly said a word while we were there. Seamus’s auntie must have thought I was simple.<br /><br />Nevertheless, she was incredibly hospitable, as almost everyone I met there was; and she made tea and served it with biscuits (cookies) on delicate china with doilies on the tray and a lace tea cosy on the pot. She talked about the terrible times of the past few years; how she had always had Catholic neighbours, many of them friends, all the way down the street; and it had never been a problem. With the onset of the Troubles, and sectarian riots, her Catholic neighbours has fled Chief Street and her Protestant ones had fled the Ardoyne. She didn’t know how it was all going to end. Half the street, she told me, were “taking tablets for their nerves".<br /><br />While we were talking I glanced out the lace curtained window. Three men drove up in a battered white van and stopped in front of a burned out and boarded up house. They took a ladder out of the back, looking for all the world like builders about to start a job. They put the ladder up against the wall to get access to the upper floor window. One of the men climbed up and went inside through the window. Another man stood at the bottom. A third man went to the back of the van and started to unload arms and ammunition, handing them to the man at the bottom of the ladder, who ferried them up to the window, where they were taken inside. Having discharged their load, the ladder was put away and the van drove off again.<br /><br />The conversation over the china tea cups with custard cream biscuits had continued throughout as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening which – for Seamus’s auntie at least – was probably true.<br /><br />On our way back to the car Seamus said to me quietly, “There are a lot of people who would cheerfully kill you to know what you know right now. Never mention it to anyone. Not anyone.” I didn’t.<br /><br />Meanwhile, I had been busy typing up reports and press releases for NICRA, who were engaged in campaigns against Internment without Trial, the issue at the heart of the protest on Bloody Sunday six months before, when fourteen unarmed civilians were killed by the British Army; against the Widgery Report which exonerated the soldiers that had done it; and against the ongoing casual discrimination against Catholics that had given rise to the Civil Rights Movement in the first place.<br /><br />I was typing up some statistics when I discovered that Catholics suffered 25% unemployment as against nearly 12% for Protestants. And that 19% of Catholics were living in sub-standard housing compared to about 10% of Protestants. And the penny dropped for me.<br /><br />If my community was suffering 12% unemployment, and if 10% of them were in substandard housing, I would be terrified of any group whose demands for parity seemed to threaten that already meagre piece of the pie. Surely it would be better to fight for a bigger pie? But the bakers were off sprinkling salmonella into the metaphorical eggs. And one of the bakers was Ian Paisley.<br /><br />Ian Paisley fascinated Seamus and he was keen to analyse the political content of some of the Reverend’s sermons as part of his research. The only problem was that he would need to go to the church and record them, and he had no idea how the hell he was going to smuggle a cassette recorder in to do it. But necessity is, I guess, the mother of invention and Seamus’s audacity and courage in the cause of academic research knew no bounds. So he got me to do it.<br /><br />Now, when you are eighteen years old, which I was then, you have no sense of danger; you really just don’t believe anything too bad is going to happen to you. So I was happy to agree to it. It seemed like an exciting thing to do in fact. The plan was for me to go to the church with Seamus with the cassette recorder concealed in my handbag. So Seamus’s mother, always keen to support her lad in whatever daft thing he thought of doing, cheerfully went to fetch a few of her handbags to find out which one would be most appropriate for this purpose.<br /><br />I had never been in a Protestant church in my life. It used to be a mortal sin for a Catholic to attend a Protestant service and, being a good Catholic who wanted to stay out of hell, I had always obliged God on this issue. (Now that it’s not a mortal sin, what happened to all the people who attended a Protestant service and died before going to Confession?) Seamus told me I would be alright as long as I said absolutely nothing and did exactly what he did.<br /><br />His minister father was known to the elders of the church, so our arrival aroused no suspicion. We were greeted at the door by someone who knew Seamus, and who shook his hand warmly, asking how he was getting on with his studies out in California. It was going well.<br /><br />They exchanged a bit of chit-chat. Seamus introduced me as his American cousin (I smiled, shook his hand, said nothing). We were handed the Order of Service or somesuch bit of paper. And we proceeded into the church. I followed him down the aisle until he came to a pew close enough to record from, but not so busy we could be too keenly observed. As he turned to go into the pew a strange and almost irresistible compulsion came over me that I was only able to fight back in the last split second.<br /><br />I came and sat next to him. He bowed his head and covered his face with his hand as if in prayer. I did the same.<br /><br />“Jesus Christ!” I whispered. “I nearly genuflected!” Seamus covered his face with both hands.<br /><br />The Big Man came on. The service began. I have to say I got into it after a while, and quite enjoyed the intense ritual of Protestant praying. But then the Reverend Paisley got each and every one of us to bow our heads and pray very, very hard to discover which of us God was going to save today. We all had to keep our heads bowed and our eyes squeezed shut while he waited for someone to be moved to stand up and ask to be saved. The wait went on and on. And I realised to my horror, that we were not going to be allowed to leave the church that day until someone owned up and asked to be saved.<br /><br />After a very long time, I sneaked a peek to see if anyone had cracked yet. But the congregation was a sea of bowed heads. Ian Paisley’s continued exhortations for someone to ask to be saved began to have a hypnotic effect on me. Someone needed to do it. Someone needed to be saved. All I had to do was stand. All I had to do was stand…<br /><br />Seamus had his eyes open too and was staring at me, a strange kind of terror in his eyes. “Don’t. You. Dare.”<br /><br />So I didn’t. But someone else did, and we were finally allowed to go home.<br /><br />I had recorded the Reverend Paisley’s sermon without a hitch, but it turned out to be pretty boring in the end. The only controversial bits were a few barbed jibes aimed at the Pope. Big deal. Had I really risk being hung, drawn and quartered as a heretic for that?<br /><br />One day this demagogue, who had held us all hostage that day, would be First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Other demagogues and hostage-takers would sit down with him in an uneasy peace. But before that would happen, decades of blood would be spilt.<br /><br />Seamus never asked me to go back with him to Ian Paisley’s church. I don't think he wanted to risk me reaching for the holy water fountain next time. And I probably would have.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on "Post a Comment" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-21027489181992239422008-05-09T12:15:00.003+01:002009-12-05T23:41:15.002+00:00A Soldier in Marquis Street<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">18 August 2007<br /><br />When I came to Belfast in the summer of 1972 I told my mother I was going to Dublin. I wrote quite involved works of fiction about my exploits there, put them in envelopes addressed to her, and then sent them on to a friend in Dublin who sent them on to my mother who was reassured by the Dublin postmark. My mother always underestimated just how sneaky and underhand I was. Which, in this case, was just as well.<br /><br />1972, though no one knew it yet, was to be the bloodiest year of the conflict in Northern Ireland. It’s hard to remember, when we look back, that it had started with a civil rights movement. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) had modelled itself on the struggle by black Americans for civil rights in the 1960s, just as surely as the Unionist government of Northern Ireland, had modelled itself on the government of America’s Deep South. Catholics were discriminated against in employment and housing, and were disenfranchised by clever gerrymandering and by outright corruption. By 1972, however, the peaceful campaign for civil rights was degenerating into civil was.<br /><br />Though it was a campaign that was rapidly being overtaken by events, I can at least say I played my part in it. I filed things. I proofread stuff. I did a lot of typing. (No word processors back then, just Tippex. And, with my terrible typing, my copy often looked a bit like Jackson Pollack in white. I would have been fired me had I not been working for free.)<br /><br />I found a place to stay for the summer in a student house on Stranmillis Road near Queen University . It was only a fairly pleasant twenty-five minute walk to the NICRA office in the city centre, which passed the heavily fortified Europa Hotel. Until Sarajevo, it was the most bombed hotel in Europe.<br /><br />NICRA were then heavily involved in the anti-internment campaign, in protesting against the Widgery Report about Bloody Sunday which they considered a whitewash (which, most of us would now agree, it was) and in following up complaints of ill treatment by British Army soldiers. These incidents had become all too frequent since the days when the British Army had been first been deployed there to stop sectarian attacks on the Nationalist population. In 1969 they had been welcomed with cups of tea by the besieged and grateful residents. Now “No Tea for Toy Soldiers” was graffitied onto crumbling walls all over the city. Battle lines had been drawn.<br /><br />So many complaints were now flooding in about the army’s behaviour that NICRA was often overwhelmed. In light of this, they took the rash decision to take me off typing duties (I think they must have got exasperated with all those layers of Tippex) and sent me out “in the field” to find cases suitable for a publication they were preparing o=on abuses by the army.<br /><br />My first assignment was in the bleak ghetto of Andersonstown where I was sent to interview a woman whose husband was “on the run” (wanted by the army). The army had come in the early hours of that morning to search her house for guns.<br /><br />By the look of it, they had been very thorough. The house looked like it was in the early stages of industrial demolition. The floorboards had been ripped up. The carpets were in shreds. The beds and all the soft furnishings had been slashed open and the stuffing pulled out. The bathroom basin and the toilet had been smashed to pieces. (I did wonder how guns could be concealed in a toilet bowl.) And in two of the rooms the walls had been pissed on. (Well, if there’s no toilet, what are they supposed to do, I guess.)<br /><br />I was appalled of course and rushed back to the office to tell everyone what I had seen, sure that this was exactly the kind of thing that should go in their report. Kevim McCorry, the director of NICRA looked at me and shook his head.<br /><br />“This is small stuff,” he told me. “This kind of thing happens every day here.” Every day, I thought? “The army will just say she did the damage herself to discredit the soldiers.” (How, I wondered, would they explain the piss up the wall though?) He shrugged and walked back into his office.<br /><br />My next assignment was to interview a woman in Ballymurphy, an equally deprived and depressing ghetto.<br /><br />When I got off the bus, I saw young kids playing in the street, as kids do just about everywhere I guess. They used to play football, but had to stop because they kept losing their ball every time it was accidentally kicked over the fence into the army barracks. The soldiers always refused to return the ball.<br /><br />“You’re not satisfied with eight hundred years of plunder?” a ten-year old had once cried angrily. “You want a bloody ball as well?”<br /><br />So, they had had to invent a new game called “Barricades”. They built a (rather pathetic) little “barricade” of sticks and rubbish and abandoned car parts, and then waited for a Saracen (an army armoured car) to come along and run over it with no trouble at all, and move on without stopping. The boys would then run out, rebuild it and wait for the next Saracen. During riots, they told me, they would dive around collecting rubber bullets, which they sold to their many journalist and cameraman customers for four pounds. It was very lucrative apparently.<br /><br />Rubber bullets, which were then liberally used to control riots, were the shape and size of the average erect penis (according to Masters and Johnson) only quite a bit harder. (Apologies to any men reading this who are insulted by that; but I have never actually got bruises from being hit by an erect penis.) Because of their shape there were a lot of bawdy songs and jokes about women using them for “comfort” when their men were on the run or when they were under house arrest. But the damage they could do was no joke.<br /><br />The stated use for rubber bullets was to disable rioters. They were intended to be shot at the legs of “ringleaders” so that they could be arrested. In practice it was a bit different.<br /><br />I knocked on the door of a woman in her mid-sixties. She hobbled to the door to let me in, then hobbled back to the couch where she lay under a blanket as she spoke to me.<br /><br />She was the archetypal cranky neighbour; the kind who complains about the noisy kids on the stairs, the people who forget to put the lids on their bins, the young guy upstairs with his heavy metal music and the half-deaf old dear next door with her radio and TV turned up too loud. So it was hardly surprising that, when she heard some soldiers in the street outside playing five-a-side football at two o-clock in the morning, she decided to come downstairs in her nightie and object to this very strenuously and in no uncertain terms. This football team, however, were well armed.<br /><br />“Get away!” she had screamed at them, . “Get away from my door!” They had gathered around her, as annoyed as anyone ever is with a cranky neighbour.<br /><br />“Get back in your fucking door, you Irish bastard!” said one of them, shoving her back through her doorway with his rubber bullet gun. The woman was incensed.<br /><br />“Don’t you dare swear at me!” she admonished, advancing on him, her finger wagging furiously. And that was when he fired a rubber bullet into her gut at point blank range.<br /><br />The woman lifted her nightie to show me her stomach. It was the largest bruise I had ever seen; spreading, in florid blacks, yellows and blues, right across her middle and from the bottom of her breastbone to under her navel.<br /><br />When I came back to the NICRA office, Kevin McCorry told me I could write this one up. “They can’t say she did this one to herself!” I insisted.<br /><br />“No,” he replied, “They’ll say she threatened them with a gun.” He had the weary air of someone who had seen all this before.<br /><br />I spent the rest of the summer “in the field” for NICRA, while also doing all that invaluable typing, filing and proof-reading (at least they told me it was invaluable). I spent a lot of time in the Divis Flats area of the city, where I was always made welcome with cups of tea served in china cups with a plate of biscuits. And in every house I went to, or so it seemed to me, there was a hand carved miniature wooden harp proudly displayed in their knick-knack cupboard.<br /><br />The harp is the symbol of Ireland, and Republican detainees in the infamous Long Kesh Internment Camp would churn these out for their friends and relatives to relieve the boredom of their incarceration. Everyone knew someone who was detained so there were a lot of them about. One woman I interviewed, whose son was interned at Long Kesh, took one out of her cupboard and gave it to me.<br /><br />“Here,” she said, “You take it with you back to America.”<br /><br />“I couldn’t possibly take it!” I protested, “It must be so precious to you.”<br /><br />“Precious?” she said, “I’ve got these coming out of my ears! I wish my boy would learn to carve something else for a change. Like a statue of the Virgin Mary or a lamp stand!” So she wrapped up the harp and insisted, rather overenthusiastically I thought, that I take it with me.<br /><br />One day a call came in to NICRA about a shooting in the Divis Flats area – something that wasn’t all that uncommon in those days – and I went out to interview a woman in one of the tower blocks who’d witnessed it.<br /><br />She was in her mid-thirties, delicate looking, nervous and very quietly spoken. She invited me in for the inevitable tea and biscuits, and I turned on my tape recorder.<br /><br />“There was a lot of shooting that day,” she said. “There were army snipers on the roofs of the flats. I’d gone out to do my shopping, but when I was walking back, I was told not to go on because there’d been a lot of gunfire. So I waited. After a while it died down and someone said I could probably go on home now; but that I should walk on the far side of the street so the army could see I was a woman.”<br /><br />She had started to walk along the street when she heard the crackle of gunfire. A boy “of about twelve”, she said, stumbled into her path.<br /><br />“Help me missus!” he’d cried, “I’m shot!” He’d seemed fine. There was no blood, though he seemed to be in shock.<br /><br />“Ach, you’re not,” she told him.<br /><br />“Help me,” he said again.<br /><br />“You’re alright,” she reassured him.<br /><br />He fell then, onto his knees and then onto the ground. He rolled on his side. He was wearing a bomber jacket, she remembered, and as he rolled she saw that the back of it was soaked in blood.<br /><br />“His back was in pieces,” she said. An ambulance was called and she held his hand until it came.<br /><br />“Am I dying?” he asked her.<br /><br />“Ach, of course you’re not,” she assured him.<br /><br />“I think I’m dying.”<br /><br />“Ach, you’re not. You’ll be alright.”<br /><br />But he wasn’t. He died before the ambulance got there.<br /><br />“Was he armed?” I had to ask.<br /><br />“No,” she said, thinking this a very odd question, “He was a boy. Maybe twelve years old.” But the army would say he was.<br /><br />I still have the tape of that conversation. But I haven’t been able to bear listening to it for thirty-five years.<br /><br />By the time I’d finished my tea, gunfire had started to crackle outside. “I’ll make another pot of tea,” she said quietly, “I don’t think you should go out till that stops.” So we had another cup of tea. And then another.<br /><br />By the time I got back to the NICRA office it was closed and I knew I’d have to use the key they’d given me. When I turned the corner into Marquis Street, there was an army foot patrol there: soldiers standing, as always, with fingers on the triggers of their SLRs . I felt decidedly nervous, something I’d never felt before, given the ubiquity of troops on the streets.<br /><br />I went to the door and put the key in the lock, anxious to get in as quickly as I could. But, it was a tricky lock at the best of times and I just couldn’t get it open.<br /><br />After awhile, one of the soldiers came over and offered to help me. I didn’t know what else to do, so I let him. I found myself looking into his face, seeing something other than a gun and a flak jacket for the first time. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, the same age I was. He might have had to run a razor over his upper lip and chin a few times a week, but his jaw line and cheeks were virgin territory. He even had a few teenage pimples and his face seemed strangely soft.<br /><br />Why are you here? I wanted to ask. I was mystified. Why aren’t you back in your hometown trying to meet the eye of a girl you fancy across a crowded disco? Getting too drunk on a Saturday night and ending up waking up on the park bench where your mates left you? Sweating over some exam or learning a trade? Falling in love?<br /><br />He got the door open and handed me the key.<br /><br />“Thank you,” I said. He smiled and looked away, almost shy. I went inside. And bolted the door.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on "Post a Comment" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-90436580506797710402008-05-09T01:46:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:58:10.579+00:00A Bullet With a Name On It<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">26 August 2007<br /><br />In 1972 the consultant physicians at the Accident and Emergency Department of the Royal Free Hospital in Belfast, so I was told, had published more academic papers, and advised more doctors worldwide on the treatment of gunshot wounds than anywhere else in Europe. It didn’t take much imagination to see why.<br /><br />Daily life went on. Women went shopping with their wheeled trolleys. Men went to the pub to watch football. People went to work in shops, factories and offices while others hung around the labour exchange (unemployment office) watching them jealously. Besotted couples got married. Embittered couples split up. Babies were born. Kids went to school. Teenagers went to discos. Danced. Flirted. Fell in love. As gunfire became the soundtrack of their city.<br /><br />I had been in Belfast for a few weeks when I met Deirdre and Siobhan. They were about fourteen, best friends, and as giggly and gauche as I was when I was their age – four years before. They lived in the Divis Flats area of Belfast and I met them when I went to interview Deirdre’s father Eamon.<br /><br />They lived in a long row of tiny two-up, two-down (two rooms upstairs and two downstairs) terraced houses with an outside toilet in the back court, and a front door opening, like all their neighbours, onto a grim treeless street.<br /><br />It was not an uncommon experience among the people in these rows of houses to have an IRA man knock at the door and ask to be allowed through their house and into the back court to elude an army patrol in pursuit. You didn’t have to be a cheerleader for the IRA to allow them in. There were two reasons for this: 1) The army was pretty much universally hated and 2) Nobody wanted to mess with the local IRA. Opening that door, however could have consequences though, as Eamon discovered. The Army tore up his house the next day looking for guns he didn’t have.<br /><br />Eamon was a pretty nervous guy at the best of times; the kind of guy who would never have opened his door to a Jehovah’s Witness (okay, not the best example) or a political canvasser (hmm…not much better, but you get my drift) never mind a gun-toting paramilitary. And since guns were often “found” by the army after a long and seemingly fruitless search, Eamon was pretty rattled by the experience even though all he ultimately suffered were a few broken floorboards.<br /><br />(I remember a guy I interviewed being very annoyed that the army found a gun after just such a search. “If there’d been a gun there,” he insisted, “I would have known about it. I keep track.” He seemed more peeved by the suggestion that he was stupid than the arms charge he was facing.)<br /><br />For some reason Deirdre and Siobhan took to me as it I were a long lost American relative (which were pretty common actually) and insisted on taking me on a tour of the area where I was introduced me to just about everyone they knew (and they certainly seemed to know everybody). I found myself constantly drinking cups of tea out of china cups and eating biscuits and telling them about life in California.<br /><br />“I’ve got a cousin in California,” someone would say. “His name is Michael Healy. Do you know him?”<br /><br />My volunteer work for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association seemed to give me quite a bit of credibility – except for a guy who, when I told him what I was doing there, said sarcastically, “Aye, and I’m thinking of going to America to help the blacks get their civil rights!”<br /><br />I told him he really should.<br /><br />August 9th of that year was the first anniversary of the introduction of Internment. It was being marked by marches and protests of all kinds right across Northern Ireland, beginning with a ceremonial banging of dustbin lids at 4 a.m.<br /><br />Since the Internment raids had started the previous year, whole communities would come out and bang dustbin lids on the pavement whenever a large numbers of Saracens were spotted coming into the area. It was a crude but effective early warning system for anyone likely to be “lifted”. And this was how the commemoration of the first anniversary of the raids was to begin. So at precisely four o’clock on the morning of the 9th of August 1972, every Nationalist neighbourhood in Belfast and beyond came out of their houses to bang their dustbin lids in a din that must have been heard in Scotland.<br /><br />Deirdre, Siobhan and I stayed up all night and, at just before four in the morning, Eamon took us all out to watch the banging and the bonfires. It was oddly reminiscent of the Fourth of July celebrations of my childhood. I took some pictures and, because I knew the drill, always asked the subject before I took them. You never knew who you were photographing or how they would take to it! Nevertheless, flash photography always has a way of drawing attention to itself.<br /><br />As we walked towards a bonfire at the end of the street, Eamon, Deirdre, Siobhan and I were suddenly surrounded by three men.<br /><br />“Give us the camera!” one of them demanded. I was savvy enough to realise this was no ordinary mugging. Maybe it was the Fourth of July atmosphere, or the fact that I really wanted to keep those pictures, or because I was like a rabbit caught in the headlights and didn’t really believe this was happening. But, I politely refused to hand it over.<br /><br />We were herded into a nearby house to discuss the issue with a middle-aged woman who seemed to be in charge. One of the men had already scaled back his demands and told me I could keep the camera if I turned over the film, but I continued to argue about it. I insisted that I was not taking a picture of anyone except a girl banging a dustbin lid; and that it was important that I take the pictures back to America to tell people what was really happening here.<br /><br />I offered to give them the film if they would promise to develop it, at which point they would see for themselves that there was nothing incriminating on it, and give me the negatives. They dismissed this out of hand, which they would when you think about it, because they were hardly going to turn over what they think might be covert intelligence to a guy in a photo lab who might be a rabid Orangeman. Either that or they were too cheap to pay for developing it themselves.<br /><br />So I opened the camera and exposed the film, explaining that I had now ruined the photos I’d just taken. But, as it was a film cartridge, the earlier shots would be preserved. Wasn’t that enough? A heated discussion followed in which one of the men suggested I might be Special Branch (the Anti-Terrorist police). Eamon, who was known to them, tried to explain that I was with NICRA and that he could vouch for me.<br /><br />“Does she look like Special Branch?” one of them demanded.<br /><br />“If she looked like Special Branch,” the other said, “She wouldn’t be much of an agent!” I had to admit he had a point.<br /><br />Nevertheless, the woman in the house decided that the exposing of the film was enough and sent us on our way. Out in the street, in the light of a bonfire, one of the girls turned to me and asked, “Were you not scared??” And all of the sudden I realised just how inexcusably and unconscionably and recklessly stupid I had just been! (Particularly when I got the photos developed and they were all pretty crap. I’d forgotten what a terrible photographer I was.)<br /><br />It wasn’t until much later, when I looked closely at the photos, that I realised there was a man (or a woman?) in one of them deliberately covering their face with their hair.<br /><br />The day’s protests culminated that evening in a number of marches, one of which was from the city centre to Casement Park in Andersonstown. The park, one of the few amenities in this depressed area, had been commandeered by the army as a barracks and had caused a deep sense of grievance among the locals.<br /><br />There was a carnival atmosphere as we marched out from the city centre in a blaze of placards and banners, chanting slogans and singing songs. Though I was there on my own, I was immediately welcomed into a group of protestors, along with a lanky, long-haired Australian journalist. I use the term “journalist” loosely. He was working for a magazine called something like “Psychedelic Times” that existed mainly to campaign for the legalisation of all drugs. Yeah, I know. I couldn’t understand it either. This was his very first day “on assignment” in Belfast.<br /><br />Suddenly, our merry, good-natured, chanting, singing march came to an unexpected halt. Word passed down from the front that there was a police cordon across the road. The leaders had been informed that our march was banned, and we would not be permitted to go a step further.<br /><br />I was surprised that everyone seemed to take this rather cheerfully. One of the group that had adopted me turned and said, “Just follow me.” So I followed him. Along with hundreds of others, including the Psychedelic Australian, I followed him over walls, along alleyways, through gates, across gardens and over waste ground. It was like a dog had scattered a flock of sheep and the farmer had no chance of rounding them up again. And every sheep arrived, defiantly, at Casement Park. (I had the feeling they’d done this before.)<br /><br />There was a very large crowd at the park gates by the time we arrived. The army were out in force, ready to rebuff any attempt to storm their fort. The Psychedelic Australian couldn’t believe his luck. The prospect of “action” on his first day! I had already taken a real dislike to this guy.<br /><br />Action, however, was pretty thin on the ground at that point, and the only weapon produced was the hot air of the interminable speeches that always accompany political rallies of all kinds. From the “Down With This Sort of Thing” variety, to rampant incoherent raving, nobody really listens because the beauty of a good protest march is the sense of common purpose, the camaraderie, and the outside chance of getting laid that night.<br /><br />But as the speeches droned on, four Saracen armoured vehicles were positioned on one side of the crowd, and four more were positioned on the other. The atmosphere was becoming tense.<br /><br />It had been a year since Internment without trial had been introduced; a year since the army first arrived into people’s homes at four in the morning and had taken away husbands, brothers and sons; “terrorist suspects” who usually turned out to be nothing of the sort. And it had been barely more than six months since fourteen unarmed anti-internment protestors had been gunned down in Derry. It wouldn’t take much to turn the previous carnival mood ugly. And “what it took” arrived swiftly.<br /><br />The light was fading, the rally was ending, and we were asked by the march organisers to head home peacefully. It was then that the four Saracens on both sides of us began to advance at a slow, steady pace towards us. With the heavily protected park gates in front of us and armoured vehicles on both sides of us, we were caught in a pincer movement and were being shown the door. A few lads started to throw stones at the advancing Saracens.<br /><br />“This would be a good time to leave,” I said to the Psychedelic Australian. He was having none of it.<br /><br />“Leave?” he said excitedly, “This is what I came here for!” Some lads (in a tongue in cheek way, I thought) invited him to throw a few stones with them. You’d think he had just been invited by a native Bajan to swim with the giant turtles! And off he went.<br /><br />By this time many in the crowd were surging forward in response to the army pushing them back. I don’t know a lot about physics, but I knew this was not a good thing. I started to move through the crowd in the opposite direction, trying to get out through the only escape route. I saw youths carrying milk bottles to the front of the crowd and breaking up flagstones. It was turning into a stand-off as defiant protestors formed a solid and unmoving mass in the face of a wall of Saracens and riot shields. It was impossible to get through the centre of the crowd so I found myself moving to the edges which was only dotted with a handful of less strident protestors. It was nearly dark now.<br /><br />Suddenly, I heard a roar from the crowd. It all happened in a few seconds. The army rushed forward as determinedly as the crowd pushed back. A light caught my eye. And, like Lot’s wife, I turned around to see what it was. A petrol bomb flew through the darkening sky, crashed to the ground, exploded, burned; casting an eerie glow onto the looming bank of Saracens and bringing the black silhouette of a stone-thrower into stark relief.<br /><br />I saw three pinpricks of light flash just beyond the flames. I heard three dull pops. In the split second it took for me to register that one of those pinpricks of light was directly in front of me, I felt something hit me in the stomach – hard. And I fell to the ground, doubled up and unable to breathe.<br /><br />It was surreal. The army were charging and people were running and screaming. I could see feet running past me. And heard more pops. But I couldn’t cry out because I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly there were two or three people kneeling around me.<br /><br />“You’re alright! You’re alright!” someone said, “It was just a rubber bullet.” Out of nowhere, a St. John’s Ambulance crew had arrived.<br /><br />The crew seemed to work the riots in Belfast the way the crews in more peaceful cities work the football matches. And they had a drill for just the eventuality I had found myself in. The most important thing was to get me out of the way of unfolding events; first because I might incur further injuries; and second because, since the army would only shoot a “ringleader”, then I must be one and would be liable to arrest. But before I was rescued, I wanted just one thing. “The bullet!!” I cried, “I want the bloody bullet!”<br /><br />I was picked up by a guy who was understandably unimpressed by my priorities, and carried into a house nearby. It was full of strangers who seemed to accept the intrusion with something bordering on insouciance, as the riot raged on outside us.<br /><br />My rescuer introduced himself as Des and laid me on the settee in the sitting room.<br /><br />“Thank you,” I said.<br /><br />“You alright?”<br /><br />“Yeah,” I said, “I just wish I’d got the bullet.”<br /><br />Well, I can’t fault Des’s bravery or devotion to duty because, bless him, he actually did go out amid the chaos of charge and counter charge, and tried in vain to find the bullet that hit me. It had, rather miraculously, hit me in the stomach exactly where I was wearing a heavy leather belt, and would leave no more than a strange little cross in my skin at the point of impact, and a large bruise.<br /><br />After awhile the confrontation outside passed by like a rampaging tornado and then petered out like one too. When it was safe, the occupants of the house were thanked and I was taken to a community centre which was full of the walking wounded. People were exchanging opinions about what happened, to whom, where, and who got the better of whom. Des seemed to know everyone there and, as they swapped stories, he told his own.<br /><br />“And then,” he said, “when she finally got her breath, she said ‘The bullet! I want the bloody bullet!” He went on to tell them how he went out looking for it in the midst of the mayhem outside, but couldn’t find it. “If I’d found any bullet! Any bullet at all,” he cried, “I would have gone back and told her it was hers!” He laughed, and the others laughed with him.<br /><br />A boy of about thirteen who had been listening piped up quietly.<br /><br />“I picked up the bullet that hit you.” He held it out to me. “Do you want it?”<br /><br />When I was a kid, we collected glass bottles from neighbours and turned them in for the deposits on them. It was how we earned our pocket money. Kids in Belfast earned their pocket money by collecting rubber bullets and selling them to journalists. So, though moved by his offer, I said I couldn’t take it.<br /><br />“But since it hit you,” he said, “I think it’s only right that you should have it.” He borrowed a ballpoint pen and wrote on it: “Witness that this bullet hit Donna”, signing it “Liam Connolly”. And he put it in my hand.<br /><br />A few hours later when all was quiet again, Des gave me a lift back to my digs. “I hope you’re not getting the wrong impression of us,” he said.<br /><br />“Not at all,” I replied, “Everyone has been very kind to me.”<br /><br />“Aye,” he said, with a certain sadness, “Belfast would be such a lovely wee place if people would stop killing each other.”<br /><br />History is full of “what ifs” I guess. What if the early civil rights movement in Northern Ireland hadn’t been so brutally suppressed? What if the British Army hadn’t shot down fourteen people in Derry on Bloody Sunday, driving nails into the coffin of peaceful resistance, and providing such an effective recruiting tool for the IRA? What if the two communities hadn’t become so violently polarised? What if the power sharing that has now begun in Stormont in 2007 could have been achieved without bloodshed in 1970? What if all those people who died in all those years were walking around right now, leading unextraordinary lives?<br /><br />In 1998, shortly after the Good Friday agreement was signed and four years after the IRA and Loyalist ceasefires, I was adapting a book for BBC Northern Ireland in Belfast. The city I encountered after twenty-six years was nothing like the one I remembered. It was full of smart restaurants, wine bars and pubs. There were no boarded up shops announcing their “Grand Bomb Damage Sale”. No gunfire crackling in the background or the dull thud of a bomb exploding somewhere across the city. Even the much besieged Europa Hotel, where I stayed, was unprotected by concrete bollards, barbed wire and blast shields.<br /><br />In a taxi on my way to the Aldegrove Airport in the dark early hours of a winter morning, the driver asked me if I’d ever been to Belfast before. I told him I had. In 1972.<br /><br />“That was a terrible time,” he said.<br /><br />“It was,” I replied.<br /><br />I looked up into the cloudless sky and, for the first time since I was a kid, saw a shooting star. I hoped to God that this was a good omen.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you would like to comment on this post, please click on "Post a Comment" below.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-1146680122386786002008-05-08T16:06:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:58:39.936+00:00Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">3 September 2007<br /><br />On my tenth birthday I had planned to have my first teenage-style birthday party, playing the latest 45s (including Donna the Prima Donna which had just come out!) and trying out The Twist with my friends. But that morning, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Which kind of ruined the party.<br /><br />I was devastated. I had idolised him like my friends idolised pop stars. I had an album of his Greatest Hits (speeches), and had started a John F. Kennedy Fan Club among my semi-reluctant friends. I had even written a Club Song called PT-109 about his heroism in WWII. So I had decided that I wanted to go to Harvard University just like him. My grandmother tactfully explained that Harvard was a male-only university, which I thought was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard! How was this possible? But then I found out that it had a sister university for females called Radcliffe, which I grudgingly thought might do, so I told my mother that I wanted to go there.<br /><br />“Yeah?” she drawled, “And who’s going to pay for it?” The idea that financial considerations could limit one’s horizons had not occurred to me yet. But I still felt sorely aggrieved.<br /><br />When the time came I applied to UCLA, which, as a California resident, was a much cheaper option. It had the big leafy campus with very old buildings that was a minimum requirement for me. And it had a certain cachet. In 1969 the Communist UCLA professor Angela Davis had become a cause celebre when she was first fired and then arrested on trumped up charges which sparked the “Free Angela Davis” campaign that led to her acquittal. That sounded cool enough for me.<br /><br />I was nominated, along with five other kids, for the North Downey Women’s Club Scholarship. North Downey was one of the most salubrious neighbourhoods in the area (some of the houses even had swimming pools, and Karen Carpenter lived there). So, when confronted with the prospect of attending the North Downey Women’s Club Awards Luncheon, I had had to spend six whole dollars at the Goodwill Shop to find something appropriate to wear.<br /><br />When the day came I have to admit I was pretty intimidated. There did seem to be an awful lot of women getting out of expensive cars. Well, they were new anyway so they must have been expensive. My school counsellor was with me and had, with an unnecessary lack of tact I thought, asked me not to screw this up.<br /><br />Lunch proved trickier than I thought, though. It was served during some fairly interminable speeches, and the main course was chicken breast. Now, I had never in my life eaten chicken with a knife and fork. It was surely something to be eaten with the hands if only for the sensual pleasure of it! So I had a bit of trouble. At one point, as I was making a great effort to get a bit of meat off the bone, the whole breast went flying off the plate onto the linen tablecloth. Fortunately, everyone was looking at the speakers, so I grabbed the chicken with my hands and put it back where it belonged. It was only then, with my fingers still on the chicken, that I realised my school counsellor was watching me. He shook his head.<br /><br />“You can dress her up, but you can’t take her out.” The story of my life, really.<br /><br />In the end, the Downey Junior Women’s Club couldn’t decide who to give the scholarship to, so they split it between all the candidates. I got a scholarship worth $600. Hardly worth getting dressed up for.<br /><br />So I worked my way through college. First in an all-night coffee shop (where I used to catch a bus after work and go straight to classes after snatching a quick nap in the doctors’ on-call room at the UCLA Medical Center) and then at the UCLA cafeteria. But I was there! On that leafy campus with the old buildings where 30,000 students studied, where Angela Davis had taught philossphy and where students got beaten up for protesting against the war. Wow.<br /><br />Nevertheless, UCLA was a difficult adjustment for me. I couldn’t help notices it was full of people who were not at all like the ones in Bellflower. They all seemed to have parents who were doctors and lawyers and businessmen. One guy I went out with had parents who were both psychiatrists (which might have gone a long way to explaining why he was so screwed up). A lot of the students had expensive cars, had graduated from Beverley Hills High, and one I knew even had a tennis court in his backyard! They all seemed so confident, erudite, socially-skilled; and they knew an awful lot of big words. I was gauche, inept, awkward and didn’t own a dictionary. So I would lie and tell people I was from leafy Long Beach. Not Bellflower. I couldn’t be from Bellflower.<br /><br />In my first year as a Sociology major I took a class called “Social Change”. It was one of those monster lecture classes of well over a hundred students, and was taught by a thirty-year old Assistant Professor called Sam Friedman.<br /><br />Sam Friedman had a thoughtful but slightly sardonic face, an already receding hairline and absolutely no sense of style. While his colleagues wore the required hip professor uniform of flared jeans, Tshirts, long hair and leather jackets, Sam wore black slacks and black shoes with a white short-sleeved shirt. He looked like he hadn’t thought to change his wardrobe since the early Sixties. Which he probably hadn’t.<br /><br />Sam, unlike a lot of the “radical” professors at UCLA, was an activist. He had participated in the early Civil Rights struggle. He had been involved in breaking into the Draft Board and pouring blood onto their records (not their own blood or anyone they knew, by the way). And he was the first socialist I ever met.<br /><br />He wasn’t at all like I thought a socialist would be. There was a lot of debate in the classroom and a lot of people who violently disagreed with him. He was always calm, reasonable and persuasive. He didn’t believe in censorship, he was just against the power held by the media barons.<br /><br />“They should have to put their views out with mimeograph machines like the rest of us!” he said. (If you don’t know what a mimeograph machine is, you’ll have to look it up on Wikipedia.) He believed that all wealth is created through labour, physical and mental, and that as such everyone should share in it. And he believed that, though it wasn’t possible to build an ideal world, it was possible to build a much better one.<br /><br />One of the term paper questions for the class was “Explain how the materials presented in this class have influenced your understanding of social change.” I built a Board Game called “The System” in which the first roll of the dice put you in a particular social class. For those with 11s and 12s, the game is about amassing wealth. For the 2s and 3s you just go around in a circle. My term paper was an explanation of how it reflected real social mobility and class. Sam sighed when I handed in the cardboard, coloured markers and paper. But gave me an A.<br /><br />By that time I was taking more than a full load of classes in order to finish my degree earlier and save money. I was working twenty-four hours a week. I had so much reading to do that I had to learn to do it on the bus without throwing up. (My fellow passengers thanked me for that.) And then I got involved with a union organising campaign at the UCLA cafeteria.<br /><br />Sam was an activist himself and started quietly making things happen for me in the union drive. When we needed to translate a leaflet into Spanish, he knew someone. When we needed to approach the Student Union, he knew someone. When we needed to get a demonstration together, Sam knew loads of people.<br /><br />I started hanging around his office in Haines Hall a lot. He knew I was struggling with some of my classes and he always knew someone who could help me with those too. He had an incisive mind and talked sociology, history and (especially) politics with an understated passion. I’d hang around his office (how did the guy get any work done, I wonder now?) and we’d discuss the Industrial Revolution, union democracy, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, America during the 1930s, Marxist Economics, Latin America and what the hell my class in Ethnomethodology was all about! (I still don’t know, but I ended up doing my term paper on the methodology of playing Twenty Questions. My research into this burning issue was subsequently enshrined in the university library as an example of an A paper. Go figure.) We discussed, debated, disagreed.<br /><br />No one had ever asked me to analyse, take and defend a position before; and the experience emboldened me. I found my confidence growing; which on occasion blossomed into arrogance! During a lecture in my History of American Reform Movements I challenged the professor on his view of the Theory of Surplus Value, refuting his (flawed!) analysis point by point. I got a round of applause from the class and assumed my eloquence was certain to get me an A in his class. I got a B. I was learning the hard lessons of life too.<br /><br />Despite my work schedule, I was becoming a bit of an academic high flyer. I made the Dean’s List at least five times. I was Alpha Lamda Delta. I was Pi Gamma Mu. (I forget what those things meant, but I’m pretty sure they were good things.) But I still wasn’t going to get my degree unless I could pass Statistics.<br /><br />My mother, who worked with numbers all her life, took a very jaundiced view of statistics. She had worked for too many bosses who didn’t like it when she gave them the “wrong” answer. She had learned, when asked what “the numbers” said, to ask, “What do you want them to say?”<br /><br />But statistics was a required course; required because a lot of academics wanted to prove that Sociology was a science like any other, and the only way to achieve that was to do lots of research in order to publish lots of studies with lots of numbers in them that could quantify human behaviour. Without statistics there would be no polls, no politics as we knew it, and no market research. Which I thought was a pretty damn good reason not to have them.<br /><br />Nevertheless, no amount of protestation about my love of intuitive truth, and my moral repugnance at the reduction of the complexity of social behaviour to mere numbers, was going to get me anywhere. The truth was stark. No passing grade in Statistics. No degree.<br /><br />My high school math had been a disaster zone. I couldn’t multiply. I couldn’t divide. I couldn’t do equations. I couldn’t calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle, or remember the difference between a circumference and a radius, never mind what pi r squared was! Cheap calculators hadn’t been invented yet. All I had was scratch paper, a pencil, and a brain like swiss cheese where numbers slipped quietly through the holes. And the moment I sat down in the lecture room and that woman started talking about the mean, the median and calculating standard deviation, I knew I was lost!<br /><br />Every day I went to class it got worse. There was a new formula to memorise and a new reason to apply it. Every day I watched as the professor stood at the front, mouthing words that could have been in Ancient Croation for all I could fathom of it. I was in serious trouble.<br /><br />I talked to Sam about it. This time he didn’t seem to know someone. It was hopeless anyway, I figured, because I just could not do math.<br /><br />“You can do math!” Sam chided me (even having the temerity to chuckle!), “It’s only your gender and class conditioning that’s convinced you that you can’t!” This, I thought, was decidedly unhelpful. I was watching my degree circling the plughole, and all he could offer was some sort of crackpot left wing dogma about the social and cultural context of “intelligence”, no doubt referenced back to the Dove Counterbalance Intelligence Test of 1969, which had no possible relevance to the synapses that were failing to spark in my brain! I was dumb at math! Period!<br /><br />Sam stayed calm and continued to insist it was my gender and class conditioning not my innate intelligence that was at fault. So I decided, in the cause of social research and because I was desperate, to sit in my next Statistics class and dare the Professor to impart any knowledge that I could actually understand.<br /><br />“Okay!” I thought, “Go on, lady! Teach me this stuff! Make me overcome my ‘gender and class conditioning!’ Give me your golden nuggets of wisdom about the calculation of standard deviation!” I sat and I listened.<br /><br />And after a while something very weird happened. It’s hard to explain, but….it dawned on me that I had understood something that she said. Just a little thing. But I had actually followed it.<br /><br />She was talking about causal correlation. Research into house fires, she said, had found a substantial statistical correlation between size of fire and number of fire engines; with the smallest fires having fewest fire engines and the largest ones having the greatest number. It could be deduced, therefore, that in order to diminish the size of house fires, fewer engines should be sent. It was totally logical. It was brilliant. And entirely ludicrous. I understood what my mother meant: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.<br /><br />Statistics could be used to prove anything to anybody. Without knowledge, there was no defence.<br />After that, with each passing day, I seemed to take in that bit more. I started to remember the formulae and filled countless sheets of paper with my clumsy, hopeless arithmetic. And I promised myself that, if I survived this, I would never have anything to do with numbers again.<br /><br />Crunch day arrived as it had to, and I shuffled in with the rest of my class to take the final exam. They all looked so much more confident than I did, particularly the rich kids with their $500 calculators. (Bastards!) No one had thought of banning them yet, or providing all the exam students with them. I sat down. And when we got the signal, I opened my paper.<br /><br />All I saw was a blizzard of numbers. I looked at my blank sheets of scratch paper. I picked up my pencil. And I cursed my agnosticism. It would have been a very good time to test the power of prayer.<br /><br />Fortunately, given my appalling arithmetic, half credit was given for any answer that used the right formula but came up with the wrong answer. Which is what probably saved me. In the end I got a B. (A low B, but a B is a B.) I had survived. I was going to get my degree. And I had to concede that perhaps there was something in Sam’s crackpot left wing dogma after all.<br /><br />Sam continued to have a profound effect on my thinking and I eventually became convinced by the argument for democratic control of the economy for the good of all which, I guess, made me a socialist. My mother was, of course horrified and, when I told her I was only taking everything I learned from my upbringing to its logical conclusion, she cried, “I never taught you to be a socialist!” This was true. My religion had. Just read the Eight Beatitudes.<br /><br />I joined the Student Worker Action Committee (a name that could only have been invented in the early Seventies!) and was even a member of the International Socialists for a while, a group who believed that one day the masses would rise and change the world. I guess they must still be waiting. When I resigned one of their number said he suspected me of being a closet anarchist. Which I probably was, and am, at heart.<br /><br />When it came down to it, what I was all about for me was my mother’s struggle to provide for us; the abject existence of the cafeteria workers I stood at the steam table with; and about Little Betty who I worked with in my first job on the receiving dock of Atlantic Department Store. I still think back to that day she dithered in the canteen about whether to have the toast for ten cents or the turnover for fifteen; dithering over a nickel.<br /><br />“I am so sick of being poor!” she’d said finally. When we all get sick of people being poor, maybe things can change.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819791011504958683noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893038365060991933.post-73051725272447199352008-05-07T00:28:00.001+01:002009-12-05T23:59:23.927+00:0055A Rose Avenue<div style=";font-family:Book Antiqua;font-size:12pt;">8 September 2007<br /><br />The one thing I wanted from a university education was to be taken seriously. The Theatre Arts Department at UCLA was never going to do this for me. It was full of people who wanted to be stars in Hollywood and who squealed with delight when they were called in for an audition for a bank commercial. So I had decided to study Sociology. And by the end of my first year, I decided that I would eventually stay on to do a PhD and become a Sociology Professor. How much more serious can you get?<br /><br />So I don’t think I was really prepared for it when Lari Pittman moved in.<br /><br />Lari was an exceptionally talented artist who had gone to high school with me. He had been part of the “avant-garde set” who lived as though they were living in Paris just before the First World War. They wrote beatnik poetry and played blues and edited a magazine called “Implosion” and created art that defied convention and often shocked. (One sculpture I remember, which was done for a Religion project, was a statue of a saint with the head broken off, with red paint – blood – pouring from the neck. We were a liberal school I guess. No one got expelled.) I desperately wanted to be part of that set at the time. But my poetry was doggerel, I didn’t even know what the word implosion meant, I sang mournful folk songs (badly!) while strumming a guitar (even worse!) and drew pictures of troubadours in art class (don’t ask – I can’t even remember).<br /><br />Lari came to study art at UCLA and in my second year there, he became my roommate at 55A Rose Avenue in Venice. Venice (California not Italy!) was on the beach and was then a neighbourhood full of hippies, students and elderly Jewish ladies who ran bagel shops.<br /><br />55A Rose Avenue was a tiny ramshackle clapboard house that had been the servants’ quarters of the big house in front from the time when people had servants. (I have no doubt it has long been bulldozed to make way for the endless acres of the condos that came later.) It had only two rooms, with a tiny kitchen and a bathroom tacked on, a wooden porch out front, ancient linoleum floors and no heat. (When we told the landlord we really needed a heater he said, “This is California! What do you need a heater for?”)<br /><br />When Lari arrived in the life that I was trying to build for myself – serious, intense, intellectual even! – it was like I was one of those crazy people who goes out to film a cyclone. And those crazy people, as we know, sometimes don’t manage to keep the distance they’d planned.<br /><br />He seemed devoid of any inhibitions and was fond of shouting out to the people in Mercedes-strewn Westwood from the window of his Pinto. He berated a cyclist for riding in the middle of the road Continental style.<br /><br />“Cest ne pas Europe!” he’d ranted. And, on Halloween, he drove alongside complete strangers and shout like an overgrown ten year old and shouted, “Hey, is that your face or is this Halloween?” (Actually, I pointed out to him, the joke goes, “Is this Halloween or is that your face?” He never did get it right.) Discovering a couple of stale Twinkies in his car, he did a tour of the UCLA parking lot to find the most expensive to smear them on. (If you once parked an expensive car in the UCLA parking lot in 1972 and returned to find it smeared in Twinkies, I apologise on his behalf.) And once, when we were stuck in traffic next to an absurdly expensive sports car, Lari rolled down the window, put his hand under his chin, looked at the driver with stars in his eyes and purred, in the sweetest voice imaginable, “Hey mister, are you really a millionaire?” I was amazed and not a little embarrassed by these outbursts, but also fascinated by them. Lari, I discovered, did not spend a lot of time trying to be taken seriously.<br /><br />But he was someone to be taken seriously when he was feverishly creating art in the front room of 55A Rose Avenue. His work seemed to occupy two extremes. He etched exquisite screen prints of leaves and plants created out of thousands of pin prick scratches; and also painted enormous canvasses composed of bold grids full of the most delicate of images. He worked in greys and browns and creams and autumn pastels. And when one of his art teachers forced him to work with a more strident colour, he painted one small corner of the grid yellow, which made him dance manically through the house singing “Congratulations! He’s using yellow!”<br /><br />I fell in love with one of his “grid paintings”, but he wouldn’t have let me buy it even if I could have afforded it. (He reckoned he could get $300 for it, a fortune for a poor student.) He was not ready to exhibit. He stored his paintings in his mother’s garage and, because she was very proud of him, she would hang them in her living room. He would come home for a visit and put them back again. When he left, she would put them back up again.<br /><br />He remained quietly worried, though, that he wasn’t developing fast enough. He felt he had to make his mark before he was twenty-three, or sink into obscurity…<br /><br />Now, one of the requirements of every degree taken at UCLA was to complete a certain number of Breadth Requirements. These were courses taken outside your own area of study that were intended to add Breadth to your degree. To most of us, however they were a chance to amass as many subject units as possible with easy classes: like Field Biology, or Dum-dum Biology as it was known, where all I had to do was go on field trips and identify plants and humanely captured rodents like the Peromyscus Californicus. (California Mouse. Like I said, it was an easy class.) And I had to know that science could not explain why the bumble bee could fly because it was aerodynamically impossible. I also took Playwriting. And, at Lari’s suggestion, the History of Modern Art, taught by Dr. Kaiser.<br /><br />Dr. Kaiser was then Professor Emeritus in Art History at UCLA, and he must have been at least eighty because Lari told me he had been Picasso’s art dealer in Paris during his Cubist Period. In his suit and bow tie, there was something of an old-fashioned grace about the man. During the Student Strike the previous year, a group of students had burst into his lecture chanting, “On strike! Shut it down!”<br /><br />“Please,” he had said in his heavily accented but quietly dignified voice, “If you must disrupt my class. Do it with elegance!”<br /><br />The History of Modern Art was a popular course, and was held in an auditorium to accommodate the hundreds of students who enrolled, hoping for an easy class that they could ace.<br /><br />But Dr. Kaiser was fiercely passionate about art, and disdainful of the students whose eyes were on their notes as they wrote down everything he said, instead of looking at the art he was showing us up at the front.<br /><br />He was, to those who looked up from their notebooks, incredibly charismatic. As he talked of the artists and their work, it was as if he had been there himself (which he probably had.) Showing us a series of Modigliani’s sleepy looking nudes he said, “To look at these paintings you would almost think he had been sleeping with them. He had.”<br /><br />These artists and their work, I realised, were reflecting their own time, both personally and historically; like the Dadaists who, when confronted by the rise of Nazism dressed in the clothes of patriotism and high ideals, put a urinal on the wall and called it a “Fountain”.<br /><br />Meanwhile, my life with Lari was becoming increasingly insane and wonderful.<br /><br />We took to dressing up my dog Gimbol (whose name had been changed from Methedrine for obvious reasons. You try calling a lost dog by shouting “Methedrine!” in a neighbourhood that was then full of drug addicts!”) in ridiculous clothes, and driving around pretending she was our daughter.<br /><br />When she was in heat, there was a dog who came courting every day. We called him Roger, which we thought was a good name for a suitor, and he camped out on our porch, visibly mooning, for days. Eventually he and Gimbol eloped (the back door hadn’t been closed properly one night) and we found ourselves having to build a nursery for her out of a very large packing crate which we lined with baby wallpaper, and decorated with yellow bows. (Roger, predictably, refused to stand by her and disappeared, leaving Gimbol holding the puppies!)<br /><br />We found an old rug and some abandoned furniture in the alley outside and set up a “room” on the vacant lot next door. A drunk stumbling by thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Everyone else averted their eyes, thinking we were bonkers, which of course we were.<br /><br />We made countless chicken dinners and sat on the wooden porch pretending to be “hicks” and exchanging dialogue (loud enough to cause the neighbours to curse us) all of which had to rhyme with Ed.<br /><br />“Did you hear about Fred?”<br />“He got wed!”<br />“No you’re thinking of Ned!”<br />“He went to bed!”<br />“No, he’s dead!”<br />“Fred’s dead?”<br />“No Ned!”<br />“That’s what I said!”<br /><br />It made no sense at all. And I found myself celebrating my lack of seriousness.<br /><br />As the term drew to a close, Dr. Kaiser was increasingly frustrated by the students who had spent the past three months looking at their notes rather than the art.<br /><br />“Many students have been asking me,” he announced at the beginning of one of the last classes before the final exam, “What I want you to memorise for the exam. So I am going to tell you.” A din of rustling papers and of pencils and pens being retrieved greeted his announcement. He paused. Pencils were poised above notebooks. “I want you to memorise every art movement, every painting, every date, every artist, what their grandmothers ate for breakfast…” Some students looked up quizzically, but the dim ones kept on writing. He sighed. “I do not want you to memorise anything. I want you to remember it. I do not memorise the moment I kissed my first love!” He seemed suddenly wistful. “But I remember it!”<br /><br />Slowly, I had began to doubt my resolve to become an academic, to get a Phd in Sociology, to spend my life in research and teaching, to be taken seriously. What I wanted, I now knew, was what I’d always really wanted and had dismissed as unachievable: to become a writer.<br /><br />Lari moved out the following year to study at CalArts. Before he left he gave me a shadow box of an exploded clock he’d created in high school. It has always hung above my writing desk.<br /><br />He went on to become a well-known artist and has exhibited all over the world. I reckon some of the hits I get on this blog will be people who have googled his name and accidentally ended up here.<br /><br />I wonder if he remembers driving around West LA with Gimbol dressed up in her evening wear or her “Gypsy look” complete with headscarf.<br /><br />“You buy her all these clothes!” he had admonished me in a crowd once, “But I have yet to see a decent pair of shoes on her feet!”<br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Madwoman Baying at the Moon thanks you for subscribing!</div>BayingAtTheMoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15646499138928320422noreply@blogger.com0