Ginny Good
Ginny Good
A Mostly True Story
Chapter One: Ashland
I’m using everyone’s real name. They can all sue me. I hope they do. I could use the excitement. It gets kind of boring living in my eighty-year-old mother’s house on the side of a mountain in Ashland, Oregon. She likes having me around, though. She wasn’t all that happy being by herself. My dad died . . . wow, a while ago, going on nine years now. Sometimes it feels like yesterday; other times it feels like he’s still alive. We keep finding scrawled notes in his ninth-grade handwriting here and there — like when I change a fuse in the fuse box or my mother digs through the glove compartment looking for a map. Plenty of other people seem to think he’s still alive too. They keep sending him mail — brochures from hearing aid companies and long letters on good bond paper explaining to him how he might want to consolidate his debt. Hey, his debt’s as consolidated as it gets. It’s paid, paid in full — going on nine years now.
I do the things my father used to do: mow the lawn, get the car fixed, put in new light bulbs, change the furnace filter, take the lids off jars that are on too tight for my mother’s arthritis. Other than that, I pretty much just play golf. I play golf every day, rain or shine. The rainier, the better — wind, sleet, hail, snow, nothing stops me. I whack the ball, find it, and whack it again. Sometimes I get to feeling a little like King Lear out there, talking to thunder, flipping off gusts of wind. Ha! The other day I held my putter up like a lightening rod, daring the elements to do their worst, but usually I just play golf.
I play golf with anyone who shows up. Ford. Wallace. Bergeron. Johnny Pelosi. Felix. Knapp. Tyrone. Tyrone’s a black guy from the Shakespeare Festival. He was the King of France last year. We all play golf at a cheap, hilly little municipal golf course called Oak Knoll. It’s out of town a ways, south on Highway 66, toward Emigrant Lake. Standing on the ninth tee, you can see everything for miles around. Pilot Rock’s directly in front of you, off in the distance, toward California. Mount Ashland’s a little to the right; Grizzly Peak and Pompadour Bluff are to the left.
The golf course is home to five families of Canadian Geese. Nobody fucks with them. They poo on the greens with impunity. Even the feisty mallards and wood ducks and the seagulls that fly over from Klamath Lake stay out of their way. The five families of Canadian Geese correspond roughly with the five families of the New York Mafia. Well, according to Johnny Pelosi, anyway. He knows all about that sort of thing. Johnny Pelosi isn’t his real name. I don’t know for a fact that he got it as part of a witness protection program; all I know is you don’t want to beat him out of more than a couple of bucks a round unless you want to wake up with your pet parakeet’s head in your bed.
It’s an eclectic group. Wallace drives a Winnebago. He’s also a direct descendent of William Wallace, that Braveheart guy, so you want to watch how much money you beat him out of, too. Ford has trouble keeping his trousers on. Bergeron has a twinkle in his eye. Knapp carries beer in a blue cooler in the summer and drinks whisky in the winter. Felix hangs drywall and thinks he’s Lee Trevino. We all make up Mexican sounding things to say to him. Felix was one of my dad’s buddies at the Elks. My dad used to make up Mexican sounding things to say to him, too.
Besides the five families of Canadian Geese and a few pesticide-resistant burrowing animals, there are flowering bushes and white birches and yellow birches and oak trees with mistletoe in their branches and willow trees. The groundskeepers prune them down to bare nubs in the fall but they always grow back into huge weeping willows by the time summer rolls around again. Then, on top of all that, there’s the sky — all different kinds of sky, changing from one minute to the next; dark clouds, white clouds, mist, rainbows, double rainbows, you name it — anything you’d ever want to see in the way of weather.
If none of the guys I usually play golf with shows up, I play golf by myself. Nor do I play golf well. I play golf badly. I’ve been playing golf badly every day for the last two and a half years. I shot a 76 once, but that was a gigantic fluke. The wind kept changing direction. It was with me on every hole. Calm zephyrs gently guided my 90-compression Titleist straight toward the pin every time I hit the thing. If I’d been any good it would have been a 66. But I’m not any good. That’s part of the reason I quit playing golf and decided to write this book, instead — well, that and just to get it the hell over and done with once and for all.
I’m not worried about getting it published. What publisher wants to get sued? No publisher, that’s what publisher. I suppose I could get my sister to stick it on the Internet for me. She has a web-design company. One of her clients is the World Elephant Polo Association, which, according to People Magazine, was one of the hot sites of the week awhile back, so you never know. Someone I knew thirty years ago might just be idly browsing the web, stumble across his or her name, and decide to sue me for something. Hey, it could happen — Sandy Good, Donna McKechnie, Gordon Lish — any one of them might just up and sue my ass. I hope one of them does. I hope they all do. I might even throw in some people I didn’t know, just to increase my chances — Mia Farrow, maybe, Jill Clayburgh, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Courtney Love. I sort of did know Courtney Love, actually. She would only have been around two years old at the time, but I’ll put her in anyway. Her father brought her over to where Ginny and I were living on Shrader Street in 1966. He needed a babysitter. We were on acid. Her angelic little towhead two-year-old glow lit up the whole room. So, yo, Courtney, sue me, man. Bring it on.
The prospect of some hard working process server showing up at my mother’s front door with a summons on behalf of some long forgotten friend or acquaintance just somehow warms the cockles of my heart. Duchess, my mother’s little black ragamuffin dog, will bark her fool head off when the process server knocks on the door, but I’ll be so glad I’ll practically kiss the guy. The summons will tell me that I should get a lawyer, but I won’t. Ha! I don’t need no stinking lawyer. I’ll be my own lawyer. That will be the exciting part.
The last job I had was as a paralegal. I got fired, but I was a paralegal all the same. I’ll know how to defend myself if it ever comes to that. That’s how I got the money to play golf every day for the last two and a half years, as a matter of fact — by suing the law firm that fired my ass: Shafer, Kirloff, Isaacson and Barish, those dicks. They were what you might call a mid-sized San Francisco labor and employment law firm. It all started out innocently enough. I had run out of money. My whole life I’ve been running out of money. I knew one of the associates. She recommended me. The partners took her word for it that I wasn’t some kind of whacko — and I wasn’t. Well, not right away. I was glad to have a job.
When I first started working there, I wasn’t sure what a paralegal was supposed to do, exactly, but my predecessor left a pile of stuff on his desk, which gave me clues. Call people on the phone. Make lists. Look up things on Westlaw. Write memos. Come up with chronologies.
I worked there around a year and a half. I liked working there. I got good at it. Everyone loved me; well, almost everyone. By my standards, I made plenty of money. I rode through Chinatown on the crowded California Street bus, jaywalked across Montgomery Street, went into the lofty marble lobby through a chrome-plated revolving door and got free coffee in the company coffee room. I liked getting free coffee. Another thing I’ve always been is cheap. How do you think I’ve managed to play golf every day for the last two and a half years on the paltry settlement money I finally managed to squeeze out of those bozos? By being cheap, that’s how.
The partners billed me out at eighty-five bucks an hour. I had my own office. We took up the whole 22nd floor. My window looked out across the red roofs of Chinatown. I ate lunch in the park next to the Transamerica Pyramid — usually with one or another of the secretaries. They were all pretty cute, too. Terri. Stephanie. Tess. Barbara! I flirted with them. They flirted back. I was happy.
In my spare time I wrote thinly disguised fictional stories about the place. That’s another thing I’ve always done — my whole life I’ve been writing thinly disguised fictional stories about stuff. In the stories I called the place “Sadler, Cristlieb, Altschule and Beckwith” or “SCAB.” That’s one of the slick things about fiction; you can thinly disguise the things you write about to suit your own clever, ironic purposes.
The reason Shafer, Kirloff, Isaacson and Barish fired my ass was that I tried to organize a union among the support staff. Organizing a union pissed them off. The partners prided themselves on being big-time union busters. That was their job. That was what they were paid to do. It would have been hard to charge the kind of money they charged to keep unions out of other businesses if they couldn’t keep a union out of their own damn business — hey, don’t think we hadn’t thought of that.
Organizing a union was intended to piss them off. They had pissed us off — mainly by making us work longer hours without increasing our pay. I wasn’t all that pissed off, myself; I was happy to be getting the money I was getting, but the secretaries were all up in arms. They were the ones who wanted the union in there. I couldn’t have cared less. But I’d written some seminar material about how to avoid union organizing and therefore knew a little something about the mechanics.
The first thing you have to do when you’re organizing a union is shut up about it. We had surreptitious planning sessions after work. Stephanie and Terri and I all took pictures of each other sitting in Kirloff’s office with our feet on his desk, leaning back in his chair, and wearing a baseball hat that said, “Union, Yes!”
I called the local Teamsters Organizing Committee. They said they’d back us up — sure, go for it, they said — and the next day, on behalf of all the cute secretaries, I wrote a memo to the partners informing them that it was our intention to form a duly recognized labor union affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
That got their attention. The partners had a healthy respect for the Teamsters. Gary Barish used to work over there. He’d recently been made managing partner, although it was Rick Shafer who started the company and still really ran the place. Shafer looked like Lenin — Vladamir Ilyich, without the goatee. Barish looked like the guy from the Men’s Warehouse. He turned the task of dealing with me and our union organizing efforts over to Walter Reynolds. Wally, he was called. Wally looked like the gray-haired guy on The Nightly Business Report.
With their fear of the Teamsters backing me up, I told the partners all they had to do was increase our pay to compensate for the increased hours. It seemed simple enough to me, not to mention fair and just and reasonable. Barish and Reynolds objected to the “tone” of my memo. That was it. We didn’t get our raise.
It took them another couple of months, but the partners finally got the secretaries to give up on the idea of joining a union. Then they sent me a “warning” memo which included a bunch of cockamamie reasons they were going to use as pretexts to fire my ass for so-called “good cause.” One of the things the memo mentioned was that I had said, “Gary Barish eats shit,” to someone in the elevator. I drafted an answer which pointed out that it wasn’t in the elevator, it was in the coffee room, and that, furthermore, it was a fact, Gary Barish did eat shit — not only due to the USDA finding that there’s a certain amount of fecal matter in most commercially prepared foods, but in the more traditional meaning of the phrase, as well. My letter started out: “If you’re reading this, I’ve been fired.”
I carried it around with me wherever I went so I could whip it out on them when they finally got around to actually giving me the ax. In the meantime, just for practice, I whipped it out on Barbara Kalinowski. She was Wally Reynolds’s secretary. Her cubicle was just outside his office. She had overheard some of our more heated conversations and liked the way I stood my ground.
I liked the way Barbara Kalinowski looked, period: green eyes, red hair, big juicy mouth all lipsticked up. She wasn’t quite twenty-five but had been on her own since she was fifteen. Her husband produced pornographic movies. She was allowed to have sex with women, but not other men. Her husband was allowed to have sex with other women and didn’t want to have sex with men. It didn’t seem fair.
We went out for drinks after work one night on the verge of them getting around to finally firing me. She had four or five gin and tonics. I sipped a Glenfiddich on the rocks. She read my letter out loud to me and kept getting all breathless with laughter and cracking up in the middles of sentences.
After we’d taken a cab to my apartment, I went across the street to get her a six-pack of Michelob. When I got back, she was on my bed with no clothes on. She had a single body piercing — a small, tasteful, 24-carat gold clit ring. She had multiple orgasms. I forget how many. Sixteen? Seventeen? Some astronomical number. She must have had some sort of gynecological condition. It wasn’t anything I was doing, exactly, she just kept having orgasms, one after another — you barely had to breathe in her direction and, whoops, there she was, having another orgasm. She said it wasn’t quite a record, but record or no record, it was all the orgasms I ever wanted any chick I ever had anything to do with to have.
The next day, I was summoned to Gary Barish’s office and was told I was being “let go.” Fired. Terminated. Given the old heave ho. Shafer was on vacation. Barish and Reynolds did the actual axing of my ass. I whipped out the letter I’d already whipped out on Barbara Kalinowski on them. It had a few gin and tonic stains on the first page. Barish and Reynolds weren’t particularly impressed with my Pleistocene understanding of labor law. Oh, well. I signed up for unemployment and wrote a letter to Rick Shafer. He said I should get on with my life. Guys like Shafer always say that. What it means is that they would like you to go away and leave them alone so that they can get on with their own lives.
A few months later, after I turned all our correspondence over to the National Labor Relations Board and filled out a formal complaint, Shafer and Kirloff met me at the Cadillac Bar and Grill and I agreed to take around ten thousand dollars in exchange for dropping the thing. It was kind of anti-climactic. I could have gotten a lot more, but I’d mainly just wanted to prove my point. Then I moved up to my mother’s house in Ashland and played golf every day for the last two and a half years.
. . .
Barbara Kalinowski came up for a visit last summer. She was in the middle of getting a divorce. We played golf. I introduced her to some of the guys I usually play golf with. She had on a yellow tank top. When we got to Felix, he said, “Ay, Chihuahua.” He didn’t mean to say it. He couldn’t help himself. She’s a pretty good golfer, too. I can’t think of anything Barbara Kalinowski’s not good at.
Later on she and I took a blanket and a flashlight and a bottle of Scotch up to the cemetery where my father’s buried. It’s called Scenic Hills. It was still around eighty-five, even at night. During the day it had been up to a hundred and six — not quite a record, but close. We passed the Scotch back and forth and shined the flashlight on my dad’s tombstone:
Many Dreams Came True
That’s what the tombstone says. My mother picked it out. It was the truest thing she found among the samples she’d been shown. Under the words, there’s a picture of a guy fly fishing beside a lake with snow-capped mountains in the background and fluffy clouds chiseled into the smooth gray granite.
Barbara Kalinowski turned off the flashlight and stretched out on the blanket. There was a sliver of moon and about a billion bright shining stars shimmering in the huge black cemetery sky. She watched the stars for a while. Then she rolled me over onto my back and I watched the stars for a while. There were times when neither of us watched the stars. Then we watched the stars together. It wasn’t all that comfortable, even with the blanket. Plus, I kept getting the eerie feeling that my father was going to rise up from the grave to find out what the hell was causing all the commotion. He never did like a lot of commotion. But he didn’t rise up from the grave. Not ever.
Barbara Kalinowski has a new boyfriend now. The last I heard, they were getting married. As for me, my meager settlement money’s just about gone. I probably ought to be thinking about getting another job, but I’ve decided to conserve what little money I have left and take a stab at writing this book I’ve been threatening to write for longer than I can remember. I’m not exactly starting from scratch. I’ve started what amounts to the same book on and off for the last thirty years or so and have, in the process, accumulated a little stack of stuff I thought might come in handy someday — the oldest surviving scrap goes back to the spring of 1960. I also have a bunch of old letters and things — part of a diary, a few pictures, a Valentine’s card from Wendy when she was around ten — but, basically, the book’s about four people, Elliot Felton, Virginia Good, Melanie and me, and what we all tried to do with each other back in the summer of 1972.
I suppose I need to start with Ginny. She was the first hippie, in case anyone’s ever wondered. That tidbit of information probably never made its way into any history books, but it’s true. I have proof, documentary evidence. She was also the older sister of Sandra Good, the same Sandra Good who used to be one of the chicks in the so-called Manson Family. Sandy’s still one of the chicks in the so-called Manson Family. I saw her on TV a while ago, talking about how she and Squeaky had set up a website to show what a bum rap poor Charlie got. When I get my sister to stick this all up on the Internet for me, I’ll have her link it to the Charlie Manson site.
I’m pretty sure I still have a letter Ginny sent me about her sister and the so-called Manson Family back before anyone had ever heard of them. I’ve got all kinds of letters and things, stuff I haven’t looked at in years. I think I’ll go ahead and start with a biography of sorts — just write down whatever I vaguely recollect Ginny telling me about what happened to her before I met her. I always used to tell her I was going to write a book about her someday. That was probably partly why she even liked me in the first place. Oh, well. Better late than never.
Chapter Two: Del Mar
Virginia Dixon Good was born on March 5, 1941. She spent her childhood in one or another of those sleepy little seaside communities down along the Southern California coast, north of San Diego. Her mother was too busy for kids. She had three daughters. Ginny was her second daughter. Sandy was the third. I forget the first daughter’s name. I can’t remember Ginny’s mother’s name, either. I might have blanked it out. Her father’s name was George. George F. Good. I never knew what the ‘F.’ stood for. There were so many things I never knew.
Ginny’s mother couldn’t have said for sure why she’d even had kids except that having kids was what one did. Kids were annoying. She couldn’t understand what the hell they were talking about, for one thing. She didn’t know what the Salvadoran maid was jabbering about half the time either, but at least the maid understood what she was saying: “Rosalie! God damn it! If I find one more grain of sand in this kitchen, I’m going to kill you! Do you understand?”
As long as it had just been her and her husband, Ginny’s mother had always been the center of attention but when she started churning out daughters one after another, the kids seemed to think that they were the center of attention. That got to be goddamned annoying after awhile — and that it wasn’t their fault just made it all the more annoying. Here she was, a bright, attractive, capable woman, stuck in a marriage she had known wasn’t going to last before her first daughter was born, but who could she blame for that? Herself? That would have been absurd. Her husband? He was happy. Her parents? God? So Ginny’s mother took her wretchedness out on her children and disguised it as altruism. She wanted to be a lousy role model. She wanted her kids to rebel. The way she seemed to have it figured was that the best thing she could do for her daughters in the long run was to see to it that they hated the idea of ever getting married and having kids — and if by some silly extension of childish logic that made them feel somehow unwanted or unloved, well, so be it, it was a small price to pay.
Ginny’s mother simply had more important things to do than dote on her daughters — her commitment to the local theater group, for example. Who else in Del Mar could act worth a damn? And who was better suited to preside over the Junior League? Ginny’s mother had responsibilities to the state, to the country, to the world. Staunch Republican causes kept cropping up all the time — the struggle for freedom in Hungary, circulating petitions to impeach Earl Warren — so that, all in all, Ginny’s mother stayed too busy to be bothered with kids, and Ginny and her sisters were mostly raised by their father (while he was still around), by Rosalie Rosales and by Jolly, the good-natured black Lab who followed them down to the tide pools and barked at fiddler crabs and whipped his tail like a stalk of seaweed and panted and drooled and shook salty water off his shiny wet coat into their flushed, sunburned faces and carried sand between his toes into every corner of the house, which, needless to say, pissed off Rosalie Rosales beyond her ability to express in English.
. . .
When she was old enough, Ginny went to a private preschool. They could afford it. Her father was rich. That was why her mother had married him. He also worshipped the ground she walked on, of course, was educated at Princeton, had his own plane, was quiet, thoughtful, soft-spoken and kept to himself for the most part — all of which had seemed like good enough reasons to have married him at the time, but none of which would have been worth a damn if he hadn’t been rich.
The marriage lasted until Ginny was five. What finally ended it was that her father was simply too nice. He loved his family. He loved his wife and his house and his dog. He loved reading to his daughters at night and listening to what they had to say during the day and was patient with the tangles in their hair. It was all too much for Ginny’s mother to bear. She divorced him for mental cruelty.
Ginny’s father didn’t contest the divorce, which exactly proved her mother’s point — the guy had no balls! How could she bear to live with a man with no balls? What she wanted, he wanted. He suffocated her. So what if he went to Princeton, he was a fool. He was short and stocky and wore coke bottle glasses with wire rims like Harry S. Truman, the haberdasher — and, on top of everything else, he collected stamps, he was a stamp collector, a philatelist!
Ginny’s mother had long since chosen to forget that she had felt truly comforted and loved and relieved when she had allowed Ginny’s father to think that in his quaint, quiet, soft-spoken way, he had talked her into marrying him, for better or worse, and chose instead to remember only that she’d had her whole life ahead of her when along came this soft-spoken guy with a two-bit Beechcraft Bonanza who had charmed her mother and had played golf with her father and had utterly fucked up her life but good with his unremitting niceness! This twerp!
Her mother chose to forget all kinds of things and remembered only what it suited her resolve to remember in order to divorce her husband without regret. Her father sadly loaded his books and his golf clubs and his stamp collection into the trunk of the second car and drove away two days before Ginny’s fifth Christmas . . . and left the sound of the car driving away reverberating in her brain and rumbling through the pit of her stomach for the rest of her life.
. . .
I used to have a picture of Ginny when she was a kid. I had it for a long time. I don’t know what’s become of it. I’ve looked for it. It was just an ordinary, black and white snapshot taken in front of the house she and her family were living in when she was four. It’s probably good I lost it. I kept it in my wallet so long you could hardly make out what she even looked like anymore, but the way I remember it is as fresh and crisp as the day she gave it to me.
She was sitting on the bottom step of her front porch in a pair of bunny-rabbit bedroom slippers and a pair of overalls. It was hard to tell they were still even bunny rabbits anymore; their ears had fallen off and their eyes were mostly missing and they had no noses. Ginny’s face was tan. Her hair was streaked blond and curly. She was squinting up into the sun, smiling a shy, cockeyed smile and holding up some imaginary something for whoever was taking the picture to see — her father, I presumed.
Ginny’s father took off two days before her fifth Christmas and never came back. He was gone. Period. There was no changing that fact. But that didn’t stop her mind from trying to change it. Minds are a determined bunch of neurons and ganglia and unknowable stuff. They’re like skin or bones, they get cut or broken, and right away they set about the mindless task of making themselves whole again. Skin and bones grow new cells, scab up, scar over; minds blank things out, compensate, make things up, and pretty soon they’re as good as new — and that was what Ginny’s mind did. There was no stopping it. Somewhere along the line, she hit on the idea that if she stayed four years old, her father wouldn’t be gone! It was simple and logical and elegant and unassailable. So she did that. Somewhere in her mind, Ginny Good stayed four years old for the rest of her life, and somewhere in her mind her father read her books at night and listened to what she had to say and was patient with the tangles in her hair, and when she grew up and got cute as any girl you’ve ever seen there were plenty of guys who were willing to perpetuate the idea that she was still a four year-old kid. I was one of them, sure, but I wasn’t the only one.
. . .
I’m not explaining this well. There’s a reason for that. I never really knew Ginny’s mother, see. I heard a lot about her but never met her. I lived with Ginny on and off from 1964 to the beginning of 1969 and kept in pretty close touch with her for a long time after that, but never laid eyes on her mother except in pictures. Elliot knew her. He and Ginny’s mother were buddies. They hung out with each other while he and Ginny were living together in L.A. Ginny’s mother and Elliot hit it off. They laughed at each other’s jokes. La dee dah. He thought she was funny and smart and entertaining and charming and arty, so if you really want to know more about what Ginny’s mother was like, Elliot’s the guy you should be talking to — go dig his dead ass up and ask him. If I knew where he was buried, I’d dig his dead ass up and ask him myself.
But, wait a minute. I’ve got a letter Ginny wrote me — I’ve got a small pile of them, actually. I used to have hundreds. I don’t know what the hell happens to everything. There’s this one letter I’m thinking of in particular, though. Ha! Got it! Okay, here’s what Ginny had to say about her mother:
I can’t write long ’cause I’ve got to write a paper. I had a neat fantasy with Dr. Crockett’s doll house. In the living room (this part’s real) the Little girl doll was upside down in the playpen. The Mummy and Daddy doll were headed toward the door that leads to the bedroom. There were two mirrors on the walls and a picture of a rose. There was a door and two windows. I looked and said, ‘Why’s that girl upside down in the crib?’ Laughed — ‘Oh my God — she’s me. I can’t get out. But I should be the woman. I’m not. I’m still stuck in the crib.’
Then I really started in . . . The Mummy and Daddy bashed her head in, she’s five, and threw her in the crib. The dad is going to leave forever. He does. What can the girl do? She must escape. She can’t go through the door, nor through the windows. The only way out is through the mirrors or the rose. If she goes through one mirror she will be in cavernous labyrinths underground. If she goes through the other, she will be in a wondrous garden. If she goes through the rose she will go through the stem to the caverns, which she may explore and eventually she will emerge, into the garden. She picks the rose.
Here I proceeded to minutely describe the sensuous qualities of the rose. She then went down through the stem. It was moist, gooey and smoothly fibrous. She slipped down in the direction of the fibers. She found herself bedded in the moist black fertile soil. She stayed there for a while and then began to grow. She grew right up into the garden — her face the center of the rose. When her feet were on the ground the petals fell away and she could walk. How beautiful it was! She followed a melodic path until an acorn dropped upon her shoulder. Dink! She opened it up, half from half, and there sat a little man. ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ They exchanged. ‘I’m so glad you found me,’ he said. ‘An old ogre imprisoned me long ago and I have been subsisting on the inner substances of this acorn.’ ‘Oh!’ said she, ‘May I have a taste?’ Here I stopped and went back to say what I felt.
Obviously, the first thing was I was bashed when Daddy left. I had to escape but couldn’t face reality way outs — the door, the windows. It had to be fantasies. What the caverns and garden is is too much to explain. It’s probably obvious anyway. Most of the thing speaks for itself, except the stem is really interesting. I associated it with anal tubes and a penis both at once. ‘Why?’ I asked. Of course! I came from a penis — the sperm that grew. My dad is both my father and mother. Why an anal tube? I reject the idea that I came from a mother. The anal tube was a woman’s. Mother’s. She is doo doo — and I, if born from her, am doo doo too. Of course the soil is obvious and the garden and me. Pretty optimistic, Huh! I can hardly wait for the next session, it’s like tune in tomorrow?
As something of an aside, here’s part of that letter I mentioned earlier, the one that talks about some of Sandy’s “adventures” with the so-called Manson Family:
Sandy is a total hippie who was living with the Beach Boys in Malibu and now is with prospectors in the desert teaching Dean Martin’s daughter how to lose her ego. They cluck their tongues about what bad shape Mia Farrow and Nanci Sinatra’s heads are in, altho Miss Farrow gave away her clothes and is living ascetically, ’she just can’t give up her image.’ I would certainly like to see my sister after reading her letters. She hikes barefoot in the desert forever, and she used to deride my mystical propensities. She is an Aquarian — Pisces cusp — which goes right along with what she is now doing. An absolutely rebellious, unconventional mystic. I sort of envy her.
All I personally remember about Sandy is that she used to work as a sales clerk at the Emporium on Market Street. She sold scarves and plastic headbands and was a lot less charismatic than Ginny — less compelling, more drab. That was before she shaved herself bald, carved a swastika into her forehead and hung out with the rest of the Manson chicks chanting spooky stuff outside the Hall of Justice in L.A., and way before she and Squeaky set up their own website.
. . .
After the divorce, Ginny’s mother was rich all by herself, and Ginny went to a private grammar school. Then her mother married some other rich guy, some military-industrial rich guy, and they were even richer still. Ginny went to a well-to-do high school, stole a bulldozer, lost her virginity, was raped by the cop investigating the incident of the stolen bulldozer and got dumped by the guy to whom she’d lost her virginity as a consequence of telling him she got raped by the cop.
Then she went to Sarah Lawrence College . . . briefly. She was, after all, bright and talented and slightly crazy — a poet, an actress, a dancer, an incisive, witty, sparkling conversationalist — and her parents, all three of them, had more money than God. While she was at school she hung out with Jill Clayburgh and fell in love with a guy who was in grad school at Brown. His name was Roger Singmaster. She went too nuts one Christmas and he dumped her. That broke her heart.
She cut her wrists, quit school, went into a private psycho ward in Ja Jolla, lived with her father in Piedmont for awhile, then moved to San Francisco, got an apartment on 45th Avenue, enrolled at San Francisco State, had dates with two different guys on New Year’s Eve of 1962, and the three of them ended up at the Jazz Workshop. Jimmy Witherspoon was there. So was I. So was Elliot.
Wait. Now that I think about it, I probably ought to have started with Elliot. Damn. It was actually Elliot I knew first. But, you know what? In order to get to how I got to know him and all that, I guess I have to start with me — which means that I have to start in Michigan. Crap. Okay, I’m starting in Michigan, but go ahead and remember all the stuff I just got done saying about Ginny. It’ll come in handy later.
Chapter Three: Royal Oak
I grew up in Michigan, Royal Oak, Michigan, ten miles north of Detroit. That was how the main roads got their names — by how far north of Detroit they were: Ten Mile Road. Eleven Mile. Twelve Mile. Like that. Starting down by the Detroit River, Woodward Avenue cut across each of the Mile Roads clear out to the lakes we went to in the summer; Orchard Lake, Cass Lake, Walled Lake. That was what you did in Michigan. You swam in lakes in the summer and ice-skated on lakes in the winter. The farther away from Detroit you got, the better the neighborhoods became. I lived a block from Ten Mile myself, not far from the Detroit Zoo.
Royal Oak was famous in the thirties and early forties as the home base of a radio program put on by a guy named Father Coughlin. Father Coughlin was a Catholic Priest whose virulent anti-communist, anti-Semitic tirades went out over the airwaves to every city in conservative America from the pulpit of the Shrine of the Little Flower. The Shrine of the Little Flower was on the corner of Twelve Mile and Woodward. According to my grandmother, anyone who listened to Father Coughlin ought to have been stood up against a wall and shot.
Not long after I was born, the Catholic Church pulled the plug on his radio program. Practically speaking, I don’t think my birth had much to do with it, but you couldn’t convince my grandmother of that. She thought me getting born was the cat’s pajamas. She spoiled me rotten and doted on me to distraction. Not much happened in Royal Oak after that. It was known for a while in the eighties as a hotbed of deranged postal workers. Now the only thing famous about Royal Oak is it’s where Jack Kevorkian lives.
I had an idyllic childhood. There were kids of every ethnicity under the sun on my block; Welsh kids, Polish kids, English, Irish, French, German, you name it. Well, there weren’t any colored kids, of course, or Japs or Chinks or Mexicans — and all the Jews lived over in Huntington Woods. That was just the way things were.
We built forts in trees, dug forts in the ground, played kick-the-can, knocked the street lights out with slingshots, had block parties on Halloween and hung out American Flags on the Fourth of July. Everybody knew everybody else. My whole family, including my grandfather and my grandmother, all lived in a big mournful-looking old house with a coal furnace and a fireplace and a backyard full of trees and a side yard full of trees — elm trees, oak trees, and a big black ash with a blue jay’s nest in its uppermost branches. Morning glories climbed the chimney, clinging for dear life to the gritty red bricks with their tough little green sucker feet.
My father put up storm windows in the fall and took them down in the spring. He had a system. Nobody else knew what it was. My mother tended her peony beds, pruned her rose bushes and kept the spirea trimmed. She picked lilacs and lilies-of-the-valley and made them into bouquets and put them into carnival glass vases on the mantle and at either side of the window seat in the dining room.
There was a cherry tree in the backyard. Cherry blossoms blossomed in the spring. Bumblebees hovered among them. White butterflies landed in them. My grandmother baked cherry pies. I picked the cherries myself. I climbed up onto a rickety old paint-splattered ladder with a big stainless steel sauce pan. The cherries plinked and echoed inside the pan for a while, then got quieter and quieter as the pan filled up and up, higher and higher.
Beyond the cherry tree were my mother’s whitewashed clothes poles and my father’s horseshoe pits and my grandfather’s vegetable garden. My grandfather grew tomatoes and rhubarb and radishes and green beans and a row of sunflowers. I ate tomatoes off the vine, while they were still warm from the sun. When I bit into one, it popped. Hot tomato juice dripped down my throat, soaked the neck of my T-shirt, turned cold, dried, left tomato seeds sticking to my chin.
My grandfather chewed Red Man Tobacco and listened to the Cleveland Indians on the radio because he was originally from Canton, Ohio. He brought me home Clark Bars and Butterfingers in his lunch box. He let me chin myself on his biceps, rubbed dandelions on my cheek to find out whether I liked butter or not, and got killed by a car on Main Street, across from Sid and Wally’s. Sid and Wally’s was a beer garden. My mother and my father and my grandmother all told me that my grandfather was color-blind, as if that was supposed explain everything, but it didn’t. It didn’t explain anything. It didn’t make any sense. He’d been color-blind all his life. He had to know a red light from a green light. Red was on top. Green was on the bottom. I didn’t get to go to his funeral.
There were ups and downs, but my idyllic childhood went on and on, summer after summer — fall, leaves, winter, snow — spring after spring. There were hand-painted pictures of Bambi and Thumper on my curtains and gold lariats on the blue blanket on my bed. I believed in Santa Claus until I was eleven. I still believe in the Tooth Fairy, but that’s only because I saw her with my own eyes, flitting around my pillow one night. She looks kind of like Tinkerbell, but she’s way more serious, and shy. Every year, when it finally got to be the middle of June and my birthday rolled around again, I got so excited I made myself sick.
. . .
The only really pertinent thing about growing in Michigan, however, is that I flunked government and didn’t graduate from high school. Mrs. Miller flunked me. She called herself “Mrs.” Miller, but everyone knew she’d never been married.
The first day of class she pushed herself away from her desk, stood up, licked the tip end of a little nub of chalk, wrote “Mrs. Miller” in chubby white letters across the center panel of a clean slate blackboard, dropped the chalk back into the chalk tray, dusted her chubby white hands together and said, “This is U.S. Government. If you flunk Government you don’t graduate high school.” Here she paused to let the idea of not graduating from high school sink in awhile, then said, “I’m Mrs. Miller.”
Chalk dust hovered in shafts of morning sunlight.
Mrs. Miller pushed her glasses deeper into the indentations at either side of her chubby nose, gave herself a hug and asked, “Are there any questions?”
Nope. Not me, Mrs. Miller, we all said silently. There wasn’t so much as a smirk. We didn’t even think things that might have made us smirk. She was on the lookout for smirks. She was on the lookout for thoughts that might lead to smirks. Row by row she zoomed in on us, one by one, bristling at the possibility that some mental retard might, however fleetingly, look like he or she was in any degree of doubt about the marital status Mrs. Miller had chosen to bestow upon herself, and row by row, we watched the second hand click its way around the face of the clock and listened to the last of the chalk dust settle onto the floor. Finally, she almost smiled and said, “Good.”
What Mrs. Miller got out of her thirty-year teaching career was those first few minutes at the beginning of each new semester when she had twenty-five fresh little half-formed souls to bully into corroborating the lie of a lifetime, and what we got out of being in her class was a visceral appreciation of the better part of valor and self-control enough to last us at least through the rest of puberty. We would have gone along with anything. She could have called herself Marilyn Monroe and we all would have sworn up and down that we saw Joe DiMaggio dropping her fat ass off in front of the school that morning.
But the truth was that Mrs. Miller wasn’t married and hadn’t ever been married and wasn’t bloody likely to ever get married, and the reason for that was that nobody liked the old bat; whereas I, on the other hand, well, everyone had always adored me since the day I was conceived — which was no doubt the real reason she flunked my ass. Out of spite. She didn’t say so, of course. She said she flunked my ass because I slept in class and didn’t do the work.
That was what she told my mother, at any rate. But what would you expect her to say? That she was jealous? Pfssh. She wouldn’t have admitted she was jealous any more than she would have admitted she’d never been married — besides which, it was all actually my mother’s fault, anyway. She was the one who used to read out loud to me before I was born — long rambling passages from Anna Karenina and Kristin Lavrensdatter and The Good Earth. It wasn’t my fault that the way I learned how to learn was by listening, but what that meant vis-à-vis Mrs. Miller was that I didn’t take notes in class or anything, just leaned back in my chair and listened and presumed what was worth knowing would stick in my mind and what wasn’t wouldn’t take up limited space. Sometimes I listened with my eyes closed.
Mrs. Miller accused me of sleeping while she was explaining some rigmarole about the separation of powers.
“Wasn’t that why people even came to this country?” I frowned convincingly. “To have religious freedom.”
“Nice try,” she said, but flunked my ass anyway.
I had to take another semester of high school when my family moved to California. Then, even though I wrote a paper that correctly predicted that Kennedy would win the 1960 presidential election . . . and by how many electoral votes from which states (including astutely allowing for voting irregularities in Cook County), the crew-cut Nazi government teacher at the high school in California almost fucking flunked my ass that time, too, and I almost didn’t graduate again.
I still have nightmares about it. I find myself stuck in long, complicated dreams of living the rest of my life in one great big endless government class with Mrs. Miller standing over me like Winston Churchill in drag, wagging a churlish, spiteful, self-satisfied finger in my face, telling me that I never will know the separation of powers from the separation of church and state. I wake up in cold sweats . . . but the only thing that really matters about any of this is that that was how I got to know Elliot Felton. If Mrs. Miller hadn’t flunked my ass, none of this would have ever happened.
. . .
Elliot was my friend. We were in a drama class together at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, California. His parents were Mormons. He’d grown up in Salt Lake City but had moved to San Mateo when his father was transferred to the San Francisco office of the FBI the previous year.
By the time I got there, Elliot already had something of a reputation. He’d almost killed one of the school’s star football players, for one thing. It was an accident, I found out later, but almost killing an all-conference defensive end gets you something of a reputation whether it was an accident or not. Then he got the part of Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind, won first prize in an art contest put on by The San Mateo Times and started going steady with Dru Davidson, the cutest girl in the senior class, all while he was still just a junior. Obviously there had to be something sort of cool about the guy, but nobody seemed to be able to figure out quite what.
Yeah, he could draw pictures and act, but the only thing he ever really did was shuffle up and down the hallways in a pair of dusty Wellingtons, never saying a word to another living soul and smoking close to three packs of Camels a day. Rumors flew. People thought he could read minds or that he knew voodoo or that he could hypnotize people. How else could he have gotten Dru Davidson to go steady with him? He must have put some kind of whammy on her. Dru dumped him the summer before I got there, but Elliot had something of a reputation when I first got to know him, nonetheless.
The second week of school we had to do a scene together in drama class. Why I signed up for a drama class I’ll never know. Elliot and I were complete strangers to one another — and total opposites in every way. The drama teacher, Donald Ralston, just sort of arbitrarily stuck Elliot and me up on the stage together. Well, it seemed arbitrary, but I think Ralston thought Elliot and I might “do each other good.” He seemed to think Elliot was some kind of budding genius but the only thing he could have known about me was that, thanks to Mrs. Miller, I was a year older than everyone and seemed to have a chip on my shoulder.
He was right about the chip. I mean, not to change the subject or anything, but not only was I a year older than everyone, I didn’t belong there, period, not in high school or California, either one. I’d already been on my own the whole summer, working on a yacht down in Newport Beach, and had no intention of ever going to any kind of school again, let alone back to high school.
I barely remember how it all happened. I was having a hard life, I remember that. I’d been having a hard life ever since my girlfriend in Michigan dumped me and went to New York to get rich and famous. She did, too — get rich and famous. Well, somewhat rich and famous, I guess. I don’t know how exactly one measures these things. She ended up thinking quite a lot of herself, if that’s one of the criteria.
Her name was Donna McKechnie. You don’t hear much about her anymore, but for a while there, she was the hottest ticket on Broadway. She won a Tony Award for her role as Cassie in A Chorus Line and did all kinds of movies and TV shows and things. She was “The Rose” in The Little Prince and Sam Malone’s girlfriend on Cheers. I think she may even have been elected “Miss Turnstile” of the New York City subway system at some point — but that all came way after I ever knew her. She dumped me right around the time that Ritchie Valens song about some chick named Donna dumping him was playing on every radio and jukebox in the country. There was nowhere you could go to get away from it.
Crap. I really didn’t want to get into any of this, but it’s true, and probably even sort of pertinent; ever since dear old Donna dumped my ass, I really never have been quite the same — so I guess I ought to go back and start with that. I’ll get where I’m going, don’t worry. We have all the time in the world.
Chapter Four: Fifteen Mile
Donna didn’t think quite so much of herself when I first got to know her. She was a new kid, from a different school. She didn’t live in the same district as the rest of us. No one knew why that was, but we suspected it was something sinister, something adult, a situation of some sort. She didn’t fit in. I found out later that it was simply more convenient for her to go to our school because of its proximity to her dance studio, but there was still something sort of fishy about her — like she had webbed feet or something. Damn! That was our first conversation.
I broke my collarbone is how it all started. I was playing football on Tommy Malden’s front lawn. Paul Grey and Jimmy Mattern were tackling me. I was trying to gain an extra yard or two, as if so much depended on it. I heard the bone break. It was a muffled crack, like sitting on a couch with a pencil in your back pocket. Dr. Steinberg put a figure-eight cast under my arms and around the back of my neck and referred to my broken collarbone as a “fractured clavicle.” When the cast was ready to come off, Donna McKechnie and her mother happened to be in the doctor’s office.
Donna and I were both sixteen. I was six months older than her. We were in the same homeroom. And if you think she was hot as Cassie in A Chorus Line, you should have seen Donna McKechnie when she’d just turned sixteen, and was wearing a modest red plaid skirt and a lacy white blouse buttoned up to the indentation at the base of her throat and dangling a dusty black penny-loafer off the ends of her toes in the waiting room of the only orthopedist in town. Her calves rippled under a pair of white tights. Muscular thighs. Sparkly brown eyes. Dimples. Waist like a wasp. Her breasts were small but not so small that they didn’t cause the tiny translucent buttons to have to strain some against the buttonholes up the front of her blouse.
“What are you here for?” she asked.
“Fractured clavicle,” I said smartly, hoping to sound as though I was someone with whom she could discuss her own medical condition if she so chose. “I broke my collarbone,” I said then, in case she thought “fractured clavicle” was too technical. “The thing’s been itching like crazy. It’s driving me nuts. What about you?”
“I have webbed feet.” Her eyes sparkled with inexplicable mirth.
The comment was meant as a sort of inside ballet joke, I found out later. Dancers walk like ducks. It has something to do with the gyrations they do — the positions, the repetition. Their pelvises become deformed. Their feet turn out. They walk like ducks. Ducks have webbed feet. Ha, ha. Joke. Funny, funny. But I thought she really did have webbed feet and for some reason the idea of primordial little folds of skin between her toes, or anyone’s toes, was mildly repulsive.
. . .
It was my father furthered our friendship. He saw a picture of her in The Royal Oak Tribune, all dressed up in a medieval costume like she might have been Cinderella. One of her legs was bent up behind her at an awkward angle. Her arms were over her head, hands relaxed, fingers touching. He thought she was pretty cute and dared me to call her up. I didn’t, not for a long time, but I did start paying more attention to her in homeroom. She seemed sad, like she didn’t have any friends, but also aloof, like she didn’t want any friends. The thing that cinched it was that I saw her riding to school with Larry Burlison one morning.
Larry Burlison was one of the local hoods. He kept a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up in the sleeve of his white T-shirt and drove kind of a cool car — a gunmetal gray ‘52 Hudson Hornet, lowered, and fitted with some sort of custom exhaust system which made it purr like a kitten — but car or no car, if Donna McKechnie would be seen in public with Larry Burlison, she’d be seen in public with anyone. So I called her up. We went out on dates.
By February of 1959, we were making out in the back seat of Ron Metcalf’s dad’s Olds ‘88, listening to Chet Baker sing “My Funny Valentine.” After that, we were mostly on our own. Once we knew that all we really wanted to do was make out, we stuck to ourselves and listened to make-out music — Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole and “Who Wrote the Book of Love?”
Donna used to come over to my house. I used to go over to her house. We sat in the car. We didn’t care where we were. She had a big mirror in her basement. The mirror had a bar in front of it. There was a couch across from the mirror. We used to sit on the couch and watch ourselves hug and kiss and neck and pet. We cut school and took the streetcar to downtown Detroit — sat on benches by the Ambassador Bridge, snuck into Briggs Stadium and wandered the marble hallways of the golden-domed Fisher Building, talking and talking and necking and talking — we talked and necked ourselves silly. And even when we did go to school, all we ever did was write each other love letters. She had a favorite pen. It was a fountain pen with lavender ink. Later on, whenever anyone talked about “purple prose,” I always thought of Donna and the lavender ink in her fancy fountain pen.
I used to go to her dance studio with her. I even played the part of the director in one of her recitals. Everyone was auditioning for me. It was like A Chorus Line. I read somewhere that Donna had had a hand in the writing of A Chorus Line. The mirror she danced in front of in A Chorus Line was very likely the same mirror she used to dance in front of down in her basement, and the premise probably came from that dance recital where I played the part of the director — hey, I was Michael Bennett before Michael Bennett was Michael Bennett. Ha!
Back then, though, Donna McKechnie was just another sixteen-year-old kid taking dance classes at The Rose Marie Floyd School of Dance. She worked up a sweat. It soaked her tights and leotard and dripped down her throat. She flicked salty drops of sweat into my face from the bottom of her chin with the backs of her fingernails and laughed with her eyes and sucked in her cheeks and made her lips move in and out like a goldfish. She was Mitzi Gaynor. I was James Dean. Nobody understood us. They called it puppy love.
When she changed back into her street clothes, she always put on extra perfume. The perfume was L’Aimant, by Coty. I don’t think they even make it anymore, but if they do, go down to the cosmetics counter at Macy’s sometime and take a whiff of L’Aimant, by Coty — it smells like Donna McKechnie when she was sixteen years old.
At some point I finally saw her with her shoes and socks off. There weren’t any primordial folds of skin between her toes, thank God, but her feet were all gnarled up with corns and bunions. They bled. She couldn’t dance in toe shoes. She thought she’d never be able to dance, period; that was all she ever really wanted to do.
. . .
Our teenage romance went on and on, getting more and more tempestuous. By Easter we were going steady . . . and breaking up . . . and going steady again. The first time we broke up was because I put my hand down the front of her blouse. She took the chain with my class ring on it sullenly, solemnly, off from around her neck and put it into the palm of my wayward hand. I threw it over my shoulder into the back seat of my father’s lime-green ‘57 Plymouth Belvedere. We had a tearful chat. She crawled over the seat, found my ring, put it back around her neck . . . and from then on it was okay to put my hand down her blouse.
The next time it was her panties. They weren’t even panties, actually, but the bottom half of a white terrycloth bikini bathing suit she had ordered from an ad in the back pages of a McCall’s Magazine which turned out to have been far too “risqué” to wear in public, so Donna wore them for panties. This too had its price. Off came the ring. Out the window it flew. And we had to spend the next twenty minutes in a tangle of blackberry bushes looking for the thing again.
Toward the end of June, Donna thought she was pregnant. I was watching Rod Steiger slur his way through Al Capone. I had just turned seventeen. She found me in the theater. I never saw how the movie ended. We had another of our tearful chats, during which it was somehow concluded that we were going to get married. Then she wasn’t pregnant. We were going to get married anyway. Then we weren’t. We were too young. She and her mother had too much invested, and personally, I didn’t think much of the idea of working at some crappy job the rest of my life in order to buy baby formula or whatever. So we weren’t. Then we were again. I’d go from one crappy job to the next, twenty-four hours a day, buying baby formula by the boxcar. We were in love. We couldn’t live without one another. We would die if we couldn’t be with each other forever. It was fraught.
. . .
All that fraughtness came to a head one night toward the end of August. We were going to go see Imitation of Life at the drive-in. I parked my dad’s car in Donna’s dirt driveway. The McKechnies lived on Fifteen Mile Road. Out in the sticks. I went in the back door, up the stairs and into the kitchen.
Her mother was doing dishes. It was around seven. The sun was still up. The kitchen was dim. There was a small, open window above the sink. Because of the angle of the sunlight, her mother’s face was wrinkled in ways I’d never seen before. Usually she looked pretty cute. She’d only been around sixteen when Donna was born. Her husband hadn’t been much older than seventeen himself. Her mother’s hands were shiny and red from the dishwater. The hem of her skirt was unraveling. Her blouse wasn’t tucked in all the way around. She looked like Donna would look after we’d been married for twenty years. The family dog was asleep at her feet — some sort of flop-eared Maltese Pomeranian.
Donna came into the kitchen. She was wearing a skirt the color of celery and a white sweater with fake pearls around the collar. We didn’t say anything to her mother and she didn’t say anything to us and we didn’t say anything to each other but just walked silently down the back stairs. She led the way; it was like a dirge, like a death march.
I didn’t open the car door for her. She slammed it when she got in and stayed as far away from me as she could get — slumped down, with her arms hugging the front of her white sweater. That was anathema, by the way. Back in the summer of 1959, the girl didn’t sit by the door. She sat by the boy, as close as she could physically get. I made a quick U-turn and squealed the car back up the driveway. I wasn’t going to work myself to death the rest of my life for some . . . dame . . . who was going to sit next to the goddamn door on our way to the drive-in movies.
Hot August dust from the driveway invaded the inside of the car when she jumped out. Good riddance, I sat there thinking. The celery-colored skirt went down maybe six inches or so below her knees, which made it awkward to run at full speed, but she ran as fast as she could, in through the back door and up the stairs. I sat there with my ears ringing the way they do when you’re pissed off and brokenhearted at the same time. It was over. Done. All she wrote.
Then I heard the dog squeal and right after that, I heard Donna screaming — nothing intelligible, just screaming. Her mother was looking out the kitchen window at me with a sort of plaintive, helpless expression. My inclination was just to throw the car in reverse and get the hell out of there, but it would not have been chivalrous to have done that, so I went up to the door again. Donna came back down. She had composed herself. She got into the car again and we ended up at the drive-in movies after all.
Imitation of Life was the saddest movie ever made. It was about some colored girl trying to pass for white — trying to be someone she wasn’t, trying to leave her humble past behind her and make a name for herself. It was a total tearjerker. We cried and cried and kissed each other’s sopping, sobbing faces with the fatal certainty that our true love we knew for a fact would last for all eternity, was doomed forever. Dead. Impossible. Hopeless. And the more doomed it was, the deader, the more impossible, the more passionate our sadness grew and the sadder our passion became.
We ended up in the back seat with most of her clothes tangled up in a tear-soaked wad around her eighteen-inch waist. I don’t know whether we ever found the bottom half of that terrycloth bikini bathing suit she wore for panties or not. They may still be stuck up behind one of the heater hoses, sitting in an abandoned junkyard somewhere, rotting into dust — the faint odor of doomed true love and L’Aimant, by Coty, still lingering after all these years.
Somewhere along the line, the movie must have ended. My car was the only one left in the lot — and the cop shining his flashlight through the steamed-up window wasn’t in any hurry to turn it off. What a dick! Well, I guess you could hardly blame the guy. I mean, who, if they ran across Donna McKechnie when she was still sixteen and all but stark-ass naked in the back seat of a ‘57 Plymouth, wouldn’t keep the flashlight on a little longer than absolutely necessary?
“What do you kids think you’re doing?”
“We’re engaged,” I said. “We’re going to get married.”
“Well. Better see to it you do, then.”
We put on as many of our clothes as we could find, got back up into the front seat again, and drove out of the bumpy drive-in movie parking lot.
Then I had to stop at a red light. That was the thing I remember most of all. There weren’t any cars anywhere. I thought about not stopping, but I stopped. Donna jumped out of the car and ran. I parked on someone’s front lawn and chased her. She could really run, too, even in that skirt. I caught up to her, yeah, but we were pretty far away from everything by then. We were out of breath, panting, sweating, still trembling some from the brouhaha back at the drive-in.
“Let’s just go back to the car. I’ll take you home.”
“I’ll take myself home.” She turned and ran again. I grabbed her wrist. “Don’t touch me!” She looked frantic. A porch light went on.
“People are going to call the cops or something, okay?”
“I don’t care!”
“Would you just listen a second?”
“No.”
“I love you.”
“Shit!”
That was pretty definitive back in 1959. When the boy said, “I love you,” to the girl and she said, “Shit,” there really just wasn’t all that much left to say. She took off again. I didn’t try to stop her. She hadn’t even bothered to throw my class ring anywhere, this time. She might still have the son of a bitch, for all I know. Maybe it’s hanging around her Tony Award. I doubt it, but, hey. I mean, who knows? Not me.
When I got back to the car, some old guy in a frayed bathrobe was standing there with a ten-gauge shotgun. The engine was still running. The driver’s side door was still open. The headlights were shining at cockeyed angles up into the limbs of an elm tree. The guy hoped I had a good explanation for the tire tracks on his lawn. I didn’t. I had no explanation whatsoever. I got in the car and drove away. If he was going to shoot me, he could just go ahead and shoot me.
I went home and waited for Donna to call. I had it all pictured. She’d be skittish and scared and cry and beg my forgiveness and make it up to me in ways neither of us had ever thought of before. She didn’t call, however. I kept waiting. School started. I thought we’d be in the same homeroom again. We weren’t. She was no longer enrolled in school. I broke down and asked at the office sometime in October. Then I saw her early one morning. She was riding with her mother in their old bronze Chrysler New Yorker. They were headed in the opposite direction from the school, going south on Woodward Avenue, toward Detroit. Her mother looked sleepy. Donna didn’t see me.
I still kept waiting for her to call. Whenever the phone rang, I got palpitations. It was never her. Finally, around Christmas, Donna came back to spend the holidays with her mother and gave me a call. That was a surprise. We went to the Shrine of the Little Flower for midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Neither of us was Catholic. I found out that during the four months I’d been waiting for her to call, she’d gone with a friend who was auditioning for the traveling company of Guys and Dolls and ended up getting the part herself. Then she dropped out of school, went to New York and — blah, blah, blah — the rest is Broadway history.
After mass was over, we parked in her driveway and talked some more, then started making out a little, like for old time’s sake. Pretty soon, she started to cry and, naturally, I thought, hey, hey — but then she stopped right in the middle of kissing me and started sobbing uncontrollably.
“What’s the matter?”
“I miss Michael,” she said.
That was it. There’s only so much a person can forgive. Who the fuck was Michael? I didn’t even ask. My poor heart was utterly crushed and broken forever.
. . .
I did manage to see her a few times as the years went by, but she kept getting more and more uppity every time. It was like Imitation of Life all over again, like I was part of some humble past she wanted to put behind her. One of the times I saw her, she was in San Francisco with the traveling company of A Chorus Line. She and Marvin Hamlish were sitting in the orchestra seats at the Curran Theater. He wanted to know what she was like in the back seat of a ‘57 Chevy. I told him it was a Plymouth. Another time I saw her, she was prattling on about how she was going to marry Michael Bennett. I presumed Michael Bennett had been the Michael she’d been crying about in her driveway lo those many years ago, and it pissed me off a little that I’d been aced out by some fag, but I didn’t mention that either.
The last time I saw her was around twenty years ago. We were eating ice cream cones in Sausalito. I told her that when it came to women, I sure knew how to pick ‘em. She took that as a compliment. I’d meant it as a compliment. Since the last time I saw her, Donna had married Michael Bennett in Paris and had divorced Michael Bennett in New York. That was kind of a sore subject. I asked her if she got anything good out of the divorce. The question pissed her off. She told me I was like a crass tabloid reporter. She got extra uppity about it, like maybe she thought I was going to go on Geraldo and tell the whole world how she used to ride around in Larry Burlison’s ‘52 Hudson Hornet. I don’t know what the hell she thought. And, frankly, I didn’t much care. I had troubles of my own by then — which I’ll get to soon enough if I can somehow manage to get back to how I got to know Elliot Felton.
Chapter Five: Pacifica
After I was as convinced as much as it was possible to be convinced that Donna had definitively dumped me forever, I drowned my sorrows by writing the senior play. I’ve always drowned my sorrows by writing stuff. If I had no sorrows I wouldn’t ever write diddly. Writing the senior play was my big claim to fame. The school didn’t have the money to buy the rights to a real play, so I said I’d write one. I stuck in a scene about a guy who had recently had his heart utterly crushed and broken forever. Then I played the part of the brokenhearted guy and gave myself lots of good advice. Ha! I was the student director, too. I did it all.
The play was a big success. I had to take a bunch of bows. People kept clapping. And all of a sudden all kinds of new chicks started coming up to me in the hallways, batting their eyelashes, bumping their breasts into my bare arms — cheerleaders, actresses, smart chicks with glasses.
Then, right in the middle of all that, Mrs. Miller flunked my ass and I didn’t graduate. What chick’s going to mess with some guy who flunked out of high school? No chick, that’s what chick. No wonder I had a chip on my shoulder. I’ve still got a chip on my shoulder. I’ll always have a chip on my shoulder. Talk about completely fucking up a person’s life forever. Oh, well. My life probably would have gotten fucked up forever somehow or other anyway.
. . .
The day after I didn’t graduate from high school, we all, me and my two younger sisters and my mother, flew out to California to meet up with my father. He’d been transferred there in April, and the insurance company he was working for gave everyone a free plane ticket. How could I pass it up? The picture I had in mind of California was row upon row of sun-bleached blond girls in bikini bathing suits lying around on sandy white beaches waiting for random guys to come rub Coppertone on them — and my father had written a letter telling us that the house he’d rented was three blocks from the ocean!
Where there was an ocean there had to be a beach, right? Hot sand? Damp towels? Salty sweat and a melting cherry Sno Cone dripping down some cute little California surfer chick’s suntanned throat?
Wrong.
What my father’s letter didn’t make very clear was that the house he’d rented was in a place called Pacifica, which, next to maybe Baffin Island and Tierra del Fuego, is easily the third most inhospitable place on the planet. According to the people who live there, Pacifica stays “socked in” all summer, and what “socked-in” means is that it’s so fucking freezing-ass cold and foggy and windy that you can’t see across the street let alone down to the ocean, and even if you could see down to the ocean, which you can’t, you still couldn’t see any beach because, number one, there isn’t any beach and, number two, what passes for a beach is nothing but jagged rocks with huge cliffs towering above them, so that even if you could see what passes for a beach, there wouldn’t be any girls on it unless some poor blind paraplegic chick accidentally rolled her wheelchair over the edge of one of the cliffs, and even then she wouldn’t have on a bikini bathing suit unless she was also so hopelessly crazy you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her anyway.
I didn’t blame my father. None of us did. Well, not for that. We took his word for it that the weather had been nice the day he’d rented the place, and besides, there were plenty of other things to blame him for — like those three blocks from the ocean he’d bragged about. What the letter didn’t say was that each block was half a mile long and went straight up the side of a mountain, so that if you were ever stupid enough to risk life and limb by venturing out into the blinding wind and fog long enough to try to make it down to the tawdry little shopping area at the bottom of the street, you’d have to be Edmund Hillary to get back home again.
My father was having kind of a hard life himself. His job wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. What had sounded like a lot of money in Michigan wasn’t much in California. I don’t know which of us was the most disappointed. I think it was a five-way tie. We all had different ideas of what things were going to be like in California, and none of them was anything like what we found in Pacifica.
My sister Nicki, who had just turned fifteen, did nothing but sit on the bare floor in her room, wearing every stitch of clothing she owned and listening to Buddy Holly sing “Everyday” over and over so often she wore out the grooves on the record. My father tried to cheer her up as best he could, first by trying to play “Peggy Sue” on the mouth organ, then by getting her her own phone — both of which turned out to be as disastrous as everything else he’d tried to do so far that year. If anyone could have played “Peggy Sue” on the mouth organ it would have been my dad, but the fact is it can’t be done, and as for getting Nicki her own phone, yeah, she always had wanted a phone of her own, but the son of a bitch never rang, and she didn’t know anyone she could call except back in Michigan, which nobody could afford to pay for, and it only would have made her more homesick than she already was even if anyone could have paid for it.
My poor mother. All she ever did was try not to cry in front of my five-year-old sister, Tuney . . . and poor Tuney! She thought for all the world that we were going to be living next door to Disneyland. Ha! The only thing remotely resembling Disneyland that we could reasonably get to on the best of days was a drafty, overpriced, mildewy movie theater down in the tawdry shopping area at the foot of that bloody mountain. I didn’t help matters much.
Tuney had heard that The Snow Queen was playing at the aforementioned movie theater and I told her that I’d take her to see it but that I didn’t have any money to buy myself a ticket. She got all excited and jumped up and down and begged and pleaded and cajoled and, in short, convinced me that she wanted to see The Snow Queen so excruciatingly badly that she gladly agreed to pay my way with the silver dollar she got from her grandmother for Christmas.
The story has become something of a family legend. The way Tuney tells it is that I tricked her into giving me her silver dollar then took her to see The Apartment. And, on the face of it, that’s true. I did. Well, not the “tricked her” part. I didn’t trick her. The Snow Queen had been replaced by The Apartment that same day, and I truly did not think that she would really want to turn around and walk all the way back up the side of that goddamn mountain again without seeing some movie, any movie, so I took her to see The Apartment instead.
. . .
The day after our disastrous trip to see The Snow Queen, I got the hell out of the house in Pacifica and hitchhiked down along the coast highway until I came to the California I’d had in mind back in Michigan. It started just past Malibu. I didn’t have any money. I ate food out of garbage cans, slept on beaches and feasted my eyes on sun-bleached blond girls in bikini bathing suits from dawn to dusk — until having no money and a third-degree sunburn had me heading back up toward Pacifica again. That was when I got the job on that yacht I was talking about.
This colored guy picked me up. He was driving a white Cadillac and had a white girlfriend. His name was Lucius. His girlfriend was a nurse, “A noyse,” he called her, being as how he was originally from Brooklyn. Lucius told me to show up at the Lido Shipyard in Newport Beach the next morning and he’d have a job for me. I slept behind a billboard, hitchhiked back down to Newport Beach and started work that same day. I was a good worker. I did everything no one else would do, like paint the inside of the chain locker. I had Rustoleum in my eyebrows for weeks.
Toward the end of the summer, when we were just about through renovating the whole huge boat from stem to stern, the captain told me that I could stay on as part of the crew when they took it on a trip around the world. I had it all pictured. Hawaii. Fiji. Bali. Bangkok! Then I don’t know what the hell happened.
Well, I got fired, is what happened — for going for a ride on the Ferris Wheel on Balboa Island with the owner’s son’s girlfriend. Her name was Paris. She had long blond hair, freckly thighs and zinc oxide across the bridge of her nose. I didn’t know she was anyone’s girlfriend. She didn’t say she was anyone’s girlfriend — and she sure didn’t act like she was anyone’s girlfriend. But she was. And the owner’s son told the owner to tell the captain to tell the foreman that I was fired and that was that — no trip around the world, no job, no money, no place to live, no nothing. I hitchhiked back up to my parents’ house.
. . .
It was September. My mother and father had moved from Pacifica to San Mateo by then and were living in a modest little three-bedroom house in a place called San Mateo Village — which was how I ended up at Hillsdale High School doing this scene in a drama class with some Mormon kid from Salt Lake City.
I was the cop. Elliot was the crook. I had to give him the third degree. That was the scene. I forget what play it was from. The script had been run off on a mimeograph machine. The ink was purple; the ink smelled purple. He had on a black and maroon striped shirt and was sitting in a metal folding chair pulled up next to a green cardboard card table. There was an open pack of Camels in his shirt pocket.
I stood over him with my sleeves rolled up and the stub of a pencil behind my ear. A hundred and fifty watt light bulb glared into his face. Sweat beaded up on his scalp. His hair was dark brown, almost black, and straight, and stringy. He had the beginnings of a widow’s peak, but his hair was so long in back it curled up at the ends like fish hooks. A muscle twitched in his cheek. Blood wiggled through an artery in his temple. The corners of his mouth jerked into inappropriate smiles. His lips trembled. I could see each individual follicle of the sparse whiskers on his chin and the pores on the sides of his nose and the veins in his nostrils and the hair inside his ears. A drop of sweat trickled down his temple. His hands were shaking. His ears were shaking. His eyelids were puffy.
And his eyes. I still can’t say what his eyes looked like. Well, they were brown, but I can’t describe the expression in them. It was pure fear — abject panic. He was scared to death. His eyes darted back and forth, into and out of every murky corner of the fidgeting auditorium, getting more and more terrified. Then he looked up and directly at me for the first time. That was the last straw. There were tears in his eyes. He looked like he was about to wet his pants. I wanted to stop everything right there and tell him, hey, man, come on, it’s a drama class. Yeah, sure, I knew he was supposed to be acting like he was scared, but he wasn’t acting, he was really scared, he was terrified — and even if he was acting, there comes a point when it doesn’t matter; like if you wet your pants in front of whole goddamn drama class, how could it possibly matter whether you were just acting or not?
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t read the lines. I tried, but when he looked up at me, I had to laugh. They had to close the curtain on us. We had to start all over. That happened three times — him looking up at me, me laughing, them closing the curtain. The fourth time, Elliot lurched out of his chair, kicked it across the stage, tossed the script out into the audience and stormed over to the emergency exit door, leaving sheets of mimeograph paper rocking slowly back and forth down through the sudden utter silence of the cavernous auditorium.
I felt sort of bad that I was screwing up the scene for him, sure, but on the other hand, what the hell did he think, it was Carnegie Hall? It wasn’t. It was a two-bit drama class in a high school I never should have been at in the first place. My girlfriend was in New York, dancing on Broadway, getting rich and famous. And, as for me, I should have been in Bali by then. I should have been halfway to Bangkok.
Over in the wings, Elliot took a few deep breaths, whipped out a comb, slicked back his hair, and came out onto the stage. One of the kids in the front row offered him a new script. Elliot waved it off. He brought his chair back, sat down again, and we tried doing the scene one last time. The curtain opened. The light bulb glared. Sweat beaded up. His cheek twitched. His mouth trembled. He looked at me. There were tears in his eyes. He was about to wet his pants. I laughed. The curtain closed. We were alone back there.
“Sorry,” I said.
Elliot didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said anything the whole time. He wanted to say something. It was plain to see that he was trying to think of something suitable to say, but by the time I got around to telling him I was sorry, he couldn’t have said anything even if he’d thought of something to say, and finally he just hissed at me. He bared his teeth and hissed at me like a cat — but not even a cat, something more primitive than a cat — a lizard, or a snake, or a sea urchin.
A current of electricity shot through me. It felt for a second like I was going to hiss back at him, but then it dawned on me that I didn’t have to put up with some California dipshit hissing at me like a fucking sea urchin no matter what I did, and I winked at him instead — just a quick little wink with my right eye.
That was the best thing I could have done. It caught him so completely off guard he had to smile. Then he caught himself trying not to smile and that made him almost have to laugh. It was like the sun coming out. All of a sudden his eyes were so full of such affection for me it felt like he was about to jump out of his chair and come dance me around the stage like a rag doll — as if his whole life he’d been waiting for someone to wink at him and no one ever had. Elliot couldn’t just let it go at that, however, and acted like he felt sort of sorry for me.
“How about I play the cop?” he asked.
“You should just get someone else, man. I can’t act worth a shit. I don’t know why I even signed up for this stupid class in the first place.”
“There’s nothing to it. Just be a cop. Be thinking about what your wife’s going to be cooking you for dinner while you ask me questions.”
“I can’t. I’d be picturing her cooking snakes or something. They’d be jumping out of the pot. She’d have to keep hitting them on the head with a spoon.”
“Hey, that’s King Lear! That’s my favorite line. ‘Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put ‘em i’ the paste alive; she knapped ‘em o’ the coxcombs with a stick, and cried, “Down, wantons, down!” ‘Twas her brother that, in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay.’”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know anything about any of that. All I know is trying to do something I can’t do makes me laugh.”
“So, quit trying.” He shrugged.
I made him feel superior. He liked that. He made me laugh. I liked that. We got to be friends. That was all there was to it. We stayed friends forever — or for however long forever might have been back then. I don’t know the meanings of words anymore. Forever seems about right.
Chapter Six: San Mateo
Elliot’s parents lived in a custom-built turquoise and white ranch style house at the end of a cul-de-sac up in the hills above the southern part of San Mateo. I liked going up there. The living room had plush, pearl gray carpet that smelled like it had just been installed and soft cream-colored love seats and a soft cream-colored couch, all with matching end tables and table lamps with three-way bulbs.
The furniture in the living room was centered around a huge combination television and high-fidelity record player. Sliding glass doors opened onto a redwood deck with a panoramic view — north up past the airport to San Bruno Mountain, south down almost to San Jose and east across the bay to Oakland and Hayward and over the hills to Mount Diablo. Beyond the deck there was a path of flagstones leading over to some jasmine bushes and a Cost-Plus waterfall. The kitchen was built around a gigantic two-door refrigerator full of all sorts of things I’d never seen outside a grocery store.
My own parents, by way of contrast, had bought a house in San Mateo Village, like I may have mentioned, down in the flatlands by the bay, with the same floor plan as all the other houses in the flatlands; the same hard grass yards, with short, newly planted trees. Instead of carpet, we had rugs. Nothing matched. Nothing was new. And the only remarkable thing in the refrigerator was maybe a bowl of browned potatoes left over from one of my mother’s pot roasts. There was nothing in the world my father liked better for breakfast than leftover potatoes from one of my mother’s pot roasts, sliced razor thin and fried in sizzling bacon grease along with his eggs — two, sunny-side up. I adore my dad. He’s dead. As I’ve said.
The other thing I liked about going up to Elliot’s house was his mother. She used to get a kick out of wearing skimpy clothes around the house. There was this one sheer white silk robe I remember in particular, with a sash she always had trouble keeping tied when she answered the door.
They had a mat on the front porch with the word WELCOME spelled out in pieces of pink rubber held together with short lengths of wire, and there was a brass doorknocker on the door with the name “FELTON” etched into it. The doorknocker was actually a doorbell disguised as a doorknocker. When you picked it up and pushed it back down, it was supposed to go “Ding . . . dong!” But there was something wrong with the dong. It sounded like it had a piece of broken Popsicle stick stuck down inside it. The ding was okay, but the dong just went “thunk.”
I rang the bell, “Ding . . . thunk,” wiped my feet on the welcome mat, and waited breathlessly for his mother to come to the door. Elliot never answered the door himself. His mother always did. I think it might have been some sort of deal they had. I heard her fumbling with the dead bolt. Moths fluttered around my heart like it was a three-way light bulb. The door opened a crack and I saw one beguiling green eye peeking out at me. She unhooked the chain and pulled the door wide open with a big whoosh, and the vacuum created by the door opening sheathed her thighs and the nipples of her breasts in sheer white silk for a second. When I looked up, she was looking at me with her head cocked, like she knew exactly the effect she was having on me. I melted. I couldn’t help but melt.
She was pretty from the top of her head to the tips of her painted toenails — short, fine, coppery-red hair, pouty lips, creamy red lipstick. Her mouth turned down at the corners; she looked perpetually sad. She licked her lips and I could see the wetness of her tongue and the shiny enamel on her teeth and could smell what her lipstick would taste like when she put it on.
“Elliot’s in listening to his weirdo music,” she said and pointed toward the living room. Then she sauntered slowly down the hallway toward the open door of her bedroom with shafts of bright sunlight streaming through her sheer white silk robe, knowing full well I couldn’t help but notice.
. . .
When I got to know him better, I found out how Elliot had almost killed the football player. The football player had been drunk. He and some other football players had been drinking beer in the parking lot next to McDonald’s. One of them tossed an empty beer bottle over by where Elliot was waiting for a bus. Elliot kicked the empty beer bottle into the gutter. That wasn’t the right thing to have done. There wasn’t any right thing to have done.
One thing led to another. The football player took a swing at him. All Elliot did was duck. The football player lost his balance and cracked his face against the edge of the curb. Three teeth broke off at their roots. Blood puddled up. His eyes stayed open. He was trying to swallow. He looked like a fish. Elliot threw up.
He went over and over it in his mind for months. He got obsessed with ways he could have kept it from happening and ended up making a vow to himself that he wouldn’t ever fight anyone again, no matter what, not even to defend himself — next time he wouldn’t even duck. He was as close to being an absolute pacifist as a person could reasonably be. The idea of hurting living things made him literally sick to his stomach.
Being such a pacifist made Elliot do things differently from other people — like take out his aggressions, for example. A normal person would, you know, just hit a wall or kick a hole in a door or something, but Elliot had to resist such simple solutions for fear of wiping out whole civilizations of microscopic wall dwellers. That wasn’t the case when it came to Dru Davidson. When it came to Dru, all bets were off.
Elliot presumed that he and Dru would be getting back together any day. The way he saw it was that pretty soon he’d be making a name for himself as an actor or as an artist or as a guitar player and she’d come crawling back, make it all up to him in ways they’d never thought of before. They’d get married and live happily ever after in a house he was going to build for them on one of those huge outcroppings of rock that juts out into the ocean down around Big Sur.
Then Elliot’s imagination started falling apart. Dick Joseph saw Dru playing tennis with some Japanese guy at the tennis courts behind Burlingame High. Not long after that, John White saw her with the same guy at a party in Eichler Highlands and mentioned that he thought the guy might be in dental school.
Elliot didn’t believe anything Dick Joseph or John White or anyone else told him. He knew his darling Dru wouldn’t be caught dead with no sorry-ass Jap, period, and especially not with no sorry-ass Jap who was going to spend the rest of his life mucking around in people’s mouths for a living. What kind of a person would pick at putrefaction and decay and dig root canals all day? Would Dru want to share a life like that? No. What would they talk about? Plaque? Gingivitis?
It certainly wouldn’t be the sort of life she and Elliot would have together. Would some Jap dentist take her to Spain to see the sublime shadows and lights of El Greco? Would they go to the Prado to marvel at “The Garden of Earthly Delights”? Would they worship at the altar of Antonio Gaudi? Or listen to Segovia? Or Charlie Bird? Or Charlie Parker? Or Miles? Or Mozart? Would he read to her from The Book of Ecclesiastes or sing to her from The Song of Songs? Would she be his Cordelia? Would they live and pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies?
Then, with his own eyes, he saw her arm in arm with the selfsame Japanese guy he’d been hearing about, and Elliot knew the guy. It was Jerry Takahashi. He wasn’t in dental school. He was taking classes at the College of San Mateo — in Dental Technology. He wanted to make false teeth for a living. That was just the beginning. Not much more than a week after he’d seen Dru with Jerry Takahashi, Elliot saw her again, this time all snuzzled up to Steve Goldner by the front window of Sherman & Clay, looking at pianos. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about Steve Goldner. He was a Jew. He worked in his father’s jewelry store — he was a Jew jewelry clerk in his Jew father’s Jew jewelry store!
I have no reason whatsoever to believe that up until then Elliot had an ax to grind with the Japanese or Jews, either one (well, his father spent a year in a Japanese prison camp, but I doubt that had much to do with it). All I know is that from then on all Elliot thought about was hunting down Japs and Jews indiscriminately and hacking them to pieces with the machete his father had brought back as a souvenir from the war in the Pacific. This was at odds with Elliot’s strict pacifism, however, and he ended up painting strange, disturbing pictures instead.
At first the pictures were nothing but bloody piles of body parts, but they got more sophisticated as time went on, subtler, more refined. I think I was the only person besides him who ever actually saw any of the pictures. Elliot wasn’t proud of them. They were necessary. They were therapeutic. I kind of liked them myself. I mean, however objectionable the subject matter, the pictures themselves were just plain pretty to look at. They were like Russian Orthodox icons; they were so gorgeous they almost glowed. One was all in dull reds and yellows and somber browns, depicting bodies being loaded into a row of fiery furnaces. That one he simply called, “Hitler’s Ovens.” Another, with the fragile outlines of a Japanese family vaporized like spider webs against one of the interior walls of a house in Hiroshima, he called, “Roll On, Enola.”
In addition to acting and painting pictures, Elliot played flamenco guitar and sculpted. He sat out in his backyard, sweating under a prickly red Indian blanket in the ninety-degree sun for hours, staring at a blank rock until some combination of dehydration and incipient sunstroke caused him to hallucinate something he could chisel into permanence. His backyard crawled with the gruesome little things. He called them his lobotomies.
. . .
After his mother let me in the front door, I finished watching her saunter down the sunlit hallway and made my way into the living room — and there he was, Elliot Felton, rocking back and forth on a Persian prayer rug, listening to music with his eyes closed and his legs folded under him in a sort of half-lotus position. He was wearing a shiny green quilted brocade smoking jacket with black satin lapels. There was a yellow silk cravat tucked down the front of the jacket. He was smoking a meerschaum pipe. His mother made the smoking jacket for him for his seventeenth birthday. The pipe had the head of a bearded gnome carved into it. His father had brought it home from the property room at the FBI. He told Elliot that the pipe had belonged to some famous crook.
I just watched him for a while until I felt myself start to chuckle so deep inside my chest it brought tears to my eyes. I didn’t say anything — I just walked over and sat down across from him and listened to whatever he was listening to. It could have been most anything — “Sketches of Spain,” Segovia, “The Magic Flute,” Charlie Parker, Beethoven, Bach.
That day it was Yma Sumac. People might not know much about Yma Sumac anymore. Not many people knew much about her then, but Elliot worshipped Yma Sumac. She was supposed to have been an Incan Princess whose voice had a range of around nine octaves, lower than thunder on the low end and so high only bats could hear it on the high end. Well, either that or she was some Puerto Rican chick from the Bronx named Amy Camus who spelled her name backwards and masqueraded as an Incan Princess.
Whoever or whatever she was, however, Yma Sumac’s voice did more things than any human voice I ever heard before or since, and Elliot flat-out adored her. He listened to her records so often he knew the words to all her songs by heart. Whatever Yma Sumac did with her voice, Elliot tried to do too. They sang duets together. While everyone else in America was singing along with Mitch Miller, Elliot was singing along with Yma Sumac. She’d growl like a jaguar and hoot like a howler monkey, and he’d try to match her syllable for syllable. He and Yma Sumac stalked each other. The living room was a Peruvian jungle. He peeked out from behind one of his mother’s huge philodendrons, then pounced like a jaguar out from between the couch and the coffee table, tipping over lamps and crashing into a set of brass fireplace tools. It was funny. He was funny. They were funny — Elliot and Yma, an odder couple you never did see.
. . .
His mother worried about Elliot. She was proud of him, but she thought he was odd. Quirky. She didn’t think he fit in. We talked about him in their kitchen one afternoon. We were looking out the window at Elliot sitting under his Indian blanket. She was wearing a pair of tight white tennis shorts. Her legs were tan. Sunlight sparkled through pretty red highlights in her hair.
“Elliot’s always been . . . exceptional,” she said.
“Everyone’s exceptional,” I told her.
“Yeah, but he’s always been so — I don’t know . . . difficult, I guess — even when he was little. He thought he could do things nobody can do. He thought he brought a bird back to life. It was just a sparrow, a little fluff of a thing.”
She stopped and seemed to be picturing him as a curly-headed little three-year-old with his baseball cap on sideways, then went on in a faraway voice:
“It flew into the screen door of our house in Salt Lake — probably the first time the poor thing had ever been out of its nest. I’m sure it was only stunned, but Elliot thought it was dead. He picked it up and cupped his hands around it and blew into his hands and pretty soon the sparrow started chirping. He was so proud. He beamed up at me. His eyes were happier than anything I’ve ever seen. I said something silly, like, ‘Now it thinks you’re its mother.’ And do you know what he said then?” she asked.
The color of copper glinted in her hair. She wet her lips and there was a sad, baffled, smoldering sexual look in her eyes, like if I could come up with the right answer, she’d be grateful beyond words.
“No,” I said. “What did he say?”
“He asked me . . . he said, ‘Are you my mother?’”
“Most kids wonder about stupid stuff like that,” I said.
“Sometimes I don’t feel like I’ve been a good mother.”
“He never says anything bad about you.”
“I was so young.”
“You must have been,” I said.
. . .
During his last week of school, Elliot went home to get the gym stuff he had to take back in order to graduate and walked in on his mother and a Lebanese real estate agent having deliberate, consensual sexual intercourse on the drain board next to the kitchen sink. He told me about it later. He trusted me. I trusted him. The real estate guy’s pants were around his knees. He hadn’t even taken off his tie. That bothered Elliot more than anything else. His mother spoke to him only with her eyes. She pretended it wasn’t happening. He got his gym stuff and went back to school.
Elliot spent the better part of the next year in bed. He still hadn’t gotten over Dru. His mother and the Lebanese guy had been the last straw. Every time I went up there, he hadn’t moved since the last time I’d been there. He was always in bed. His room had sliding glass windows with drapes that didn’t close all the way. There was a half-finished painting on an easel over in one corner, a bare bones rendering of the kitchen sink. The dishes were all washed and stacked neatly in the dish drainer and there was a fancy silk tie draped around the silverware.
I sat on the edge of his bed. The ceiling sparkled where sunlight came through the crack in the drapes. His bed was a mattress and box springs on the floor. He flicked the ashes from a cigarette into a teacup. The cup had morning glories on it. The ashes sputtered. He coughed. Veins stood out at his temples and in his forehead. His skin was so thin I got the feeling he could see me with his eyes closed. With his eyes open, it hurt to look at him.
He didn’t know what to do. He was thinking about maybe cutting his vocal cords and playing flamenco guitar in the gutters of Madrid. He was thinking about maybe taking a kayak to the source of the Amazon River. I brought him a National Geographic map of Brazil. According to it, the Amazon River had several sources; some came down from Colombia, a few went over into Peru.
“The sources all have sources,” he said, looking more closely at the map, and pretty soon his head was shaking slowly and he was half-whimpering and half-saying “shit” over and over with long pauses in between like each time he said the word it was a complete sentence.
“Hey, so, go up them all,” I said.
“Which one should I start with?”
“Throw a dart.”
But he couldn’t make up his mind, period, not about anything. He was close to catatonic. He just stayed in bed, smoking cigarettes. His skin turned yellow and his muscles atrophied and his fingernails grew long and his fingers turned the color of the empty packs of Camels strewn around his room. He didn’t want anything from anyone. His mother thought it was her fault. She implored me with her eyes, what should she do, what should she do? What could I tell her?
Then, one fine morning, without saying a word to anyone, Elliot got out of bed and joined the Special Forces before anyone had ever heard of the Special Forces and was going to be going to Vietnam before anyone had ever heard of Vietnam, and this time it was his father’s turn to be proud. He’d known the kid had had it in him all along. He bragged about his son, the Green Beret, to his buddies at the FBI.
Elliot’s decision to go into the military crushed his mother. She thought he was trying to hurt her in the worst way he knew how. She thought it was a conspiracy, that Elliot and his father were in on it together, that they were punishing her, that they wanted her to die of pain and shame and guilt and sorrow and regret.
Personally, I didn’t get it at all. I pretty much just thought he was nuts — why an absolute pacifist would join the army, I did not know.
“What are you going to do in the army? Grow up? Liberate people? Stop communism? Get laid? What?”
“Special Forces,” Elliot said.
“Yeah? What makes them so special? They don’t kill people?”
“How will anyone know whether I kill people or not?”
“What are you going to do, pretend?”
“Maybe,” he said. Then he smiled the way he had when I’d winked at him back in drama class. It had been almost two years since then.
During those two years I’d gotten to know Elliot well enough to know that while I may not have known what the hell he was doing, he usually did. For one thing, he was going to get a lot closer to Bangkok than I ever had. Maybe I was jealous. Maybe he was brave. Maybe I was chicken. Maybe the army would be good for him. I couldn’t think of anything that could have been much worse than what he’d been doing. And, besides, he’d already done it, signed the papers, taken the oath. He couldn’t have changed his mind at that point if he’d wanted to.
Chapter Seven: North Beach
Six months later, around Christmas of 1962, Elliot came home on leave. He’d just finished basic training and some other hush-hush CIA sponsored school at Ft. Bragg and was going to be on his way to Vietnam the morning of New Year’s Day.
His head was shaved. His ears stuck out. The leather band around the edge of his green beret made a red, painful-looking groove in his scalp. His face was tan. His nails were clipped. He had a few crisp, new ribbons above his shirt pocket and had already earned himself something of a reputation. The guys he’d been in boot camp with called him “Deacon Felton” or “The Deacon” or “Deak.” He was the only Mormon in the elite, newly created branch of the military they called “Special Forces.” None of the big Bible belt Baptist bruisers who were his comrades in arms had ever known anyone who belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and Elliot talked to them fearlessly about The Book of Mormon.
He told them the whole story of how this Moroni guy, this sort of angelic fellow who glowed and walked a foot or two off the floor, told some New England dirt farmer by the name of Joseph Smith where to find some gold tablets hidden under a rock, along with a secret magic decoder device, and that the tablets explained how, shortly after the resurrection, Jesus came to North America and turned a bunch of naked savages into Christians. Elliot’s army buddies took kindly to him the way people take kindly to the incurably insane. He used to do that with the real Bible in the cafeteria at Hillsdale High School. I remember this one thing he used to go around quoting all the time, from The Song of Songs:
Stay me with flagons,
Comfort me with apples:
For I am sick of love.
People looked at him like he was nuts.
. . .
We had dinner at Elliot’s parents’ house. It was New Year’s Eve. I don’t think Elliot’s father knew about his wife’s infidelity with the Lebanese real estate guy on the drain board in the kitchen, per se, but he knew something. Their marriage had deteriorated beyond recognition. They spoke to each other with icy niceness.
“Could you pass the pepper, please, dear?”
“Certainly, darling. Anything else? Salt? Parmesan? More salad?”
It made you want to throw spaghetti in their faces. They wouldn’t have noticed if you had. They would have ignored it. They would have politely finished their desserts with spaghetti noodles looped around their ears and spaghetti sauce dripping off the ends of their noses.
Elliot and I finally managed to get the hell out of there around ten and took what was left of a half-gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy with us up to San Francisco, to Chinatown, to North Beach. I was twenty. Elliot was nineteen. His uniform was so new you could smell it. It was the same smell as the polish on his boots. The creases in his pants were sharp as knives. He had a tentative smile twitching at the corners of his mouth, like he couldn’t make up his mind whether he was proud of the way he looked or embarrassed by it. It was the same way he looked when he used to wear his quilted smoking jacket. I half expected him to whip out his meerschaum pipe.
What Elliot had learned in the Special Forces so far was that every Asian over the age of eight wanted nothing more out of life than to slit his throat while he was asleep. In Vietnam, for instance, according to what he told me he’d been told, there was a ten thousand dollar reward for every Green Beret anyone could get his or her hands on — just the hat, all by itself — ten grand for a hat.
Half the stuff Elliot told me I still have a hard time believing. They had him imagining all kinds of whacko things. It was probably part of some sort of self-esteem program — like if just your hat is worth ten thousand dollars; the rest of you has got to be pretty valuable, too. I didn’t think he would have fallen for it, though. I wasn’t sure he had fallen for it; I never could tell whether he was just acting or not. All I knew was that there we were, on Grant Avenue an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve, with noisemakers gyrating in our faces and confetti sprinkling our shoulders and firecrackers going off like gunfire at our feet and half the Asian population of San Francisco jamming into us from all sides, and it suddenly didn’t seem unreasonable that he’d gotten sort of jittery — which is not to say it still didn’t seem pretty stupid.
I mean, what he hell did he think? That someone was going to run up, grab his hat and go cash it in somewhere? He was scared, edgy, ultra-aware; a little paranoid, probably. The color had gone out of his cheeks. His eyes darted back and forth and he backed up into some kind of karate stance, like he was maybe thinking about trying to take on all of Chinatown with his bare hands.
Then these two Caucasian guys in wingtips and three-piece suits came out of the noisy crowd, got on either side of Elliot and escorted him over into the alley behind City Lights. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Elliot seemed to be agreeing with them. His head was bowed. His cheek twitched. He nodded and looked up at them and nodded again, and pretty soon the three of them walked up to Broadway and shook hands. The wingtip guys disappeared back into the crowd.
Elliot marched like a toy soldier over toward the intersection of Columbus and Broadway. The light turned red. There wasn’t any traffic. The streets had been roped off. But he stopped anyway. I caught up to him.
“Ah, Elliot?”
“Yeah?”
“So, did we, like . . . know those guys?”
“No.” He shrugged and took off across the crowded intersection.
“Hang on a second,” I said, trotting along at his elbow. “Who were they?”
He sped up.
I grabbed his sleeve.
“Knock it off.” He pulled his arm away and narrowed his eyes and bared his teeth like he was maybe going to hiss at me again. I was thinking I might have to shoot him another quick wink. I guess just the thought crossing my mind must have calmed him down some. He glanced over his shoulder and said, “They’re army intelligence.”
“They didn’t look that smart to me,” I said.
Elliot smiled one of his twitchy smiles and stopped walking quite so fast. Then he told me in a halting, carefully worded, circuitous sort of way, that the Special Forces were so new and so elite and the training he’d just been through was such top secret hush-hush stuff that whenever any of them went out into the “civilian” population, plain clothes army intelligence officers followed them around.
“To what? Make sure nobody steals their hats?”
“Something like that, yeah,” he said.
Then he clammed up on me again, like I wasn’t qualified, somehow, to be let in on what went on among men on their way to some little nowhere country on the other side of the National Geographic world.
. . .
We ended up at the Jazz Workshop. Jimmy Witherspoon was there. I was too curious about what had just happened in Chinatown to care. I mean, come on, this was me he was talking to. I knew things the army couldn’t have known. I knew all about him and Dru and about his mother and about his father. I’d seen him under his Indian blanket. We’d listened to Miles Davis. We’d listened to Yma Sumac! I’d heard him hoot like a howler monkey and growl like a jaguar. I’d seen him in his smoking jacket, I’d seen him almost wet his pants — so what was all this hush-hush army horseshit all of a sudden? What did he have up his sleeve? Maybe he’d caught Dru Davidson diddling some Vietnamese guy up by the Pulgas Water Temple. Or maybe he was a spy. But for who? Spain? Brazil? I couldn’t figure it out.
We had found seats by then. That was when I started noticing a girl in the row ahead of us — and whatever had been going on with Elliot out in the street took a back seat to the girl in the row in front of us. Her name was Virginia Good. Ginny. Ginny Good.
My eyes hadn’t adjusted to the dark. She was fidgeting in her chair. Her voice trilled and broke at the top of a giggle. She cocked her head and her hair touched her shoulder. Her hair was brown, lighter and darker brown, and curly and cute. It bounced up and down in thick, springy spirals when she tilted her head back and laughed.
She had on a tight black dress, a black lace shawl and a string of pearls, but she still managed to look disheveled, somehow — like she’d come there fresh from riding a horse bareback along the edge of an ocean somewhere. Her shawl brushed my knee. When she talked she got her whole tiny, tough little body into it. The words tinkled like she was playing them on a piano. At one point, she got so adamant she had to jump out of her chair and stamp both feet on the floor like Jerry Lee Lewis. Great Balls of Fire!
“That’s not fair!” she screamed.
Now, questions of fairness have always piqued my curiosity, I admit, but in fairness, what piqued my curiosity even more was that Virginia Good had the most perfect ass since Donna McKechnie. I was instantaneously in love forever again.
The best I could figure it, Ginny was out on a date with two different guys at the same time. One of them was wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses. The other had a crew cut. They both had on narrow suits and ties, and although I’d still only seen her from the back, I presumed she must be pretty cute from the front, too — you have to be pretty cute to get two different guys to go out with you on New Year’s Eve.
I had on a white, button-down shirt and a light green cardigan with imitation leather buttons and was feeling sort of adorable myself. I accidentally stepped on the end of Ginny’s black lace shawl. Then I kept my foot there on purpose. The next time she moved, the shawl ended up around my ankles. Ha! That got the ball rolling. We had to fumble around at my feet, trying to get it untangled. Our heads kept bumping. By the time we’d gotten everything back where it belonged, it would have been rude not to have said something to each other.
The band was tuning up. Jimmy Witherspoon was clearing his throat. Elliot was slumped in his chair. I was eloquent, charming, shameless. Elliot covered his face with his ten thousand dollar hat. At some point in the conversation it became apparent that Virginia’s dates were ticked. It was bad enough that they had each other to contend with, without some other asshole horning in. They joined forces against me and somehow got Jimmy Witherspoon on their side. I became the common enemy. Being the common enemy is a role I’ve always relished. With everyone ganged up on you, you don’t have a lot to lose and if you win, hey. Besides, the guys she was out with were just a couple of snotty college kids, and as for Jimmy Witherspoon, he could go fuck himself, I wasn’t old enough to get in there anyway. Someone should have checked my ID.
The only thing that mattered was that Virginia liked me. I could tell. I had her laughing her ass off. She thought I was cute, too. I was. I was young. My heart was young. My veins filled with blood so fast I couldn’t sit still. What did I have to gain? Plenty. What did I have to lose? Jack. I quoted long, surprisingly apt passages from Blake and Shakespeare and Allen Ginsberg — things I didn’t even know I knew, things I’d probably picked up by osmosis from Elliot.
I told her I was the smartest person in the world. I told her I knew everything there was to know. The guy with the crew cut asked me a trick question. He probably thought it was funny. “How many pinheads can dance on the head of an angel?”
“Seven,” I said.
Ginny laughed. I was on a roll.
Now, any fool knows that the last thing you want to do is encourage some twenty-year-old drunk from San Mateo ten minutes before midnight at a jazz club on New Year’s Eve, but Virginia couldn’t help laughing. I was funny. The whole thing was funny. Jimmy Witherspoon was funny. The guys she was out with were funny.
Her dates kept encouraging me more and more by getting more and more pissed off every time I made Ginny laugh — and by then she was laughing at just about everything. The more pissed off they got, the more eloquent I became and the more Ginny laughed.
Somewhere in there, Elliot stood up, took off his hat and introduced himself.
“Charmed, I’m sure.” Virginia extended her hand.
“Your hand’s so little,” Elliot said.
“‘Not even the rain has such small hands,’” I quoted.
“That’s E. E. Cummings,” the guy with glasses chimed in.
“No shit,” I said.
Then Elliot introduced me to Ginny and she introduced us to the two guys, and finally she introduced herself. Virginia. Ginny. Ginny Good. I stepped in and shook her hand. The boyfriends watched like cobras.
“I’m going to kiss you at midnight,” I slurred into Virginia’s ear while I was holding on to her hand. I thought I was whispering, but Jimmy Witherspoon glowered down at me from the front of the stage like he thought I might have been talking to him. Virginia made her eyes big and gulped.
Midnight came. First, she had to kiss the guys she was with. It was only fair. After she’d bestowed scrupulously equal little pecks on each of their cheeks, it was my turn. Ha! A spotlight lit up her face. It was the first time I’d gotten a good look at her and, wow, was she ever cute — tiny mouth, smirky, mischievous smile, confident body, clear, tan, healthy skin, a few freckles across the bridge of her nose — whoa, was she ever pretty. Her eyes sparkled an eerie, eerie, otherworldly blue.
The spotlight went out. My head swirled with snatches of beatnik poetry and after-images of tables and chairs and musical instruments and echoes of whisky-drinking blues lyrics all jumbled together with Ginny Good’s pretty face and her eerie blue eyes.
At first it was just a tentative, sort of who’s going to call whose bluff kind of kiss, with me mainly worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get all the way through it without throwing up all over Jimmy Witherspoon’s shoes. But then it turned into a big kiss. We both somehow managed to maneuver ourselves out of our chairs and were standing up, face-to-face, jamming closer and closer into each other.
She was small and strong. She felt like a dancer. Her hands were under my sweater, tugging at my shirt, and I had her dress pulled up to the tops of her nylons and felt the hem of her panties under the straps of a silky garter belt.
Then she was pounding on my chest and whispering into my ear, “We have to stop. We have to stop. My panties are getting ruined!”
“So are mine,” I said.
The guys she was with were practically apoplectic by then, but what could they do? With Elliot sitting there, looking stern and menacing in his jaunty Green Beret and shiny black boots? Call the police? Get Army Intelligence over there? What?
Then Elliot stood up again, bent over in his stiff uniform, and kissed Ginny himself — barely brushed his lips across her forehead — and I think he might have been crying. I couldn’t tell. I could never tell whether he was ever crying or not.
Virginia laughed like a four-year-old kid. She let her hair fall in front of her pretty face, covered her tiny mouth with her tiny hand and said, “Oh, dear!”
. . .
The next morning, Elliot was the one who remembered her name. All I remembered was barfing gobs of his mother’s spaghetti up and down Broadway the rest of the night and, vaguely, that I was in love.
I was picking him up to take him to the airport. It was late by the time I got to his house. He was out by the curb with his duffel bag, looking worried.
“Hey, remember that girl last night?” I asked him, after he’d stuffed his duffel bag into