As in most transitional areas, immigrant communities thrived in port cities, the strongest of them being the Italians and Croatians (from both of whom I can claim descent, depending on whom you ask). San Pedro remains one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the county of Los Angeles. The Catholic working class still organize their bands of formally dressed children to church on Sundays. The city is a gritty twin to Palos Verdes with its Protestant, country-club citizens. And in my father’s day, as a Palos Verdes girl’s life marched toward her debutante ball, her eventual marriage and procreation, a Pedro boy’s life marched toward the holiest of all grails, joining the longshoremen’s union.
Not my father’s though. His marched toward Oxford, an MBA, a major job at Ball Aerospace, owning multiple homes, juggling multiple lives. He was too golden.
He left us when I was three years old. Or my mother kicked him out. Or he went to rehab. Or my grandfather kicked him out. Or, as he would say to me years later: To be honest, I never had much interest in children.
My father has never been around one of his three children for an extended period of time. He rarely remembered to call for a birthday or purchase a Christmas present. I was ten when we finally started to visit him regularly, at his new home in Boulder, Colorado. My mother was surprised when he offered to take us for eight weeks of summer. My sister and I flew on an airplane by ourselves, the flight attendants hovering over us. My father set himself up in a small town outside of Boulder called Lyons, abutting the Rockies, with a beautiful wife and a sparkling, cream-cheeked baby boy, my half brother, Jared. But on those summer visits, he put us directly into an outdoor adventure camp. He said he was curing us of the corruption of the country club my maternal grandparents belonged to, but it meant that we hardly saw him during those two months.
When I became his child full-time at age sixteen, he had been away for the majority of my life. We knew nothing about each other. He put me into a devastatingly expensive school where he hoped they would do the heavy lifting of containing me. He had no interest in starting a career in parenting with me, which was fine as I didn’t have any interest in being parented.
What I knew about his cocaine use from my aunt was dismissed—in my mind—as recreational. Youthful indiscretion. Even before the full extent of his addiction came to light when I was a senior in college, he wasn’t like a father. But it was during my two years in Boulder, against odds or sense, that I came to adore him.
He had that gilded, incorrigible quality that women went crazy for. His charm was legendary. He could talk to anyone. He gave impromptu speeches that were rhyming poems and moved his audiences to tears. He hunted, he fished, he hiked. He was grand and masculine. He was smart and condescending—dismissive in a way that never seemed closed-minded, just final. Accordingly, the women in his life stopped fighting quickly.
I began to take pride in being able to tolerate what many women eventually found intolerable. I didn’t ask questions. I never pursued him. I never tried to connect. I would laugh when he hurt me. I wasn’t his kid, I was the person that understood him. I was the only one who understood that he couldn’t love anyone, especially not me, and I was charmed by his cruelty. The endless game of earning his affection. I began to think of myself as tough. It doesn’t seem like a crime—but it’s easy to see I was built to love a certain kind of man.
Owens Valley, California
The Love Interest and I are driving along the San Bernardino freeway where it splits the desert. We are heading to Joshua Tree again. It turns out, I love camping.
He’s picked me up from Alex’s bachelorette in Palm Springs. I have glitter in my hair and four false eyelashes left. I’m so hungover I’m nearly fetal. When I climb into the front seat, there’s a bottle of water and a cup with wildflowers in it. He calls it a car bouquet. I feel girlish and grateful. I’ve pitched an essay, unformulated still, about this California he’s given me access to. I want his help but don’t know how to ask for it.
I want to say that the desiccation of Owens Lake is the greatest environmental disaster in California’s history, I tell him.
The greatest? he asks, skeptical. Is that true?
I don’t know. It feels true.
Maybe you should do some research before you write something like that. I can put you in touch with one of my professors.
No. I’m annoyed. Never mind.
I put my hand on the window. Heat ripples against the glass, the wind turbines moving plaintively through it.
He says, You want general permission to write whatever feels true?
A few weeks ago, on the tail end of our Death Valley trip, the Love Interest took me to see a piece of land art at Owens Lake. I’d never heard of the place, but he once worked on a ranch overlooking it. This part of California’s Central Valley, laid between the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevadas, is a tourist stop for those on their way to Mount Whitney. The area is more famous for its economic depression and for making good meth. As we came into the valley and found the Sierras extending sharply into the horizon, I saw what looked like a massive scab on the valley floor.
I scanned the landscape. Where’s the lake?
There’s no lake. That’s the point.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Owens Lake was one of the largest in the state, the surrounding area so lush it was once referred to as the Switzerland of California. Known for its whitecaps from the Sierra winds, the lake floated two steamships that transported silver from the mines between the Sierras and Inyo Mountains. By 1926, hardly more than a decade after the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed, taking water south to feed the thriving metropolis, Owens Lake was completely dry.
A dry lakebed is ugly, but not a disaster. Dust is a disaster. Carcinogenic, powder-fine, lodge-in-your-lungs-forever dust. The winds that once whipped whitecaps now blew the dust off the lakebed and scattered it across the state. In 1987, the Environmental Protection Agency called Owens Lake the worst source of dust pollution in the country. Without the Owens Valley water, the city of Los Angeles could not exist.
We drove down onto the lakebed and walked around the sculptures in Perry Cardoza’s park, a large shaded plaza where visitors could take in the remains of the “lake,” surrounded by “trails” that mimic the dust migration. Beyond the one shaded area, the wind and sun made it hard to linger. We were the only people around for miles. The salt-cracked lakebed spread around us, the sky unbearably bright, gravel paths marking the way to sprinklers spitting out water.
Afterward we stopped in Lone Pine for coffee. There was a road sign that said: INDEPENDENCE, CALIFORNIA, 16 MILES. Independence. I had seen it before and was stunned. In an unnameable part of my body, a bruise was pressed upon.
What’s up? he said. This man always asked a question when I turned rigid.
I looked at the sign again. I’ve been here before. A place up by Independence. I went when I was a girl.
He waited for me to go on. I surprised myself and told the Love Interest a story:
Attached to my father’s surname is an old mining claim up in the Inyo Mountains. His family has had a bare-bones cabin up there since the 1890s. The landscape of that part of the Inyos is harsh. Rugged, someone kinder might say.
My father’s last name is a name I declined to retrieve when my marriage ended, but it remains attached to me like my Catholic schooling, my maternal grandmother’s WASPiness, and being born in Los Angeles. Things I enjoy forgetting but from which I seem unable to remove myself.
In that moment, when I saw the sign for Independence, I realized I hadn’t thought of the “Diggins”—as they called the camp and the land around it—in years. My sister and I visited a handful of times as children, these visits dominated by the fear we felt whenever we went anywhere with our father. He did not know how to take care of us, how to make food for us or bathe us; he didn’t have games or toys.
His
father’s house in San Pedro, where he took us for his visits, was always dark—an Italian peasant thing, to keep the lights off and heavy curtains drawn. The men in his family hunted, and the house was filled with taxidermy: an elk head, a boar, and multiple bear rugs that shed.
Our great-grandfather, who had dementia, lived there too, and spent all of his days on a faded blue couch, staring out the window, unspeaking. It seems quaintly gothic now, but it was terrifying then. My father smelled like a man: one part aftershave, one part feral, one part rental car.
Our mother was back to being a “Ferrero.” Ferrero family retreats involved Palm Desert, books, and tubes of orange-scented Bain de Soleil. When my father called to announce he was taking us to the Diggins, she shuddered. What a godforsaken place, she’d say. I was unsure if she meant the cabin or her marriage.
I remember the rattlesnakes. The bats at dusk. The frogs and the gigs for killing them, the rats’ nests we discovered, the guns we used for target practice, and the truckloads of illegal fireworks our father shot off, their explosions thrilling us. We all slept outside, my sister and I horrified as the coyotes’ yips and howls clocked the night.
The adults kept a variety of rusty Jeeps and Land Cruisers on the property. My father would let me sit on his lap and steer over the roadless brush. He collected the rattles off dead snakes in the road and kept them in the cup holder, where they jumped each time he accelerated.
There were cousins, nine of us in total, along with diaphanous aunts who made a warm band into which my sister and I wanted to be absorbed. After a day or two, we didn’t want to leave the Diggins. It also held a treacherous promise: that I would—if I was strong enough, shot straight enough, did not complain while hiking—be accepted back into my father’s life. Even as a six-year-old, I was addicted to this challenge. Every time he left, I had failed.
Colorado
There is a rehab center tucked into the mountains outside of Estes Park, Colorado, a town known as the gateway to the Rockies. It must be eight years ago now that Christina and I flew in from New York City and drove through a snowstorm to spend a “healing” weekend with my father, who was finishing up his thirty days.
For years my paternal grandmother, Gloria, had been saying that my father was not a drug addict but suffered from bipolar disorder. The last hospital he was admitted to was inclined to agree. They put him on Lithium and Thorazine, but the two drugs weren’t mixing well. He had better diction after a bottle of gin than he did with the pills.
While the patients went through their own closing ceremony, the families sat on plastic chairs in a semicircle around a space heater with the other family members. They were haggard parents, bereft siblings, thickened men and women aged before their time by dealing with their addicts.
We went around the circle and told our stories. My sister and I were at the end. We listened to the thefts, the car crashes, the lies, the injuries, the unimaginable actualized over and over again. I started thinking about which story about my father I would tell these exhausted people. I thought I would do the hard talking for my sister.
I come from a long line of charismatic liars, I might say. Our main currencies are epiphanies and promises, highly inflated, though we ourselves remain completely bankrupt…
Some writerly grandiose bullshit like that. My turn came and I remember getting out, My father is a liar before I erupted into tears.
That was only his fifth relapse.
When it comes to my father, I don’t believe addiction is a disease. I don’t necessarily believe he’s bipolar. I don’t believe he can be treated for any of the afflictions that we hope will explain his atrocious behavior. In my time with addicts I’ve learned to identify those that are liars first, those whose great comfort in addiction is that it allows them to practice their art. It was clear, as I watched him sleepwalk through his graduation from rehab, that it was not drugs that brought him here. It’s what I call his black hole. It sits behind his heart. It has been threatening him his entire life. Drugs are just one way to pacify it.
I know because I’m his daughter. He passed it on to me. I realize during these visits that I have been guarding against it, minute by minute, for my entire life. I’ve touched all its edges.
* * *
An attaché case left on the roof of a silver car, flying past the gray strip malls of Southern California. It belongs to my father, coming to pick us up and take us out to dinner. Perpetually tanned in tailored Italian suits, a different rental car every visit. He was always on his way to and from the airport, never in my life for more than forty-eight hours at a time. I couldn’t keep track of where he lived, but I believe, after he left us, he went to New Mexico, then Seattle, Washington, eventually Colorado. He told me he made telescopes for outer space. I told my friends, their parents, my teachers: my father is just away on a business trip. The teachers told my mother, and she said, What your father tells you isn’t true.
Fifteen years or so later when I was not a child, my father and I were at a gas station a few hours outside of St. Louis. I was on my way to my senior year at college. My father’s cell phone died and he made us pull over so he could use the pay phone. I had no idea who he was calling. He asked me for change. I fidgeted in the gummy leather seat, annoyed that we could only agree on Bob Dylan to listen to. My father’s attaché case was on the front seat. I wonder now: If I had opened it back then, would I have found him out? Would I have done anything differently?
Instead I looked at the attaché case and remembered the time he left it on the roof of the car when I was a child. When he pulled up to my mother’s house in Long Beach, my sister and I were out front waiting for him. My mother wouldn’t let him come past the front gate. He opened the car door with a huge smile for us and then he saw the attaché on the roof. I remember thinking that he was more excited to see it than us, that his relief was audible, so marked a thermometer could have picked up the change in him.
His attaché case was the eloquent extension of his arm. He said, Let me see, where is my attaché, to any question asked of him. He would undo the clasps and consult a calendar while we sat at Chuck E. Cheese and I told him how good I was at tetherball. His importance was bigger than games and rides at Chuck E. Cheese. It was bigger than my mother, my sister, and me combined.
On that drive back to Ohio, I knew my father was unwell. I think I knew, subconsciously, that I shouldn’t be in the car with him. I did not imagine that his life as he had meticulously constructed it was coming to an end. That his mysteries that enthralled me were the most mundane lies.
What I’m left with from that drive is this image of him at the pay phone: He is so tall that he can’t fit in the phone booth. He is so thin he looks like a plank of lumber. He is looking at his hands as he speaks; he is still so tan he looks golden against the blue Midwest flatland behind him that goes on and on and on.
* * *
When I tell people I lived in Boulder, Colorado, I don’t actually mean Boulder. I mean Hygiene, a petite unincorporated town outside of Boulder, where the foothills flatten, where my father had a home. Hygiene got its name from the tuberculosis sanatorium built there in 1881 (called the “Hygiene House,” which is also what we called my father’s house), during a time when it is estimated that one-third of Colorado’s residents were there because of some illness to be cleansed by the thin mountain air.
Hygiene is a stop sign on a country road, surrounded by lakes, rivers, small ranches, and rutted roads that take you toward the Rockies. It is a small market, an elementary school, a post office, and a gas station. The gas station was important to me because I could walk there and rent from their small collection of VHS tapes. My father didn’t believe in “having a television,” but we did have a small television with no channels (no cable or Internet when I moved in) and a dusty VCR that lay next to it. He wouldn’t even keep it in the house. It was kept on the screened porch, even in winter.
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br /> The man who ran the gas station was what is generously referred to as a “local character” or what I, at sixteen, referred to as a “hick.” He had a glass eye, bad teeth, and a prominent mustache. He and my father were friends because the gas station had a secret collection of illegal cigars. While I browsed the same thirty VHS tapes, wondering what I could possibly watch, yet again, he would take my father into the back room for “the Cubans.” Occasionally they would smoke one together, and I would stand outside talking with people filling up their tanks or walk over to the cemetery next door where the graves were so old the names were rubbed out. I imagined that many of them met their end at the Hygiene House, which promised a curative elixir of mineral water that was actually just water pumped from a ditch out back.
Later Mr. Glass Eye hired Blake, a teenager my age who would end up robbing the store and running away before he could graduate from high school, a beautiful boy who claimed to be the only mixed-race kid in Colorado. One day I left school early so I could get home in time to work a closing shift at the coffee shop in Boulder. I took my dad’s truck to the gas station to fill up, and Blake and I chatted. He asked some questions about the private school I went to, what the kids were like. The usual: boring, spoiled, was my response. He said he was finishing his shift and asked if I wanted to get high. With an eight-hour shift ahead of me, one that got me home past midnight, I of course did.
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