Because I’m writing about them, I remind myself. I’m in the garage, looking for a notebook from 2005, wondering what was going through my mind when I got into the car with my father. This is not what I want to be doing. I want to write a novel. I want to stop writing things I’ve only said out loud to a handful of people, most of them paid professionals. It keeps them too close to me, I tell my sister. I’m losing it. The act of remembering them feels like a betrayal. Telling the truth about them, when I’ve been trained since childhood to keep secrets, is unthinkable. But in these days in Laurel Canyon, I cannot write anything else.
Grieving the living feels like an infinite state, until you remember that it ends in regular grieving. It happens in breakups, or in prolonged illnesses. It has happened with my parents. As I write about them, they’re still living. But they aren’t here anymore. We each have our memories, or lack of them, as personal and cryptic as dreams. But we no longer share a history because a history must be corroborated. There is no one to call. There is no guidance, or a center that holds. I think of Orpheus trying to lead Eurydice back into the land of the living, not understanding that she has passed beyond his reach into the realm of the dead. What, exactly, was Orpheus’s story after that?
Brooklyn, New York
The day I let my father go was unremarkable except that I was happy. It was the year after his fifth relapse in Estes Park, where my sister and I had flown in. I was twenty-seven years old and newly engaged to Brad. I had never, not once in my life, wanted to be married. When he proposed, I felt shock, then dread, then hope, in that order. His eyes were wet as he held out the ring and I thought, Why not me?
Up to this point I had always been involved with my father’s recoveries, though I never deluded myself that it was his children that would save him. He liked it when we were there because he liked to show us off, differentiate himself from the other addicts. Still I made space for him in my life. He visited me and Brad a few times, sleeping on the couch in our tiny one-bedroom apartment on Grand Street in Williamsburg.
On those visits Stephen was subdued, chugging sparkling water, but still himself. Boastful, full of stories, preferring to walk the entire city. I was often unsettled when he left. He’s using again, I would say to Brad after my father walked out the door, and for weeks after I would wait to hear news of the next disaster.
He spoke of having money, though he hadn’t worked since he was fired in 2005, six years earlier. I wasn’t sure where he lived back in Boulder, it changed often, but recently he had gotten an apartment with a roommate. He wanted to become a Jesuit priest. He had hiking clubs. Lots of friends. He spoke endlessly about his workout regimen and meditation. He had applied to divinity school. Nothing struck me as entirely logical. I used to say to Brad, He never really hit rock bottom. I don’t mean with his overdose, the car accidents, or poverty. He never let go of this idea of who he was. Humility was missing.
When I tried to call my father to tell him of my engagement, I was met with a disconnected phone. Not the first time. I tried again the week after. Then I called one of his sisters, who went looking for him. He hadn’t been living in that apartment for some time. He’d been living on the couch of someone else in the program, who had since kicked him out. My father was not remotely sober.
It had been a month and we couldn’t find him. I sat at the table one night, working on a bottle of wine, and said dully, He’s dead somewhere. The call is coming.
Brad said we didn’t know anything yet. But when I was drinking heavily and could bear it, I could imagine him unmistakably. As if I had a portal in my chest that allowed me to access his feelings. His life was in shadows. He was in places he wasn’t meant to be: truck stops, crack houses, empty parks, this golden, graceful man, emaciated and lost.
I saw him begging. I don’t mean that he literally begged for drugs, though I know he did beg, and did more than beg, on many occasions. But that each of his movements trembled with desperation, like a trapped animal wanting to escape itself.
I know that as he fell into his black hole, he prayed. Thinking of his eventual death didn’t hurt me, perhaps because I had been preparing for it for so many years. When it came, it would be a mercy. The thing I felt most acutely when I thought of him dying, was shame that he would die on the dark side of his life. Not in his home or in the mountains he loved. He would die nameless, in his ghostly world that he could never bring to light.
The end-of-summer Brooklyn light when you live near the water is concentrated and honeyed. Our apartment had only four electrical outlets, the toilet was in a closet, but it was graced with a cast-iron tub in the kitchen. At that point with Brad, it was the longest I’d ever lived in one place since I was eleven. The leaves in the trees outside the window were prolific, almost blocking my view of the East River. I was in a tepid bath midday, even though it was sweltering. Brad brought me a glass of ice water and went back to what he was working on. I watched the beads of cold water drop into the tub and I knew my father was never going to get better. When I let him go, it wasn’t in reaction to one of his disasters. It was finding myself in the right temperature, the right light. I suppose it contrasted so sharply with wherever he was, if he was still alive. After all the therapy, rehab, jargon, the quixotic perspectives and contexts that allow us to fidget and escape the logical consequences of action—in my bathtub there it was, suddenly, the truth: it didn’t matter.
I’m not getting my father back. Not because he’s dead, or because he’s an addict. But because he was never there to begin with.
The hardest part of remembering that afternoon is not the loss of my father. It’s the way Brad sat on the floor next to the tub and talked to me. It’s the bottle of Riesling he opened. He gave me, for our entire relationship, unflinching care. I didn’t foresee how some years later I would watch the movers toss boxes roughly. I couldn’t imagine I would leave him. I could say I was doing it to be honest or true to myself. That staying in the marriage would have made me a liar just like my father, but in truth, I still have no idea why I did it.
We found my father a few weeks later in a rehab center in Utah. He hadn’t been allowed to use the phone. When he finally called me, I didn’t answer. I don’t know who it was who told him I got married.
The Salton Sea, California
You wanted conflict, the Love Interest says, as we contemplate Salvation Mountain. I expect grandeur, but the mountain looks like papier-mâché. A pink, teal, seafoam pile that slides underfoot like melted candle wax. There’s a hive of dripping sculptures off to the side. All this absurd color in the middle of a flatland next to the Salton Sea.
The “sea” is still the largest lake in California, called a sea because of the water’s salinity. In the 1960s this accidental lake, created from an overflow of the Colorado River and then fostered, was more popular than Yosemite as a tourist destination. By the seventies, flooding from the Colorado River and toxicity in the water threatened commerce. When thousands of fish and bird corpses piled up on the shores, the money abandoned it for good.
Stepping out of the car today, we find the shore comprising pulverized bones and giving off the ironized stench of fish guts. The most prominent and discussed problem facing the area now is that California needs the water it has been pumping into the sea (which also serves as the largest wetland in California, crucial to migrating birds). But without that water the lake recedes, and the lakebed—this one laced with more chemicals and pesticides than Owens Lake could dream of—will become exposed. So the issue comes back to dust. California says it needs the water and does need the water. Water’s greatest good, it seems, is to create: build, farm, expand. Water given to repair or maintain a project in its unsexy middle age is always a waste.
None of us ever seems to learn anything.
These aren’t really “date” places, I say to him as we get back in the car. The sea and sky are as opaque as a blind eye. We drive pas
t the ruined resorts sinking into the lakebed, and bleached-out signage promising an ocean, waterskiing, a Miracle in the Desert for your uninhibited enjoyment.
We’re here for another piece of land art, Slab City, also known as “The Last Free Place on Earth.” It’s a trailer park of squatters on a piece of abandoned land near a bomb-testing site. It simulates a town, with a bar, a theater, and community meetings. It’s covered in garbage, banners, withered plastic, painted pieces of wood with messages directed at Jesus. We are almost out of gas.
We pull out our camping chairs in the parking lot and I open the cooler. A ripe avocado is an optimistic omen in my life, and I have one. It doesn’t need anything but salt and lemon. When I open the tortilla chips and beer, two men approach us. One white, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and carrying a twelve-pack box; one black, shirtless, and with pants fallen so low they expose his pubic hair. Both are holding cans of Natty Light. Neither have shoes. Noah, the white guy, introduces himself and his friend, Henry, then they sit down on the ground and ask to snag a chip.
It is not entirely true that amphetamines destroy your appetite. You eat not for sustenance or satisfaction but to be doing something, whether drinking, smoking, or eating chips—a thoughtless way to tether the mind’s mania to movement. The men’s hands are filthy, and they plunge them into the chip bag. We all cheers our beers, while the my-little-pony-colored mountain preaches Salvation behind us.
The Love Interest has gone silent. He can’t tell if I’m okay with our new, very enthusiastic, friends. He doesn’t know that I take a certain pride in being able to pass on the fringes. That I have an expertise in talking to people on speed, or meth, or heroin.
I’m talking with Henry about Slab City, where he’s been living for three years. The soles of his feet look like asphalt. Slab City isn’t free anymore, at least ethically speaking. It’s still a place where you live off the grid, where you barter for goods. It houses a harmonious balance of ex-military libertarians and aging anarchists. But from an ethical standpoint, it’s over, Henry says, commodified. He wants to call his mom and have her pick him up and take him to Detroit. Detroit is where violence is possible, he extols. Violence is the only true expression left to us. He was a teacher in another life. When I tell him I went to the New School, he talks about Eric Fromm and Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish exiles who taught there during the 1940s. He wants to talk about the Frankfurt School. He picks up the bowl of mashed avocado and helps himself.
Noah recently moved to LA with his wife. He’s out here taking photos for the weekend, a budding photojournalist. He asks us, Were you at Occupy? and Why is chaos regarded as a negative concept?
The Love Interest is watching me. People trickle down the yellow path glazed onto Salvation Mountain and the sun has shifted into its closing stance. GOD IS LOVE is emblazoned on its peak, surrounded by cartoonish hearts. I think about Noah’s wife, who is waiting for him back in LA. He has spoken at length about photography, but I’ve yet to see a camera, or even a phone. I’m sure he told her he was out for a standard, privileged, voyeuristic gaze at the last shreds of “freedom” and ended up on what was an “accidental” speed bender.
The Love Interest asks if I’m okay. Now I can tell he wants to go, but I smile brightly at him, thinking, You don’t know anything about me yet. I’m punishing him. For pushing me to talk about people and places I’ve forcibly tried to bury. For bringing me to yet another godforsaken place. For wanting me to sleep under the stars, to feel light when I arrive at the ever-widening bomb blast of these wheezing desert towns. For a moment, I hate him for not knowing how fragile I am.
I ask Noah and Henry about a gas station and they invite us to stay the night. Suzie always has space in her trailer, Henry declares. It has solar panels. Apparently, Noah has been there for days. Someone will probably be cooking, and someone will probably drive us into town for more beer and cigarettes and a couple gallons of gas. Their friend Toadie lives in an abandoned water tower, his house is a marvel, we can’t leave without seeing it. There’s a library in Slab City, a free library in the last free place, I’m told, and I can look at the books.
The Love Interest reaches out his hand. I stare at his palm.
Owens Valley, California
In 2007, my cousin August went into the Inyo Mountains to perform a rite of passage, three days and three nights in the wilderness with no supplies. Though he was strongly discouraged by the family, he decided to stop by the Diggins. A decade after its abandonment by my father’s generation, it was covered in five-foot-tall weeds. It was heavily vandalized. The shack had been repurposed as a rat’s nest. August and his partner, Claire, spent the summer months camped out at the Diggins, visited by their friends, my aunt, my other cousins, even my father. There were days upon days of manual labor. They rebuilt and replanted. August took over as custodian of the mining claim. He calls what he does out there, “nurturing.” He believes our generation can heal that land. I want that to be true.
I’d forgotten about the water. My grandfather was able to build the Diggins because of a pipe that juts straight out of the mountainside. It pumped water—freezing, the color of quicksilver—into a bucket, which we bathed out of, yelling from the cold. The water overflowed from that bucket into a ditch, which we children called “the moat.” It encircled the property, lined by thick grass on both sides, a ring of vivid green. The Diggins, our kingdom, fertile, sheltered. Within the perimeter were stands of cottonwoods, apple trees, wild roses, grapevines weaving through an arbor that shaded us during meals. The mountains around us were barren save for some sagebrush and tumbleweeds—a vacant, echoing beige for miles, and then this breadth of green, screaming hope.
PART III
Monster
Los Angeles, California
My grandmother was the first person to confirm my vague feeling that I had a power: I could separate from my sadness. Alchemize it.
We were driving up to Palos Verdes from Long Beach after a day of second grade. I was eight years old. I had written, illustrated, and turned in a story that required my grandmother’s presence at school, a substitution for my mother who was always at work. We met with Sister Mary, the principal, and Sister Bernadette, the nice one, and the school nurse. As we drove home, my grandmother asked me to read the offending piece aloud.
In the story, it is an October night. Five girls are invited to a slumber party. Each girl has a defining characteristic: one of them is sporty, one is brainy, one is shy, one of them is the most beautiful and the leader. One of them is the orphan.
During the slumber party the girls play with a Ouija board and detect the existence of spirits. They perform a séance to entreat the spirits to come closer. They perform “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board,” lifting the Orphan with their fingertips because she is the smallest. All the lights go out and she ascends toward the ceiling. They are successful.
The Orphan drops down to the floor, unconscious. She wakes up and realizes that she is not alone. She has been possessed by an evil spirit, her twin who died when they were in the womb. The Evil Twin begins to twist her thoughts, then her words. The Orphan knows it will make her do awful things, turn her into someone she doesn’t want to be. She goes to the kitchen, where the mother of one of the girls is cooking. The Evil Twin tells her to pick up a knife. The Orphan picks it up. The Evil Twin tells her to use the knife to kill the mother, then her friends. The Orphan stabs herself in the chest instead.
The End, I said. I watched for my grandmother’s reaction. From this vantage point it doesn’t take a psychologist to see how terrified I was by what might seize me. There was already a split in me: disorder, abandonment. I leaned into the gothic to illustrate what I couldn’t articulate. At eight years old, I unconsciously understood the function of symbols. I mimicked my favorite writer, Poe, but with this story I had taken the perilous and grandiose first step of making it my own. Did I already know that art could m
ake sense of madness? Did my grandmother?
Her navy Cadillac was at a stoplight. There was a Pavilions supermarket behind her, a row of eucalyptus trees, an air-conditioned stream through the car that made my nose run. She looked at me, so directly I flinched, and she said, Never stop writing.
Los Angeles, California
My best friend in the world right now is Carly’s three-year-old son, Luca. Though I have always responded to children, the way I feel about Luca is outsized, and probably preposterous. We’ve grown close in a way I can’t justify, as I’m not his blood relative. But I miss him when I’m away. I take note of things throughout my day I want to tell him about, keeping lists of jokes and games. Whenever I leave Carly and Al’s house, I’m still talking to Luca in my head. When I’m with him, I don’t have to think, or hold myself still until some predatory sadness has passed.
Luca’s at the age of imaginative play: pirate battles, great floods, wild storms, jungle animals, and monsters (Don’t worry, Luca says, he’s secretly a good guy). We play cop and robber, though instead of the robber, I’m pulled over for speeding on his scooter. We play restaurant, and he’s the waiter, the chef, the owner, and they are always sold out of lemonade. I teach him to say, Eighty-six the lemonade!
This morning I met Carly at SoulCycle. The instructor blared at us: What kind of person do you want to be today? A complacent one? Or a brave one? I wondered about choice, but I pedaled harder and said back, I want to be a kind one.
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