She asked, “How come it feels strange to see two men holding hands?”
“I guess because they don’t do it in your neighborhood.”
“That’s true,” she said.
I added, “When I first moved to San Francisco, it seemed strange to me, and then I just got used to it.”
And she said, “I guess I will too.”
Eventually, Holly and Pia planned to visit a Glory Hole. These were establishments where a man would stick his dick through a hole in the wall, and an unseen man on the other side would suck him off. The girls thought of disguising themselves as boys, with rolled-up socks in their crotches.
On my wall there was San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery’s photo of a Vietnamese child and his mother, both severely burned by napalm, just staring out at you with a look of disbelief and horror.
Holly said, “Daddy, can I ask, how come you keep that picture there?”
“Well, because whenever I have a problem, I try to explain it to that little kid and he gives me perspective.”
“What’s perspective?”
“It means, by comparing my problem with his, I just can’t feel sorry for myself.”
Holly observed my eccentricities, which, in my hermit-like lifestyle, I had come to take for granted. For example, I didn’t have any liquid dish soap. She found it very odd that I would wash dishes using only hot water and my fingernails. She also noticed that I didn’t have a vacuum cleaner. She wasn’t completely satisfied with my explanation that I would just wait for enough dust to gather so that I could sort of wrap it around my hand and roll it away like tumbleweed. And yet I would request that she throw her banana peel into the kitchen garbage can instead of my office wastebasket.
Naturally, there were certain eccentricities that even Holly wasn’t aware of. Occasionally I would pick up the phone and say “I love you” to the dial tone. And often I would be a model of efficiency by simultaneously using one hand to brush my teeth and other hand to urinate. But I would always put the toilet seat back down out of respect for Holly. It was a simple exercise in consciousness.
I had my limits, though. Holly was a skateboard enthusiast to the point of evangelism. She loved skateboarding down the hill, and even though she showed me how she could stop before she came to the corner, I couldn’t stop myself from worrying. She urged me to try her skateboard.
“No, thanks. I’m too old to start scraping my knees.”
“Oh, come on, Daddy, if you wanna have fun, you gotta get bruised.”
For fun, Holly and Pia skipped down the street, arm in arm, singing, “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz . . .” For fun, they got dressed up as prostitutes on Halloween and went from door to door, saying, “Trick or treat?” For fun, they pretended that Holly was having her period by leaving ketchup-stained tissues floating in our toilet.
One afternoon they were going to see the film Carrie—in which Sissy Spacek is confused by her first menstrual flow. Holly had read the book and was curious to see how it got translated to the screen.
As she was leaving to meet Pia, I said, “Hey, Holly, wouldn’t it be funny if you had your first period right in the middle of the movie?”
“Very funny, Dad.” And she went on downstairs. Then she came back up the stairs, smiling. “You’re right, it would be funny.”
One day I decided to make a chef’s salad for dinner. At the Safeway supermarket I bought lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, and dressing, but, perhaps because I was becoming a vegetarian, I somehow felt justified in shoplifting the ham—a slight perversion of situational ethics. But I stuck the package into my back pocket carelessly enough for a security guard to notice. He followed me out of the store and brought me back in. He took me upstairs where I could watch other shoplifters through a one-way mirror.
The manager ordered me, “Open your sweater.” I was wearing a bulky wool sweater, which looked suspicious under the circumstances, but when I opened it, there were no other stolen goods. I didn’t fit the usual profile. He held out the package of ham and asked, “Do you have the money to pay for this?” I nodded my head yes.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m gonna let you go this time, but listen, you ever steal anything here again, we’ll bust you.”
The security guard led me downstairs and said, “You can wait on that line—it’s for nine items or less.” We both smiled. It was a moment of intimacy. Herb Caen heard about this incident at a party for City magazine and mentioned it in his Chronicle column.
I had been assigned to write an article about Ken Kesey for City magazine, but even after it was published, they still didn’t pay me. I was concerned about the dwindling supply of food money for Holly and me. She noticed my habit of constantly counting the money in my pocket. I even had to sell my collection of original Mad comics to pay the rent one month.
So, while Holly was languishing in my waterbed wearing her curlers, I put on my boots, took a dime to call a lawyer, and walked diagonally across town to the City office in North Beach, psyching myself up all the way there. I was planning to take the receptionist’s typewriter and throw it through their front window if they didn’t pay me the money they owed me within half an hour.
Although I knew where Francis Coppola ate lunch, and could have gone to that restaurant and embarrassed him—“Oh, Godfather, please help me”—this wasn’t really his fault. It would be more proper to confront directly those staffers who had ignored my letters and phone calls. My threat was taken seriously, and I received my check in twenty minutes—but more out of public relations than justice. They knew that if they had me arrested, it would get into Herb Caen’s column. Coppola accused me of “betraying” him, but Warren Hinckle told me that I had done the right thing.
Our favorite neighborhood restaurant (founded by Dennis Peron, later coauthor of the medical marijuana referendum, Prop. 215) was named Island, after Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel. Holly would sit there quietly reading Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about a pedophile, and if I felt at all embarrassed, well, that was my problem.
We often went to the movies together. Her favorite was Paper Moon, with Ryan O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum, playing a father-and-daughter con-artist team. Holly would end up seeing that movie nine times. She relished the scene where they’re sitting in a restaurant, and Tatum tells her father very loudly, “I want my $200! I want my $200!” So it didn’t come as a total surprise when Holly and I were sitting in a restaurant and she started shouting, “I want my $200! I want my $200!”
Holly resembled Tatum O’Neal. Her friend Diane—daughter of conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell—resembled Linda Blair, who played the young girl possessed by Satan in The Exorcist. So there they were, Holly and Diane, sitting poolside in Carmel and pretending to be a pair of young actresses, graciously signing their autographs—Tatum O’Neal and Linda Blair. Diane was chewing bubble gum, wearing platform shoes, and talking about Neil Diamond.
“He’s good, sure,” she said, “after they’ve knocked off thirty other singers.”
While Holly was at school, I covered the Patty Hearst trial for the Berkeley Barb. She had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, led by Cinque (Donald DeFreeze). Patty was kept in a closet, then she joined the SLA, changed her name to Tania, adopted radical rhetoric, and robbed a bank with them.
Now, the philosophical question which had plagued the history of human consciousness—Is there is, or is there ain’t, free will?—was finally gong to be decided by a jury. While they were deliberating, I took Holly to the empty courtroom, and she sat in Patty’s chair. Mae Brussell called, worrying that our daughters might be kidnapped. I passed her warning on to Holly and offered to accompany her to school.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, “that’s not necessary. Mae’s just paranoid.”
Holly then bought a gift for me—a plastic clothespin-like paper holder labeled Threats.
On one hand, there was Mae Brussell, busily documenting the rise of fascism in Americ
a. On the other hand, there was Holly, standing on Pia Hinckle’s front porch, yelling, “Hitler! Hitler!” That was the name of Pia’s cat, so named because of a square black patch under its nose, just like the mustache on Adolf Hitler’s face.
I asked Holly, “Do you know who Hitler was?”
“Didn’t he lead the Jews out of Germany?”
“Well, not exactly . . .”
I had become involved with Bread and Roses, an organization founded by folksinger Mimi Farina to provide free entertainment at institutions ranging from juvenile centers to retirement homes. I was scheduled to perform at a drug rehabilitation center in Marin County, and Holly came with me.
I had been developing a routine about the Deaf Mute Liberation Front, which began as a takeoff on the fact that, until Henry Kissinger’s image as a harmless philanderer had been established, President Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, would not allow the audio of Kissinger’s statements to be broadcast—and the electronic media complied—but it was my contention that lip-reading viewers, who could tell that Kissinger had a German accent, were warning their friends: Henry Kissinger is a Nazi.
So now I became a fake ventriloquist, and Holly sat on my lap, playing a hearing-impaired dummy who simultaneously translated into sign language whatever I was supposedly making her say.
“Well, Holly, how are you today?”
“Just fine, thank you. Would you like to hear a riddle?”
“Okay, sure. How does it go?”
“All right—why is Anita Bryant like a Polish lesbian?”
“I give up. Why is Anita Bryant like a Polish lesbian?”
“Because she fucks men”—and now Holly switched from her facsimile of official sign language to that universal gesture, making a circle with the thumb and index finger of one hand while pushing the index finger of her other hand in and out of that circle. We may not have been politically correct, but we were a team.
Holly and I spent Thanksgiving with the Hinckles, and Christmas with the Keseys at their farm in Oregon. The whole Kesey family lived in a huge, sectioned-out barn, with a metal fireplace that hung from the living-room ceiling. Outside, there were cows and peacocks and a dog who dropped stones on your foot because he wanted you to throw a stone so he could fetch it. There was a swarm of bees to provide honey, and there was a beautiful colt, which we tried to catch, but the mother horse kept running along and blocking us like a football player.
Chuck Kesey, Ken’s brother, ran a creamery, and he bought over a large supply of homemade ice cream with liquor in it. I ate so much—the coldness and the sweetness covered up the taste of the alcohol—that, without even knowing it, for the first time in my life I got drunk—on ice cream—throwing up and passing out.
“I’m not used to taking legal drugs,” I explained.
In April 1976, on the same day that the pope announced he was not gay, I received a registered letter from the FBI informing me that I was on a “hit list” of the Emiliano Zapata Unit of the New World Liberation Front, but that “no action will be taken, since all of those who could carry it out are in custody.” I was more logically a target of the government than the NWLF—unless, of course, they happened to be the same.
Was the right wing of the FBI warning me about the left wing of the FBI? A communique from the NWLF charged that “the pigs led and organized” the Zapata Unit. Jacques Rogiers, aboveground courier for the underground NWLF, told me that the reason I was on the hit list was because I had written that Patty Hearst’s kidnapper, Cinque, was a police informer.
“But that’s true,” I said. “It’s a matter of record. Doesn’t that make any difference?”
Not to him it didn’t. “If the NWLF asked me to kill you,” he admitted, “I would.”
“Jacques,” I replied, “I think this puts a slight damper on our relationship.”
That’s when Holly and I moved to a new apartment on States Street, without telling Jacques. I kept the FBI letter in that plastic Threats holder that Holly had given me. She was in Oregon, spending her Easter vacation at the farm with the Kesey family.
At that drug rehabilitation center where we performed our ventriloquist act, I had met a musician, Doreen, who later told me that she was so inspired by our visit that she gave up dope. Now that she was released, she contacted me, we began to date, and she turned me on to snorting heroin. I got high on the irony but sick from the smack, neglecting to feed Holly’s goldfish in the process. They died, their bloated bodies floating in the tank, and I had to flush them down the toilet. Perhaps because I knew them as individuals with names, Jaws and Lily (after Lily Tomlin), I never even considered replacing them with substitute goldfish.
When Kesey flew back with Holly, I met them at the airport.
“Listen,” I told her, “I have some bad news and some good news. Which do you want to hear first?”
She cringed. “Which is worse?”
“Well, the good news is that I was on a list of people to be killed, but the FBI captured the group who were planning to do it. And the bad news is that I got very sick and neglected to feed Jaws and Lily, and they died. Holly, I’m really sorry.”
She started hitting me mock hard with her little purse, a poignant mixture of frustration and affection.
When a drug rehabilitation counselor came to give a guest lecture at her school, he informed the students that they couldn’t fool their parents about smoking marijuana, because it was obvious from their dilated pupils, slurry speech, and short-term memory loss. Holly couldn’t resist asking, “What about if somebody’s parents have those symptoms?” The counselor had to admit that this was sometimes a problem.
The students were warned that if they took a quaalude and smoked a joint three days later, they would still feel the effects of the quaalude. Some students took this as a homework assignment. “Day one . . .”
One student wanted to know if Silver Rectangles was good LSD. The counselor was aware of Orange Sunshine and Green Triangle, but he had never heard anything about Silver Rectangles. They were actually tiny electronically treated strips of foil that were intended to set off a metal detector if a library book was being stolen. I extended that premise onstage, recounting how the kid ate a Silver Rectangle, and the security guard made him take off his jacket when he set off the metal detector, then his sweater, then his pants, until he was completely naked, but he still set off the metal detector, so it was sent back to the factory for repairs.
The drug counselor’s visit had one other side effect. Holly asked me if I had ever tried heroin, and I finally gave her the details of what happened with Jaws and Lily.
She said, petulantly, “That drug rehab guy told us that people would kill for heroin, but he didn’t say that it would be my goldfish!”
In the film Save the Tiger, Jack Lemmon plays a middle-aged man who has a brief affair with an assertive teenage hippie. At one point they match role models—one pair of names after another—from their own particular cultural and countercultural backgrounds. Lemmon would name baseball star Cookie Lavagetto and the hippie girl would counter with Baba Ram Dass. But in real life, when I told Holly that Ram Dass was coming to visit us, she had never heard of him. The game was different. Now Ram Dass was my Cookie Lavagetto.
Holly had adapted easily to my assortment of friends, listening intently whether it was Super-Joel reminiscing about the Yippies or Margo St. James talking about organizing prostitutes or Ram Dass discussing masturbation as a form of spiritual meditation. Holly thought that for a guru he was a pretty regular guy.
Her year with me was coming to an end.
“When I go back to live with Mommy,” she said, “I’m gonna call you more often.”
“Oh, yeah?” I teased. “How come?”
“Because I know you now.”
“Well, who’d you think I was before?
“Fred Astaire.”
Intuitively she had understood the symbolism of Fred Astaire as a romantic figure in tuxedo and top hat, dancing ac
ross tabletops and ceilings, as opposed to me, this funky Daddy who didn’t have a vacuum cleaner, who sawed his violin bow in half, who got caught shoplifting, and who accidentally killed her goldfish.
When Holly left, I started leaving the toilet seat up again.
In the summer of 1977, I got a magazine assignment to cover the trial of Roman Polanski. Holly was now thirteen—the same age as the girl Polanski was accused of seducing (I didn’t know yet that it was actually rape)—and Holly had decided to come to Santa Monica with me, sit in the front row of the courtroom, and just stare at Polanski. She also planned to write an article about the trial from her point of view. However, Polanski pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, then fled the country on the day he was supposed to be sentenced.
I told Holly, “I’m gonna write about the trial anyway.”
“How can you do that?”
“I’ll just make it up as if it actually occurred. Roman Polanski’s defense will be that the statutory rape laws are unconstitutional because they discriminate against kids.”
“How would you feel if the kid was me?”
“Well, I’m a liberal father, but . . . you’re right. I’m not gonna write the article.”
When she was fourteen, Holly went to Mexico to learn Spanish at a school where no English was spoken. The next year, in the summer of 1979, she served as my translator on a three-week expedition to Ecuador, focusing on shamans and healers. She was the only adolescent among a dozen adults, so the experience would have elements of an archetypal rite of passage for her.
After we left Quito, our bus stopped at a marker signifying the exact dividing line between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. I couldn’t resist the territorial urge to urinate on both sides of the equator with one bladder splatter merely by adjusting my aim. Later on in our journey there would be a billboard proclaiming a NASA tracking station, and I would urinate on that too. Still another of my Great Moments in Urinating series would occur in an old-fashioned bullfight stadium. It was empty, but as I walked to the center of the arena, I could hear a roar—the wild cheering of an invisible crowd of spectators, anticipating my moment of urinary truth.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 40