by Robin Green
With a scornful and superior look, she handed over the bag just as her friend Dottie honked the horn out front.
“You think you know everything, don’t you?” I said in a tone that suggested it was, in fact, cigarettes.
I never told my mother or father about the crabs and I didn’t tell them, six weeks later, after they’d waited on me hand and foot, after they’d wrapped my cast in plastic and hauled my sorry ass to the beach, after the bone in my leg had knit and the plaster cast had been removed and my crutches exchanged for a cane, that I was going back to California. I just went.
They had gone out to dinner with Ronnie’s parents and I had a rare evening to myself. I sat on my bed and looked around my little room in the little house on Wayland Avenue, the smallest, cheapest house in the nicest neighborhood. My bedroom was just big enough for two twin beds, a cheap white wicker dresser, and the window seat/hope chest my father had built for me, really more of a plywood box than the chintz-upholstered, crown-molding-edged window seats in the bedrooms of the girls I knew—Ronnie and Lynnie and Jackie and Susie and Jill—all of which had been designed and carpentered by professionals.
My father had tried. He’d found affordable white vinyl floor tiles (“You can hardly see what makes them seconds,” my mother had said) and installed them himself and installed the white louvered closet doors too, both jobs sadly uneven, black gullies appearing between many of the nicked white vinyl tiles and a closet whose doors formed a long X when shut.
I’d spent hours, weeks, months, and years in this room, as a teenager feeling especially marooned, deserted, and hopeless after my brother went off to college—alone with my parents at the dinner table, alone upstairs while downstairs they talked and laughed with Frank and Pearl and Raymond and other friends, alone at the window, watching rain, alone in front of the mirror, sketching myself and then writing my first short story about escape.
I’d made one big escape and now it was clear to me, although with no specific plan, that it was time to escape again. My father’s aunt Frances, who had herself fled Providence for Manhattan and a semi-glamorous life as a saleslady at a swanky Park Avenue dress shop called Polly’s, a swanky Park Avenue studio apartment, and a miniature gray poodle named Chico with a rhinestone collar, told me once that I was the only one in my family with ambition. (Apparently, in her mind, my brother’s becoming a physician who spent his life teaching neuroscience at Dartmouth Medical School didn’t qualify, maybe because he’d never gotten out of New England.)
Was it ambition that drove me that night? Or was I simply on the run from myself? Or both? Whatever it was, I left that very night. I wrote a note to my parents, called a cab, and soon limped on my cane into the Greyhound station and boarded a bus for Logan Airport in Boston, where I got on a plane to Oakland.
What a little shit I was not to think of how my parents would feel when they got home and found me gone. Of how hurt they’d be that I’d deprived them of a proper goodbye scene. Of how worried they’d be that I’d behaved so rashly. But if I had bothered to think anything, it might also have occurred to me that they’d be happy to have the house to themselves again.
After I left Providence and flew back to Berkeley and before I started living in garages, David Leach, Andrea, and Mark took me in. They’d moved from the Berkeley Flats to the north Berkeley Hills, into a house they’d bought with proceeds from their work in waterbed sales and also from David’s new business dealing coke in what he described as small quantities to friends. Cheek by jowl with other houses on the hillside, it was a cozy little place with sweeping views of Berkeley and the bay and San Francisco—the whole shebang—and there were David’s Persian chairs by the fireplace, his expensive sound system, and Reuben the black dog wagging his tail and glad to see me.
The woman David eventually married, his widow now, still lives in the house today and when I went to see her she showed me the deck David had had built with a rustic outdoor shower that was his pride, pointed out the plot in the garden below where he had finally buried Reuben’s ashes. The Persian chairs still sat by the fireplace, their cushions now covered in beautiful cloth woven by his widow, an artist whose medium is fabric.
I had been in touch with Mark and learned that on David’s death, in addition to figuring out how to deal with an arsenal of firearms that David had stashed around the house to protect himself from a real or imagined cocaine-dealer threat, my old boyfriend’s widow was coping with what to do with the contents of the basement closet that had served as his darkroom and that was filled with photographs and contact sheets and negatives, all of it neatly labeled, though now mildewed and moldering from years of his neglect. She had agreed to let me take the material from his and my time together off her hands.
I’d had no idea there was so much stuff—not just of me, but all that he had photographed in his life. Had he been an artist? He had never given himself credit for being one and went to his death feeling, as he had felt all along, like a failure. When I spoke to Mark recently, he told me a story about David, how David had called him weeping one night not long before he died and said that he had to tell him something he had done, something horrible.
Between sobs, David managed to tell Mark that old friends from Providence had called and said that they were coming to the Bay Area and wanted to see him but that he’d lied and said he’d be out of the country. The old friends continued to press—could he at least tell them about himself? He had been so interesting and brilliant; they had always admired him and wondered what he’d done with his life.
Still sobbing, barely able to talk now, David said that he’d told his old friends from Providence of Mark’s life—his accomplishments and travels, his life abroad working for the World Bank, the many languages he spoke—that he’d told them of Mark’s achievements as if they were his own.
But David’s death would be years away, in 2010. When I returned to Berkeley from Providence, it was still 1973 and David’s life in the new house was the sybaritic, hedonistic affair it always was, except now, in addition to the liter a day of Johnnie Walker Black, the Lapsang souchong tea, Sara Lee pound cakes, and pot, there was cocaine, lines and lines of it, making for nights that lasted until dawn and days spent sleeping.
People came and went—dealers, buyers, friends. Andrea played “Angie” over and over on the stereo, swaying to the music, entranced. Mark sat cross-legged on the carpet, endlessly proselytizing Werner Erhard’s EST. David drank, smoked, snorted. An old friend of his visited one day and announced that he was moving in with his girlfriend and did I want to stay in the converted garage he rented in the flats near the Oakland border while he saw whether the relationship was going to work out or not?
I did. I lived in that garage and then the Leary garage. I still had the little Sunbeam Alpine I’d bought from Annie and I drove it one night to San Francisco to a Victorian house in the hills above Noe Valley where someone from Rolling Stone was having a birthday party for Hunter Thompson. I went alone. David Felton wasn’t at the party; he was in LA—with his family, I supposed. On the baby grand was a glass bowl filled with little blue pills—mescaline. I took some and soon I was tripping.
I’d had a bad trip before, the one I’d written about in the reunion newsletter, at the Trident Restaurant in Sausalito with Annie and Felton and Jon and Julie from the art department. That time I’d felt unable to walk and they’d had to haul me out of there. They were laughing and happy and tripping as they carried me outside, and then in someone’s car we drove to Jon’s house, where I took off all my clothes and got into someone’s bed and writhed and whimpered and hallucinated that I was an infant until I finally came down.
You would think that I’d have known better than to try it again. If anything, this time was worse. I felt paranoid; I felt crazy; I had to get away. I found my way into the backyard and crawled into the bushes, where, kneeling in the dirt, I watched the party from between the branches. I knew I couldn’t stay there forever and somehow got through the pa
rty and outside to my little sports car parked perpendicular to the curb on one of the city’s steepest hills on an angle that made it a struggle even to open the door and get in. Somehow, I backed the car out and somehow I managed to drive back to Berkeley—down the hill, through San Francisco, over the Bay Bridge, and up Wildcat Canyon Road to Tilden Park.
In a catatonic state, I sat unmoving in the sand at Lake Anza. The sun came up. People walked into the park. A woman let her Weimaraner off the leash and it came to where I sat immobile, sniffed me, then lifted its leg and peed on me.
Is this low enough? Is this miserable enough? How about this: days later, distracted by thoughts, I was driving in the Berkeley Hills and didn’t see a car coming around a bend in time to avoid embedding my little car in the front of hers. Fortunately, she had insurance, because I didn’t. My car was totaled and I took to hitchhiking around Berkeley.
And finally this: after I’d moved into my lovely little backyard cottage in the flats and harvested a season of tomatoes and squash from my garden, I befriended the woman who managed the laundromat on University Avenue where I washed my clothes. She told me she and her boyfriend were gleaners—they went to the fields east of the Bay Area and gathered crops that had been left behind, onions, potatoes. I thought it might be something to write about, so I went with them. We shared a motel room and it was all benign enough until a few days later, when the boyfriend, hulking, furtive, showed up at my little cottage behind the house on Francisco Street.
He said if I ever needed protection back here against intruders or anything I should let him know. He told me he had a gun. He took it out to show me. I told him thanks but I was fine. I somehow got him out of there. But I had the impression he was casing the joint, and I felt very strongly that he’d be back.
I called David Leach’s house. Andrea answered the phone. “I think I’m in danger,” I said. “I have to leave here. Can someone come get me?” It was from David Leach’s house in the hills that I telephoned Kit Carson the night before his wedding to Karen Black, in June 1975, and he told me that if I wanted to write for Hollywood, I should move there. Which I would do. But not for another three years.
* * *
Chapter Twelve
Fields, Fields, and More Fields
In August 1975 I decamped to Iowa City, to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The younger heiress, the one who lent me the jean jacket with the patch of people fornicating on the back that I wore to interview for a job at Rolling Stone, had married a poet who had gone there. It sounded so classy. And so cushy. A writing workshop? Nothing to do but read books and maybe write something? And the last place I’d felt safe, much as I’d wanted to flee from it, was academia.
I sent in a short story to apply and was put on some sort of waiting list. I later learned that one of the readers, the novelist Allan Gurganus, found my material “thin.” I wrote John Hawkes, my teacher at Brown, who hadn’t found my writing thin, to ask if he’d put in a word for me. We’d kept in touch a little. I’d sent him my Rolling Stone article about Dennis Hopper and later had dinner with him in Palo Alto when he came west to speak at his friend and colleague Wallace Stegner’s writing program at Stanford.
In what was probably an effort to seduce my old writing teacher, I dressed provocatively in black crepe pants and a midriff-baring red satin top that tied under my breasts. When I went to the Stegners’ grand hacienda to pick him up, the Stegners were at dinner. It was a memorable tableau, the dignified couple in their formal dining room, sitting kitty-corner at one end of a long table, in front of each a glass of red wine and plate on which sat a single serving of Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese, still in its tin. (In those days, this frozen product came in a tin that you heated in an oven and got this nice, caramelized cheesy crust; today it’s microwavable plastic, faster but, alas, no crust.)
Mr. Stegner raised his eyebrows at my outfit, then gave a hubba-hubba look to Hawkes. We left and had steaks and our own glasses of red wine someplace in town, and somewhere in the middle of dinner, I realized the futility—and unseemliness—of trying to seduce this man, something I’d tried in college, staying at a party at his house after the other students had left and his wife had gone up to bed. We’d sat close, cross-legged on the floor. He put a hand on my knee and then, with a sigh of what seemed like amused regret, gave my leg a dismissive pat and said good night. I hadn’t read his novels then and didn’t until Iowa, but when I did I saw that he was a strangely, if brilliantly, perverse son of a gun. Still, he wrote a letter of recommendation to John Leggett, the workshop’s director, and they let me in.
I found a room to rent in a big, creepy old Victorian house—like something Charles Addams would draw—hard by the railroad tracks at the edge of town. Not fifteen feet from my window as I lay sleepless in the saggy iron-framed single bed, the trains would come to a stop outside in the black Iowa night, sounding for all the world like a herd of giant mechanical buffalo, clanging into each other one by one by one, all the way down the line ad fucking infinitum.
My landlords were out of Charles Addams too: hardscrabble Iowans, the fat middle-aged matriarch careening around in a baggy housedress with stockings meant to be knee-high falling down around her ankles, her Jack Sprat husband in worn-out farmer’s overalls, and their useless lummox of a son, a grown man who spent most of his time in front of the TV (they all did) and whom I once saw amusing himself by pinching his little nephew to the point of tears.
My room was in the back and had its own entrance, so I rarely saw them. I was busy reading seven volumes of Proust and discussing it in seminars and trying to write and discussing that in seminars and also working—for money, that is, to bankroll all this erudition. In Berkeley months before, I’d answered an ad in the classifieds: Writers Wanted! I’d telephoned for an appointment, borrowed a car, and driven across the bay to lovely Sausalito—and then to the address they’d given me, which proved to be a grubby strip mall just outside town.
The office was above a doughnut shop, and the job was rewriting porn. They’d send you a paperback book with the cover torn off and instructions like move location from city to countryside and change dog to baby bull pet. You kept as is the dirty parts—paragraph upon paragraph of taut nipples, straining shafts, pink pearlescent slits, and shooting jism. It was a bit illegal, they said (like being a little bit pregnant), so I should keep the job to myself.
You had to have good grammar and spelling and you’d better be able to type because each manuscript came to about two hundred and fifty pages, for which, after you mailed it in and it was accepted, they mailed you back an envelope with another book to write and a note that said, Mayhaps this will help, referring to the enclosed check for two hundred dollars. The beauty was that you could mail it in from anywhere, which was where I now was.
Fields, fields, and more fields were all Jenny Fields could see, I was typing one night—rejigging a porn novel to have its protagonist lured from the city by an Iowa corn farmer who proved unable to satisfy her sexually but who gave her a baby bull pet that did—when there was a hard knock on the door that connected my room to the landlords’ quarters. I opened the door to find the landlady there, all fury and righteous indignation.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “I came in today to check the radiator and—are them dirty books you writing?”
I allowed as how they were.
“Well, I can’t have that here,” she said.
I packed my few things and moved in with a couple girls from the workshop, then one of them left and it was just me and Nancy in the apartment. A Nebraska girl, fresh out of Mount Holyoke College, Nancy didn’t smoke, but she drank—she kept an awareness of how much bourbon was left in the bottle in the cupboard, much as I knew how many brownies remained on the plate above the fridge—and she was still a virgin, which seemed perfect for me, as I wanted to become one again too.
The second year, we were both awarded prime teaching/writing fellowships, which paid tuition and a stip
end, and we shared an office in the English building as well. She was at her desk when Mitch came in for the first student/teacher conference, and she was there when he returned again and again as weeks went by. She could tell he had a thing for me. Once, when we heard his heavy footsteps in the corridor, she turned to me and mouthed a Stanley Kowalski Stella! and then the door slammed open and in came Mitch.
He threw himself down in the chair beside my desk and handed me a new short story and I could see on his face that he knew he’d hit it out of the park, epiphany and all. He was a wonderful writer with a voice uniquely his own that, when it evinced itself in an essay he’d written for an undergraduate rhetoric class, led his teacher to suggest he join a fiction-writing seminar. Rushing to class that first day, sweaty and out of breath, he got the room numbers wrong and came into my class by mistake, changing both our lives forever.
He remembers what I was wearing that day—jeans and a long-sleeved white thermal undershirt with a rainbow printed across the front that I’d bought from a street vendor on Telegraph Avenue. My hair was short and prim like Nancy’s and I’d slimmed down to my fighting weight. Mitch says he remembers thinking, Now there’s somebody for me.
On the last day of class that December, he was conspicuously absent. I knew he worked at Epstein’s, a bookstore in town—I’d seen him there when I went to a poetry reading one night and I remember his eyes on me when I left with the African poet who’d read. What can I say? I’d never been with a black man before, let alone an actual African.
I went straight to the bookstore.
“You didn’t come to class today,” I said. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“I had to work,” he said.
I nodded. He nodded. We both knew we were lying. (He confirmed later that he’d stayed away hoping I’d come.)
We were standing close. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was about to jump off a cliff. I met his eyes.