“Your mother wanted to buy this land. She wanted to start a commune before it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Too late for such a thing to work.” All my father’s sifting had yielded a tiny rusting hinge. He turned the relic over in his hand before lobbing it back out into the sand. “It was already too late by the Summer of Love,” he said. “Haight-Ashbury was nothing. Squatters, dope fiends, dropouts. The dream was over. All that flower power smelled rotten by the Summer of Love. There was just enough time for the ad stooges and the soda companies to cash in on it. Your mother wanted to start something out here, preserve something, away from all that. She wrote a charter, drew up plans. Housing. Irrigation. A Garden of Eden right here in the Mojave.” Absently, Big Bill drew shapes in the sand with his index finger. “Humph,” he said, scratching them out. “By God, we almost did it.”
“And what? The Manson Family beat you to the punch?”
I don’t think Big Bill heard me. He was far away—in 1967, I guess. He surveyed the landscape, west from the San Bernardino Mountains, north across the dusty flats, and east to the Bullions. Finally his eyes settled on the ditch with the pile of tires. “That used to be an irrigation pond,” he said.
“So, what happened?”
“It dried up.”
“No, with the commune, what happened?”
“You happened,” he said, sifting some more sand through his fingers. “Your mother got pregnant. That changed her thinking. She finished school. We moved to Santa Monica.” He sounded a little disappointed by it all. He tossed his handful of sand out into the void before he’d finished sifting it. “I dreamed it all again last week,” he said.
I scanned the horizon. Here and there a little compound sprouted up out of the desert: a house, a few aluminum outbuildings, the rusting carcass of an old Chevy. Other than that, nothing. I tried to envision Big Bill and my mother and a dozen half-naked hippies making a go of it out here in the middle of nowhere. All I could think was why ? Why here? There wasn’t any shade. What the hell would they eat? Where would they go to the bathroom?
“Why would anyone ever want to live here?” I wondered aloud.
He looked genuinely surprised. “You don’t like it?”
“What’s to like? Some sand, a few rocks.”
“Shhh,” he said. “Listen.”
I listened. I heard the faint but incessant buzzing of a single-prop aircraft on the horizon, but I think I was supposed to be listening to the silence. And the more I tried to hear the silence, the more I heard the buzzing.
That’s when the inconceivable came to pass. Squatting there, Big Bill reached in his shirt pocket and fished out what appeared to be a crooked joint, then a book of matches. He was very matter-of-fact about it all. He never even looked at me. He just straightened the joint out between expert fingers, popped it in his mouth, lit it, hit it, and passed it up my way, a tendril of smoke curling between us. I tried to be equally matter-of-fact.
We smoked. We stopped talking. We stared out into the nothing.
Pretty soon I heard the silence, and it occurred to me that the desert landscape all around me was just visual silence, and I thought that was a pretty cool idea, because it made me see emptiness in a whole new light. The beauty of emptiness wasn’t in the emptiness itself, it was in the fact that you could make emptiness into whatever you wanted. You could build absolutely anything—a turkey ranch, a commune, a cement brontosaurus—and it would define the emptiness. Now I envisioned the commune through my mother’s eyes, and it made a little more sense: the garden, the pond, the rows of vegetables, the kids running around in moccasins with stardust blowing through their hair, the half-naked hippies dancing around a drum circle, the light of the campfire reflected in their eyes. All of it made sense except the taking-a-shit part. There wasn’t any plumbing for miles. Suddenly, I had to take a dump. I remembered my backpack.
I left Big Bill squatting there and walked a couple hundred yards to the west, where I dug a hole behind a creosote bush and did some squatting of my own, utilizing several pages of Schopenhauer’s great anthology of woe to a purpose that would have surely pleased its critics.
When I rejoined Big Bill, he was lying on his back with his eyes closed, and for a moment I watched the slow, steady rise and fall of his breathing. I lay down beside him. He opened his eyes for an instant, smiled, and shut his eyes again. The smile stayed there for a few minutes. The sand was warm through my T-shirt. The breeze all but disappeared that close to the earth. I rested my head in the butterfly wings of my arms, like a guy in love lying in the grass watching clouds roll by. Except there was no grass, and no clouds, and the love was unrequited, and something was poking me in the small of my back, which my probing hand soon discovered to be the rusty hinge Big Bill had cast off.
I tried reading a little Schopenhauer, but I had no use for the world of ideas at that moment. So I closed my eyes, and emptied my mind, until nothing was left but images of Lulu and me alone in the desert, with our very own pond and our very own vegetable garden, and the light of our very own campfire reflected in our eyes.
And it didn’t occur to me then to guess what Big Bill was imagining as he lay there on his back with a smile stuck to his face.
A Normal Life
September 27, 1990
Dear Will,
Today is your birthday, so this is late. I usually begin with an apology of some sort, so here goes . . . I’m sorry . . . And I’m sorry I couldn’t make it down for the twins’ graduation, or this summer, like I’d planned to. My life here is chaos. Summer is a blur already. I’ve tried everything, Will: I’ve tried acid, I’ve tried poetry, I’ve tried drinking, I’ve tried AA, the Bible, skydiving. I’ve tried being a waitress, a messenger, a stripper. I’ve tried being cool, I’ve even contemplated lesbianism, which I was accused of on more than one occasion by Dan, but I’ve yet to feel satisfied. So I’m putting the search on hold, at least for a while.
I’m digging a trench. I’m putting my shoulder to the wheel. I’m back in school, this time in earnest. I’m declaring a major once and for all. I haven’t decided what, yet. Maybe accounting. Numbers are manageable. Or maybe even sociology. I’m starting therapy. I want a normal life, or at least I think I need a normal life. And so I’m equipping myself with normal things—a normal education, and a normal lifestyle—and willfully ignoring my responsibility to try and define my culture by drinking microbrews and wearing lumberjack shirts and puking my inner turmoil out onto canvas and selling it as art (not that anyone was ever buying). I’ve decided to let other people build biospheres and write anthems and protest the inequities of the world. I don’t want to change the world, or conquer it, or seize the day, or skydive, or snowboard, or hang glide, or climb Mt. Everest. I don’t want all that thrill of victory and agony of defeat. My goal is no longer to find a goal, but to pursue the standard goals that have been set before me. Maybe I’ll start calling myself Louisa. Maybe I’ll join a sorority.
I wonder whether I’m making sense, or if I sound like I’m whining? You once said that dreams, or maybe it was aspirations, were the car keys of life, and that they were easily misplaced, and hard to find. That may be bullshit, I’m not sure. But I do know that the finding part is hard. And frankly, I’m sick of looking under dressers and couch cushions and every pocket of every pair of pants I ever owned.
I broke up with Dan. We got back together for one night, but then we broke up for good. He took it kind of hard. Dan was sweet, or I should say, he is sweet. He’ll find a new girl. He’ll find a whole string of them. In clubs. In Portland or Chicago or Minneapolis. Dan is eager and optimistic and dreamy and idealistic, and all the things I’m not. Most of all, Dan is spreading his wings, and he doesn’t need a lead weight around his neck, and I would always be pulling him back to earth. I don’t want that responsibility. I have a hard enough time living with myself already. S
ooner or later he’ll understand that. I’m getting better at breaking people’s hearts cleanly.
I hope you are well. I’m sorry I’m so flaky about returning calls. Dad says that you’ve got some radio classes—or communications classes or whatever—this fall. I hope you’ll tell me all about them sometime. Call me! I’m out a lot, but keep trying. Can you believe Doug joined the air force? What a blockhead. Then again, who am I to talk?
Well, I’ve got a biology lab and I’m working tonight. Take care of yourself, brother. I hope you know where your car keys are . . .
Love, as always,
Lulu (or maybe Louisa)
P.S. Remember how I used to want to live above a gas station? I’m getting closer. My new apartment on 45th is a half block from an Exxon station.
Kierkegaard: Now You See Him, Now You Don’t
Kierkegaard was the son of a gloomy religious zealot. It stuck. His commitment to Christianity was undying, though he proposed that group congregations were meaningless, and that in the hands of “the crowd,” Christianity became an empty religion.
As I understand it, Kierkegaard believed that philosophers ought to be judged by the sum of their lives, rather than the sum of their intellectual artifacts. So he distanced himself from his own works by all manner of subversive techniques, such as employing multiple (and quite often contradictory) pseudonyms in the same text, appending authorship, sometimes editorship, publishing two ideologically opposed books at the same time, all in a grand design to undermine his own credibility. At first I thought this made him a loser. But now I see that he was forcing readers to take responsibility for their own beliefs, instead of trumpeting his own. Only then could the individual arrive at truth.
It may be overstating the case to say that what old Søren was proposing (in opposition to his nemesis Hegel) was that what we call objectivity is not objective at all, that it is, in fact, totally subjective. This is consistent with his belief that the individual must take responsibility for his own existential choices. The individual must question the very impetus of his existence. Doubt, he supposed, was a fundamental tenet of faith. Without doubt, one could not possibly know Enlightenment.
Good work, Will! Kierkegaard’s approach seems to suggest that his audience suffered from too much knowledge, rather than not enough. I read somewhere that he was considered something of a gadfly by his contemporaries.
—G.S.
Soren Kierkegaard: An Overview
By Will Miller
December ? 21st or 22nd, I think, 1990
Dear Everybody,
Sorry, not too much time to write. I have fire watch tonight from 22:00 to 04:00 which is 3:00 in the morning until 4:00 in the morning and its 21:30 now. Im using a flashlight to see what Im writing, and all I could find was a pencil and the tip sucks, so sorry if this is sloppy, but I dont think it really is. I hope you all have a merry Christmas and a happy new year, and I wish I could be there, but oh well. I got issued my rifle today, an M-16 three shot burst. We start ground combat training soon, which sounds weird, I know, with this being the AIR-force and all. The food is good at Lackland, and the drill sergeants arent that bad, really. Ive only been dropped once. Lackland is near San Antonio where the Alamo was but you wouldnt know it. Its its own world. Theres a lot of talk about Kuwait. The armys deploying VII corps to Saudi Arabia, and theyve already doubled ground forces there. Some of the guys here are gung-ho for active duty. Im not so sure how I feel. I wasnt expecting this to be an issue, oh well. Im staying in good shape, but losing weight. My biceps arent as big. Some of these guys are in crappy shape, I feel bad for them, but oh well. I have to go, but Ill write again soon and let you know how things are.
Doug
Where the Alamo Was
The only time I ever saw Big Bill cry was January 15, 1991, the UN deadline for Iraqi withdrawal in Kuwait, also the day Doug left Lackland Air Force Base for tech school in Illinois, as well as the day escrow closed on the Pico house. Big Bill had been purging the old house for weeks, with little help from anybody—hauling furniture to the curb, driving rented vanloads up the coast to Sausalito, where he was set to join Willow in her empty nest. But in spite of his efforts, he’d hardly managed to dent the accumulated mass that twenty years of family life had created.
When I dropped by late in the evening to pick up a beanbag and some other relics, I discovered that I no longer recognized the geography of the Miller household. I discovered curio cabinets and nightstands and dressers I hadn’t seen in over a decade, staged in the foyer at the foot of the stairs, draped with moving blankets. I discovered an empty living room with shaggy geometric patches that didn’t match the rest of the piebald carpet. And I discovered Big Bill sitting at the dining room table, surrounded by cardboard boxes fit to burst with every conceivable form of printed matter, from dental receipts to vacuum cleaner instruction manuals to muscle magazines. The boxes were stacked to precarious heights, and out of the uppermost boxes poked picture frames and trophy tops, so that the overall effect was a Monument Valley of boxes, constructed over decades by the collective forces of our family. And there was Big Bill, sitting alone in the middle of it, with mounds of photographs covering the tabletop in front of him, and a few empty boxes. Some of the photos were black-and-white, some of them color, some of them Polaroids.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said hoarsely.
“What’s up?” I said.
Big Bill laid the picture of my mother on one of the mounds and straightened his posture a bit.
“You all right?” I said.
“Yeah, I’m okay. Sit down.”
He didn’t look okay. He looked haggard and drawn and a little bit gray.
“What’re you doing?”
“I was just sorting through some old stuff,” he said. “A lot of old stuff, actually.”
I felt bad for him. All that history there in front of him—and all that unfinished business surrounding him—none of it was conducive to a short ending.
“Funny,” he said. “How it takes the future sometimes to look at the past. I guess I’m the kind of guy that needs to see it all in boxes before it starts to sink in. Humph. What a mess.” Looking around at the valley of boxes, he sighed. “The truck will be here tomorrow.”
“What time? I can get Joe to cover me in the afternoon and skip my—”
“No, no,” he said. “I’ve got hired hands. Thanks, though. Ross and that little Regis are helping, as well.”
“You mean Alistair and Regan.”
“Yes, Regan, that’s right. Ross is back to Ross, though, or Alistair is back to Ross, however you look at it. He cut that swifter off the top of his head, too, thank heavens. Do you know, he pulled down nearly two grand in extra commissions over the holidays?”
“Oh,” I said, and started thumbing through a mound of photos.
“Sangria?” he said.
“No thanks,” I said.
“That’s Quicksilver Messenger Service,” he said of the photo I was holding, which pictured a vast and colorful throng of young people in various stages of dishevelment strewn around an outdoor stage. “One of the free concerts. I knew the drummer.”
I wanted to indulge him, but I couldn’t, somehow. “Mmm,” I said, flipping to the next photo.
Big Bill piloted his chair around the corner of the table and hunched over my shoulder. “That was taken in Park Merced, out front of your mother’s apartment.”
“Nice hair,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You look skinny.”
“I quit pumping iron in those days,” he explained. “Up until you came along.”
I supposed that bodybuilding must have been square, unmellow—an act of aggression. Brute strength was hard to reconcile with flower power. Big Bill may not have been training, but he was still posing, decked out in full hippie regalia bordering on cartoonish:
barefoot in bell-bottom jeans, a billowy shirt with leather drawstrings worthy of Gerard Smith, a mustache like Wild Bill Hickok’s mantling a defiant grin, flying a peace sign in the face of them, the enemy, the establishment, whoever or whatever they were, a guitar at his side for strumming out anthems, teaching the world how to sing in perfect harmony, whatever that was.
“That’s more like it,” I said, flipping to a photo of Big Bill shirtless on the beach somewhere, striking a front double bicep, grimacing like a man with a hot curling iron up his ass.
“I wasn’t exactly cut yet,” he observed. “But the arms and chest were starting to look decent, especially the pecs. The lats don’t look half bad, but the abs are weak, that’s for sure. I still had legs like a chicken, too. That must have been ’71 or ’72.”
I wondered if it were ever possible for Big Bill to turn this critical eye for self-improvement inward, and if so, what was the scouting report on his patience, his tolerance, or his honesty? How would he appraise his stubbornness, or his refusal to have certain conversations? In all those years of building muscle mass, all those years of crafting lines and curves and finely fingered muscles, had it ever occurred to him to build up his insides? To define his temperament, his faith, his emotions?
“Who’s this?” I said, indicating a black-and-white portrait of a guy with dark circles under his eyes, who I was guessing was the grandfather I never met—the guy who was married to the grandmother I never met. He looked like an encyclopedia salesman, gimlet-eyed and determined, wearing a crisp gray fedora. He wasn’t smiling. In fact, he looked rather determined not to smile, as though nobody had told him the war was over, that America was enjoying unprecedented wealth and abundance. Despite his rigidity, he was a little rumpled about the lapels. He looked like a guy who might conceal a flask in his coat pocket.
All About Lulu Page 18