by Lucia Berlin
Mark in Washington Square Park
The roof was our yard, with clothesline and garden, chairs to look out and watch the tugboats and barges, the elegant liners going out to sea, to look over at City Hall, at Trinity Church.
Denise Levertov and Mitch Goodman and their son moved in upstairs, which was a real apartment. We all liked our new place, explored our neighborhood. Down the street were the Fulton Fish Market and Treflich’s pet shop. Mark and Jeff had a job there. While we drank coffee next door, they would teach a parrot to say “Hello, Seymour!” by saying this to him over and over, every day for about an hour, for a week or two, until the parrot squawked “Hello, Seymour!” incessantly. It would only take a few days for some Wall Street man named Seymour to pass by, heading down to Fulton Street for lunch, and of course he would have to get the bird. Then Mark and Jeff would start on a new one.
“Whatcha know, Joe?” or “Run, Sammy, run!”
Nights were quiet. Until the produce markets opened at midnight there were few cars. I’d watch small boats and barges going downriver, men in doorways huddled close, passing a bottle, warming themselves over an oil-drum fire. Sometimes an old sailmaker drove by in a creaking horse-drawn cart.
Winter was hard. The heat and the hot water went off at five and all weekend long. The boys slept in earmuffs and mittens. I wrote by the oven, wearing gloves. We went to warm places during the day. Hottest were the Brooklyn Museum, the Hayden Planetarium, and Klein’s on Fourteenth Street.
One really cold night I made a bedroom for the boys around the oven, nailing three smallish paintings together. But then I was out in the cold, which I said out loud, and I was laughing at myself when Buddy knocked on the door. He brought a bottle of brandy and four tickets to Acapulco.
Mirador Hotel, Acapulco, Mexico
My memories of Acapulco come in snapshots, like the childlike drawings in Babar the Elephant. Palm trees above the hotel on the edge of the cliffs. The boys in sailor suits rode rented blue tricycles around and around a track ringed with red canvas. Brightly colored taxis. Parrots in cafés with wooden fans. Buddy and I sat on wrought-iron benches in front of the church, Mark and Jeff shot marbles with a new friend on the grass in the plaza. Sandcastles on the beach, the boys brown, with red pails and shovels, arms akimbo. Buddy and I kissed inside a blue-and-white beach cabana. All of us laughing in the calm waves at Caleta Beach.
Acapulco, Mexico, 1961
Lucia, Jeff, and Mark in Acapulco
The wooden shutters of our room let in the scent of ginger and tuberoses, moonlight and stars, the sound of the surf. In the morning, we took a funicular down to a green-tiled pool set into the rocks by the ocean. Waves crashed against the rocks, misting us with spray. I lay flat on the hot cement, eyes level with the pool, watching Buddy teach the boys to swim. Even when he was not holding them to teach them, he would hold them, or me.
We met people, on the beach, in the plaza, at cafés. People liked us, invited us over to their table, home for tea. Flamenco dancers gave us tickets to concerts; a trapeze artist asked us to the circus. Manuel, one of the divers at La Quebrada, joined us for a drink, then had us over every Sunday for steamed clams with his wife and children. We spent most evenings with Don and Maria, who became close friends for many years. Maria and I talked while Don and Buddy played chess and the boys colored and read until they fell asleep.
We went out often to dinner with Jacques and Michele, a French couple whose little girl, Marie, played with Mark and Jeff at the beach. We went to parties at Teddy Stauffer’s with Acapulco society people and movie stars, to concerts with a Mexican doctor and his wife. When the boys and I were in New York, we chatted, sometimes they chattered, but now in Acapulco the three of us were talking all the time, in English and Spanish … the boys even in French! Everybody embraced us hello and kissed us goodbye.
Acapulco
Just after we got to Mexico, I woke up one night and Buddy wasn’t next to me. Sleepy, I went into the bathroom, where I found him shooting heroin. I wasn’t as shocked as I would have been if I had known what heroin was, what addiction was. He said he was going to get off it, even though it would be rough for a few days.
It was bad food poisoning, we told people. Diarrhea, I told our friend the doctor, who didn’t give me paregoric, prescribed tea and apple. Jacques and Michele took the boys boating and to the beach for several days; after that we went to the usually empty pool by the ocean. The boys spent hours diving over and over into the water. We all played Monopoly, ate enchiladas suizas, drank lemonade. Buddy shook violently under his towel in the sunshine.
He got well finally, and then weeks went by, busy and lazy, such warmhearted weeks. The heroin became but a quick scary moment. After several months, we were ready to go home to New Mexico. I would divorce Race and we would be married.
Buddy and his wife, Wuzza, had lived and traveled for years, mostly in Spain, on her money. He had studied bullfighting, had continued to play saxophone and race Porsche Spyders. She finally insisted that he do something; so, with her backing, he got one of the first Volkswagen franchises in the west, back when the few VW drivers waved to one another on the road.
In only a few years he paid her back, had made so much money that there was no need for him ever to do anything at all.
Buddy enjoyed. He did this so well. He really enjoyed people and music, books and paintings. The next enthusiasms would be Native American culture and history, photography and flying. Oh, and the three of us.
Buddy Berlin, Acapulco
We thought then that our love would protect us from heroin, that we were starting out on a new life.
Nate Bishop came to fly us back in the new Beechcraft Bonanza, a tax write-off that Buddy was going to learn to fly.
Maybe that’s where Babar came from—our toy red plane. We circled low over the city and its lovely bays, white sand, tile roofs, and palms, a crayon-blue sea. Oh, we had all been so happy there, with the old lady and the monkey.
An hour out of Albuquerque, Buddy started to shake. His nose was running and he had cramps in his legs. As soon as the plane landed, he took off to make a phone call.
Edith Boulevard, Albuquerque, New Mexico
A sprawling old adobe with fireplaces in most of the rooms. Bedrooms, baths, pantries, and studies had been added on over the years, at different levels, in every direction, but every new room had the same three-foot-wide walls, high windows facing the pool and garden. The front entrance opened into the huge wood-plank-floored kitchen, the main room of the house. In the old days this had been the hacienda, set among acres and acres of grazing land. Now it was hidden in an industrial area, with lumberyards and sheet-metal shops nearby, a car-parts dump on one side and a school-bus yard on the other side. In back of us in a tiny house lived the Luceros, with two children in their early teens, many ducks and chickens, and a cow.
Edith Boulevard, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1962
Lucia, Edith Boulevard
I learned fear here. My fear of the drug dealers, my fear of the drug, their fear of the narcs, one another, of not having a fix. The house, hidden away as it was, with thick walls that kept out all sound, enhanced the feeling of always hiding, sneaking. With addiction comes hiding, lying, suspicion. “You only look in my eyes now to see if they are pinned,” he said. True.
Those first years on Edith went by with him on and off heroin, with us all in and out of happiness. Each time he went through a run on drugs and still another withdrawal, I swore that was the end.
He was not just a seducer or charmer. Well, yes, he was. He was sexy and charming, sharp and witty. His energy lit up any room he walked into. When the boys saw him, they didn’t just say, “Hello, Dad!,” but immediately ran over to touch him, hug him. So did I.
We climbed and explored Acoma and Bandelier, Mesa Verde, went to Indian dances and ceremonials and powwows. Camped out at Canyon de Chelly and Chaco. Awoke late at night under the stars, wondering what the people living there had been like.
Lucia, Edith Boulevard
The Berlins and the Dorns
Buddy with Jeff and Mark
We had many good friends then. Bill and Martha Eastlake, the Creeleys, Liz and Jay in Taos. Buddy got his flying license. We all loved the plane. In the evening, we would fly into the sunset, red and orange cumulus all around us, on and on we flew, with the colors toward the west. Buddy used to fly to Pocatello to visit the Dorns, or he would fly up and bring them down. We flew several times to Boston to visit Buddy’s family, stopping to refuel in small towns that had no highways going through, whose people hadn’t seen tourists ever, that seemed preserved in another era. Amish towns were the most obvious, but other remote towns in Kansas and Tennessee seemed almost to have their own language, and were as strange to us as we to them. We would land on crop dusters’ strips—fields with only a gas tank and a wind sock—get gas and a pickup ride to the town café, where Buddy would get even the most suspicious farmers to warm to him and talk to us.
Lucia and Jeff
We flew often to Puerto Vallarta, a small town then with no road to it and no commercial flights. In summer when the sky was billowing with clouds, the four of us would go up in the Bonanza to watch the sun set over Albuquerque, flying low over the flaming-red foothills, then banking around to follow the spill and tumble of colors all the way into Arizona, back again just in time for dusk. Every time, the boys fell asleep just as we landed.
In the summer on Edith, we had barbecues, big parties where we ate lobster and clams we had shipped in from Maine. The pool was always full of children—the boys and their friends played until dark in the desert and junk yards around our place.
When he was on drugs, our house turned into a bunker, the doors always closed and locked. “Buddy’s sick,” I’d say, just like Mamie. Only Junie or Frankie, Nacho, Pete, Noodles would come. The predators who followed him to work, to the bank, who knocked at night on our door. Whispers. Raspy laughter in the dark.
David was born. Buddy had had to leave me at the hospital to go home and get a fix, so it was my second child born “with no man to hold my hand.” Still, he was overjoyed with our beautiful baby, wanted now desperately to get clean. Just having needle marks would put you in jail in those days; there were no treatment programs for addicts. When David was only a few weeks old, we went to Seattle, where a doctor was allegedly curing addicts by changing their blood, adding coenzymes to the new blood. This was a nightmarish week, with blood dripping into his arm all day long in a stifling little room.
Lucia, Puerto Vallarta
But the nights in our fine Olympia hotel room were sweet … the two of us with our new baby, talking all night. We would plan our move to Mexico, to Puerto Vallarta, away from the dealers. Teach the boys at home, raise them away from all the violence, greed, racism, and consumerism. We would lead a simple, clean, and loving life.
Third son, David, born September 20, 1962
Lucia and David, 1963
Lucia and boys, Albuquerque
Yelapa, Jalisco, Mexico
Here is how I once wrote about our house in the village south of Puerto Vallarta:
The floor of the house was fine white sand. In the mornings, our maid Pila and I raked and swept the sand, checking for scorpions, sweeping it smooth. For the first hour I would yell at the boys, “Don’t walk on my floor!” as if it were waxed linoleum. Every six months, One-Eyed Luis would come in with his mule and carry out saddlebags of sand, making countless trips to the beach for fresh white sparkling sand washed up by the sea.
The house was a palapa, the roof made of thatched palm. Three roofs, for there was a tall rectangular structure met on each end by a semicircle. The house had the majesty of an old Victorian ferryboat; that’s how it got the name la barca de la ilusión. Inside, cool, the ceiling was vast, supported by tall posts of ironwood, crossbars lashed together with guacamote vine. The house was like a cathedral, especially at night when stars or moonlight glowed through the skylights where the roofs joined. Except for an adobe room beneath the tapanco, there were no walls.
Buddy and I slept on a mattress in the tapanco, a large loft made of the veins of palm trees. When it was cold, all three boys slept in the adobe room, but usually Mark slept in a hammock in the large living room and Jeff outside next to the datura. The datura bloomed in a profusion of white flowers that hung heavy clumsily until night, when the moonlight or starlight gave the petals an opalescent shimmer of silver and the plant’s intoxicating scent wafted everywhere in the house, out to the lagoon.
Most of the other flowers had no perfume and were safe from ants. Bougainvillea and hibiscus, canna lilies, four o’clocks, impatiens, zinnias. The stocks and gardenias and roses were heady with perfume, alive with butterflies of every color.
The beach and lagoon in Yelapa
At night, my neighbor Teodora and I patrolled the gardens and the coconut grove with our lanterns, killing the swift columns of cutter ants, pouring kerosene into the nests of the ants who ate our tomatoes and green beans, lettuce and squash. Teodora had taught me to plant during the new moon and to prune when it was full, to tie jugs of water onto the lower branches of mango trees if they weren’t bearing fruit.
Jeff and Mark ranged between first and fifth grades in arithmetic and spelling. Jeff loved fractions and decimals, a mystery to Mark and me. Mark read everything from children’s books to I, Claudius. Every morning, the boys had school at the big wooden table. Scratching, sighing, giggling, they leaned their bare brown backs over marbled copybooks, Big Chief tablets.
The house was built at the edge of a coconut grove on the bank of the river. Across the river was the beach and the perfect small bay of Yelapa. Up the rocks from the beach, south over the hill, was the village, above a small cove. High mountains surrounded the bay, so there were no roads to Yelapa. Horse trails through the dense jungle to Tuito, to Chacala, hours away.
The house in Yelapa, la barca de la ilusión
David in the Yelapa lagoon
The river changed all year long. Sometimes deep, swift, and green, sometimes just a stream. Sometimes, depending on the tides, the beach would close up and the river would turn into a lagoon. This was the best time, with ducks, blue heron, and egrets. The boys would spend hours playing in their dugouts, tossing nets for fish, ferrying passengers across from the beach. Even David could handle a canoe, and he was only three.
After the rains began, the water would come, at first in wild torrents. Carrying boughs of flowers, branches of oranges, dead chickens, a cow once, the swirling muddy water would break through the beach with an enormous gasp and suck of sand, swirling out into the turquoise ocean. As the days passed, the river water grew clean and sweet, and the warm rock pools filled with water for baths and washing.
Our garden grew. Buddy and the boys speared fish, caught lobster, gathered clams. We became a part of the village and of the bay and jungle around us; each day was full, each day was quiet.
Jeff, David, and Lucia on the beach
Our mornings began with the hundreds of roosters from town, the squawks of Teodora’s chickens. The boys sat at the table eating oatmeal while Buddy and I drank café con leche in the garden, inside the pig fence that protected the flowers. The gulls came with an enormous clapping and calling, a staccato swift flapping up the river, then a swoop back down, dispersing out to sea, calling calling, “Wake up, all is well.” Every morning, when the gulls came, for the next year or so, we would look into each other’s eyes, confirming the happiness and gratitude we felt, too fearful to actually say it out loud. And then we stopped that look, and for all I know, the gulls stopped coming.
First, Peggy sent a little box with a dozen vials of pure morphine. “A little something for Bud.”
Peggy lived alone in a fabulous house on top of the hill. She spent much of her day looking through a powerful telescope, checking the beach for arrivals of famous people to invite up to her house, checking out everything else going on. She must have seen the
boys playing soccer with village boys, riding horseback on the beach, going upriver with Juanito to help his father pick coffee. She must have seen them racing canoes, heard their laughter echoing above the water. She must have seen us talking with friends in our beautiful garden, lying on the beach. She must have seen Buddy and me kiss, must have seen us happy. How could she send that box?
And then, as if addiction had sent out loud heartbeat messages, the drug dealers began to show up. Tino or Victor, Alejandro. All young, handsome ex–beach boys, smart and mean. Whispers in our garden, laughter in the dark by the datura tree.
Southern Mexico, Volkswagen Van
Our VW van had a Porsche engine, other modifications that made it good for tough Mexican roads. Buddy and I had fixed up the back for travel. The entire back seat was a comfortable bed, with a hammock for David. The two doors opened to cupboards under the beds. Easy to get to lanterns, books, crayons, water, food, an ice chest, and a Coleman stove. Hammocks we could hang and make ourselves at home anywhere, even for a short nap while the kids played on a beach or in a forest.
We were headed for Guatemala to renew our tourist permits, we were headed away from heroin. But there was no hurry. We stayed for days in Guadalajara, spending mornings at the market, eating birria, strolling the aisles as if we were in a museum. Each stand was arranged with artistry and flair, whether it was squash blossoms, wreaths of garlic, intricately painted birdcages (with dozens of species of birds), pink-and-green candies, huaraches.
There was a Henry Moore exhibit at the museum. El Cordobés was at the bullring. Buddy considered him a shameless showoff, but the boys were thrilled by the pageantry, the danger and grace. We stayed at a fine old hotel there, ate baby squab, guisantes, fine Mexican cuisine. From there we went to Ajijic. A nice pension there, but so many Americans, and such drunk ones, that we camped out for several days instead. In this way we traveled down to Guatemala. Sleeping in the woods by a river sometimes, or near some town or a small ruin that we could explore. Which meant just climbing and circling and talking about what it must have been, and each of us pretending we were there then.