Despite all this socially liberal activity, I still considered myself a Christian. I wanted to visit a Mormon temple, so I set up an interview with the San Jose church patriarch, who turned out to be a kindly old fellow.
“I’m interested in visiting a temple,” I told him as I sat across from him in his library-like study.
“Well, you have to be in a pure state for at least six months before you enter the temple,” he said. “You cannot smoke cigarettes, drink coffee or tea, eat too much meat”—Check, check, check, I was thinking—“or have sex for at least six months, since you are not married, and you cannot enter the temple if you have committed adultery.”
Oops on unmarried sex. I’d have to think about it. I said in my most convincing, optimistic tone, “Thank you. I will have to think about when I would be able to go.”
We shook hands, and I left.
I was new to sex, and so far, it was not all that great, but it seemed like it had potential. Plus, it involved boys, and I was just getting to be attractive to them. In this new college environment, there were more of them that didn’t care if I was handicapped, at least in the short run. It didn’t dawn on me right away that their interest might be because I was acting physically interested.
I thought about abstinence for about a week and decided I didn’t really need to go to the temple. I figured I could go later, at some time when I was either married or sure I didn’t want to have sex for six months. That’s a clue regarding how committed I was to the church.
My freshman year, I took my first psychology class from Dr. Thomas Tutko, a teacher I loved. I had caught his attention when I had spoken up in class. We were discussing the effect the Bible had on society. He’d asked what some of the topics illustrating this point might be: what the Bible said that might be controversial, what about sex outside of marriage, etc.
“It says that men can ‘do it’ and women can’t,” I piped up.
The fraternity guys all turned around, looked at me in my seat near the rear of the room, and whooped and hollered. Then the bell rang.
After class that day, Dr. Tutko asked if he could speak with me for a moment. He told me he thought I was particularly honest and asked if I would participate in IQ and personality tests voluntarily.
I agreed—and subsequently scored high in IQ, but had some things on the personality side that piqued the researchers’ curiosity. So they asked me and some others to come back and answer some questions that the associates or grad students were almost salivating to ask.
On a hot spring afternoon, I sat down at a student desk in an empty classroom in the psychology building and answered their few questions.
“We see that you checked, as one of the things you don’t want to be, ‘normal,’” one of the grad students said. “Could you explain why you answered this way?”
I looked at them for a moment. They were dressed so conservatively—the young man in khaki slacks and a button-down shirt, with a short haircut; the young woman in a dress and nylons (warm day, pre-pantyhose)—for this non-professional, casual meeting, that I was tempted to say, “Like you; I don’t want to be like you.” At this point, I was an art student wearing jeans, turtlenecks, loafers, and flower child beads most of the time. I looked like I was suspended between the beat generation and hippiedom.
“What seems to be considered ‘normal’ in society is not appealing to me,” I told them. “The emphasis on fitting in, on being the same as everyone else, on buying things so that corporations can make a lot of money, on making sure your personality is not too different, seems superficial to me. Especially the willingness of people—parents in particular—to follow along with the government’s military intervention in Southeast Asia as a normal thing for a non-communist government to do . . . if all of that is normal, it isn’t what I want to be.”
The two young people just nodded their heads and made notes.
Now, this is contradictory if you look at my life up till this point. I had done everything I could think of for at least fifteen years to be seen and accepted as “normal.” I had worn miniskirts with colored tights that covered up my foam prosthesis, had hairdos like everybody else, and accepted social mores like everybody else (white girls don’t date black boys, there are things you don’t talk about, don’t be too weird or nerdy, and so on). But college had freed me. I suppose this was my time to look over my shoulder and say, “Since I’m not normal physically, ‘normal’ in general will be something that’s not important to me.”
A girlfriend pointed out to me recently that we all want to be seen as normal, and everyone is concerned about that. I still do not want to stand out. I experience my life, when I’m not in physical difficulty or pain, as normal. I still forget that I limp, and I sometimes flush when people stare at me, at the way I walk. But when they are embarrassed, I now feel worse for them than I do for myself, for that moment. I want to tell them, “It’s okay. I would probably stare too.”
I’d been paying attention to all the black power and racial marches and beginning to realize how pervasive racism was. There were perhaps two or three black families in my home-town, and although nearly all their sons were sports stars going to college, we white girls were not supposed to date them. As a child, I had simplistically thought, We have Negroes, Hispanics, and Asians in addition to Anglos. People just don’t date across races because races don’t intermarry. But aside from that blockbuster of a young prejudice, I was not really aware of racism.
In the spring of 1967, I had a visit from the Mormon monthly visiting teachers. Here at college, I was visited not by an old lady who thought I was too meticulous about my appearance but a couple of young married men in their twenties. I liked these guys; they seemed casual and trustworthy. We’d meet in the lobby of my dormitory on campus for about an hour and talk about church philosophy and how I was doing personally.
I knew that the Mormon Church did not allow black men to be in the priesthood, though they could be members of the church. This seemed strange to me—that black people would even want to be Mormons, given this exclusion. The reason the church gave was that Cain slew Abel, and according to the Book of Mormon, all black people were descendants of Cain.
How could anyone know this? What about evolution, which seemed clearly true? What about all the Asian people that the church was making such an effort to convert? What the heck was going on here, and who was setting these rules? (Note: The Mormon Church did lift the ban on blacks holding the priesthood in 1978. Somebody had a vision, I guess. This is called out with clever humor in the recent Broadway musical The Book of Mormon.)
One Wednesday evening, these two nice (and white) young men came by and we chatted a bit, as we always did. And then I had a query for them—one that I’d been waiting for weeks to bring up.
“I’m not comfortable with blacks not being allowed to hold the priesthood,” I said, “and I’m also not in agreement with the ‘Cain slew Abel’ reasoning. What do you think about that?”
They gave each other a long look, which seemed to say, “Any question but this one.” Then one of them turned to me wearily and said, “We’re not comfortable with it either. We don’t have a good answer for that.”
At that moment I ceased being a Mormon. I didn’t tell the guys this, as I didn’t want them to feel responsible for a young woman leaving the church. I could see they truly believed in their religion and were grappling with the parts of it that did not feel right to them, as any sincere believer may do, as he or she delves more deeply into questions of faith, dogma, ethics, and morality. It’s challenging to know when to follow, when to leave, and when to go along with some things while secretly not believing in parts of what’s taught, so that one can remain in the religious community, the family, the relationships based on this set of tenets.
But I, Carol Francine the Christian, had been falling away from the church for some time. I hated it when Sister N., the mother of the catty girl in sixth grade, said to me in the foyer of the church in Yub
a City after my absence of a couple of months, “Oh, Carol, you’ve come back to the fold!” as if I were a lamb who had wandered away from Jesus. I had nothing against Jesus. I just was beginning to think he didn’t have much to do with the way different churches had structured their religious teachings. I hated it when people in the church talked behind others’ backs about their behavior and then were sickeningly sweet to those same people in person. It didn’t seem Christian to me. Not that I haven’t talked about people—I’ve done it a lot—but the gossip amongst these women who were so outwardly pious seemed hypocritical. My sister hated that about the church too.
And why was Jesus so Anglo-looking in that chapel picture? He was Jewish! If the Jews were the chosen people, as both the Jews and the Mormons often said, why did the image they used for Christ make him look like a white hippie with light brown hair and blue eyes?
When I was around eleven I asked Mother who had painted that picture of Christ that hung in our church and how it had been preserved for all those centuries. She told me it was “an artist’s conception”—to which I did an inner, Tch! What the heck! I’ve been duped.
As a young adult, the church tenets suddenly seemed very unsupportable to me, on top of being racist, despite the loving relationships and friendships I did have within the church. Today, I still have Mormon friends for whom I hold great affection; it’s just hard for me not to think, given my change in philosophy, that they’ve been taken advantage of, because they are such nice people.
So, I was done at nineteen. No looking back, and no regrets.
There was a big variety of maleness at college, from the varsity jocks through the hippie guys, and I gravitated to the latter. Frequently. Frankly, I had too many boyfriends in my very early twenties (and later again in my late twenties); I was sort of a serial monogamist. I made this possibly poor choice for several reasons, one of which was a desire to prove to myself that I was attractive to men, and prove to myself and them that I was a viable life partner. Evidence had been to the contrary in high school; I hadn’t, after all, gotten very many dates. Besides my leg being unattractive, that may have been because I had developed a sharp wit and a sometimes-sharp tongue, which teenage boys in the 60s did not necessarily equate with attractiveness. I also had not been “easy” in high school; I’d been saving myself for somebody special.
I was naïve in my college days and the couple of decades after that, and it did not dawn on me till many years later that if you were willing to sleep with men early in the “relationship” (if there ever was a relationship), of course you were going to attract a lot of “partners.” I thought I was holding tryouts for a marriage partner, while most of the guys, I now realize, were just out to have a good time with any nice gal who was willing. Birth control, particularly The Pill, had liberated us girls in one respect, but being on a more equal footing with the guys also meant it was harder to come up with a good reason not to have sex. This was, fortunately, long before AIDS was a specter.
I did learn that there are different kinds of lovers and had both successes and failures in relationships in my twenties, which taught me other lessons: how to compromise, when not to push too hard, when to give in, and when to insist. (I’m still learning about all that; bet you are too.)
I cried a lot in my twenties—and on into my thirties—over men. My forties, too, at least a little bit. I blamed myself for failure with several boyfriends I thought would have made good life partners, although in retrospect, they may not have. I deeply grieved the loss whenever I fell in love and it didn’t work out, even if I thought I was not to blame. Where is MY mate?? Why am I attracting the wrong people? My grief echoed my mother’s perspective that the most important thing in life was a husband, and if he died or left, your life was nearly worthless.
It took me decades to learn that developing a sense of self and what was important to my own heart and mind—for instance, finding fulfilling work, creative pastimes, and friendships, which I was doing concurrently—was more important than relationships with men. I did also begin to learn to work things out without feeling it was the end of the world if someone was upset or disapproving. And a lot of the time, I was enjoying the ride; I just hated permanent good-byes. Each time a relationship ended, though I wasn’t conscious of this at the time, I viscerally re-experienced the painful finality of losing my dad.
I didn’t really think much about disability rights in my twenties. I was able to walk better then, for one thing, and I already knew that I was in a small subset of people—and of women in particular. I knew that I wasn’t everyone’s dream girl, but I thought that physical and social discrimination was something I’d leave in my small home town with my childhood, and my new college and adult world would be full of mature, intelligent, unbiased people. I was trying so hard to be like everyone else that my self-image did not involve identifying with the group called “disabled.” It would be a long time before I’d sit in a workshop and listen to one person after another share their impressions of my handicap and what it meant to them.
I was living in the “I’m Not Really Disabled” bubble in those days, and exhausting myself with long-distance walks and stairs at San Jose State. I worked hard to keep up with everyone else and keep my mouth shut about it, as I’d been taught. However, at the end of my freshman year class scheduling at San Jose, when we had to physically go to each department to get our next semester’s classes (I actually spent the night on the sidewalk in front of the art department to get my first-year art classes, popular with graduating seniors who needed units), a wise teacher approached me and quietly said, “You can pre-register; didn’t anyone tell you that? You don’t have to do all this walking.”
Nope. Didn’t know that.
She didn’t say, “because you are handicapped or disabled,” and I appreciated her not drawing public attention to me more than my limp already did. There had been nothing in my application that asked if I had a handicap, and nothing had been mentioned at freshman orientation.
After three years of art school—two at San Jose State and one at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland—I quit. I loved making art, and I liked hanging out with artists and musicians, but by the time I transferred to CCAC, it was becoming clear to me that although my renderings and photos were good, I was not particularly inspired. I did skillful, sensitive line work in my life drawings, but about the only thing I could imagine I’d be able to do with that was greeting cards or book illustrations. DaVinci or Ansel Adams I was not.
I was not an outstanding talent; artists had to live in a city to make a living; and I was running out of money—I didn’t have enough for the next year of college. So I dropped out. Mom was profoundly shocked and accused me of wasting the money “your dad died for,” the $10,000 in VA insurance that I had mostly used for art school. Although I had a “full scholarship” for any college in California, it did not cover living expenses, books, and supplies (which is why my husband says I should have gone to Stanford and gotten my money’s worth). I was surprised by the strength of her reaction, but in hindsight I think it was because she was artistic herself and had never had a true career of any kind. I suspect she had a romantic attachment to the idea of me becoming an artist and wanted to live through me vicariously.
I moved north to Sonoma County, where I met people I really liked—back-to-the-land folks, musicians, students of yoga and mysticism—and landed in a temporary business partnership with another woman, creating handmade clothing in a little consignment shop.
18
—
drugs lite
I took a few psychedelic drugs from age twenty-one through thirty-nine, most of it in my twenties. I do not regret this, though I would not generally recommend it. I have a strong will, mind, and sense of self, and even on my very few bad trips was able to steer myself either on my own or with help to normalcy and what we know as reality. But I knew people in the 70s and 80s who were damaged irrevocably by psychedelic drugs— some because they
were mentally unstable to begin with, most because they took too many.
The good trips were worth the risk, for me. I took LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and mescaline, with a sense of adventure and seeking an expanded sense of what the world was. I was looking for deeper meaning in the late sixties, with friends going off to the Vietnam war and a few of them getting killed over there. I was protesting and signing petitions. I was hoping to find a greater spirituality than one that dictated, “There is a male god in heaven who controls much of our lives and leaves us to make our own mistakes and then later punishes or rewards us.”
Also, the drugs were fun. I learned that not everything was as it might seem in life, that there was an “I” in me that was an observer beyond the limited mind and personality I had defined as Myself previously, and that the apparent barriers between objects might not actually exist—that maybe all things were one.
These are the kinds of deeper threads to which psychedelics led me in those days.
When I was twenty-one and in my junior year at art college, I had taken some THC and was sitting in my room, looking at my feet. I was living in Oakland with a fellow artist, Rich Wilbur, at the time, and I called him to my room from the kitchen.
“Look at this foot,” I told him. I was staring at my little foot and could see its unusual circulation with its blue and red and purple coloring, and its small, paralyzed toes, which were a babyish mirror of their sister toes on the other foot. I studied this nearly inanimate, discolored, and helpless limb, perceiving its strangeness, especially compared to the other one.
Not a Poster Child Page 14