Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  Tony had tears in his eyes, but he accepted her decision. “Claudey, you know, after you leave, can I still visit you and the Babu?” He called me Babu, which was short for Baboso—the Slobbery One.

  “Of course, Tony,” she reassured him. “You can always visit us.”

  My mother and I moved around the city four more times, and throughout it all, Tony was my loyal and regular visitor. Wherever we were, I could count on his weekly visits. He came every Sunday, bearing some little gift, and each time he took us out to dinner.

  At first my mother resisted the weekly dinner: “Tony. I’m a feminist. I’m not going to let a man pay for our dinner. I’ll pay my own way.”

  “Claudey, if you have to pay for your own dinner, will you still go out to dinner with me every Sunday?”

  “No.”

  “OK, so I want to eat dinner with you every Sunday. So let me pay for it on the days you wouldn’t have come out on your own.”

  “Fine.”

  He paid for dinner every week.

  At one of those dinners, I asked Tony whether he was my father. Tony looked at Claudia for a long time and received only silence in return. Tony finally shook his heavy head, No.

  “But he’s like my brother,” Claudia offered as a compromise, “so he can be your uncle.”

  Uncle Tony. I liked the sound of that. It was like a father, only better. Uncles were real.

  Claude did not appear on my birth certificate. My father’s first name was listed as Joshua, but the rest of the Father of Child section was a sea of “Unknown”s. In my vital records, Claudia described my father as a “poet moving to South America.” My father would have remained Joshua Sr., the unknown South American poet, had it not been for an accidental meeting and declaration of paternity in a peasant food restaurant in the Haight-Ashbury. I was two years old and, as I spooned up my organic barley, Claudia began telling me about the CIA overthrow of the Árbenz government in Guatemala. Behind her a strange man entered the restaurant and walked past our table. He glanced our way, turned away, and then spun his head back in a dramatic double take. The man sauntered over to the table pensively, looked to my mother, and then looked down at me.

  “Can I join you?” he asked.

  My mother nodded, and he sat down next to me, his face working with emotion as he tried to avoid my inquisitive eyes. I could sense that there was something important about the moment and sat up on my knees, facing him. We were both wearing Sherpa hats and turquoise down jackets. Our big blue eyes stared across a generation at one another.

  “How are you?” he asked me, his voice shaking.

  “I’m good,” I whispered.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me.

  “Josh.”

  “I’m Claude,” he introduced himself, putting his hand over his heart.

  Something about Claude resonated deeply with me. I stood up on my chair and leaned toward him, staring into his face, locking blue eyes. He cloaked me in a deep embrace and called me Son.

  This first time that we met was to be my only perfect moment with my father. But I don’t remember any of it. I recall only my mother’s memory of the event. She told me the story over the years, and I enjoyed the hope in her voice and the dramatic outpouring of paternal love she reenacted. There, watching our Sherpa-hatted heads come together in an embrace, my mother felt the Spirits working their magic. Once Claude had seen me—the delightful little spitting image of himself—how could he not step up to become my father?

  But, despite Claudia’s newfound expectations, he didn’t step up. One of my earliest memories is not of my father, but of waiting for him. Pacing back and forth over the black floorboards in our apartment, standing on Claudia’s foam mattress on the floor to stick my head out the window. I stared at the unyielding sidewalk below, my hopes rising and falling as each new figure coming into view failed to become my father.

  “When is Claude coming? When?”

  “Five more minutes.”

  “Is it five minutes yet?”

  “No,” my mother called back from the little kitchen. “You just asked me, it’s only been a minute.”

  “Is he coming now?”

  “I called him to remind him. He’ll be here soon.”

  Time slithered languidly by. Eventually my mother sighed: “Well, I guess he’s not going to make it, Josh.”

  “But he promised.”

  “I know,” she said. “Damn it! He didn’t make it last time, either.”

  I began crying and worked myself into an inconsolable fit. Only sleep soothed my sobbing.

  The day after one of these no-shows, my mother and I came across Claude on the street. She tightened her grip on my hand. Claude avoided making eye contact with me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “My mom made dinner for me last night and insisted I eat with her.”

  “You don’t owe us anything,” Claudia said. I could hear an unfamiliar angry register in her voice, escalating with every word. “If you don’t want to come over and be with your son, then don’t! But for chrissake, don’t promise a little kid you’re going to come visit him and then bail on him.”

  Claude nodded thoughtfully: “Well, I guess I could see how that might make you feel helpless.”

  My mother let go of me, stepped in toward Claude, and slapped him across the face.

  She shouted: “I’m not helpless and neither are you! If you could manage to give your child half the attention you give to your mother, you might be a man.”

  His stunned, stubbled cheek turned away from me. His eyes were moist with the sting of the slap that kept reverberating in my ears. Claude walked away silently, his head down.

  My father didn’t come to my fourth birthday. At the end of the party, a scattering of wrapping paper lay before me on the floor. My mother told me that I should be happy. “You had a nice little party. Uncle Tony came. Look, Josh, you got a toy piano and a truck.”

  “Claude was supposed to come,” I protested. “Why doesn’t he want to see me?”

  My mother knelt down in front of me and focused all her attention at my eyes. “Your father will never come through for you. He never will. He’ll say he’s going to do something and maybe, sometimes, he’ll actually do it, and that’ll be nice. But don’t expect it. He’ll never keep his promises. That’s just the way he is. Do you understand?”

  I did. Something about the certainty in her words convinced me that I wasn’t to blame. If he didn’t want to see me, then something was seriously wrong with him, not me. And, like that, Claude was transformed from an aloof and intriguing role model into an unreliable liar.

  A few months after my birthday, a girl with pigtails in Dolores Park asked me: “Who’s your mommy?”

  “Her name is Claudia,” I said, “but I’m not supposed to call her Mom because that name is too limiting. She’s more than a mother. She’s a full person named Claudia.”

  The girl nodded knowingly and then asked: “Who’s your daddy?”

  The question caught me off guard and I had to think about it for a few seconds. “Oh, I don’t really have a father.”

  “You don’t have a daddy?” The girl frowned.

  “No,” I reassured her, “but I at least have an Uncle Tony.”

  While Uncle Tony’s weekly visits gave me a hint of what it might mean to be a man, the rest of my time was spent immersed in an estrogen-rich environment. Claudia and her friends and lovers remained my role models and, naturally, I wanted to be just like them.

  One day when I was three, Claudia and her lover, Linda, cuddled on the bed as I ran around the apartment with a little green pillow under my shirt. “Look, Claudia, I’m pregnant now. Look, I have a baby in my womb.” I threw a blanket down to serve as my bed and squatted down to give birth to my baby.

  Linda couldn’t keep from laughing. “It’s time you told him, Claudia.”

  My mother nodded and decided to break the news to me: “Joshey, you’re a boy. Boys can’t give birth to babies.”r />
  “But when I grow up I will?”

  “No, Joshey, you’ll never be able to have a baby.”

  “Never!?”

  “No, not ever. You don’t have a womb or a vagina.” She brightened. “But you have a penis! Someday a woman could put your penis inside her and you could shoot semen into her to make a baby in her womb.”

  I was so disappointed. Who wanted a boy’s semen-shooting penis when you could be a life-giving woman?

  I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed by my lack of a womb and vagina. My mother’s coven remained scandalized by my sex. How could they tolerate a future rapist and batterer in their midst? Perhaps even more shocking to them was the realization that raising a child, of any sex, was hard. I was the first child born to the coven, and when the witches were asked to stop changing the world and start changing diapers, they were quick to distance themselves from my mother. Claudia felt abandoned by these Sisters who had promised to support her, and she moved on in search of a community that allowed children to be part of the Revolution.

  For a while she was able to afford the help of the Candy from Strangers Collective. The Collective was made up of gay male babysitters who would watch the children of activist feminist mothers so they could take part in political protests. My mother’s favorite Stranger, Taj, would come to the apartment to take care of me while she was out fomenting the Revolution. He would arrive promptly, giving her enough time to change into her cobalt moon-goddess outfit and make it to the rally before the police broke it up. While she was out, Taj would clean the entire house, reorganize the refrigerator, and dust the altar. When she made it home, still buzzing with the energy of the streets, she would find me tucked into a professionally made bed, bathed and hair-styled so I looked like a sleeping model from a children’s magazine. As he let himself out, Taj would stroke his waxed handlebar moustache and tell her: “Sometimes I go out with the mommies too,” letting her know he was bisexual and might be up for more than just babysitting.

  When I got a little older, my mother enrolled me in the Feminist Center Playgroup. The parents were all radical single mothers. I shared nonviolent wooden toys with the likes of Jody Gai (named for a merciless woman officer of the Vietcong), and Katanya, the half-black daughter of a prisoners’ rights activist who had been assassinated by the FBI upon his release from prison.

  But even with the gay babysitters and the feminist playgroup, my mother still wasn’t getting enough time to herself. The never-ending demands of single motherhood were more than she could handle, and she began sneaking out in the evening after I had gone to sleep. One night I awoke in a panic, somehow sensing that she was gone. I ran around our little apartment screaming for what felt like hours. When Claudia returned she found me climbing out onto the fire escape to search for her.

  “Where were you!?” I demanded.

  “I’m sorry, Joshey. I went to a women’s bar down the street. I was just going stir crazy.” I stared at her, my face quivering. “Josh, my days used to start at eight o’clock at night. I’d wander around to all-night poetry clubs and hear music. Now when you go to sleep I get so bored.” I shook my head, refusing to accept these answers. “I was feeling lonely, Josh. You were sleeping. I just ducked out for a minute.”

  Claudia in her cobalt moon-goddess outfit, which was often mistaken for a burqa.

  “Don’t… you… ever… do that again!” My voice was breaking and seething.

  “I won’t.”

  I slept in her bed that night. As the dream world came rushing up at me, I looked over to see that Claudia was still awake, staring up at the ceiling. I put my hand on her arm to keep her with me and fell asleep.

  We spent the next few nights at her girlfriend Linda’s house so my mother would have someone to talk to after I fell asleep. My mother openly identified herself as a lesbian, and she tried hard to be a “woman’s woman.” But, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t stop herself from being attracted to men. In the end she had to admit that she was only gay for political reasons. One of her girlfriends, a Southerner named Jody, cried as they broke up: “I want you to love me for who I am, not who I represent. I wish ya’ll breeders would just fuckin’ go home!”

  The radical women’s movement had become too anti-man for Claudia, and we began spending time with more moderate lesbian couples who were part of the Compost Reunion Coven. The name was a sort of euphemism for “witches getting their shit together.” They weren’t just lesbians playing at being spiritual, they were serious, honest to Goddess Wiccans. To my mother’s delight, these witches worshiped the Goddess, but they also thought there was room in the world for warlocks.

  Through the Compost Reunion Coven, my mother was invited up to a witchcraft colony in Ukiah called Greenfield Ranch. She left me with Uncle Tony for the weekend, packed her magic staff, and headed north to celebrate the fertility rites of Beltane. She came back crackling with blue energy: “Joshey! Oh my Goddess, it was beautiful! I want a community like that for us. It’s got everything: it’s feminist, it’s spiritual, and they honor Mother Earth. I’m hungering to get back to the land. Wait till you hear about it.” Despite my mother’s enthusiasm, I was happy to have missed out on the transcendental adventures at Greenfield Ranch. Something didn’t sit quite right with me about losing control of yourself to a drug called “acid” so you could dance naked on a hilltop all night while the Goddess exploded your head into an energy fountain and showed you your past lives. I preferred listening to Tony expound on Kierkegaard while I rode the carousel in Golden Gate Park.

  The more my mother began to experience Wicca, though, the more it began to feel like an organized religion to her. One full-moon night, she joined Starhawk, the anarchist high priestess, and four thousand other witches in the park at Fort Mason. As the service to the Goddess commenced, my mother stood at the water’s edge, looking down at the moonlight rippling in the waves. Starhawk grabbed her suddenly from behind and forced her down to her knees to worship the Goddess properly. She came home dejected. “Joshey, there’s as much hierarchy in Wicca as anywhere else. You may be tripping out of your mind, but it’s still a church.”

  After so many false starts, Claudia was beginning to doubt that a real revolutionary community existed for us in San Francisco. When she meditated on it, this didn’t come as a surprise. After all, her plan had always been to leave the city and head for the hills once I was old enough to make the journey. Maybe that day would come, but the Spirits were telling her not yet. She decided to give San Francisco one last try.

  Claudia quickly found new promise in the avant-garde radical neo-paganist lesbian music scene where she became a regular dancer for an all-women band called Alive! Composed exclusively of drummers, their shows began with silence. Then each drummer would begin with small chirping sounds. The audience would respond in kind. Then the animal sounds from the drummers would get louder and crazier, and the audience would call back. Then the drums would explode. The room would fill with women shrieking like banshees, and the drums would rumble like a herd of zebras. No woman could resist this primal invitation to dance. My mother spun round and round, whirling as Miriam must have danced with her timbrels at the Red Sea, until her side hurt so badly she thought she might throw up.

  One night, she staggered out of the steaming jungle cacophony into a little courtyard, gasping for air. There she met Anahid, an Iranian artist. The two of them, drenched with sweat, talked into the night about metaphysics and revolution. The next morning my mother raved to me about Anahid, this sophisticated artist visionary who was part of Project Artaud, a live-work art studio and theater of the absurd. Anahid was changing the world with her paintbrush. She and Claudia could share chakra readings just as easily as others could share a meal.

  My mother was deeply impressed by the artists she met through Anahid and began to feel that perhaps the Revolution could be achieved through art. They didn’t need rifles and ammunition. They had canvas and paint.

  When the People’s
Cultural Center on Valencia Street put out a call for revolutionary artists to install a massive mural capable of transforming reality, my mother volunteered for the mission. She became part of an anarchist collective of five artists that would spend a year of their lives painting the side of a building for zero dollars. Because the political statement made by the mural had to be profound, and because their decisions had to be made by consensus, the collective of artists tended to meet more than they painted. My mother volunteered our apartment as the venue for their evening planning sessions, but was told that the meetings had to rotate to each artist’s house.

  “But, if we meet at my place every time,” she said, “my kid can stay sleeping in the other room so I don’t have to get a babysitter.”

  “Sister! Don’t you get it? The basis of an anarcho-Communist society is equality in small-group decision-making. If we have a meeting more than once in a row at any one artist’s house, then that artist will have too much power. It has to be equal.”

  “But I’ll have to hire a babysitter every night, and I’m on Welfare.”

  “Sister, if we compromise our ideals in the planning process, how can we bring about a revolution through our finished work?”

  Claudia (lower left) displaying her art with feminist comrades in San Francisco, 1978.

  The mural was too important. My mother called the gay babysitters from the Candy from Strangers Collective, and rotated from house to house for meetings. A year later, they finally unveiled the mural that was to spark revolution in all who saw it. From the right sprang images of oppression: factories spewing pollution, people in gas masks, war. The middle of the mural conveyed the concept of revolution: people surging forward, rising up to overthrow oppression in joy, rainbows, peacocks, love, energy, and a woman holding up her little boy. On the left the public was treated to the post-revolutionary peace of the future. The world to come was full of farming, windmills, and diverse people passing each other trays of fruit and vegetables and feeding one another.