Much to my mother’s surprise, the day after the mural was completed, people continued walking past the painted wall on Valencia Street as they had before. They weren’t ripping off their neckties and taking to the ramparts. They were still going to work. While the mural didn’t spark the flames of revolution its creators intended, it did inspire my mother, who was moved by her own illustration of Utopia. That was what she wanted—an agrarian collective of peacemakers. It had become clear to her that the process-oriented urban anarchists were not her community.
She moved on to a group of revolutionary artists known as the Haight-Ashbury Humanist Artists, known as HA HA! With HA HA! she felt that she could really express herself without having to seek anyone else’s approval. Her visions flowed through the swirls of oil paints and drenched the canvases with climaxes of color. Painting day after day she felt truly alive. HA HA! put together an art show at Fort Mason, and my mother installed her pieces with the trembling hands of a girl emerging from the darkness into the light. But the critics didn’t like her oil paintings. Devastated, she wanted to hurl herself back into the darkness. Another artist pulled her aside and told her that her passion was real, but that she needed more formal training. He suggested that my mother go to City College for art school.
The idea of going back to school overshadowed all else in her mind that night. Was she good enough for art school? Why not? She had every right to trade the model’s platform for the student’s stool. But between her boy and school, she wouldn’t have time for the Revolution. Was she selling out? No, she told herself. Her strength as a revolutionary artist fundamentally rested on her skill. The better the artist she could be, the more effective her message. She would drop out of the Revolution now to invest in its future. Besides, how could she not paint? When I was a baby, she couldn’t even pause to breastfeed me. She had held me at her chest with her left hand and painted with her right.
“I’m going back to school, Joshey. I’m tired of all these political types who think they’re making a statement by mixing their menstrual blood into the paint. I’m going to art school, to be a real artist.”
“What’s minstrel blood?”
“I never showed you before? Menstruation is a woman’s monthly bleeding. Every month the lining of a woman’s womb basically dies and it flows out of her vagina in a thick, meaty stream of blood. It takes about a week for it all to come out.” Then she showed me the amber-colored sea sponge she used to soak up her flow.
I was suddenly and profoundly relieved not to have a womb. If my mother could give up on the Revolution, I could give up on being a woman.
TWO
The Day Before the Apocalypse
After her first day of art school, Claudia returned home awash in artistic inspiration. She had plunged into her classes with abandon, soaking up every second of painting, sculpting, print-making, ceramics, and life drawing with a live nude model. In the studios, she told me, she was completely immersed in the creative world of her fellow artists. “Joshey, they’re the freest people I’ve ever met, just wildly expressing themselves in every medium. For once I don’t have to be political. It doesn’t matter to them. All I have to do is create with every fiber of my spirit!” And create she did. Our apartment was soon adorned with her new paintings: the atomic angel of death; the dead body moldering in the grass in El Salvador; the massive portrait of Victor Jara, the Chilean revolutionary musician, framed by people stabbing an anaconda to death with sharpened sticks, representing the struggle against the Anaconda Copper Company; and the larger-than-life portrait of a redheaded woman—half her body naked flesh, the other half skeleton.
While Claudia was crafting these disturbing manifestos on canvas, I was fretting about the nuclear apocalypse she kept telling me about and attempting to learn Tagalog at the City College preschool. Through some unexplained socio-educational phenomenon, 75 percent of the kids in my preschool were from the Philippines. They tended to stick together, and none of them came to my feminist-themed birthday party.
Most of my time in preschool was spent playing with a girl I called Karina Katherine Cheese. She had a single mom too, and we both played mother to the tattered stuffed animals from the blue toy bin.
“Karina, did you know that President Carter has a button that can blow up the whole world with nuclear bombs?”
“Yes. The Russians have one too.”
“The Russians are just an excuse, I think, for the nuclear power company to use.”
“Here, Josh, the turtle wants you to nurse her.”
The Filipino kids around us were laughing, playing games, and riding back and forth on the Big Wheels as if nothing were wrong, as if the world would last forever. They didn’t seem concerned about the coming nuclear war or the nuclear winter. Maybe their parents weren’t telling them the whole truth.
The worries were still on my mind when Uncle Tony took me out to a Chinese restaurant later that week. I tried his patience quickly—sweetening my bitter tea with ten packets of sugar and dropping my chopsticks on the floor twice before needing him to take me to the bathroom.
“Oh, Josh,” said Uncle Tony. “You have to put the toilet seat back down when you’re done taking a wizz. What if a feminist came into the bathroom after us? Claudia will kill me if she finds out you’re leaving the toilet seat up.”
Heavy thoughts weighed on me as we walked back to our booth. When we reached the table, Tony looked down at me and his eyebrows jumped up in astonishment. With a comical stage whisper, he said: “Oh, Mr. Josh, don’t look now but your pants are undone. You have to button them up.”
“I don’t like buttons.” I pulled myself back up into the red booth, still unbuttoned.
“Why not?”
“They’re scary.”
“Why?”
“Buttons are scary because they don’t just hold up your pants, Tony. They can also blow up the whole world. Did you even know there’s a red button in the White House and if the president is mad at the Soviet Union or even just in a bad mood, he can push it, and everyone will die from nuclear power? It used to be that if you wanted to kill someone, you had to look at them and shoot them or stab them with a sword. But one day it changed. It was in a town called Hiroshima, which is in Japan. People were at work, and women were painting with Japanese paintbrushes, and in the park kids like me were playing. Then there was a nuclear bomb from America. It exploded the sky and melted the buildings and the trees. People’s skin burnt off. The nuclear light was so hot it burnt kids’ shadows into the sidewalk. The survivors, the people who were left over, they’re called the hibakusha. They’re still losing their hair and throwing up their guts from it.”
“You’re too young to worry about all this stuff.”
“I know that already.”
At night my eyelids could not shield me from the images of the fiery mushroom clouds erupting along Market Street. Through the choking smoke, I could hear the strained animalistic shrieks of my fellow passengers on the Muni crawling out the shattered windows of the streetcar.
But what was even worse than nuclear war was the nuclear winter to follow. Once the fires had died down and the masses had succumbed to nuclear radiation, the unfortunate remnants of humanity would be left to wander the gray, snowy forests in search of food. The hazy skies would forever smudge out the sun in a perpetual winter of deprivation. Lying on my foam mattress on the floor, I projected myself up into the filigreed canyons of the chalky crown molding above me. These were the snowy tracks through the forest. It would be cold. The frozen air would lash at our faces. We would be trudging, Claudia and I, through knee-high snowbanks. I would hold on to her gloved fingers with my right hand and caress an old crust of bread with my left. Hunger would claw at my insides, and we would wander endlessly, propelled forward by fear.
In the light of day I’d shake the image of the nuclear winter and remind myself that Hiroshima was far away in Japan. And a long time ago—back when people were still black and white, and wore straw sand
als and pagoda hats. This was enough to reassure me.
At least it was until March 1979, when Hiroshima came to America. Claudia was cooking bok choy for dinner and telling me about the CIA’s overthrow of Allende in Chile when the phone rang. I ran to answer it. It was Elizabeth, one of Claudia’s closest friends.
“¡Hola!” I said, trying out the revolutionary Spanish Elizabeth had taught me. “¡Viva La Revolución!”
She wasn’t playing: “Josh, put Claudia on please.”
“¡Hola, hermana!” Claudia greeted her. “¿Qué…” my mother’s voice trailed off and she listened intensely. She nodded her head a few times. Then she became very still, pushing the receiver into the side of her head until it looked like it hurt. “Oh my God,” she said. I knew it was serious or she would have corrected herself to say “Oh my Goddess.” When the call ended, Claudia’s hands were shaking and her eyes were red. She turned to me, trying to keep her voice steady:
“Joshey, something horrible has happened. That was Elizabeth…”
“I know.”
“Well, her mother, Elizabeth’s mother, lives near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. No one really knows this yet but there’s been a meltdown at the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. No one is being let into the area. They’re evacuating the children and pregnant women. We don’t know how many have died.”
We rushed to the bookshelf together and began flipping through the pulpy pages of the road atlas. There was Harrisburg, a knot of yellow roads lodged in the bottom-right of the map. My mother traced her finger in concentric circles of impact. York, Lancaster, Reading. Expanding out into Baltimore, Philadelphia, and edging in on DC and New York. The death of so many people was sickening, but we both took selfish comfort in how far away Harrisburg was from California.
“Is it going to be OK?” I asked.
“We don’t know yet,” my mother answered.
“Here’s what’s next, Joshey, look.” The atlas was now open to California. My mother put her finger on an indentation in the coast line. “Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. It’s about to go operational.” She traced her finger up the coast. “Here we are. Joshey, we’ve got to stop it.” Her jaw was tight and her lips curled up. She looked so tough. But tough enough to stop nuclear power? I wasn’t sure.
That night the twin specters of Three Mile Island and Diablo Canyon haunted me. Particularly Diablo Canyon. It was right on the same map we were, and the word canyon seemed so sinister. A few months later, I met some kids who told me they were going on vacation to the Grand Canyon. I took a step back from them and shook my head in sorrow. Those poor bastards. Those poor irradiated mutant bastards.
For Claudia, Three Mile Island was the summons that dragged her out of the good life of an artist. She had been naive, she concluded, to think she could ignore the Revolution. The stakes were too high and she was too valuable to the cause. She joined a group called No Nukes Is Not Enough and began to reengage herself as a political activist.
Claudia didn’t quit City College, not yet. But she was having increasing difficulty fitting motherhood into her commitments to art school and the Revolution. From the moment I woke with an exuberant burst in the morning to the moment I collapsed with exhaustion late at night, I was constantly demanding my mother’s undivided attention.
The preschool took me off her hands just long enough for her to get new assignments in class, and then I was back with renewed energy. With me around she couldn’t paint, she couldn’t study, she couldn’t think. She would become stony silent, refusing to make eye contact with me. She’d cup her mouth in the palm of her hand and rub her upper lip with the flap of skin between her thumb and forefinger, trying to control herself. She told me she felt like her mother in those moments—a suffocating, frustrated artist about to lash out at her consanguineous distraction.
One night, in desperation, my mother opened the phone book to the listing for psychotherapists. She slid her finger down the page until the Spirits led her to the name Amanda Light. She called the number. “I’m so angry at my kid,” she told therapist Light. “It’s rougher than I thought. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to pass this rage on to him. But I’m trying to go to art school and I’m trying to fight nuclear power. I have no money or insurance, but can you help me?”
Therapist Light told her: “Come see me. Someone did free therapy for me once on the condition that I pass it on. So now I’ll counsel you for free.” At their sessions together, therapist Light gave my mother a pillow. “This pillow is your mother. Tell the pillow what you would tell your mother.”
My mother was soon screaming at the unfortunate pillow. She cried and screamed and began punching and then strangling the pillow. “You never loved me!” After a time she was quiet.
“Is that all you have to say, Claudia?”
“No!” And she started screaming and punching the pillow again.
My mother came home from these sessions limp but placid. She cried when she told me about punching the pillow embodying the mother of her lost childhood.
With therapy—on top of taking care of me, classes, studio time, and plotting the Revolution—Claudia was overextended. For a few months she made it work, living off of bagels and coffee and little or no sleep, but one day she collapsed while climbing the steps to the preschool to pick me up. Every deep breath felt like a stab to her chest. She had no energy. She sat there crying until some passing parent agreed to bring me down to her. We hobbled home together, with my mother needing to rest every few steps. I waited at her side, holding her hand while she wheezed and grimaced. When we finally got back home, she called a nurse in one of the feminist support groups, who told her to check herself into the hospital.
Claudia came back with a diagnosis of pneumonia and stayed home with me for two weeks until she regained her health. I tried to entertain her, staging plays and arranging elaborate puppet shows, but she was depressed and bitter.
“Where’s my community to help take care of you, Joshey? This is the feminist promise? Not one of the Sisters will even call me back. Oh, Josh, I’m so isolated and lonely. I should be out there,” she said, pointing at the window. “They need me. Fighting nuclear power, stopping Diablo Canyon, and here I am flat on my back. The whole world is on the brink. And school!? How am I supposed to keep up in school, Joshey? What’s the point?”
I didn’t know what the point was.
My mother had new clarity when she got back on her feet. At the next No Nukes meeting, she interrupted an argument over a point of order and took the floor:
“What do you think you’re all accomplishing by protesting at San Francisco City Hall? The same six people get arrested every time, and then we protest their imprisonment until they get released and arrested again. Nothing changes. Spilling blood on City Hall steps doesn’t change anything. City Hall doesn’t give a shit. What we need is a parade that manifests all of our best creative energy: drama, art, poetry. And we take that parade not to City Hall but to the Black community, to the Chinese community, to the neighborhoods that really matter. We’ll get the people involved. It’ll go national, and then we’ll be unstoppable. The politicians will be shamed into shutting down the nuclear power industry once and for all, and then we can all go home and go to sleep at night knowing that the nuclear arms race is over.”
She received a standing ovation and was unanimously selected as the organizer and spokeswoman for what would become the Three Mile Island Memorial Parade held on the first anniversary of the disaster. Art school was over.
When informed, I accepted my mother’s chosenness as the anti-nuclear messiah with stoic pride. I knew it was an honor, but why did it have to be my mother? The Struggle took so much of her time. For months it felt like I was competing with the entire world for her attention. The city wanted her because they needed to give her parade permits. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence wanted her because they were transvestite nuns who wished to be taken seriously. The American Indian Movement wanted her because
the government was taking away their land for the uranium rocks that lay beneath it. The veterans wanted her because they had been forced to watch the nuclear bomb blasts at Enewetak and Bikini. They all wanted to be in her parade. And when it wasn’t the meetings with the groups, it was the meetings in the warehouses with the artists to build the floats: the giant papier-mâché nuclear cooling tower; the Trident nuclear submarine; the skeletal nuclear grim reapers.
When she was home with me, my mother spent endless hours on the phone, strategizing, negotiating, wheedling, and pleading. If she wasn’t on the phone she was so deeply absorbed in thought that I could have peed my pants or endorsed Governor Reagan for president without her noticing.
Claudia’s flyer for the 1980 Three Mile Island Memorial Parade.
Three Mile Island ruined my preschool graduation. While Claudia actually got me to my ceremony on time, she promptly wandered off, mulling over the logistics needed to shift seamlessly from the Plutonium Players’ performance to the dance by the Gays for Nicaragua. By the time she wandered back, she’d missed the entire ceremony, including my solo in the lyrical tribute to our Filipino ancestors who came through Angel Island, the Ellis Island of the West.
As the Three Mile Island memorial came closer to fruition, my mother was organizing the parade every waking hour and envisioning the parade-to-be in her dreams, mumbling in her sleep: “Freedom Socialists to the left, bring up the Abalone Alliance.” With no time left for me, she asked Uncle Tony to take time off of work, and even asked Claude to take time off of unemployment to care for me in her absence. Tony ultimately had to take three weeks of vacation and sick leave, and Claude brought me along to some New Wave gigs where I was officially introduced as the band’s go-go dancer.
The one-year anniversary of Three Mile Island dawned clear and full of promise. This was the day my mother had been working toward for so long.
Free Spirit Page 4