Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  I am the lucky one. I always was. I know they’re all proud of me but there’s something else, a feeling like a prisoner who has escaped, who has left others behind.

  I try to remember a time before all this crisis. But when was that? What was there before? Did we ever sit quietly, eyes closed in a warm field untroubled by all these ghosts?

  I already know the answer. And yet.

  You can pretend the ghosts don’t haunt you. But they do.

  So it’s bittersweet, the feeling as I run alone on the path. Grandma is dead, Grandpa is dying, Paul is dead (or in a gutter somewhere), Mom is devastated, Dad is sick, Tiffany is on the street again, Tony is working construction in the rain in Salem to support a child he is too young and too drunk to care for …

  And me, I get to go to college.

  HOLLYWOOD PARK

  And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

  —JOHN STEINBECK, EAST OF EDEN

  CHAPTER 36

  THE DREAM

  All these kids are running heedlessly across the grass in the brilliant California sunshine, oblivious to the cars and golf carts, to time itself, as if frozen in a romantic tableau of cardinal reds and verdant greens, the ageless marriage of new blood and old money. Some wear visors, some wear sunglasses, some with short-cropped hair, some with ponytails and tie-dyed shirts retrieving Frisbees or blankets with lanky, unhurried strides. They look healthy. Tan. Well insured. They’re all smiling. This is why they’re here, all of them. For the Dream.

  The Dream of Stanford University, the image chiseled in stone across the marble-block minds of all incoming students and scholars, is the facade at the front of campus, the picturesque scene sitting at the end of Palm Drive: a Romanesque quad with big earth-orange bricks like a modern-day Arch of Titus, the hundred-foot mosaic atop the gable of Memorial Church welcoming the righteous into the kingdom of heaven, the silhouette of the massive white satellite dish pointed skyward on the hills in the background. The stunning effect upon observers of this tableau is that here is a place with one foot rooted in the past, an eye toward the possibility of the future, and—right smack in the center of it all—the enthusiastic endorsement of God himself.

  This is the precise dream I have in mind as Dad, Bonnie and I cruise the mile-long drive beneath the hundred-foot palm trees that guard the Stanford campus. Bonnie keeps saying how excited she is for me to have this opportunity. We are impressed by the impact, the row of palms that lead to the grass oval at the threshold of the Dream.

  Dad is more direct, staring out at all that perfect academic art direction. “Man, this place is not fucking around.”

  It’s an easy dream to get lost in. This shining beacon on a sunny California hill overflowing with optimism, crushing all doubt with confidence of its own rightness. The physics tank, the football stadium, Hoover Tower, Lake Lagunita, the golf course, Maples Pavilion, the Rodin Sculpture Garden, the hospital, the linear accelerator, the mausoleum, the spectacle at the front of campus, the rolling hills behind it—it’s impossible not to get caught up in the feeling that you have arrived at the fount of wisdom, the place where you will finally achieve the great thing for which you have spent your life preparing. What else could possibly lie behind that perfect facade?

  * * *

  THE FIRST LUNCH of freshman orientation is divided between the different advocacy groups on campus. It is a kind of introduction to the diversity of college life. There is the Black Student Union Lunch, the Asian/Pacific Islander Lunch, the MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán) Lunch, the Native American Cultural Center Lunch, and then there is lunch. It may as well be called White Lunch. That’s where I go. White Lunch.

  The cafeteria at Roble Hall, my perfectly art-directed dream of a dorm, covered in ivy and everything, is a smorgasbord of game hats, flannels fraying at the seams, hiking gear, Gap jeans, well-pressed khakis, golf shirts, Bermuda shorts, ponytails and mock turtlenecks. I feel out of place in my twelve-hole Docs and bomber jacket. I’ve never seen so many white people. Tall ones and short ones and fat ones and skinny ones, ones who think they’re cool and ones who have clearly given up. I’m used to being an acceptably white misfit in an 80 percent black public school in Los Angeles. I loved it there. It felt like a privilege to go to school among people who took Black History Month seriously, to feel a part of the struggle, that kinship with Richard Wright, to receive the warmth of the upright black parents from the track team with their prayers for me and pride in their children’s achievements. The fashion shows, the talent shows, the barbecues, the dances, the gospel, the R&B and hip-hop, the feeling that outside our walls was a mostly white, mostly hostile society against which we must arm ourselves with powerful ideas. I felt that way too. I liked the snaps on the bus on the way home from track meets when someone would suddenly stand and say, “Jermaine mama so old, she knew the Dead Sea when it was still sick.” It made me less ashamed that my father had been in prison, that we’d been raised on food stamps, that few men in my family ever graduated from high school. That was a familiar story at Westchester High. I liked the feeling of traveling this road upward with friends named Jabari and Tremayne and Tamika. I wasn’t a code switcher like some of the white kids who adopted all things black in order to fit in. But it never once crossed my mind to feel different because I’d been poor white trash. I felt protected, if not by black culture itself, then by those kind black parents and my serious black classmates who wanted the same things I did. To get out. To move up. Some of their dads were in prison too.

  So I can’t help but wonder what I have in common with these kids, these East Coast prep school kids at White Lunch with their inside jokes and Gamecock hats. What are we supposed to talk about? Mayonnaise? The Gap?

  I feel sized up. Measured. And I quickly learn, to my surprise and embarrassment, that in the eyes of my mostly white, mostly upper-class peers something in me is lacking. I just don’t get the jokes. I just don’t know what to say. Their questions are a kind of quiz I fail over and over again. In the lunches, the get-to-know-you dorm meetings, the late-night rap sessions, when people ask, “Where are you from?” or “Where were you born?” or “What do your parents do?” If I say “my dad managed a mechanic shop” or “well, I was born in a commune that became a cult called Synanon,” I receive a patronizing, sympathetic look and the more I impugn myself for being different, for being weird, for having been brushed by negative forces outside my control—history or addiction or poverty—I see an expression form on their genteel faces, a kind of turned-up, barely hidden disgust, exactly as if I’d just cut a fart.

  It’s pity for the fact that I simply do not know the words I am supposed to say, the positive, humble, inspiring, outwardly self-effacing but lightly self-aggrandizing words about future plans and past achievements and guarded self-regard that shows how much I fit the mold of this shiny society on a hill, this Dream blessed by God himself with a foot in the past and an eye to the future.

  I quickly learn to lie. I don’t want their pity. I hear myself saying, “Shut the fuck up,” in my own head as I mention Chino state prison or Tomales Bay or the food bank at the church.

  It’s not that I can’t fit in. It’s that I can fit in only by lying. By hiding. By pretending to be someone who knows how to answer each question correctly. During freshman orientation, as the dorm makes trips to football games or a Frisbee golf tournament or some ridiculous frat party at the edge of campus where the once-awkward upwardly mobile overachievers of America lean tenuously on walls nursing half-empty red Solo cups of stale beer from the keg, I learn to lean hard on AP test scores, the honors service club I was president of, the YMCA Youth and Government club in which I was Speaker of the Assembly, I learn to mention that my mother went to Berkeley (don’t mention tear gas or shaved heads or Thatasshole Reagan), that my grandparents live nearby (don’t mention Grandma died of cirrhosis), that I was L.A. city champion in the mile (don’t mention the long days running through the wooded park behi
nd Englewood Elementary after my stepfather died, or didn’t). And definitely, do not mention, no matter what you do or how inviting the conversation seems to be for confession, the growing suspicion in the back of your mind that your mother may have a tenuous hold on reality.

  I can make a new face to hold to the world, a new mask to hide behind.

  The only place I feel comfortable is at the twice-a-day workouts with the track team. I spent the summer training among the oil derricks in the dusty hot hills just west of Inglewood. Ten miles every day. I was never recruited by the school, but I had a notion I could “walk on” to the team if I trained hard enough, which I did after meeting the coach and running a few workouts with the team on the golf course. It’s a relief to be grounded in something so simple. Sweat and heavy breath, the ache in my belly and the burn in my lungs.

  There is an easy camaraderie among people sharing such grueling daily toil—at this point it’s twelve miles a day—and distance runners are an unassuming group. There are so many great athletes. I’m the only freshman who is not a state champion, the only one who runs in boxers and basketball shorts because I would’ve never dared to wear those tiny silk running shorts on the football field of Westchester High. They adopt me, like a mascot, affectionately referring to me as a “hack,” as if taking pride in my awkward clothes and awkward stride, my homemade workouts pulled from old running books (or thin air) because we did not have a cross-country coach. It fades over time. Like a pack of horses, there’s a bodily closeness that erases our differences as we focus on the Task at Hand. I tuck into the back of the pack and keep my head down, content to simply shut up and run.

  * * *

  A MONTH INTO freshman year, I get a call from Mom telling me that Grandpa Frank’s back cancer has metastasized in his lungs and brain and there isn’t much time left. She flies down and picks me up in front of my dorm in a rental car and we drive to a hospital in Los Gatos. I wonder why Doug didn’t come.

  There’s a light dusting of white stubble on Grandpa Frank’s sunken face as he lies in the hospital bed. He still looks somehow handsome, like a slightly deflated version of the proud and gentle man I’ve known since that day we left Synanon.

  Mom and I sit next to him in chairs trying to tell him we’re here as he nods in and out of consciousness, dizzy from the morphine. It’s been six months since Grandma Frieda died. He’s been fighting the cancer for ten years as it slowly reduced his once powerful back to the twisted, painful relic it has become. We thought he might beat it because he lived with it for so long. Like he was impervious to it. There was something miraculous about his battle. But it’s as if Grandma’s death was a mortal blow, like losing his reason for fighting.

  We hold vigil for a week. In between classes and trips to the administrative office to get my work-study requirements for my financial aid scholarship, Mom arrives, tears in her eyes, a defeated expression on her face as we drive the twenty miles to the hospital in relative silence. Everyone in the family knows Grandpa is a good man with his short mustache and permanent smile, his easy jokes, his commitment to his family, to two countries, to his recently deceased wife, whom he tended the way a parent nurses a sick child.

  I wear a medal he won in track and field in Holland in 1932 that he sent me when I got into Stanford. It hangs from a leather string tied around my neck. I feel it bounce against my chest when I run, reminding me of him. I feel a connection to him, hear his voice in my head sometimes when I think about the future. I’ve always felt such a pride to be his grandson. He’s still got those strong hands. I can feel their strength as he grips mine in the bed. He’s somewhat lucid when Mom leaves me with him before we go to dinner one night. His head is shaking and his mouth trembling and I can see him searching for words. I tell him I love him and I’m glad I knew him and I thank him for taking care of everyone. I want so badly to know what to do, how he made his way through this impossible, confusing world.

  His lips quiver as he raises his head and stares at me, trying to form the words, his eyes glassy and blue. “Chin up,” is all he says. I kiss his fist and he gives my hand a pump, like we’ve made a sacred agreement.

  Two days later we arrive to find a kindly nurse who tells us he passed. Mom collapses on the chair in the visitors’ lobby to cry and I put an arm around her shoulder to comfort her. It seems unfair to lose so much so quickly and I can’t help but feel for her. He was a good man, a kind man, something like solid ground in a world of so much quicksand.

  When she drops me off on campus, the Dream is still there, unaffected by sorrow. The church, the Roman arches, the satellite dish in the distance. I miss my grandfather already. The world seems emptier somehow and I have no place to find comfort. Laura and I broke up the day she left for UCSD, nearly four years to the day since I asked her to be my girlfriend standing next to her locker. It quickly felt like a mistake but when I called her three weeks later to win her back, she told me she had a new boyfriend and was in love. She said she got tired of all of my inconsistency, all the times I broke up with her then ran back to her. I felt my heart fall out of my chest and I carry with me an alarming desperation over it. I miss Dad and Bonnie with their jokes and easy love for me. I miss Drew and Jake and Morrissey and Bowie, the sense that it is enough to simply feel weird or fucked-up, to reject all this crushing optimism.

  There’s a party at Roble Hall, a din of cheesy pop music in the common area as I walk silently past to lace up my running shoes, put on my headphones—Disintegration by the Cure—and disappear into the dark, dark night.

  * * *

  THREE MONTHS LATER Mom calls to tell me Doug left her for another woman. She is sobbing. Inconsolable. It’s been only three months since her second parent died, three months spent in grief and sorrow. Even I am surprised at what a stunning betrayal it is. It was time for honesty, he told her. He just couldn’t lie anymore. So he confessed to the mistress, the affair he had throughout their entire seven years of marriage.

  There’s a panic in her voice, a kind of hyperventilating staccato as she tries to process the thoughts in real time. I don’t know what to tell her. It seems like a dirty trick, like all that doe-eyed talk of “someone to grow old with” was meant for precisely a time like this. And after years of holding that idea in front of her like a carrot, making her tolerate his inconsistency, his weird habits and weird rules about food, he simply left in the night when she needed him most. I think about his angry look when his knees pressed my arms into the ground, the disgust, the hatred in his eyes as he pulled his hand back and punched me in the face.

  I don’t know how to comfort her. I have the old feeling, the sense that I can feel her loss so perfectly, her pain and devastation. I croak out the words “It’ll be okay,” though I’m not really sure if that’s true.

  She tells me I drove him away by calling him a “pussy,” by not accepting him as a father figure, that I never liked him and he knew it and that made him leave her.

  I don’t have the heart to fight her, to tell her that I moved out seven years ago, that he left her four different times before they ever even got married. There are sobs and gasps at the other end of the line and it seems cruel to deny her her reasoning. Not now. So I just listen and tell her I’m sorry and she can call me anytime, that it’s not fair, that I will always be there for her, whatever that means.

  * * *

  SCHOOL IS A blur. On top of Organic Chemistry, Physics for Engineers, Integral Calculus, and all the Dante, Nietzsche, Plato, and other classics all Stanford freshmen must read to become educated people in the world, there is a three-mile morning run, weights, an eight- to ten-mile afternoon workout on the track, and an hour of rehab in the training center on the arthritic knee for which I take eighteen hundred milligrams of ibuprofen a day. There’s no time to play guitar or sing songs, but I’ve managed through my daily workouts to become the fastest freshman in the Pac-10, the third fastest in the nation at the ten-thousand-meter run. I keep thinking I can just put it all into my run
ning, that if I train hard enough, nothing will matter, if I can win a national title or make an Olympic team someday, all this will be but a minor hiccup on a road out, a road to Something Great.

  I lie alone on the grass after long interval workouts, staring up at the sky wondering if I can just turn my body into stardust, grateful for the exhaustion, to turn the anxiety into motion, to have something to do with it.

  On a quiet morning run, while preparing for Junior Nationals, a couple weeks after Pac-10 Championships, where I placed sixth, nestled in at the back of the pack, I feel a sudden sharp pain in my knee, as if someone fired a nail beneath my kneecap. I pull up short thinking it’s a minor pain, the kind of thing that arrives suddenly and just as suddenly disappears. I try to walk it off. But each time I try to jog it out or ignore it, the pain returns, an electric shock going up my leg. I limp back to the field house.

  The trainer advises me to take a week off, which I do, sweaty and anxious and roiling with nowhere to put it all. It feels like being trapped with all that energy, that fuel to run twelve to fifteen miles a day, a claustrophobic feeling, all fumes and nerves.

  I try to run after a week off, but the pain is still there. After an X-ray and an MRI, the sports specialist at Stanford Medical Center tells me my season is done, that the cartilage in my knee is worn down from the awkward stride created by my flat left foot. There is a palpable resignation in his voice. “Surgery is rarely successful on distance runners. The slightest problem gets magnified by all the miles.” He gives me a summer rehab schedule of physical therapy, weights, and swim workouts, but I know my running career is probably over.

  I can’t sleep. My appetite is gone. I have trouble focusing. It feels like my heart is going to leap out of my chest on each one of its thirty-eight beats per minute through a body whittled down to 4 percent body fat. I just want to run. I would trade twenty years of life for another year of training. That is my bargain. My way out. To become more horse than rider.