The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

Chapter 14: All Summer in a Day (1972–74)

  “I think the sun is a flower,

  That blooms for just one hour.”

  —Ray Bradbury, All Summer in a Day

  “All Summer in a Day” is a science fiction story by Ray Bradbury about children living on a planet which rains every day of the year but one. The protagonist of the story spends that one beautiful day locked in a closet by the other kids. My situation was slightly different: in a school career spanning years of bullying and violence, I had all summer in a day at a gifted school, before I got to go back to Hell.

  When I was six or seven, my aunt Diana and her friend Rusty Sporer taught me to ride. Rusty was a big, tall man, and he had two daughters. He was a member of the OTO, or Ordis Templi Orientis—one of many occultists who were friends of my mother and father. He owned horses, and was friends with an old girlfriend of my father’s named Anya. Anya lived on a beautiful ranch in Los Altos with trees everywhere, and it felt safer than anywhere I had ever been.

  Rusty taught me to ride bareback first, then progressing to a bareback pad and finally to a saddle. He told me that once I had fallen off a horse ten times, I would be a horsewoman. Naturally, I wasted no time falling off ten times. I was unafraid, and so happy. Learning to ride was absolutely the most fun I had ever had, and I felt completely at ease with the horses.

  Anya was very taken with me. She was a teacher at a gifted school. I was sent to Anya’s gifted school in Los Altos for one glorious day when I was eight. It was a dream come true. For one day, I was not a freak; for one day, the other kids were like me. I thought that if I lived with Anya, I would get a decent education with no fear of violence, and I would not have to BART everywhere or hide in my bedroom in terror of my mother’s rages.

  Anya offered to adopt me and get me a spectacular education, as she could easily do at her school. This became the source of one of the bloodiest fights that I ever had the misfortune to overhear between my mother and my father.

  My father was all for it, and thought that for me to be in a gifted school would be a dream come true. He understood far better than Mother did what it was like for me, since he had been through the same sort of thing. Not only had he heard from me day in and day out about what had happened to me in school, he had been a victim of violence in school as well. I was not in the habit of confiding in Mother. She was rarely interested, let alone sympathetic unless she had an audience to impress. At the time I knew she was not helpful so I didn’t reach out to her, but she saw me coming home bruised and bloody often enough that she should reasonably have known how much trouble and danger I lived in at my school.

  Mother had been mildly teased at school, but mostly her intellect brought admiration from her classmates and excellent grades from her teachers. To her, school was her escape. She was nowhere near as bizarre as either my father or I had been in school. She either didn’t understand what school was like for me, or she simply did not think what was happening to me was important. Maybe she thought I would have something to “learn” from being in a public school. Perhaps she was responding from her emotions, and like a child latching onto a forgotten toy she was not going to let me out of her sight.

  I wanted to go live with Anya, more than I had ever wanted anything else in my life. I knew she wouldn’t hit me, and if I went to a real school I wouldn’t get teased or beaten up anymore and I would get a real education instead of being bored all day, every day.

  My mother dug in her heels. She didn’t want to “lose” me, and noisily threatened suicide if my father let me live with Anya. She got her way.

  John Muir only went through third grade, and we were expected to attend fourth grade at a school below Martin Luther King Junior Way on Ashby called Malcolm X. I was bused there for a school visit and I was beaten up in class for being the wrong color. I refused to go back. My brother was already enrolled in Malcolm X, but he got in a fight that was rather worse. A classmate stabbed him in the hand with a pencil, and my brother saw red, and pounded the kid’s face in. He “woke up” sitting on the kid’s chest. Rather than risk any more of this, our parents put both of us into an alternative school.

  Mother drove us, since there was no realistic way to bus or BART there. That school was an interesting place, if useless in terms of education. The students did whatever they wanted to. There was a boy who cooked all day long and his only mistake was that he typically baked things with way too much baking powder, and I can still taste it whenever I remember that school. I wanted to learn more than they were willing to teach. Mostly, I did crafts and I read a lot, which is what I would have done at home. I dressed horse dolls by making them little hand-stitched saddles out of leather and wire.

  There was a Christmas play. Yes, in the Berkeley of the Seventies Christmas was still allowed! I was an angel, and my father played Santa Claus—truly a dream come true for him. I made angel wings for my costume, about three feet long. The base was heavy cardboard, and I had made feathers for them out of rows and rows and rows of crepe paper, so they looked as much like actual wings as possible. My white dress was a long white nightgown of some sort.

  The thing I remember most, though, is that I was a holy terror, and I used to throw chairs at people when I got upset. I believe they were too socially conscious to discipline me much, though.

  At the same time, my brother and I were taking swimming and trampoline classes at the YMCA. The swimming classes were sequential and progressive, beginning with “Minnows and Guppies” and ending up with “Sharks and Killer Whales” which included elementary lifesaving techniques.

  My concern about the lifesaving techniques is that while it might be informative to teach a class of children how to be amateur life guards, actual life-saving involves far more physical strength and endurance than one might come to expect, if you are practicing on willing volunteers in a swimming pool rather than practicing on frightened victims in open water. As we will see later, the only real-world application I ended up with involved me remembering that it was absolutely forbidden to try to save a life when we were wearing heavy or restrictive clothing lest we turn one victim into two.

  My brother took the same classes as I did, and he loved trampoline. I believe Mother took us both to school and to swimming class after school, because they were close together in time. We were expected to take BART home together afterwards, since the YMCA was only two blocks from the BART station.

  During that time, my brother had piano lessons. I don’t know what happened, but he quit and I was not allowed to have piano lessons, though I asked for them. Every time my brother couldn’t do something I was barred from doing it, lest I “make him feel bad.” This made me very angry; why should I be punished for being able to do things that he could not? Why did my future have to be sacrificed to make sure he didn’t feel inadequate?

  It went beyond merely denying me lessons. I taught myself how to play a little from the John Thompson book on the piano. I could make my hands work together, but I’m sure it was not amazing. I remember learning to play one piece which had the lyrics “Stately as princes the swans part the lilies and glide under the willows.” It was a pretty song, and I’m sure that my halting playing was offensive, at least to my mother. She told me I had “no touch” for the piano, and made sure I understood I was not even to try to play. I stopped, rather than risk any more of her ire.

  I started taking ballet classes when I was almost seven. Mother would drive me to the Oakland Ballet and wait with the other mothers, although I knew she did not want to be doing this. Later on, she enrolled me in the professional school at the San Francisco Ballet, which I did not understand at the time. I had thought I was simply taking normal ballet classes. My mother only drove me a few times to my twice-weekly classes, and then she had her friend Jaida accompany me on BART to downtown, then we took the bus from there to way out in the Sunset. After class, I always wanted to go to the amazing bakery nearby, and eat some carb-laden pastry: ballet could make anyone hungry, and we work
ed very hard.

  When I was about eight, I had to get myself to ballet class, and I made the BART trip alone. This was only dicey when I got home after dark. We lived on Fulton St. at that point: three blocks east of Ashby BART, and it was a walk I made hundreds of times alone. I was always frightened, always. But I knew better than to tell that to my mother: she would scoff at me. I can’t tell you how often she told me I “carried myself like a victim.” She would demonstrate how tough she was, how straight she stood, and show me how strong she was when she walked. I believe I was meant to conclude that if only I could be like her, I would not have to be afraid of walking alone. After all, an eight-year-old child should be perfectly safe wandering around downtown San Francisco and Berkeley alone, right?

  There were times when public transit did not go well at all. One day, I was in downtown Berkeley, and I was walking into a BART station, and a man brushed up against me, and put his hand on my privates, saying “why don’t you slip me up your box?” or something like that. I got away, and I was very shaken up. When I got home and told my mother, she told me that I carried myself like a victim, and if I was tough like her, it would never happen.

  Another time, when I was about ten, I wanted to go riding and I knew there was a stables at Golden Gate Park so I took BART and a bus out there, and I set off from the bus stop on foot to find the stables. I did not find them, but I found a place where someone was keeping a horse, and she let me have a short bareback ride, which was tremendous fun. Unfortunately, as I was walking back to the bus stop there was a man in the bushes, probably a homeless man, and he called out to me. I don’t remember what he said but I was terrified, and I ran all the way to the police substation close to the edge of the park. I told them what happened, and I had an asthma attack. I don’t remember whether my mother came and got me or whether I took public transportation home. She probably came and got me because of the asthma attack. It would have taken rather too long for me to recover.

  My mother claimed that the only reason I was targeted by the guy in the park and the guy at the BART station was that I “carry myself like a victim.” She then put on an embarrassing demonstration about how tough she was, and told me a story about walking through Harlem at midnight. She said that when she did, a gentleman stopped her and asked her what she was doing there, and he did not assault her after she told him that she was not afraid. My interpretation of the story is that the gentleman felt it was dirty pool to mess with crazy women who are out alone in the wrong part of town. I did not think for a microsecond that my hugely fat mother would impress anyone as being “tough” when she was rather less physically fit than a microwave oven.

  Now to be fair, it is completely possible—even likely—that I do carry myself like a victim. At twelve, and even much older than that, I did not have anything resembling “situational awareness” as the martial arts or military types would say, and I was certainly not able to defend myself with any guaranteed method, no matter how many knives I carried.

  After some time with the school, we were coming up on the Nutcracker and I was slated to be cast as something or other. Our classes had gone from two to three times a week, and I was beginning to struggle with my asthma and with severe exhaustion. I was born with a mitral valve prolapse which has tended to limit how hard I could exercise without chest pain and weakness.

  When I was almost nine, I began to get a lot taller, and the head of the school informed my mother that I was going to be too tall to be a ballerina: height/weight requirements were absolute. At our full growth, we were allowed to be 100 lbs, and granted one extra pound per inch. They told my mother that if I was 5’8 or above as they expected, I would simply never be able to make the weight. Not with my shoulders.

  Eventually I decided to quit ballet, and to become an actress instead.

  During my time in ballet, my mother made a judgment about me which she mentioned years later. She told me I was neither the best nor the worst dancer in the class, but I was the only one who was always on the beat, and she knew that I was destined to become a musician and not a dancer. I did not resent this judgment, and I still feel it was probably the most insightful observation she ever made about me.

  I loved to dance, though, and have continued to dance throughout my life. Ballet has made more of a difference for me in all physical endeavors than any other discipline, bar none. It has made every form of dance understandable easily, because the core of the movement made sense, and everything was a variation on the basic building blocks I learned in ballet.

  I had been attending yet another alternative school way up in the Berkeley Hills. It was called “Kilimanjaro,” though my brother and I called the place “Kill-a-kid-jaro.” My mother had gotten me into the school because of my Tuscarora (Iroquois Nation) ancestry. She had not thought this out especially well: the basic philosophy of this school was that color was what mattered, and I was the wrong color. Despite my Indian cheekbones, which are obvious to anyone of Native American ancestry, I was as pale as any Celt or German from the rest of my family tree and once again I did not fit in.

  I remember learning to hide from the other kids when things got ugly. One day, after I had been badly beaten by a couple of kids up there, I had hidden in a locked restroom until after the end of recess. After the bell, I ran as fast as I could down to the bus stop, terrified that the kids who had hit me would have seen me leave. I was bloody when I got to the bus stop, and hid near it until I heard the bus at a distance. I can still remember how relieved I felt when I got on the bus and it pulled away from the bus stop, when I realized that they had not found me and I was going to get home safely.

  It seemed my mother was willing to put me into any kind of an alternative school at all, provided it was not a gifted school. This meant I remained a freak. I have come to believe that her issue with private or alternative schools was less about money and more about giftedness, which is a strange attitude for a former Mensa member to take. It is almost as though she was willing to solve any problem except the real one. At Kilimanjaro, I went from merely sounding like a freak to looking and sounding like a freak. Seriously, sending an assertive, scrawny, gifted, overly verbal, pale-faced child to a school which prioritizes non-white ethnicity above all? To claim a category of difference for me which I was obviously not entitled to? What did she think was going to happen? She might as well have painted a target on my back!

  Chapter 15: The Lonely House with the Lemon Tree (1973–1976)

  “There was no believing she was getting better as you could not tell which one of her would wake up at any moment. It is so much easier to bear being hurt yourself than being blamed for someone hurting someone else. The shame from that alone is this boulder I have hanging around my neck.”

  —Secret Keeper No More, Mark Greyland

  My mother had moved us to the first of three houses on Fulton St. in Berkeley from Hamilton Place in Oakland. Our house was behind another house, and it was small and dingy. My parents had their bedroom in a carpeted garage, and my brother and I had a bedroom. The house was on the block between Ashby and Prince St, about a mile west of Greyhaven. Mother no longer needed to pick us up from Greyhaven after school because we could walk home ourselves.

  My relationships with my mother and father were no better in California than it had been in New York. My mother was a frustrated, unhappy woman, and my big mouth made me a frequent target of her wrath. My father did not spend time with me voluntarily, although I loved him and regarded him, overall, as far safer than she was.

  My father now had a full-time job, unfortunately in New York as the Vice President of FCI, or First Coinvestors Inc. under Stanley Apfelbaum. He cataloged parts of the Pine Tree sales, some of which were named for him. Despite his expertise, he never collected coins himself beyond a very few kept in a small box. He invariably claimed that collecting coins was for rich people.

  My father’s fame and influence was growing. In 1975, he gave a lecture at Princeton University, “Tolkien and t
he Occult Revival” which was sponsored jointly by the English Department, the Infinity Club, a student science-fiction group, and the Society of Middle-Earth Readers. He also gave a seminar at Esalen Institute in Big Sur for scientists and physicists, sponsored by his friend and colleague, Jack Sarfatti. The topic was “Some Effects of Music on Consciousness: Overview and Preliminary Explorations.” My father’s fame, coupled with his commute to New York, made for increasing distance between him and our family. Maybe he felt he didn’t need my mother or me any longer.

  His employment with First Coinvestors was a boon to him for many years, because, apparently unbeknownst to him, he and his room would be watched so that he could never sleep with any underage people while at coin conventions. Once First Coinvestors went out of business many years later, they could no longer protect him.

  My father would commute to New York two weeks per month, though there were times when he was gone for a lot longer than that. Once he was gone for a few months. I missed him terribly when he was gone, and my mother was worse in his absence. When he was home and she did what she did, I could go to him and he would dry my tears and hold me. When he was gone, there was nowhere to run.

  Here is a quote from Donald Mader’s essay describing Walter’s conduct as a house guest in New York at that time:

  “Although based in Berkeley, California, Breen was frequently in New York for business in the 1970s and 1980s. … He’d arrive around 7:00 p.m., and somewhere around 9:30 p.m. he would take out his Y Ching and throw his changes. This would inevitably produce something to the effect that it was “dangerous to cross the great water” which he would interpret as a warning that it was inadvisable to take the subway back under the East River, and ask to stay the night….

  On another of his visits, with malice aforethought, I arranged for another Atlantean, Rick Nielsen, photographer and owner of a gay cardshop-annex-gallery on lower Seventh Avenue in the Village, to come around so they could compare their past lives. They could agree on nothing; one insisted Atlanteans wore yellow robes; the other insisted on white and so forth. By 4:00 a.m. when they decided they must have lived on the lost continent in different eras, I had long since ceased to find the confrontation amusing.”