“Nope.”
I’d seen enough hell; I didn’t need to raise any more.
While I waited to be approved for a visit, Susan called me constantly. My phone bills soared, but I couldn’t refuse her calls. She had no one else to talk to.
All this time she kept asking about her brother. She told me she’d decorated her cell with images of men that reminded her of him—great athletes and handsome movie stars.
After clearing it with her doctor, I haltingly told her the truth.
She was pained to hear that Terry had died, but not surprised to learn he had killed himself. She said Terry, the strapping ex-boxer, had been pummeled by depression for years.
Hearing that, I was knocked for a loop. I’d spent so much of my childhood wishing I’d been born a boy—a big, strong, fighting boy like Terry. I thought my life would be better if I was a boy. I thought Jimmy would love me more if I could lace up some gloves, get in the ring, and beat someone silly until they tasted their own blood. But I could now see it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Boy or girl, son or daughter, life as Hank or Jimmy’s kid would’ve always been a fight. And, sometimes, like Terry, you just went down.
Blood Sisters
I left California and flew back to New Hampshire to see Susan. I rented a car and drove north from Manchester to Concord on a pleasant day in June. As I got close to the prison, the sky turned dark as if some numbskull up there had forgotten to pay the electric bill. The moment I pulled into the driveway, three shards of lightning sliced through the darkness and the clouds spilled their guts.
I shook my head. Too frickin’ unbelievable.
I ran through the downpour and entered the main reception area, clammy from the rain and my anxiety. While I waited to get checked in, a guard, seeing my driver’s license, began to kid me about California. Wasn’t I afraid of getting buried in an earthquake? Or creamed on the freeway? Or frostbitten from those brutal winters?
Compared to this place, I joked back, fault lines, traffic, and perpetual sunshine suit me just fine.
After checking in, I was directed to a more remote area of the property, where the secure psychiatric unit was tucked away.
I was buzzed through several thick metal doors and took a filthy elevator up to SPU. I carried five bucks in change—all I was allowed to bring in—to buy Cheez Doodles and Kit Kats for Susan from the vending machines.
Although the main waiting room, where I’d checked in, had been jammed with visitors, the waiting room at SPU was totally empty. I figured the SPU patients were so far gone, most of their relatives had written them off.
I sat down on an orange plastic chair that was bolted to the floor, and nervously waited for someone to bring Susan. A noisy air conditioner blew cold air over my damp body. I wished I’d brought a sweater. I wished I wasn’t so nervous. I wished Susan and I were meeting on a warm beach somewhere.
Five . . . ten . . . twenty . . . minutes went by, and still no Susan. I wondered if she was as anxious as I was. I wondered if she was going to stand me up.
Finally, the door buzzed open.
Susan walked through it, all spiffed up, like she was on a first date.
I jumped up to meet her.
She sauntered toward me with an impish smile. Though she had warned me that prison, Percodans, and poor health had taken their toll on her appearance, I would have recognized her anywhere. Now fifty-six, she was still quite attractive. Her dark hair was cut in a cool spiky-on-top, long-tail-in-the-back style. Her light olive skin was unlined and radiant. Her mink-brown eyes still seemed to have a hint of gold.
She turned to the guard and asked if she was allowed to give me a hug, or what. She’d never had a visitor and didn’t know the drill. The guard nodded, bored.
We embraced and it wasn’t awkward at all. My nervousness disappeared faster than those five bucks.
For three hours we ate piles of junk food and gossiped like old girlfriends. We talked about our fathers, of course, and about my life in the outside world.
She asked if I was going to have any pip-squeaks of my own. I told her I was scared I’d be a crummy parent. Scared of passing on Jimmy’s genes. Just. Plain. Scared. I said it was miracle enough that I had a great marriage. I didn’t want to push my luck.
She said she had a couple of stepkids from her third marriage but didn’t see them anymore. She said she didn’t see anyone from the outside anymore but tried not to get down about it.
Her Christianity got her through, she insisted. She took a stab at converting me, but I told her it was way too late for that. Jimmy had gotten to me first. I was an agnostic like him and didn’t think that was going to change.
We moved on to talking about other things—Monica Lewinsky, the Oklahoma City bombers, cloning. She was still up on everything.
She kidded me to hurry up and write something about her already, she wasn’t getting any younger. She reminded me she’d done some acting in high school and would be open to taking a part in the movie of her life.
She was a little crazy, a little delusional, but who isn’t?
It was the kind of afternoon I’d dreamed of sharing with her years ago. Except, back then, I’d pictured us playing Candy Land in a bedroom with frilly curtains and stuffed animals on our laps. I never imagined it would be taking place in a prison with stale candy, barbed wire on the windows, and a guard breathing down our necks.
He told us our time was up.
I returned to the prison several more times that week. Not every visit was as delightful as the first. Sometimes Susan was lucid, sometimes not. She was friendly one moment, sullen the next. Whether she was schizophrenic or just medicated, I couldn’t say. I had to roll with the punches. I had to accept her for who she was, not project on to her who I wanted her to be. Harsh though it might be, I wanted to live in the reality of Susan, not the fantasy.
The reality was pretty sad. I often sat in the car after I left her and cried.
On my last visit, I knew she was upset that I was leaving. She looked at me intently.
“Do you have any idea what it’s meant to me to hear from you after all this time? You were the closest thing to a sister I ever had.”
I nodded and hugged her.
The bored guard came to take her away. She followed him to the door. Then she turned and called out one last thing:
“I love you.”
Her words startled me. They filled that sad, empty room with a kind of joy.
“I love you, too,” I called back.
She stepped over the threshold and the door slammed behind her. I watched through the little window until she disappeared, the way Shirley had always done with me, so nothing bad would happen to her.
I stood there for several moments, still feeling her presence all around me.
I knew all those years of searching for Susan, of wanting something from her—approval, insight, love—had finally come to an end. I realized she had already given me everything I needed years ago—a road map for my life. Just because she hadn’t followed the map herself didn’t make it any less valuable.
KooKooLand
Susan completed her sentence in a few years, was paroled, and was never incarcerated again.
She lived the next several years in a small group home in Concord under the watchful eye of a court-appointed guardian, a nice woman who helped keep her on the straight and narrow. I visited her many times. One time, I even brought Shirley to see her. She hadn’t had a mother’s arms around her in a long time. I could see from her face how much it meant.
We stayed friends to the end—until her illnesses caught up with her and she passed away at sixty-five.
I flew back to the group home for a memorial service. I passed around a photo of Susan in her glory days, on her way to med school. I read a few poems she had published in her college paper.
“Wow, she was beautiful,” said one person.
“And smart,” added another.
“I loved her,” s
aid someone else.
“Me too,” I said.
No one from her family was there. Just me. Her blood sister.
As for Jimmy, his worst fear came true. All those years of smoking and drinking finally caught up with him. He got lung cancer. The Big C.
He knew enough about medicine, and cancer in particular, to know his days were numbered. But he was a fighter, always a fighter, and he went down swinging. He got two-thirds of his lung chopped off. An hour out of surgery he yelled at the nurse to give him some goddamn scrambled eggs, then force-fed himself to get his strength back. He had a round of radiation and still hit the racetrack every day. He took an expensive drug that the VA paid for. He was, at long last, a veteran—the dummkopfs in Washington had finally reclassified the World War II merchant mariners as veterans.
“Now that most of us are kicking the bucket, those bastards are finally doing the right thing,” he said, and on that score, I had to agree with him.
The whole time he had cancer, he never gave up cancer sticks.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” he said, quoting Dylan Thomas.
After fifteen months of raging, he was getting near the end. He said he was going to die like a man, in his own bed, and insisted Shirley take care of him. Shirley couldn’t manage it alone. Virginia offered to move in with them, but I thought she’d done more than her share. So I moved back in with Jimmy and Shirley for the last month to help out.
I wish I could say knowing he was going to die made Jimmy nicer. I wish I could say it made him apologize for some of the awful things he’d done to us. I wish I could say it made him appreciate his family and the time we had left together.
But it didn’t. It simply didn’t.
It just made him madder.
He was mad at the raw deal of life, of his life in particular. He was mad at every single numbskull who was going to live on after him. He was mad that his big-shot daughter was going to be globe-trotting to film festivals while he was trapped six feet under like a palooka.
We tried—we really tried—to comfort him, but he just kept getting madder.
Here’s how he spent those last few weeks:
He secretly threw out my wedding album, one of the things Shirley still treasured most in the world.
He compiled a list of all the wars he could remember, to prove that man was nothing but a killing machine.
He plotted how to become a killing machine himself and shoot the cop who had arrested him. He tried to enlist me in the plot, wanting me to drive the getaway car.
And, last but certainly not least, he tried to take Shirley and me with him into the great beyond.
This last act—whether spontaneous or planned, I can’t really say—started out innocently enough.
He said he wanted to go for a Sunday drive.
“Great!” I said, pleased he was finally expressing something nice we could do together.
“I wanna drive my own goddamn car one last time.”
He hadn’t been behind the wheel for a few weeks and for good reason—he was too weak and medicated.
But I didn’t say he was too weak. I knew better than to use that word to describe him.
And I didn’t say he was too medicated. He was used to driving drunk.
“You can see the scenery better if I drive,” I said.
“I don’t care about that, dum-dum. I just want to feel like a goddamn man one last time in my life. Like I can go where I want, do what I want. I want to be King of the Road one more time. Can you at least give me that? I’m dying, for Chrissake.”
I was a dum-dum. I fell for it.
Shirley and I proceeded to hook up his oxygen tank. His pants were falling off him. His eyes were a little yellow.
But he smiled at me and made a joke.
“Hop to it. I’m gonna croak before you two get me outta here.”
We walked with him to the car. I held his oxygen tank. Shirley walked in front of him. I knew what she was thinking. If he toppled over, she’d cushion his fall.
It was almost April. Spring was in the air. New grass was poking up through the mud.
I helped Jimmy get behind the wheel of his big boat of a car. I was about to get in the passenger seat beside him, in case something went wrong. But he had other ideas.
“I want your mother sitting beside me. I want my beautiful doll beside me, just like old times.”
I hesitated, and then climbed in the backseat.
And off we went. Just like old times.
At first, everything seemed fine. In fact, Jimmy’s driving was better than before he got sick. At least he wasn’t cutting people off. At least he wasn’t flipping the bird and yelling pluck pluck pluck.
I began to relax. I told myself I was doing something nice for a dying man. So what if he was vengeful? I didn’t have to be like him. I wasn’t like him. I wasn’t. That’s what I told myself, as I sat in the backseat behind him.
Still, I couldn’t help but notice how much, even in his debilitated state, I resembled him physically. In his sad, tired eyes, I could see the hue and shape of my own sad eyes. In the sag of his shoulders, I could feel the weight on my own shoulders. In his hand clenched on the steering wheel, I could see my own fist, lying in my lap like a knotted ball of roots that had outgrown its pot.
Like it or not, he was the man who made me.
I caught his eye in the rearview mirror and smiled.
I still held out a shred of hope for his redemption.
But it wasn’t to be. Not in this life, anyway.
A young woman drove up beside him. She was singing along to a song: Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”
Jimmy glared over at her, despising her carefree mood and the life she had in front of her.
“Goddamn women drivers!” he croaked in his cancer-wracked voice.
I felt my stomach start to tighten. Just like it had on that car ride to see Blood Feast decades before.
In Jimmy’s car nothing had really changed. The car moved, but went nowhere. Time stood still like a deer in the headlights.
Jimmy yanked off his oxygen and defiantly lit a cancer stick. It was dangerous to smoke around oxygen, but when had danger ever stopped him?
At the next red light we came to, Jimmy sat there stone silent.
“This is a nice ride, isn’t it?” chirped Shirley, hiding her real feelings.
All of sudden, he spat back two words: “Fuck it!”
He smashed his foot down on the accelerator and barreled into the path of oncoming traffic. Shirley and I screamed. I saw streaks of metallic color and heard rubber squealing as drivers slammed on their brakes.
Miraculously, nobody hit us.
Shirley, in her one act of driving, managed to jam her foot on the brake.
I don’t know if somebody was watching out for us or if we were just a couple of lucky so-and-sos.
Whatever it was, the bad guy didn’t win.
In Jimmy’s race to end his life, a race he had tried to take us along on, he didn’t prevail.
We finally beat him.
I took over the wheel and he never drove again.
He died a few weeks later.
I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I would.
After several days, Shirley insisted she just wanted to be alone. She wasn’t afraid of the hopheads anymore. Word had gotten around that she was out of the business. She told me to go home, and she told Virginia the same thing.
Virginia and I called her every day. She usually said she was OK, but we could tell she wasn’t doing very well. Pretty soon, she fell into a deep depression. Virginia brought her food, but she wouldn’t eat it. She stayed in bed and talked about how much she missed Jimmy.
I could only think of one thing that might cheer her up. A few months after Jimmy’s death, I bought three tickets to a Red Sox game. All these years, Shirley had remained a fan, despite every effort of Jimmy’s to prevent her from being one. But she’d never been to an actual game.
I s
howed up unannounced and called Shirley from the front steps.
“Look out your window, Mom. I have a surprise for you.”
All the shades to her apartment were down. She lifted the edge of one of them and her sad face peered out.
I held up the tickets.
The next day—on Shirley’s eightieth birthday—Shirley, Virginia, and I made our way to Fenway Park. Virginia wasn’t a baseball fan—she was just being a good sport. But even she stopped in her tracks when we entered that old ballpark and came upon that bright green field.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“Oh, my God,” said Shirley.
Shirley watched every pitch as if it were the most important one in the history of the game.
Unfortunately, the Red Sox, being the Red Sox, lost.
But that was OK because it was the year they broke an eighty-six-year curse and won the World Series. And Shirley watched every game they played to do it.
After that, Shirley had eight fun, Jimmy-free years. She never learned to drive, but she learned how to write a check. She came to California several times. My husband always met her at the airport with yellow roses. She got to see a lot of palm trees.
As for Susan, she finally made it to California too.
When she died, there were no blood relatives to claim her ashes. Her guardian turned them over to me.
I scattered half of her ashes over her mother’s frozen grave in New Hampshire.
And the other half I keep with me here in sunny California.
Sometimes I can’t help it. I still call it KooKooLand.
Susan and Gloria, Concord, NH.
Acknowledgments
There are a number of people whose encouragement and early feedback meant so much to the writing of KooKooLand. I would especially like to thank:
Beth Atkin, for her deep love and support.
Kate Guinzburg, for spurring me on at a crucial moment and for her insightful notes.
Cheryl Hill, for suggesting I write the book in the first place and for being my sistah.
Lucinda Jenney, for always being in my corner and for giving me my wonderful goddaughter, Marion.
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