by See, Carolyn
On the floor! In many ways working at Van de Kamp’s was the best job I ever had. You knew you could never go hungry. You always went home with money in your pocket. And there was a moment, at five minutes to five, when you sailed out on the floor, full of energy and giggles, when you were filled with well-being. The restaurant was huge, bigger than a church, done in those oddly soothing blue and white Van de Kamp’s colors. They’d done something pretty daring with the lights, so instead of being harsh and fluorescent they were indirect and cool. To your right as you whirled out was a place where they sold baked goods; to your left, perhaps six looping counters that seated twelve customers to a loop. And then, for miles, clusters of booths. Seventy-five cents an hour to work the booths, eighty cents an hour to work the counters, because the tips, in theory, were less at the counter. (Except that the counter waitresses had their own highly devoted bachelor clientele, who would order prime rib, the waitress would charge them for an Enchilada Americana, and their devotees would tip them the difference.)
Van de Kamp’s! I met my first gay guy, who’d been a skating partner of Sonja Henie, and made sundaes now. And an older waitress, who’d lived through the Dresden bombing and said it had been much easier than California earthquakes. And a wonderful salad man named Orlando T. Hungerford. I saw an extramarital affair unfold before my eyes as the main chef began to bang one of the many waitresses. Van de Kamp’s couldn’t fire the guy, since he could dish up two hundred entrées at once and often did. His wife came to work and huddled in the back with Miss Nace, looking needles at the rest of us: don’t mess with my husband! She stood by the door to the parking lot, where all the sex and smoking and loitering and drinking went on. Her husband straightened up, but another waitress, unmarried, unimaginably old to us, in her thirties, did it, got pregnant, and was given a baby shower by all of us, with a cake, done up by the management: WELCOME LITTLE STRANGER.
One night as I went on my shift, I saw a little tiny girl with a nice white chest that totally filled out her uniform in the way the management must have pined for. She wheeled around station twenty-eight, carrying coffee, taking in the whole vast place with a pleased and whimsical gaze. She met my eyes and I knew, with a sense of extreme pleasure, that we would be friends.
Teresa was here in town because she was following a recalcitrant boyfriend—one of Gerry Mulligan’s many drummers—who was just on the verge of getting her pregnant. She was a jazz freak, turning a lot of us on to Gerry and Chet Baker and Warne Marsh, Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz (even though those last two were still in New York). Didn’t we know that jazz was changing? Thanks to Teresa, a lot of us found ourselves on double dates at the Haig or Shelley’s Manne Hole or Whistlin’s Hawaii, a low bar, where one night a week, the usual South Seas Bruisers went away and the place filled up with somber young couples in black who listened to Red Mitchell; huge, reflective Leroy Vinegar plucking a bass that looked small next to his big body. And Warne Marsh would play the most beautiful saxophone in the world. Teresa would smile.
Warne Marsh was on heroin at the time, as were Art Pepper, Chet Baker, and a few more. It stretched out their sweet notes; it stretched out their speech. We once brought Warne a turtle from a dime store, a baby thing the size of a silver dollar. He peered at it a long time, then ventured: “Just … how … big … will … this little fellow … grow?”
Because of Teresa, I decided to work five to two in the morning, instead of tame five to eleven. At eleven the vast majority of good girls went home. As the lights went down, we became an after-the-movies hangout for a predominantly Jewish clientele who prompted racist slurs from us because all they ever wanted to order was a “vaffle vell done,” and there were only five waffle irons to accommodate the rush of two hundred people.
After the vaffle people went home, kids lounged around and planned parties and went to them, so that because of Teresa you found yourself sitting at three in the morning with gay guys in love. English movie actors failing in Hollywood. Giddy girls, physically exhausted, emotionally serene. We passed joints around—and this was 1952, 3, 4. We listened to jazz. Once, late at night, Teresa, who wore Shalimar perfume and silken clothes with metal threads, said, “Laws doesn’t know anything, do you, Laws?” And leaned forward and kissed me.
These two lives imposed on each other most in the summers, when I’d work five to two almost every night, party until five or six, sleep until seven, and haul out to a swimming class at City College that lasted from eight to ten in the morning five days a week. A good way, in theory, to get your phys ed requirement out of the way, but as we swam laps I’d often think I couldn’t make it; I’d sink right to the bottom. And, of course, that was emblematic of my life. I was swimming pretty hard. After two years, we were going to graduate with our AA degrees.
I took a shine to a new fountain man named Bill Jones. My friend Susie, during a boring class, wrote in the margin of my notebook, “You love Bill/Use your Will!” Dick Jones, routinely snooping through my things, found this out and got pretty mad.
I began to think of an old friend from high school, Richard See (who had written in my yearbook, “If you have to have this to rember [sic] me by then there’s no use me writing this. I will see you after you graduate. If I do not see you, then you should not want this to remember”). He’d been a college guy then. He had a car. Those buses and streetcars could get on your nerves.
Richard wore pirate shirts with full sleeves. He wore a Fu Manchu goatee. With a great show of ersatz irritation he’d drive Jackie and me around in the afternoon as we ran errands. He’d heave great sighs and refer to himself as “Saint Joseph,” because in his opinion Joseph was the most put-upon saint in the Bible, doing all the dirty work, hauling the Virgin Mary around on a mule, and never getting any sex or any credit.
When I’d been in high school, Richard had written me twenty-page letters, questioning the meaning of life and so on, but mostly filling up pages of lined yellow pads with lists of personal grievances: his mother was English-Irish, his father Eurasian, and he, Richard, had no sense of ever fitting in, anywhere. He’d been in love with his Chinese aunt, he told me, since she was in junior high and he was in high school, but since that was out of the question, he’d decided he’d make do with me. When I still lived with Jackie, Richard would come to call in the company of a few very cute Chinese guys. They’d stand out on the lawn until Jackie’s mother said they couldn’t come around any more: they were making her look bad in the neighborhood.
Richard was goofy. He was pretentious. His looks would come into style in twenty years, but right now he just looked darling-crazy. His loneliness—even when I was back in high school and he was a snooty college sophomore—was so rank and strong it came off him like an odor. In my life I’d never met anyone remotely resembling a soulmate, but Richard was my soulmate, because he was so lonely and freaky and sad. The trouble was, who wanted a soulmate if he was so damned strange? Being with Richard was like looking in a mirror. But I let him drive me on errands, and liked to hear him groan and complain.
Dick Jones got over his temper. But I was tired of him. Also I found out, by routinely snooping through his things, that he’d already been married and divorced. On the day of our break-up he tried to strangle me, but I have to say he didn’t try very hard or I wouldn’t be here today. I was able to call my father, who put his pants on over his pajamas, tore over to where we were, walked right past me where I stood gibbering with fright, and shook Mr. Jones’s stunned hand. “I’m sorry we have to meet under circumstances like these, pardner,” my dad said, and made small talk with Dick until all my belongings were stuffed in paper bags. Then Daddy, shaking, took me to a drive-in, bought me a burger, and told me I ought to look out for myself a little better.
A couple of weeks later, from the pay phone at Van de Kamp’s, I called up Richard See’s family. He was in the army, and had been for months. Richard had been my soulmate, my ace in the hole. From my point of view, he’d left without even saying good-bye.
A friend from City College named Marliss introduced me to some Communist-leaning students. I had a Hell date with a boy named Bill, who strummed protest songs at stoplights, jamming his guitar between his lap and his steering wheel. “One Christmas holy evening / They’ll all be hanging!” (That would be referring to the Spanish fascists, of course.)
We graduated with our AA degrees. Marliss and Bill and I threw a graduation party for ourselves. My mother insisted on coming and I was so stupid I let her come. She brought Aunt Helen down for the occasion. They came in dead drunk and laughed themselves sick. Through their eyes I saw how Bill’s socks flapped down around his ankles, how bad his revolutionary songs sounded, how Marliss was a cheap little waitress; how I was a cheap little waitress. How this whole enterprise was ludicrous beyond words.
For junior year, I would go to UCLA. My friend Joan from high school drove across town to UCLA every day and she’d recently gone to work at Van de Kamp’s. She and Marliss knew each other. I finally found the perfect furnished room. It had a false window with venetian blinds; you opened the window and stepped into a shower. Marliss moved into the room beneath mine. The three of us began to talk about going to Europe for a year. We put up copies of the Paris Métro map on our walls and read Tropic of Cancer. Wynn gave me a copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, with a silver dollar pasted in it, and the inscription: “With this dollar and prayer every day, I know you’ll live your dream and next Christmas be in Paris.”
—
The next year I was in Paris. But that was because a cunningly wired time bomb had gone off in my life. Richard See, in his army uniform, had come into town from Newfoundland. We slept together.
Richard took me to the screen porch of his parents’ little house. He was sad, silly, resigned, full of stamina and imagination. You’d have thought he was going to the dentist; you’d have thought he was in a funhouse. Later in the night, I lay awake and watched him grind his teeth in his sleep. His skin was golden and glossy. You could say my heart went out to him, and more or less stayed there. Forty years later, I’m going to break down and say I was hopelessly in love.
A week or so after that my period was late. Reflexively, I adopted the hard-boiled stance I’d always taken with Dick Jones when my period was late: yes, you can marry me as a gesture of good faith. But if you don’t, and there really is a kid inside this stomach of mine, you’ll never see it—or me—again. Because if Richard had gotten his feelings hurt by life, I felt pretty strongly that life had insulted me, time and time again. I was enraged at all of them—everybody: my forever-bitching mother, my grotesque stepfather, my hardworking stepmother, even my happy-go-lucky dad. I was scandalized at Dick Jones and his concealed first marriage. And now just the thought that sensitive, alienated Richard See might let me down sent me into a fit.
The fifties were the days of the horrendous illegal abortion: you took the bus to Tijuana and came back on it, drenched in blood. My friend Teresa had suffered through it. (Her drummer had let her down in a big way.) My friend Susie had gone for an abortion, gotten up on a filthy table, got right back down again, had the baby, given it up for adoption. When I’d gone to a doctor for a diaphragm, he’d asked for a wedding ring (or license), and then told me that diaphragms caused cancer. Half the waitresses at Van de Kamp’s were always taking quinine or castor oil to make their periods show up, or soaking in three-hour, boiling-hot baths, or all of these at once. And my period was late.
Richard thought about it. Just the idea that he would have to think about marrying me made me furious. And he was just as angry, trapped as much as I was. We were living our life in a stupid cliché. But through January and February of 1954 we made up our minds: we would get married and I would follow him to Newfoundland. Marliss and Joan would go to Paris alone. When Richard got out of the service, we’d join them in France instead of going home.
Until the day I left him five years later, Richard would never say he loved me. Two people can play emotional hardball, you know! He would study to be an anthropologist. He didn’t, at that time, he said, believe in such a thing as love, except when it came to that Chinese aunt.
So why did we get married? Because, back in high school, the first day he drove me home from school, I said that my favorite movie star was Anna May Wong, and he said he’d played poker with that lovely lady only the week before. Or because his father, like his grandfather, had married a cute Caucasian girl, and here I came, fitting that tailormade description. Or because my period was a few days late. Or because his parents’ bungalow was poorer than anything I’d lived in but filled with literally priceless artifacts. His family had culture and beauty and elegance. I’d be learning amazing stuff if I married Richard See.
Surely a powerful reason for Richard to get married was free, guaranteed sex, the bargaining chip for many women in those days. Newfoundland was the end of the earth. It gets lonely at the end of the earth. I could say I got married because UCLA was huge and cold. I had the sinking sense that my first two years in college added up to nothing. You could say I grabbed sweet Richard like a drowner grabs a raft. And drowning Richard grabbed me.
But very early on, when Richard was a college kid hanging around John Marshall High trying to pick up a date, he’d given me some throwaway information along with his family history. He’d already been arrested for drunk-in-auto. In fact, he would prove to be a riproaring, unending, absolutely awful and unpredictable drunk, following that strangest of all patterns—just a wonderful guy when he was sober, and a monster when he wasn’t. A year or so into our marriage I’d wail to myself, or to anyone who would listen, “Why didn’t I pay attention when he said he’d been arrested?”
I believe I was looking to explode. What a life I’d had! People had let me down! My fuse was burning right along and I needed someone to blow up at. Who better than a drunk, like my stepfather, who burned my baby pictures, or my mother, who took naps in her dinner plate and beat her children until her arms were tired?
So Richard and I got married at the Unitarian Church, where the FBI photographed all the “Communists” going in and out and we were exhorted, during the ceremony, never to cross a picket line. (A vow I’ve kept to this day.) My bridesmaids were Joan and Marliss. Richard’s groomsmen were his uncle and close friend Cheun and another friend, Allan, both Chinese. Wynn turned up in a very low-cut satin suit: the guys were entranced. My mother showed, alone and bats in a badly cut muskrat stole. My father looked good. In the pictures, Richard and I look terrified and young.
Also at the banquet: My mother, Stella and Eddy See, my dad, Richard and me. Dad’s still giving Mom the eye.
The morning after our wedding night, Richard woke me—perhaps joking—with these words: “Get out of bed and make me some breakfast, lard ass!” We were in a honeymoon beach bungalow and I did, I made him some breakfast. I weighed 110 pounds at the time. Fury came down on me and didn’t let up for five years.
This was the dynamic of drink that we followed. In Newfoundland, where Richard still had six months to stay in the army, in a one-road town by an angry dark sea, we rented a room in a houseful of illiterate, drunken, scurvy-and-TB ridden Irish folks named Kelly. In 1954, they thought we were still fighting the Germans. We kept warm with a wooden stove. We used an outhouse in back and kept a slop bucket in the bedroom. In the morning, I’d toss the contents of the bucket into the stream that ran in front of the Kelly house. Richard would sneak off base to see me; I would sneak on base to see him—dressed as a Newfie, “an all-’round Newfoundlander,” since army dependents weren’t allowed.
We’d spend many nights at the enlisted men’s bar. The music was Western: “I Gave My Wedding Dress A-Way” a big favorite. I danced and stayed up until I couldn’t do it anymore and then took a cab home through wilderness and snow to our room in the Kelly house. Back at the base, Richard would be vomiting, flailing, carrying on.
When the commanding officer finally relented and Richard could legally come
off base to see me, we would have his friends—young army guys—over for dinner. At our first “dinner party,” Richard drank so much that he ended up in a ball, moaning in a corner, his hands covering his head as if he were fending off a beating. His friends left; I got Richard into bed (a mattress stuffed with old nylon stockings). I lay there in a helpless rage—because by this time I really was pregnant, and there wasn’t a bathtub to take a hot bath in, and no quinine, and by God, I was married, this was it; I’d picked the guy and this was going to be my life (and my mother’s words rang in my head: you’ve got to take shit, take shit, take shit in this world!).
The next morning Richard was still holding his head. “I think maybe I’ll go in and see if I need glasses,” he said wanly.
“Yeah, don’t you think a hangover might be a better diagnosis?” I may or may have not said, as I hauled the pee bucket on out through the snow. But later that day a phone call came to the village and made its way through the farmhouses to ours—Richard was in the hospital with spinal meningitis. He sat up in bed with his horrible headache, imploring me and his friends to roll him some cold beer across the floor, since we weren’t allowed to go in the room, and he wasn’t allowed to drink. We did. We rolled them right on in.
A few weeks later he was up and around again, working as one of the world’s least efficient clerk-typist while I hung out in the Kellys’ kitchen watching with horror as they’d take a diaper off a tot called Baby Clayton, give the diaper a businesslike shake, and, without even rinsing it out, sling it over an indoor clothesline to dry. I watched as Clayton, in one of his foul diapers and nothing else, opened the kitchen door and marched out into a blizzard. “Aren’t you going after him?” I asked, and his grandma, a sweet woman named Bride who felt sorry for me, would say, “Ah, nah. Clayton can take care of himself.”