Dreaming : Hard Luck and Good Times in America (9780307807274)

by See, Carolyn

  Tom wore a sappy smile that I’d never seen before, he couldn’t get it off his face. When we went downstairs to check the cave-room that might be his study, he found a little postcard-sized sign in gothic script left by her late husband: Arbeiten und nicht verzweifeln. “Work hard and don’t get depressed.” Wasn’t that it? Work hard and don’t get depressed? We’d found our home. The price was twelve thousand dollars. We borrowed the tiny down payment from every friend we knew.

  All our friends helped us move in over the course of a scorching day in July 1964. I remember someone taking the tram up about midnight, sitting in a rocking chair eating a hamburger, oblivious to the dangers involved. I remember, about one in the morning, sitting down at a dented table with more hamburgers and beer. There were about eight of us left. A chair that went with the table exploded under one of our friends. “This is a stunt house,” he roared, and opened another beer.

  The next day Marina Bokelman, the current girlfriend of Richard, my first husband, telephoned. “He’s broken up with me. I’m going to kill myself if you don’t take me in,” she announced, and we said sure, come on over. We were feeling a little daunted ourselves. When Tom had gone out running, birds swept down on his golden locks to grab good stuff for their nests. The lady had left five layers of rug on her floor, filled with pins and needles. She’d taken her hot plate, but left a hideous couch that her husband had sawed in half, horizontally, he who’d never had a hammer in his hand! Marina came up and we put her to work hammering in planks, unplugging the toilet to get the raw sewage to travel across the patio. Our second night there, Tom went out to buy groceries and didn’t come back for six or seven hours, hopelessly lost in another whole canyon. Marina and I sat, utterly fatigued, and put away a six-pack of beer apiece. It sank right into us, like rain in the desert. Directly across from us was a sheer cliff, the other side of Topanga Canyon, nothing but a majestic wall of dirt and scrub but with as much living presence as a big sleeping dog. It was alive: you could imagine it getting up, stretching, ambling away.

  Marina, in the next day or two, brought up some marijuana. She was intensely meticulous about it, sitting in the tiny kitchen working at the sawn-in-half table, separating seeds from leaves, rolling slim and perfect joints. Tom and I, coated with mud and sweat from working on the house, inhaled with all our might. Marina told us A Hard Day’s Night was opening; we were exhausted but took outdoor showers and went down to Santa Monica, saw it, and saw it twelve more times in the next fifteen days. We began buying Beatles albums. If you turned the sound loud enough the whole house acted as a speaker. The circle of Circle Trail was actually an acoustic bowl.

  Tom’s mother came up and stayed for ten days. She slept on the balcony, outside, but her head was eleven inches from ours. Griped at having no sex for over a week, Tom and I sneaked down to the Volkswagen at the bottom of the tramline, jumped in the back seat, and conceived Clara.

  The Stones came out, after the Beatles. We felt like we owned them. All those friends who’d helped us move felt like they had a stake in our place. Every Sunday afternoon we’d lay out a huge spread in the patio. Tom was still skin diving and we usually ate fish soup, drank quarts of white wine, and smoked until we were utterly placid. We couldn’t believe our luck. Lisa went to school at Topanga Elementary. It was the kind of place where you loved, loved going to PTA meetings because everybody there was cool. When the principal suggested that some of the kids might want to be cutting their hair, the parents picketed.

  Tom had Katharine, his daughter, who could finally spend summer months with us. Along with Katharine, Tom’s mother always came, and the strings of affection tangled almost unbearably. One August day that first summer, the kids were baking out in the patio. Katharine came hotfooting inside, announcing that there was a snake! I looked outside the bathroom window and there it was, a rattler, coiled and fat and dangerous. I got Tom on the phone at the RAND Corporation. He had to come home and kill the snake. He asked for his mother and the next thing I knew she had his shotgun out and was fumbling with shells. “I don’t know if I remember how to load it, dear …”

  I grabbed the phone and screeched that I did the cooking and cleaning and the ironing, but that killing snakes was man’s work! Twenty minutes later he was outside in the patio, fit to be tied, carrying a eucalyptus branch. Yes, he’d do what a man had to do, but if I couldn’t take my place on this earth as a fullblown, genuine adult and learn to kill snakes myself, well there were a few things he had to say to me. At the top of his voice.

  I stood in the bathroom, wedged between the old-fashioned tub and the rust-stained sink, my arms folded across a paint-speckled windowsill that dated back to 1917, and listened as Tom raved for another twenty minutes or so. Behind me, Tom’s mother, Lisa, and Katharine sweated and listened. Eighteen inches away from Tom’s muscled calf, the snake listened too. It hadn’t moved in an hour. “Because if you can’t do something as simple as this,” Tom shouted, and took out the snake with one wonderful eucalyptus hit, “then you don’t deserve to live in Topanga!”

  Afterward, Tom was quite pleased; he cut off the snake’s head and rattles, and hung the skin out to dry on the clothesline. We all ate snake that night. Later, during that same visit, Tom’s mother drank a beer and another one, and then fell forward and cut herself badly. She begged us not to tell Tom, and we didn’t.

  Mary drank like this: nothing for days and days. Then something would bother or frighten her. She’d drink two beers in ten minutes, fall straight forward on her head and bleed. I drank white wine in copious quantities, and tequila. Tom drank on the weekends, and went skin diving. His life itched at him.

  Lisa went to school and watched it all. She had developed quiet sweetness and a wonderful composure.

  Work hard and don’t get depressed! That’s the trick to being an adult, right?

  We worked hard. The day before Clara was born, a Sunday, I pulled weeds along the tram track. Tom went skin diving with a friend. When he came home I was steamed. Who was going to do the work around this place? He yelled so hard … and I yelled back at him—that I got premature contractions and had Clara a month early. The first morning she was home we had to burn a tick off her head. The first week she was home I read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and got a clue. By Clara’s third week, Tom was in love with a girl, Jennifer, at the office—honest, straight-arrow Tom! (I wouldn’t “find out” for three more years.) Lisa welcomed Clara and doted on her with what would become an almost saintly devotion.

  All this mixed bag of stuff seemed OK, because of the Beatles, and the beautiful view in every possible direction from our little house. And every Sunday there were long, lazy daytime parties where we drank and smoked and ate like kings. Clara, as soon as she could walk, got into the black olives; she liked to put one on each finger, walk around with them, eat them, go off in a corner and throw them up, do the whole thing again.

  Somebody always had grass and what a production it was! The transporting, the hiding, the sifting and rolling. The pitiful efforts to grow the stuff! The toilet-flushing! Because—in talk, at least—someone we knew was almost always getting busted by the cops, while somebody else was always locked in the bathroom, trying without success to flush two pounds of feathery dried leaves down a stubborn toilet.

  My father decided that belonging to AA just meant that you didn’t drink. He still went faithfully to AA meetings, but he and Lynda fell in with a raffish dope-smoking crowd, young artists and roustabouts. An artist named Robin, for instance, whose brother, always in the good search for new ways to get high, brewed up a tea from the wild nicotine that grew in his backyard, became paralyzed for three days, unable to move or talk, and lived to tell the tale. My dad always had great dope, and he too gave wonderful parties.

  Some weekends, Tom and the kids and I would drive on down to the sweet house that Daddy and Lynda had bought for a down payment of a mere 250 dollars. They’d be puttering around in their kitchen getting ready for a party. There
would always be chicken and potato salad and a huge jar of marinated vegetables that tasted great when you got stoned. There would be some kind of spiked punch in a big crock that Daddy had painted with sayings like WORK IS THE CURSE OF THE DRINKING CLASSES. (The spigot came out of a set of delicate, explicitly rendered labia.) Dad would roll a set of joints and concoct the punch. It involved soda and very cheap white wine by the gallon. Cribari.

  Around four, folks would drift in, talking about art or the movies that they’d seen. Tom and my dad would lounge and tell jokes.

  The wine punch would slide down and the joints would circulate and the Beatles wheeze on. I remember once, in the middle sixties, leaning against my dad’s living-room wall, looking at a neighbor with a beard. He looked at me. I looked at him. He looked at me. I looked at him. Finally, one of us said, “Would you like to go out to the garage and play some darts?” The other one of us answered: “I don’t believe so.” I think that’s as stoned on marijuana as I ever got.

  My father, at that time, was in his middle sixties, and except for his house, didn’t have a dime. He wrote a weekly column for a local newspaper. He ran a junk shop that he called an antique store. He hadn’t written his great American novel, but he’d successfully escaped his tormented past. He was a man who—at most—would only break even in life, but every Saturday and Sunday he’d look that fact in the face, pare some vegetables to put in his secret marinade. He’d roll some joints, put on his party albums, get out one of his party shirts, survey his own backyard, as big as a postage stamp but a hundred times as pretty, and go for it.

  Tom and I were young adults, with a total of three kids, his, mine, ours. We both had our PhDs. He worked at RAND and I taught extension classes to wealthy, very kind matrons. We had our crazy house—work hard and don’t get depressed!

  Tom had his girlfriend. And my own eyes might have been wandering a bit. But I was beginning to write little short stories, and we had our friends, our Sunday parties, and an unending supply of plain healthy marijuana.

  One night we had a dinner party for six. One couple, anthropologists, old buddies from graduate school, had just come back from the Rif. The Bedouins had been very nice, but Roger had caught malaria and his wife, Terri, had had to sling him over a donkey—head hanging down on one side, feet on the other—and walk him for ten days out of that high, hostile desert. They were insanely glad to be home. Roger had written us long, wistful letters about cold beers when he was out there with his tribe, and tonight he drank about eighty-seven of them.

  Our living room was long and narrow—23 by about 10 feet, the house cut in half lengthwise. We ate at one end, under a bright pink bookcase with one shelf taken out so it could hold our tree of life. We must have eaten either fish soup or chicken-and-sausage stew. We listened to Ravi Shankar. Trees scratched at the windows and raccoons looked in. The place was lit by candles and it glowed. We were stoned out of our minds. When it came time for dessert, I brought out a board with cheese and fruit. Terri started to cry. “It’s just so beautiful,” she said. And it was.

  7. ACID

  Me, blissed out

  I heard about acid for the first time from Wynn, separated now from my dad. I’d pretty much written her off as totally cracked: she’d believed so passionately in Senator Joseph McCarthy, she’d plastered that kitchen with pink cabbage roses, she’d given me The Power of Positive Thinking, along with that silver dollar. My own mother made it a practice to say things that were horrible—but turned out at some level to be true. Wynn’s approach to life was to make statements that were cryptic, oblique, and totally cracked. Then you found yourself in Paris.

  So, at about the time that Wynn told me that Gerald Heard, the English pundit-buddy of Aldous Huxley’s, was “the second most intelligent man in the world,” she also told me that Huxley was taking peyote and getting in closer touch with God.

  Later, Wynn said that there were wonderful experiments going on at UCLA: didn’t we know about them? They had another new drug that put you in direct touch with God. Gerald Heard had been to UCLA. Bill W. himself had gone on over “to see if he could recreate the same mystical experience that led him to create AA, and he could, Penny, he could.”

  I filed it in my mind under T for Totally Cracked.

  I didn’t know about Bill W., but I knew Wynn wasn’t on a first-name basis with Aldous Huxley no matter how often she called him Aldous. And the God that Wynn kept referring to was that Norman Vincent Peale God, the One who would fix your carburetor if you asked him hard enough. If taking a pill or dropping a tab would get me an introduction to Wynn’s God with those rimless spectacles and that smarmy smile, forget it.

  Wynn told me about all the care they took down at UCLA with this new substance—that they had gray walls and gray carpets and gray blinds and gray tables so that when the “psychedelic” experiences came that introduced you to God, they came from your own mind and not from some picture on the wall. Sure, I thought. And the man who put those papers in the pumpkin you’re always talking about was a treasonous Communist just like Harry Truman.

  So we’d heard about these experiments for what seemed like years. Some distinguished gentleman or other was always dropping by UCLA and getting his brain fried in the name of science. (You never heard of women doing it.) What would become the counterculture seemed at first to mimic the culture: white guys made the drugs and took them. Later in the sixties, Tom would come home from the RAND Corporation with many dark stories about how some military assholes were using this great new compound to fry enemy minds.

  When, as teaching assistants, we taught our own freshman comp classes at UCLA, half the papers we got were about getting high. We’d ask students to write about their rooms: they’d get stoned and write about their rooms. We’d ask them for their favorite recipe (perhaps to compile a starving-student cookbook): they’d advise us that if you baked oregano leaves you could get high off that, or let banana skins dry out enough, you could get high off that, or morning-glory seeds, or nasturtiums. One student earned Tom’s particular wrath by writing that you could get high on three-quarters of a cup of nutmeg dissolved in a cup of warm water. “My God!” Tom raved, “you could get high on three-quarters of a cup of dirt dissolved in a cup of water, three-quarters of a cup of anything!”

  Nevertheless, we always had something drying out in our Topanga oven; we were always grinding something into a powder and rolling it up and smoking it, so we were always feeling just a little bit stretched.

  Marina Bokelman, who had helped us so much when we moved into Topanga, came back from an extended trip to the South, where she’d been gathering folk music. She rented a tiny house down by the beach in a swampy patch of land called Topanga Gulch.

  The Gulch checked in at some line below sea level. You approached it from the Pacific Coast Highway and went down a long dirt slope to where about a dozen houses sank into the ground under big tangly capes of morning glory, anise, honeysuckle. For years this damp ground had been the place of the really great parties. Hundreds of UCLA students would come and mill about for forty-eight hours at a time. Gary Merrill, Bette Davis’s husband, showed up once wearing nothing but a sombrero over his penis: He wanted to party, he sobbed, he wanted a good time.

  When Marina settled into her little house, she’d shed a husband and a couple of boyfriends (including Richard), but she’d kept dozens of jars of herbs and ointments. There was always something simmering on the back of her stove, fresh herbs melting down in purified beeswax.

  Marina Bokelman was the strange flower among our friends. She said that her feet were not formed to wear shoes, went without wearing them for five years or so. For five or six years she drank, and matched Richard See drink for drink. She developed a scurvylike rash on her arms and her teeth loosened up in her head as if she were six years old. Then she stopped drinking and that was it. Marina once came to a masquerade party dressed as a gypsy. She’d not only found an authentic eastern European pattern (with more than a dozen secret poc
kets for easy stealing), she’d dyed her face brown—not with makeup or fake suntan stuff, but with stain made from simmered walnut shells and skins: what the gypsies themselves used when they wanted to be darker than usual.

  So when people started smoking pot she naturally always had the best stuff. Her shoebox was always with her—one end holding unseparated leaves, seeds, and twigs, another little plastic bag in the middle holding carefully collected seeds, and down at the other end, next to a couple of packages of Zig-Zags, leaves that had been sifted and caressed to the point that they were as smooth and soft as baby powder. And Marina didn’t worry the way the rest of us did about police. She could slip the whole damn thing into one of her gypsy pockets.

  She hated shampoo and brewed up her own. She hated toothpaste and sometimes she’d pull a toothbrush out of her pocket, roll it around in a pouch of goldenseal she kept dangling from her belt, and start brushing her teeth. She loved to gossip and spin theories. We talked once about a young friend of ours, who, at twenty-one, had dropped out of school and was getting into hard drugs. Marina sententiously announced, “Why, when I was her age …”, realized what she was saying and finished up, “I’d gotten a divorce, clogged up my fallopian tubes, and was a confirmed alcoholic!”

  So when peyote, mescaline, and acid came into our lives it was natural and seemly that it unfold down in the Gulch where Marina had already begun her life’s work as a healer. She just didn’t know it yet.

  When Marina discovered acid, she figured that she might have happened on one of the greatest secrets of the universe. She was strict about it. If any of us were going to drop acid we would do it in her house, with our favorite things around to comfort us. None of us rushed into it. Even though we knew they were lies, part of us believed the stories of people looking into the sun until they were blind, or diving off skyscrapers. Tom said he had devils in his mind he didn’t want to know about, and said if we did it, we shouldn’t do it together. We had the children to think about. I asked Marina if it were true what some people had said, that the symptoms of acid were unbearable. She took her time about answering. “It depends what you mean, ‘unbearable,’ ” she said. “What people may be saying is that this is ‘unbearably beautiful,’ or ‘I’m unbearably happy.’ There aren’t words to describe it. And that’s what they might find unbearable.” Her words and Wynn’s endorsement transected. I decided to do it.