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

by See, Carolyn

  I ended up down at Marina’s one afternoon around four, jittery with nerves. I’d skipped lunch because some of the worry about peyote nausea had rubbed off on acid. I had some Thorazine with me, because that was supposed to be the way to bring you down from a bad trip. I’d be spending the night with Marina: she’d drive me home in the morning. The afternoon sun came in through green leaves, making lacy patterns on the wall. She smiled, gave me a piece of paper to chew, and then turned around to her desk to do some studying. She could be disconcerting sometimes. After about fifteen minutes, I felt a scrabbly feeling in my chest.

  “That happens,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.” The next thing I noticed was that the refrigerator—an old-fashioned one up on four spindly legs that she kept in the living room next to her desk—was alive. It had been watching me all along. It was sleepy, and it yawned. A wave of unbearable happiness washed over me.

  The second most boring thing in the world after people bending your ear about dreams is people bending your ear about their acid trips. Nevertheless! I saw immediately that everything, not just the refrigerator, was alive. The chair I sat in was holding me up, with great consideration. The trees outside Marina’s open door waved and said hello. The bedspread on the single bed next to the wooden wall stretched and wrinkled and said hi.

  Marina, without saying anything, brought me a saucer of lavender and yellow baby chrysanthemums. Each petal on each chrysanthemum was a little open mouth, opening and closing and saying hello! Marina had sliced up a raw mushroom, I put a slice in my mouth. When Christ said: “This is my body, this is my blood,” he didn’t mean just bread and wine, he meant all, all, all of life was the same body, the same blood. The mushroom was pale and alive—it had the skin, the feel, of a perfect teenaged girl. The universe was one, and alive, and sentient—very smart and very funny.

  I saw the walls breathing, shallowly and quietly. After a while—and I saw that time was an illusion, that we were spinning in eternity —Marina suggested that I might like to lie down. It was getting dark, and I did. Marina put on the Beatles: “Revolver” had just come out. And after straining and straining all through the fifties to hear the chord changes underneath the hectic flutterings of Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Charlie Parker, now, effortlessly—and with such joy!—I heard every single note, and the breaths of those sweet boys as they inhaled, and sang a line, inhaled and sang a line. I put out my hand to the wall, the breathing wood, and felt it was not solid, that nothing in the universe was solid.

  If I can’t feel that right now, it’s because my senses are too dull. I can remember it, though, and I date that evening and night to the most important personal discovery in my own life: that I wasn’t a desperately unhappy person faking cheer in an abominable world, I was part of a wide, free, joyous universe.

  For the rest of the evening, I closed my eyes and listened. The world was asthmatic. It didn’t just breathe, it snorted and wheezed and muttered and hummed. At one point, Marina lit a candle. That fire went back to the first fire any man ever made, and Marina’s house was the first shelter, and Marina the first wisewoman. Around midnight, I felt like getting up and having some tea. Things were calming down. Except once I looked at my dear friend and saw her face two ways at once: full face and profile, and thought, Picasso, big deal! He only painted what he saw!

  I went to sleep and woke with that extraordinary feeling, that sense that someone has sent your flesh out to the laundry and taken the opportunity to scrub down your bones until they’re buffed to a gleaming shine. And everything everyone said was part of the Big Plan for a week or so, in the same way that in the last weeks of writing a novel the whole world decides to finish it up for you, so that waitresses, mechanics, the people in the booth next to you at the restaurant, all conspire to give you chunks of dialogue, so that all you have to do is take down the dictation …

  Until it’s over, and you dull down again, but you still remember. And no matter how much you get stuck in grocery shopping or gassing up the car, you know that other world, the Big-Plan World, is still out there.

  In October of 1966, Tom Sturak dropped acid with his best friend Jim Andrews and Jim’s longtime girlfriend, Solveig. Tom still wasn’t ready for us to do it together. There were devils in his head, he said, and I—remembering our hard days in Mazatlán—was inclined to agree with him. Tom was ordinarily taciturn and sometimes (from my point of view) given to tantrums, and, even worse, bouts of despair. Tom—my Tom, who’d offed that rattlesnake with a single whack of a eucalyptus branch—Tom laughed for two hours and a half, laughed so long and so hard and so loud and so sincerely that he pulled a muscle in his chest from laughing. Even after that he kept on smiling, and when he came home he wore a scrubbed, beaming look. Blissed out. All his fear had been for nothing. The devils he’d been scared of all his life—apparations that had turned up in his dad and his uncle—weren’t there, in him. All he’d experienced was ecstasy.

  The question then became, how do you take that ecstasy and match it to the rest of the world? It was a question that occupied us a lot. Marina seemed to have done it, but not really, her personal life was always about some stormy romance that didn’t pan out.

  Then, in the early spring of 1967, Rose, who was sixteen and still toughing it out in Victorville with our mother, called me, gasping and crying. “I can’t take it anymore, I can’t stay here any longer. Isn’t there something you can do? Can’t you get me out of here?” I thought of how my dad had helped me when I was the same age. I couldn’t ask Rose to live with us, but my friend Judy found her a job as an au pair girl, and I enrolled her in high school, and she stayed at our house several nights a week. She slept out on that balcony where huge black spiders built their webs, and Tom, to amuse her, would take his trusty rifle and blow those spiders to smithereens, while Rose squealed. At least she was away from Mother, but what would become of her? What would the wide world do to her? I’d driven up to Victorville, packed her up, gotten her out, brought her to LA, but now I felt my imagination failing. I could barely help myself and my own children. How could I help Rose?

  Lisa would be graduating from elementary school (where the world, in Topanga, was cool and groovy and endlessly forgiving) and going to be bused for an hour every day down to large schools in the San Fernando Valley, a part of the world (to our minds) unregenerately materialistic and square. Clara was only two, and had endless energy. At around three in the afternoon on an ordinary Wednesday, with Clara crabby and Tom due home from the RAND Corporation, and Rose calling from somewhere needing a ride, where was the ecstasy?

  And it wasn’t like we were the total acidheads who lived in the rest of the Canyon, the women who went naked under flimsy pieces of net (and made my father so happy when he visited), or the man dressed in white who sang mantras in the Topanga Center parking lot (“Oh, how beautiful is Topanga in the morning!”) and the dogs around him heard that one long piping note and hit it right along with him, recreating the music of the universe—only the dogs and the man were sometimes pretty flat. It wasn’t like we were the Canyon guy named Mo, a short guy with the biggest dick in Christendom, and all the Canyon housewives knew it, because when we carpooled kids home to the commune where he lived, there Mo would be, stark naked, fit and tan, with his genitalia hanging down to his knees, flipping absently at his dick, asking casually, “Does this hang you up? This doesn’t hang you up, does it?”

  Actually, it did hang us up. We were caught between worlds. Every night on the news we’d watch the awful reality of the Vietnam War. In one demonstration in front of the Century City Hotel, Tom and I stood in the first row of demonstrators while nervous soldiers pointed guns straight at us. Tom forgot what he knew about laughing and began to rant: “Go ahead asshole, pussy, pull the trigger!” I, wearing a JoAnn Lopez hippie dress and carrying a bouquet of homegrown marguerites, kept saying, “You don’t want to do this,” and, as was the custom of the day, stuck flowers in the guns, stem end first.

  Meanwhile, Chr
istmas was coming. That meant my mother and Rose together again in horrid acrimony, Tom’s mother and father and aunt and uncle, my dad and Lynda, a few miscellaneous cousins, all the presents and the tree and the turkey—and driving around from place to place, since none of those people could actually stand to be in the same room together. My mother had been out of her mind with rage at Rose since she had left, and kept saying on the phone, “Is she on top?” (meaning “pot”). Several winter holidays compress in my mind, one at which we strove mightily to do the family thing. Sometimes it was close to what we dreamed of: a Thanksgiving in our cabin with about forty people, including giggling young Rose and my amiable dad, who rolled enormous joints and passed them down through the long dark room that was packed with laughing people, and Marina and I got hung up on making creamed onions that would be white on one side and brown on the other, the two of us spending the shady afternoon sautéing those silly vegetables in the darkest sherry we could find, but only on one side!

  Tom and me on our first day in Topanga Canyon. We’ve found our perfect home.

  My dad, loving the sixties, and his sixties, in Topanga. (He had another wife now, Lynda Laws.)

  The gap between the true vision of what we knew life was, or could be, and the life we seemed to find ourselves in grew wider. We talked about how we could make our daily lives happier. One night, up in our pretty little house, I took it on myself to chaperone my friend Joan from junior high school on her first acid trip. Her marriage had gone badly. She’d been raising three kids alone as a single woman. I’d known her since the seventh grade; knew her as intelligent and cheerful, if a little reckless in her love life. Hell, I’d been to Paris with her when we were all in our twenties, and Richard See and I had observed jealously as she’d romanced half of France. So I thought: this will be a lead-pipe cinch. This will be swell.

  But she said, “Don’t you see it?” and began to shiver with terror. No Thorazine would help, no music would help. “No,” she kept saying. “No, I have to see this. They want me to see this.” I sat up all night with her while she lay on the couch and cried, spending the night with the Devil.

  The next morning I took her to a flower nursery, teeming with beautiful flowers. Joan cried again, and the attendant asked her what was wrong. “All of these things,” she told him, “all of these things that are so beautiful, they’re all going to die.”

  Acid truth. The scrubbed kid in the seventh grade, the madcap in Paris who picked up Africans with tribal markings, had been a beautifully put together fiction. The weeping woman who saw horror was the truth.

  We weren’t acid freaks. Far from it. We fretted over every trip. Marina and I did it together one hot summer afternoon, and as the sun went down we saw how God turns off the lights. I threw some leftovers down the hill and Marina said, “That’s it. Feed the hill and the hill will feed you.” I believed it, I still believe it, and I wrote a novel off it. Marina, that day, striding into the chaparral, looked for a vision. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll find a snake?” I asked her, every word a syllable pounding with care. “I already have,” she answered. “It didn’t mean me any harm at all.”

  So it was inevitable that one afternoon Tom and I took Clara and Lisa off to a babysitter, that we cleaned up the house and went ahead and did it—took acid together. I believe we felt we’d each passed a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Our love was stronger than our bad temper. I was worried about a particular paperback book, that it wasn’t put away, but soon its covers began to flutter and breathe and its paper contained all of knowledge, and printing itself was so beautiful, blah blah blah.

  We went outdoors, the stiff sides of the Canyon holding us up, and looked far, far into the sky. There were some very big clouds up there and so we went back into the house, just to be on the safe side. Tom was so beautiful! He had that wonderful spun-gold hair and his athlete’s body, and he’d begun to laugh again—not the lung-wrenching gulps of his first trip but constant delighted giggling. It got darker and we sat in candlelight holding hands. Tom had perfect white, even teeth and as he laughed the candlelight struck sparks off them that fell down to his chest.

  We had a snack—marinated artichokes and mushrooms again—and realized that Triscuits, of all things in the sentient universe, were not alive. They’d been processed to death and Tom wouldn’t touch them, but I figured, heck, they still tasted pretty good! We went back to the couch and then Tom turned to me, smiling. “Well,” he said, in a friendly way, “I guess it’s time to do it!” We kissed with true affection, and then we kissed some more, and then we got our clothes off. But it just wasn’t going to happen. After a while we stopped trying and went back to listening to music.

  A couple of days later we wondered out loud why we hadn’t been able to make love. “I don’t know,” Tom said, a little ungallantly, “but that was about the closest to a bad trip I’ve ever had! No offense.”

  About a year later I “found out” about his other woman. I gave Tom an ultimatum. Her or me! He couldn’t make up his mind. God, it felt awful! The naked man from the commune came up and showed me his dick again. Was this what my life was going to be like? But Mo gave me good advice: “You have a nice life. You’ve got your kids, your friends, your work, you’ve just lost one component.” Wow, Mo, that’s some component!

  Marina came over and spent a few nights. She stayed up all night, working. No acid this time. People brought over casseroles. I went around like a madwoman asking rhetorical questions: “What was it? What happened? It’s like I have a mark on my back!” (What pathetic Freudian displacement.) It was more like we both took a look at the “mark” on daily life. Tom must have thought, if I can only get out of this past! If I can only get rid of this unbecoming present! If I can only strip down like Mo, then I can feel the sweet breeze on my bare skin, I can have some ecstasy. (Not the drug, which wasn’t even invented yet, but genuine ecstasy!)

  Tom got his picture taken. His mother had been after him to get a haircut, so of course he’d let it grow to a wild frizzy patch of stuff that stuck out eight inches on every side of his head. He put on a JoAnn Lopez shirt with ribbons hanging off all over it, stuck his tongue out, and sent the photo to his mother. This is the truth, Ma! This is what I am. This is the acid truth!

  I took a look around. I could barely drive a car. I couldn’t write a check. I looked at my two scared kids. I got a phone call from a writer whose face had been deformed in World War II. “I heard about your separation,” he said. “Why don’t you go to Addis Ababa? The air is wonderful there in Addis. You won’t find any fresher air on earth.”

  Eight months after Tom first left, Rose and I took acid together for one last time.

  I was a wreck. I thought my life was finished. “Thirty-five years old and divorced twice” rang in my ears and in my soul. Rose had managed to graduate from high school, and still came up to the house all the time. She’d kept the job as an au pair girl. After she graduated, she left the little kids she was taking care of, got a job, found a place in a bungalow court, and with the help of a couple of girlfriends and my daughter Lisa, painted every last pastel inch of it, even using mascara brushes to get to those tiny corners no paintbrush can reach. When the apartment was finished, Rose took one look at it and decided that she couldn’t live there, not alone. It was way too sad, and she was only eighteen. She dug up a boyfriend startling in his normalcy: Tony, who worked for the phone company, liked to sit on anybody’s couch, including ours, with a six-pack and watch TV. Once, watching a travelogue about the Alps, he uttered the (to us) immortal remark: “Gosh! Who’d ever want to leave Switzerland?” Rose recognized his kindness; appreciated his apartment in Santa Monica Canyon only a few blocks from the beach, but she was bored out of her mind.

  I’d been learning to write twelve-page pieces for magazines—and got them turned down half the time—but I was managing to make a living. I’d watch TV with my children, drinking sweet Cinzano, or—remembering Sylvia Plath—brandy and water. My firs
t business trip to New York was coming up, and I’d gone out and bought a brown linen pantsuit that I thought was the absolute coolest, and perhaps a ticket to a newer, better life.

  Katharine Sturak visiting with her half sister, Clara, in Topanga. Little hippie chicklets.

  Tom came over, as he did once a week, to fix a “healthy” dinner for Lisa and Clara. He paused in his task of grating beets and beet tops together, and braising up a nice batch of kidneys and lamb hearts, to go to the bathroom. Along the way he paused to snoop in my closet. He came out the door holding up my precious new brown linen suit, swinging from its hanger. “All right!” he raved, “Who is he? Why does he keep his clothes in here?” I was depressed. I knew that dressing for success would be forever beyond me.

  That night, on the balcony with Rose, the inside of the house seemed unbearably inviting. The brown-paneled walls made a sweet enclosure. Through the window just behind us, above the table, a big crazy oil painting of Tom Sturak shone in the lamplight. It had been painted by Joan, the tormented woman who’d seen Evil when she dropped acid right in that room, but when she’d done the picture she’d been in a better mood. She’d taken grousing Tom and laid him out on the couch, perched a toy helmet of Clara’s on his head, piled up Clara’s toys around him, and begun to paint. She’d caught him, his blond brows scrunched down over his eyes, his blond mustache safely covering up his lips, his eyelids safely scrunched closed. But she’d caught the ridiculousness of this position too. All those defenses, but for what? Couldn’t he break down and open up his eyes, for crying out loud?