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

by See, Carolyn

  Then we were home and I was alone with Lisa and Clara in our house. I had actually thrown Tom out, put what was left of his clothes in two paper bags and told him to leave. I fed the kids lentils and instant hot cereal and black-eyed peas and Italian sausage and polenta. I loved polenta because you could look in the refrigerator and see it any time. Tom, by now out of the house and into a place of his own, was paying a hundred a month in child support. And I was making some money, writing for TV Guide and Holiday and New West. Each check, when it came, was enchanted money. There was never enough, but what there was belonged to me and the kids.

  Lisa and Clara were having a hard time, I knew it, but it was rowdy, different from the tomb-hard times I remembered. I picked up a part-time job testifying in pornography trials. I went out with the defense lawyer. He had a nice disposition and looked like Sidney Greenstreet. The kids developed a tolerant exasperation that would last them eight years. Sometimes it wasn’t that tolerant. But listen! The boat was sinking! Most mornings I woke up and wondered: will this be the day I go on welfare? But it never was the day.

  I went out with an ex-priest who wore red gabardine slacks. Tom ran up the hill to check him out and ran down again without saying hello. I went out with a Pentagon colonel, who said he was going to bring lunch—which to me was wine and cheese, but to him was Coke and Twinkies. I never forgave him. We needed protein over at this house! I went out with (or had up to lunch) the brother of a famous celebrity who told me that his chief erotic thrill in life was exposing himself. I couldn’t remember anymore what it was to be a regular person.

  My friend Joan was, of course, divorced, with three children. My friend Judy had dumped her husband, left him and the kids to run off with a lawyer who promptly dumped her to run off with an eighteen-year-old who liked to drape her naked body in the American flag.

  During this period I got an assignment to do a profile for TV Guide on Walter Huston, the old guy from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He told me that if you put all the Jews and niggers and Communists on one boat and then sank that boat, this would be a better world. When he disappeared into his trailer on the set a camera-boom operator told me that, yes, the guy was always like that. As I left, the old actor came up to me. “Sister, there’s just one thing I don’t want you to say.”

  I waited, my heart sinking. “Don’t mention that I’ve got emphysema!”

  The camera-boom operator called me a few times and then asked me out. The night after my last acid trip we went to an excellent French restaurant, where I had my first decent meal in months.

  When he wasn’t eating, Harvard Gordon talked all the time. When he wasn’t eating and talking he was listening, in restaurants, or around the house. Everything struck him funny. He treated my girls with brusque cheerfulness, and they decided they liked him. We went through an Indian-food phase, all of us together, eating so much Indian food that our sweat smelled like curry. We went through a water-pistol phase, secreting water pistols around the house, soaking ourselves and soaking the furniture, screaming, roaring. One Sunday afternoon when Lisa, Clara, and I sat on our soaked couch, exhausted, Harvard came around the corner with the garden hose, turned on full blast.

  Once, when I was worrying about money, he wrote me a $1,000 check, which I tore up, but never forgot the gesture. He gave me bracelets and a velvet cloak, and night after night after night, the four of us went out for dinner except when the two of us went out to dinner or Harvard cooked.

  Harvard Gordon and me in the seventies. “Eat, drink, and be merry” would be the best way to describe Harvard.

  Harvard was chunky—how could he not be, with all that eating? He wore dumpy khakis and tweeds, and a golf hat. His preferred mode of speech was the crazed monologue—usually about kinky sex at whatever set he was working on. He loved dumb stories, about how he used to surf in Hawaii, swim out with his buddies, tread water, and look into hotel windows where honeymooners, convinced there was nothing out the window except the sea, would outdo each other showing off in acrobatic sexual acts. Harvard and his surfing pals would laugh so hard they almost drowned. Or they would climb trees in Hawaiian parks, watch American sailors making out with their girlfriends, and laugh so hard they’d fall out of the trees.

  Harvard would get a yearning for Armenian food, and for weeks at a time we’d have nothing around the house but basturma and lamogen—Armenian pizza and cured beef—and all the red wine you could pour down. He yearned to see Paris, and took me to find the perfect meal. I got so homesick for Lisa and Clara, I cried. The next year he took me and Lisa. We got so homesick for Clara we cried.

  When Tom wasn’t juggling his romantic life, he’d run up the path and circle the house and run down again, just checking. He’d still phone me ten times a day to remind me of my character flaws, one time calling me up to say, “Yeah? What do you want?” before he got flustered and hung up.

  “You’re always doing, you’re never being!” he raved at me once during this period. “Why don’t you do what Jackie Kennedy did, just be!” And another time, “You think you’re the sun and I’m the moon, and you want to burn me to death, make me a wasteland!” And while Harvard and I stuck to good red wine, Tom came to one of Clara’s birthday parties wearing a butterfly appliquéd directly to the crotch of his jeans and opined that “mescaline was a great teacher.”

  The second Christmas after Tom left, our family decided to rent a vacation chalet in Big Bear—a lake in the mountains that divide the suburbs of Los Angeles from the Mojave Desert. Leaving home for the holidays was a custom we’d follow for years. The first Christmas after Tom left, when he’d come up to be with us in Topanga Canyon, had been too heartbreaking.

  For this one, Tom would be with us for Christmas Eve afternoon, then peel on out to pursue his social life. He was two-timing his girlfriend, and he kept me up-to-date on every deception. But the rest of us would be there. The “family” included my mother, Rose and Tony (he forgave her after the sweater incident), Lisa, Clara, Harvard in his golf hat, and me.

  We put up the tree. Mother picked a bedroom and unpacked. We ate a buffet of cold things. Mother began to hit the Hill and Hill Blend. Harvard and I built a fire and we turned on the Christmas-tree lights. It was Christmas, for God’s sake! We—Lisa, Clara, Rose, me—crowded into the little rustic kitchen, cleaning up. Rose was beginning to freak. She was scared to death of Mother. I put out some milk and cookies on the kitchen table. Clara was so little that her chin just hit the rim. She wore a pink trundle bundle, a little sleeping bag she could walk around in. Mother appeared in the door, as threatening as an armored car.

  Rose began to shake. “Are you putting out those cookies for Santa Claus?” she asked me brightly.

  Mother blinked in the light, then snarled, “There isn’t any Santa Claus!”

  “There is too, there is, there is!” Rose and I said, as Clara began to sob and Lisa sneered. Mother turned around, moved blindly to the door of one of the two bedrooms and disappeared, shutting the door behind her.

  What was there to do?

  Rose and Lisa began to giggle, nervously. Out in the living room, Tony opened up a daybed; Rose snuggled beside him. Lisa (who had been sewing and getting ready for this holiday for months) calmed Clara down. We hung up stockings. Harvard waited until Clara was asleep, her thumb in her mouth, her head on somebody’s lap, and then began a series of pointless, lighthearted stories about blow jobs on different sets in Hollywood. Rose and Tony rolled some joints.

  Then the door from the hall of the bedroom wing opened. A draught of freezing cold air blew in on us. We stopped talking. Dead silence. What’s going on? Is she coming in or going out? Or what?

  Flapping and snapping, a sheet floated out far into the living room, hung there, dropped slowly to the floor.

  We stared into the dark doorway. Snap! Another sheet twanged out from the doorway, hung like a ghost in the middle of the room, then slipped down in collapse.

  There were two twin beds to each bedroom,
so eight sheets would zing out and into our decorated Christmas Eve. The assembled group included a child of four, a beautiful young girl of fourteen, a newly single mother in her middle thirties, her sister, who would be twenty on her next birthday, and two gentlemen friends, one a man who worked for the phone company (and took night classes in anthropology), the other the son of an Armenian doctor, a Stanford graduate who’d decided to spend his adult life surfing, traveling, and checking out the fine restaurants of the world. The lakeside chalet they were in was made for family holidays.

  —

  Those sheets flew out (carrying with them Kate Daly’s heartfelt reminder that “you’ve got to take shit! Take shit! Take shit!”) The gentlemen must have reflected upon the circumstances that brought them to this place. The adult sisters and the adolescent silently got their defenses in order for whatever would happen next. The toddler, with God’s help, snoozed through it all. But I want to take a time out. Time Out! I want to look at it all again.

  —

  What’s the pact here? What are the explanations, the expectations? The people in this living room are all pretty nice. They haven’t committed any crimes. Even the woman who is slinging the sheets has worked hard for most of her life, nursed her dying mother, withstood divorce and widowhood, and has a devoted circle of friends. Somewhere out there, maybe even in the vacation chalet next door, families unself-consciously gather around a piano and sing carols. Grandmothers dandle children on their knees. Women gather in back bedrooms and gossip. Men kick back and watch sports events, or they sit at the kitchen table sorting out flies and lines, getting ready to rise at dawn, to go out and fish on the lake. In some houses in America (not just in situation comedies, not just in television commercials) people are reasonably happy.

  Where is the division here? It doesn’t have to do with a belief in God. As Irish Catholics, we were always ending up at a midnight mass. Our earlier Christmas stories have to do with poor Uncle Bob deliberately disregarding instructions for everybody taking communion to go up the center aisle and return by the side aisles. Drunk and terribly dignified, he goes up the side aisle and returns by the center aisle, while Aunt Helen sobs and my mother commiserates in a voice that can be heard by all.

  Or Tom Sturak sits in at midnight mass in Victorville, where an Eastern European priest is telling a Christmas story: in an elementary school in Bucharest a Communist teacher is making his sixth graders stand up one by one and renounce the Lord Jesus Christ. (Why he would do that instead of tackling beginning algebra is a real question, and Tom, who’s had too much to drink, loudly addresses the question: “Why would anyone do that?”) But one student won’t renounce the Lord. He just doesn’t feel like it. The Communist teacher taunts the kid. “If you believe in the Lord so much, why don’t you ask him to come in the door right now?” Of course, in sails Jesus. “And that teacher,” the Eastern European priest intones in barely understandable English, “is in an insane asylum today!” Tom Sturak calls out, “My God! Wouldn’t you be too?” The congregation titters, my mother sobs, my aunt commiserates, and the mass goes on. So, no. It isn’t religion that separates us from the happy few out there.

  Is it politics? In my own lifetime the American middle class has taken some awful knocks. America is destroying itself. More specifically, America’s middle and working classes are destroying themselves, with a little help from—could it be those Republicans over at the golf course?

  We came from England and Ireland—mother countries. But mothers don’t always have the best interests of their children at heart. Britain’s Poor Laws weren’t designed to help the poor, but to keep them under control. Thomas Carlyle had a plan for them: he wanted to harass them to death. Some people will do anything to keep up their country-club membership.

  Karl Marx opined that “Religion is the opium of the people.” Could he have overlooked the obvious: Opium is the opium of the people? Alcohol is the opium of the people? You can’t engineer a revolution with a hangover. You’re lucky to keep down a breakfast, lucky to get the laundry done, lucky to show up for work.

  If I were a Republican on a golf course, I’d want a working class that was efficient but subdued, hardworking but depressed. I’d want them to have a low energy level. If my country was involved in a series of Asian wars during the twentieth century, I’d remember the curse and the cash crop of Asia, and I’m not talking about rice.

  My sister Rose, a few years further into this story, will get turned on to heroin, not in a low dive in Europe, but at a joyful end-of-the-Vietnam-War party on the north shore of Oahu. “All the boys were coming home, and their duffle bags were stuffed with the very best Asian heroin!”

  Couldn’t the working class just say no to heroin, gin, Hill and Hill Blend? Maybe. But let’s consider the woman snapping sheets out into the living room of the rented vacation chalet on the shore of Big Bear Lake. Or the unknown grandfather tipping forward to die in the snowdrift. Or that grandmother going into the bathroom late at night, pushing the barrel of a gun into her mouth. Let’s consider the deceived wife, rolling around in weeds clutching a tequila bottle, screaming you fool! you fool! If that stuff is what you think of as life, how can you give up drugs and drink? If Uncle Bob doesn’t set himself on fire on Thanksgiving, how do we know it’s Thanksgiving?

  I hope that some day a scholar will do a study—not just a biography—of the Kennedy family. They had enough money for the yachts and the house and the universities and the country clubs. But they couldn’t shake the other stuff! The womanizing, the brutal dad, the forever-weeping mom, the son who said “She was never there for me, never!” And the other brother got killed in a hotel kitchen and another brother got drunk and drowned a secretary. (And the guys on the golf links breathed a collective sigh of relief) Because who knows what the working class might do if it really got some education and money and power? It’s already hard enough to get good steady help.

  So, yes. I think that drugs and alcohol in America have a political base. They keep the underclass under.

  Mother has snapped out another couple of sheets. I’m going to suggest two more aspects to this … thing that envelops America. Alcoholics and drug addicts are depressed. Now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, we’re just beginning to understand depression (although my mother, even before her divorce, would spend whole days in her back bedroom sobbing, tugging at her hair, convinced that her head was in a vise). My father, in the last five years of his life, said that flowers grew everywhere but in his yard. Tom Sturak spent hours lamenting that he was “too little and too late.” Richard See was convinced that he was “only smart enough to know how dumb he was.” Many times, especially in the set of months after the sheet-Christmas, I had to think: what’s the use? What’s the point? What difference does any of it make?

  Scientists say rather primly that “alcohol is a depressant.” They measure blood levels and God knows what all, but—forgive me—might they not be putting the cart before the horse? Alcoholics are depressed. And maybe that’s why they drink alcohol? Why they snort cocaine? Why they smoke dope? Why they shoot heroin?

  Tom Sturak before acid.

  Tom Sturak after.

  And what if this happens? What if depressives clan together in a series of genetic secret handshakes, so that depressed men meet depressed women and they breed depressed children and so on, in perpetuity?

  Depressives think they’re smarter than their compatriots. That’s why they struggle with scholarly papers on Hemingway, while their happy classmates take engineering classes and don’t even worry about the atom bomb. They pay off their mortgages, invest wisely, coach Little League teams, sing in the choir, and look around for good country clubs. (And maybe a few of them once in a while do slide off into the abyss, hit the rehab clinic, perish from AIDS.)

  Drugs and drink deaden the disappointments of American life. In some countries—let’s say the Netherlands—a house painter never entertains the thought of a lovely home, money in the bank, a thr
iving career, a chance at transcendent love—the whole American kit and caboodle. If he has a few beers, he just has a few beers. In America (I see the fifth and sixth sheets snapping now, and I remember there are only eight sheets back there, two to each bed, two beds to a room) the people in trailer parks drink, the kids in the slums do crack cocaine, the wannabe rock musicians shoot heroin, the sobbing wife cracks open the Southern Comfort, the mail-order merchant hides his scotch in a desk drawer. Because there was supposed to be more to it than this. There really was.

  Can it be that the system is totally rigged? That when they repealed Prohibition, they did it for tax purposes? That California’s biggest cash crop, marijuana, is there for a reason? That kids are killing each other in unspeakable slums so that the guys on the golf course don’t have to be bothered? Has America become the old country again, and all in a few hundred years? Is the American Dream, to put it bluntly, nothing more than a sham and a crock? Oh, no no no no no. That can’t be right! And so the merchant opens up his scotch, the hippie shuts her eyes and holds out her arm for a hit, the divorced novelist rummages through the cupboards for the Cinzano, and the camera-boom operator puts another case of twenty-year-old burgundy into a temperature-controlled bin. The disappointed woman in the bedroom wing of the Big Bear chalet takes a hard slug of Hill and Hill Blend straight from the bottle, makes a terrible face, and strips down the last twin bed in the icy bedroom. She bundles one sheet under her left arm and tucks up the other in her right. She knows how to snap a sheet, she’s been doing it forever! She snaps first one and then the other, taking time to note the sheep-looks on her family’s sheep-faces. There’s nothing she can say to them about the tragedy of her life, and so she snaps the sheets.