by See, Carolyn
Fuming, Tom ran down our switchback path to check with our neighbors in the Canyon. They confirmed that, yes, there had been a landmark party, and yes, a young woman had gotten the key to the house by saying she was my maid. As mad as only Tom Sturak could get, he ran back up the switchback path. About halfway up, next to a sappy homemade “statue,” a papier-mâché and plaster-of-Paris construct of a guy hitchhiking up the long and tiring trail, Tom encountered Rose, naked under a flowered wrapper, taking a morning stroll, sipping coffee. In his own words, he unleashed a tirade. “I gave it everything I had,” he said now, in the China Palace, “and she wasn’t even scared. She started yelling right back at me! She called me a cocksucker! You could hear it all over the Canyon!”
Tom had thrown them all out. Poor Tom-Tom was so terrified and traumatized by the whole thing that he took the next plane home to Switzerland.
Talk about mixed emotions. Rose had stood up to Tom. What reckless courage! You had to admire it. Except that she’d lied to me, she’d broken into my house, she’d dealt dope out of the house, she’d stashed it there. She had done, in effect, all of the kinds of things that my mother had accused her of. I was furious that Rose had put my job and my children and me in jeopardy, but what made me maddest of all was that somehow she had maneuvered me into a position of agreeing with my mother.
I cut Rose off. She couldn’t come to my house anymore and jeopardize my life. Through all this, she didn’t seem to understand that she’d done anything wrong. I knew as long as she stayed with Ferenç she’d be like this. The thought of heroin also crossed my mind. Because the feeling was, then, that if you did heroin, you’d gone over. You were a different kind of person. There wasn’t any coming back. Of course, from Rose’s point of view, I was the third person in our family—after our mother and Aunt Helen—to betray her.
That was in the early summer of 1972. During the next eighteen or twenty-one years—depending on how I count—I only saw her six times. The first five times crowded into the first two or three years. I visited her once at Sybil Brand Jail. I met her once for breakfast at Nate ’n’ Al’s, a Beverly Hills deli mainly for television comedy writers. My mother was with me. We got there early and went to the women’s room. It was small in there. Another woman looked up from applying her lipstick and said, “Hello, Mother.” Of course, Mother didn’t recognize her. I saw Rose again at Nate ’n’ Al’s with a new boyfriend, Michael, who asked me wistfully, “Do you yell as much as Rose does?” (But Rose looked beautiful and well-dressed and composed and had a new Vidal Sassoon haircut. I, on the other hand, was beginning to fray.) I saw her again in Beverly Hills, with Michael, at the Swiss Café. The maître d’ told me never to bring those people in again. “Don’t worry,” I said with feeling, “I won’t.” The last time I saw Rose was at Loyola Marymount University, where I worked as a nervous assistant professor of English. She’d come to visit, she said, but she was clearly frantic. Nuns and priests strolled past my office as she told me she had a terrible case of genital herpes, could barely walk, and desperately needed twenty-five dollars. I wrote her the check and told her I was too busy for lunch. Rose left, crying.
That would be the last time I’d see her until I caught up with her two decades later in a rehab in East Oakland, smiling and looking unbearably sweet, and then in her own apartment. But we wouldn’t really spend time together until the summer of 1993—on the quiet island of Alameda, in an apartment next to a lagoon, where mother ducks quacked at long strings of ducklings—when we started getting to know each other again. Eighteen to twenty-one years, and for at least fifteen of those we didn’t have clue one about Rose and about her life. She was lost; she was gone.
—
After getting tossed out of the Topanga house, Rose and Ferenç found a place in Silverlake. A week or so later, Ferenç got arrested for smoking a joint out on the street with some friends and went to jail. He promptly got raped and Rose called me in an attempt to get me to put up my house for his bail. I told her she was living in a dream world.
“Well, when he got out he knew there was going to be trouble, so on June 18, 1972, we drove on out to the Calabasas courthouse to get married, to keep him from being deported. It was just my friend Kathy Rosalez, his friend Larry, and me. I knew this had the makings of an adventure. This was getting to be a wild story!
“Then the rest of that summer I must have snapped out of it. I worked at Alice’s Restaurant in Westwood. I made seventy, eighty dollars a night and that’s after I tipped the busboys. We had to wear long scarves and dresses, the whole hippie deal. I saved all that money and told Ferenç that we had to go to Hawaii. I was sick of LA. That would be the fall of ’72. The minute we landed Ferenç went into this depression on me. I guess he felt he was another three thousand miles away from where he wanted to be. But he got over it pretty quick. All he needed was his guitar and people welcomed him anywhere. We got out of Waikiki right away and went to the north shore of Oahu. We stayed there through Christmas, until the money ran out. Then, it was either go home or try to stay there! I was up for trying to stay there.
“We wanted to see Kauai. And that was the high point of my life. We stayed at Taylor’s Camp. And then, you know, the island is round. There’s an eleven-mile stretch where the road ends. We hiked into it. I was crying because I was so exhausted. But when you got there it was the most beautiful place in the world. It was paradise. We put our little tent into a cave. We took our showers under a waterfall. We’d take hikes to places nobody had ever been. You know those hippies, they said the next valley over was the Valley of the Lost Tribe—fair-haired people who had lived there long ago and then just disappeared. You had to swim out and around a cliff to get there, and we thought we were their descendants. We didn’t have any acid, but we got high on mushrooms that grew on cow piles. The minute you got there people would say ‘get up early in the morning and try the mushrooms that grow on the cow piles.’ So you’d get them at dawn and clean them under the waterfall. They tasted horrible but a couple of hours later you were in another world and it was much better than acid, because it was natural.
“You had to bring all your provisions in from Taylor’s Camp, but all you really needed was rice and beans, because there was fish and fruit and everything you needed. But then, in March, when the rains came, it was going to be too dangerous to hike the trail. So we hiked out from Kalalau back to Taylor’s Camp. That was just flat beach, but it had fresh running water. There were a lot of people from New York there, living on food stamps. And all these elaborate tree houses. But I don’t know, you can’t stay forever on the beach! There were times I’d be at the beach and I’d think—there’s nothing here between me and Alaska. And the Stones were coming to Oahu, so we went back over. Now come the life-changing events! Here is where history comes in.
“When Ferenç and I decided to go back to Oahu in the spring of 1973, Nixon was bringing the troops home. The troops are all over Oahu. They are happy! And they’re all bringing their heroin back. So, at a welcome-home party out on the North Shore, that’s the very first time I fixed it. Everybody was doing it. It was as common as passing a joint around. We were living at the North Shore at the time, and we had a very nice place. I was pretty happy in my life. But you know? I just stuck out my arm and closed my eyes and somebody stuck the needle in. I wouldn’t have to stick a needle in my own arm for over two years.
“I still talk about that moment, that first time. I LOVED IT! Other people say they got sick their first time, but that’s probably because they use dirty Mexican stuff. This was pure Asian. It was like the missing link for me. I thought: for the first time, I’m a whole human being. Walking on the beach, starting to come down, I already wanted more. My sponsor says he’s been doing some work, some research, and he feels the genetic … thing that makes you an alcoholic is the same thing, the same genetic thing that makes you love heroin. Like, later, I’d choose being sick rather than do something like morphine. I just couldn’t see it. I wanted the hero
in!”
In the spring of 1973, Rose and Ferenç made it back to LA. Rose went to work as a waitress again, while Ferenç began to panic. “By this time, he was more in love with me than I was with him. And around this time we met Frank. Frank could always get heroin and Ferenç was off and running. It was different stuff, Mexican, and I’d always throw up. We’d do it once or twice a week, always with Frank. The hearings were coming up, and more and more I’m thinking, I do not want to go back to Europe! We had to spend days down at the INS. It was terrible. Finally, they gave him an ultimatum: leave by August or go to jail.
“So he called his mom and she came through. She sent us two one-way tickets to Frankfurt. We’re both twenty-three by that time. Ferenç could never come back to the United States because he had two felony counts of possession. But guess who didn’t want to leave with him?! The night before we were supposed to leave I said I was going out to the liquor store to get some cigarettes. Then I went over and hid with the girl who lived next door to Frank and his mom. I knew Ferenç would have to be on the plane the next day. He had no other choice. So I hid, and waited until the plane had already taken off before I went back to the house. It was probably the most exciting thing, as far as what a woman goes through, as anything I’ve ever done. So I stayed in our house and once in a while got high with Frank.
“But you know what Ferenç’s mother did? She sent me another ticket. And I was already sleeping with Frank! It wasn’t easy. I did not want to go.” And still Rose can’t or won’t say why it is that she finally went, except for a throw-away sentence—“You’re never poor or hungry in Switzerland.”
It took a couple of months, but in the fall of 1973 Rose landed in Frankfurt to be reunited with her husband. He was waiting for her at the airport. “I was crying so hard when I got off the plane. But one of the first things he said was, ‘Don’t worry, honey, don’t worry. I’ll go out and get some stuff and you’ll feel better about it tonight.’ And that was that. That was that.”
Rose had mixed feelings about Switzerland. It was clean, heroin was cheap—“ten dollars a night for both of us, just what you’d spend for a good bottle of wine”—and she got to furnish their own apartment, all from scratch. Rose’s mother-in-law, a fabric merchant, took her to Paris to pick up more good clothes. Ferenç got up early and—just as a devoted husband brings coffee to his wife in the morning—he would cook up some stuff, go over to the still-sleeping or drowsy Rose, ask her to stick out her arm, and then go off to work.
“But I never liked Switzerland. Especially Basel. It’s such a drug town! It’s such a company town!
“There’s only one industry there, the drug industry. Ciba-Geigy, and Hoffman La Roche, who invented Valium, and Sandoz—that’s where they discovered LSD. So they live off drugs. But everybody in Basel gets up at exactly the same time and goes off to do pretty much the same work and they come home at pretty much the same time, and then they do their little laundry and they eat and go to bed. But I’m going to say, Ferenç had this amazing job at Hoffman La Roche. You know those little brochures you find in doctors’ offices, advertising a particular kind of medicine? Well, Ferenç would go off to work, perfectly loaded on heroin. And they’d hand him a stack of magazines. His job was to look through the magazines for pictures of people who might need a Valium. You know, like a tired mother with children pulling at her skirt? Or a man with a briefcase who’s just missed his train? Then Ferenç would give all these pictures to the Hoffman art department and they’d show up in doctor’s brochures with the caption ‘If you have a patient who looks something like this, chances are, he or she needs a Valium.’ I even worked, believe it or not, giving little tours of Hoffman. Because all kinds of people would come through, but the common language was English. That was, like, February of ’74. And we used and used and used and used.
“But, God, I hated the routine. I was raised in California, for Christ’s sake, where you had 7-Elevens! In Basel, if you wanted milk, and if the stores were closed, you were out of luck. In the apartment they even told us what days and hours to do our laundry. I was—like, I’m from California! I’m gonna do my laundry whenever I want! This is a free country! But Switzerland wasn’t a free country. So they thought I was the belligerent American chick. And even though I was loaded I couldn’t get used to it.”
Once, Ferenç and Rose were busted: “They came in, the po-lice, at five or six in the morning. I just didn’t expect it! They have two jails there in the city, the jail for real offenses, and the interrogation jail. They put us into the interrogation jail, without our ever having been charged. It turned out they could keep us there as long as they liked. It was like with the laundry and the 7-Elevens. I was, like, ‘I’m an American citizen! You have to have me up in front of a judge within seventy-two hours! You can’t just keep me here. Call the American Consulate! If I don’t see a judge within seventy-two hours, you have to let me go!’
“But they just laughed at me. They spoke to me in German and turned around and shut the door. It was my actual first time in jail and it was like a good hotel. I had a room of my own, but I had no one to talk to. In America it’s horrible, but at least you have people to talk to. I stayed there around five or seven days. They didn’t want us, they wanted our connection, and they weren’t going to let us out until they got him. They wouldn’t let us get to a phone to warn him. We were all waiting until Pépé got back from Amsterdam. As soon as they caught him they let the rest of us little mice go. You know, they say Switzerland is a democracy, but this whole experience made me glad I was an American.
“So then, our life went on. We worked. His mother would take me to Paris and buy me more clothes.” When I ask her where, Rose shrugs and says, “God, I don’t know. I was loaded all the time.” Then she fills me in about her mother-in-law, whom she never calls by name. “His mother had been in a concentration camp. She’d gotten a disease in her eye, and she really couldn’t see out of it. She’d get checks from the Nazis all the time. Her brother threw himself in front of a garbage truck when he was still in the camp and committed suicide, he got so depressed. She got compensation for that, too. But her business partner was German, I don’t know how she could stand it …”
Not only that, her husband had been killed in the Hungarian uprising against Russian occupation, and now here she was in Basel with a son who was a dope fiend, who cut out pictures from magazines for a living, and his space-cadet young wife who couldn’t or wouldn’t do her laundry on time, who couldn’t speak the language, who was loaded out of her mind, and who was sinking deeper, faster, and further into a serious depression: “I remember being sick for the first time, when we couldn’t get any stuff. It was, OK, we won’t do it again! But as soon as we got some, of course we did do it again. I was very very very lonely. There was nobody to talk to. It was so sad and lonely. Then, in March or April of ’74, his mother got the idea to put us both in the detox. It was spring, and beautiful in the Swiss countryside. Ferenç had to go to all these counseling sessions but I didn’t understand the language so I didn’t have to. I’d go outside in the hills and relax with a book.
“And the Swiss detox, that was my first experience of methadone. I liked it. It gave me back … my self-confidence and energy. You remember that old TV commercial where a man is just standing there and somebody throws a baseball at him but it doesn’t hit him because he’s got his COLGATE SHIELD? It’s like an invisible suit of armor. You can drink, but not too much, something like eggnog at Christmas. It’s like having all the benefits of the heroin experience without being loaded. The Germans originally invented it, did you know that? During World War II, when all the morphine was going, gone, and Hitler said, ‘Can’t you guys come up with some sort of a synthetic?’ So methadone came from that war.
“Even now, they give methadone to terminally ill patients. They start with five milligrams. A block dosage of forty milligrams, what you give a dope fiend, is eight times what you give to a terminally ill person. What methadone does,
it fills up all your chemical receptors, so you don’t want anything else. And if you did take anything else, it would probably kill your liver. So with methadone, you don’t ever get sick. And we stayed there at the detox about six weeks. And the Swiss health insurance paid the rent on our apartment for when we were gone. Can you imagine?
“In Switzerland, it’s so easy. Drugs are right there for you. In America you have to do crimes and go to terrible jails. If I’d been in America then—I’m not sure!—I’m not sure I would have gotten to where I did. But in Switzerland, at that time, it didn’t really sink in what I’d done to myself. So after the hospital, we stayed clean for a while. I worked in a hotel restaurant, but they put me in back with the wine and the espresso, where I didn’t get any tips. And I had to work a split shift. I was so tired! I worked very hard and got very depressed. Then … I got a little kitten. And we’d go out for jaunts in the countryside. We tried to have a family life …