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

by See, Carolyn

  “But we started in again. Actually, it wasn’t too bad of a habit. But it was there. His mother came up with the suggestion that maybe if we separated for a while, things might get better. She had two propositions: I could go to the States, or they’d send me on a holiday to Spain or Portugal. Of course, I said I’d take the ticket to LA. It wasn’t so bad in Switzerland, I guess. We went skiing. Or, really what happened, he made me go and for three days I tried. And we went down to Lake Lugano. And we’d always be going to Amsterdam for drugs. But the Swiss were starting to ask me questions, like, how long are you going to stay? I’d made it up to green-card status, but there was no way I was going to stay. My love for Ferenç had just worn off.

  “The day after I came back was the day Nixon resigned. I went to stay with Kathy Rosalez at first. I was a little bit sick, a little bit shaky, but not much. But right away I went back again, to Frank. You know that classic phrase, a man turns you out to drugs? Frank taught me all that. All the thievery and the petty scams and the low, low life that we lived! The famous shoplift-refund scam—you could make hundreds! At Robinson’s, The Broadway, Robinson’s Beverly Hills.

  “You dress up as nice as you can, then you go out to shop. You go in and pick up a real expensive sweater. You don’t even leave the store! You just walk up to the counter in another department and get the refund—you don’t need receipts. Robinson’s had no cash limit. I was better at it, and did more of it, than Frank did. We had a little place on—what was it? Orange?—in West Hollywood. And I kept it up until they put me in for six months in the County Jail.

  “After I got out, I got a job at the LA Tennis Club. I worked in the bar-snack club thing. I worked there for quite a while before they caught on to me. Because everything I didn’t write down, I could take home the cash for. I was bagging all the cash. It took months for them to realize that they did better business on the days I wasn’t there. They never said anything. They just laid me off.” While Rose did all this, Frank, a young Latino kid, painted houses, moved in furniture, worked on cars.

  In certain insurance claims, investigators construct a fault tree and trace it back. You can—I can—always pin some of this on my mother; she’s tough enough. But what about the soldiers who swarmed over Oahu, all of them so happy to be going home, all of them with duffle bags jammed with heroin? You can’t blame them, you can’t blame Nixon for bringing them home. You might have to take a look at Kennedy, at Johnson, for sending troops over in the first place. At a recent writers’ conference, I met a pilot who’d been in Vietnam and who was there to learn how to write down his adventures. He’d flown all through the war, he said, not against the North, but flying South in huge cargo planes, shipping opium for the United States government. He was depressed about his life and was trying to find a way to put it into words.

  If not fault, what about remorse? I ask Rose a little more about those nineteen missing packets of opium, not whether she’s sorry or not, just asking. It’s only a footnote to her. But she’s proud, I think, of having stayed away from all of us—not stealing from us through that twenty years. She feels guilt about our mother. She feels as if she abandoned our mom. But she says: “Nothing on earth, not all the money in the world, in the universe, could make me ask her over for, say, Thanksgiving. I just couldn’t do it.”

  “I did it for years,” I say.

  Rose looks at me sadly. “There should have been a medium ground between what you did and what I did,” she says.

  —

  Rose admires something she calls “the Berkeley Gestalt. There’s a whole feeling up here,” she says, “that with a little education and some hard work, and the willingness to take some risks, that you can make something of yourself. Right now, in 1994, you see it happening again. Somebody across the bay is importing heroin again, the good Asian stuff. They’re bringing it straight over from China, and right now, this month at least, it’s cheaper than crack. College kids are falling for it again, they think it’s cool. It’s like you think—pot didn’t ruin my life, acid didn’t ruin my life, why should heroin ruin my life? And there are some people who can try it once, or twice, and then forget it. But there’s a lot of people like me—you go, ah! ah! I’m human. That’s the transplant that I needed.”

  I ask her to tell me some more about the seventies. What happened after she got fired from the LA Tennis Club?

  “Spring and summer of 1975, Frank and I were trying desperately to use every day. We had a little apartment. A studio. One room, kitchen, bathroom sort of thing. After the Tennis Club I got a horrible job working at a Denny’s type place. I’d work a split shift, then go home and wait for my connection to wake up. (Because, you know, the mornings, and just waking up, are horrible for junkies. Something happens to your body while you sleep. You’re always sick when you wake up.) So I couldn’t stand that job. I went and got myself fired and on unemployment. Back then, in California, you got an automatic fifty-two weeks of unemployment.

  “And that brings me to my one claim to fame with a movie star! I was on unemployment at the end of ’75. People who were desperate would go down to pick it up as early as seven o’clock on Monday morning, and you’d wait around until the doors opened. Frank was always very good at seeing movie stars. You remember how much I always loved that movie The Lords of Flatbush? It was like American Graffiti, only better, more real. It had Perry King and Henry Winkler and the guy everyone forgets, and Sylvester Stallone in his very first role as Stanley. I loved him in that. So one morning Frank says, ‘Look! There’s Stanley!’ He was parked outside the unemployment office at seven in the morning. He had to be as desperate as we were.

  “Now Frank’s mother had gone shopping one day and come back with a black silk jacket somebody had brought back from Vietnam. It was real pretty, real feminine. It had an embroidered dragon on it and in back it said DANANG. So every Monday morning, while we were waiting, I got my nerve up and said, ‘Hi, Stanley!’ and he would say, ‘Hi, Danang!’ And we did that for weeks. This would be either while we were waiting for unemployment to open or for the check-cashing place right across the street to open.

  “Finally one day I asked him, ‘Whatcha doing? Making more movies?’ And he said, ‘No, I’m writing now.’ So he must have been writing Rocky right then. But he wasn’t buffed at all. In fact he looked a little overweight. One day I asked him, ‘Whatever happened to Perry King?’ And he screamed at me, ‘Why do all the girls ask about Perry King? He’s not even Italian!’ I just found it so funny that he was screaming at a little junkie in a parking lot.

  “It was then I got into the shoplift-refund really badly. I think I told you, Robinson’s was the best, I’d hit both stores. Because by Tuesday all the unemployment money would be gone. We were both hooked like dogs. I got caught. But they just looked at me and said go away, you’re on two years’ probation. Then, about November, I got caught again. It’s funny! I got caught stealing a hardcover copy of Prince of the City because I wanted to read it. The judge gave me six months in jail. That was kind of steep! I walked in court with the public defender, I’d already pled guilty. The PD said, ‘The judge is talking substantial jail time.’ I didn’t find out until later what that meant. Some jail time is, like, sixty to ninety days. Substantial time is usually six months. And significant jail time means the pen. The judge was up for reelection. Nowadays, they just give you a ticket for shoplifting, like a parking ticket!

  “I was sick as a dog in jail. I was kicking a pretty large habit. I went in January of 1976 and I was going to get out in June. That’s when you came and visited me in jail.”

  Rose’s uncle, the successful lawyer, had phoned me. He said that Rose had been caught with a raft of very expensive sweaters and was selling them to support her drug habit, and maybe—since she was my sister—I might want to go and visit her.

  I went down to Sybil Brand Jail to visit Rose. They took my purse and frisked me. I couldn’t believe the oppressive heat, or the thick plastic “glass” between us. I almo
st couldn’t recognize the chubby little lady who lolled on a stool on the other side of the plastic. Fat packed itself on her young body. Her eyes were duller than a dog’s, but she said she had the best job in the jail. Her hair was in big curlers. She sure didn’t seem glad to see me. I left there feeling scalded. About fifteen years later, though, when I met Sybil Brand at a party in Beverly Hills, I was able to chat: “Oh, my sister did time in your jail. She loved it!”

  Now Rose says, “Jail was not a horrible experience. There was this one really pretty, feminine guard. She got me a job in the officers’ dining room. It really was the cushiest job in the jail. You got to serve the officers and you got to eat officer food. You got your little dresses and your pantsuits. You had the run of the jail. I made some enemies with the white girls. A few of them didn’t like me, but I always got along with Latinas. That was the whole part of my life. Until I got into the drug program, I was raised as a Mexican woman—by Frank and Michael and their moms.

  “I asked the judge for modification of my sentence. He just laughed at me. There was only one other way you could get out and that was sheriff’s parole. Five out of fifty people got it. That’s when I called up my uncle again. He sent some attorney over. He said it was outrageous. Nobody did six months for second shoplifting! When it came time for my sheriff’s hearing, Mr. Attorney never even showed up. I walked in there alone. I was just as remorseful as I could be. And they let me out! From one second to the next, I was free. I found out later that my uncle had talked to the judge.

  “I got a ride out of jail and went straight over to Frank’s house. Then I headed for unemployment and picked up thirteen checks that had been waiting for me. In minutes, Frank was there, waiting to help me spend my money. That was May 1976. I had all these stringent rules with the parole, so I got a job at Grand Photo Litho, but I hardly worked any hours. I still wanted to use. I wanted to get high.

  “Now I’m going to say that Frank and I had a lot of fun. Kind of like Panic in Needle Park, the beginning part. Frank reminded me of Al Pacino. His life had never been anything, so he didn’t expect anything. His mom, she was a saint. She had nine or seven kids. She named one of them after Damon Runyon. She wasn’t your typical East LA mom. She was a good little hustler, boy! She was so nice to me! Frank and I went back and forth for years. He always wanted kids. He would have been a good father.

  “Two things happened that summer. I got another job, delivery driving for Phototype House. I got to deliver the posters for Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in A Star Is Born. I drove a Datsun B2-10. A Mexican woman ploughed into me, and that was my famous car accident! The accident that will live in history! I got fired! Then I got a laywer. They started sending me checks once a week. I had a hundred a week income. Then Frank’s number came up at a methadone clinic. He’d been on a lot of waiting lists and always said no when the time came. But this time he said OK. It was in West LA, right across from the Design Center.

  “At that time methadone was totally free. They got Frank on it and then they gave me the hustle. They never really asked me, they told me. At that time you had to have been an addict for at least two years. Now they’ve taken it down to only one year. What I’m going to say now is: you shouldn’t sell your body, mind, whatever, to the country, the city, the state. You don’t realize that you’re selling your body. And now they get these little kids started. You’re talking the government as pusher. Starting people on drugs free of charge and then raising the price, and if you can’t come up with the price, they cut you off, as mean as any pusher.

  “They say heroin is strong but methadone is a million times worse. What it is, you drink a little bit of stuff and you’re feeling no pain. You don’t feel anything, the pain or the joys. You think you’re living a regular life. You can settle down and have kids. Two weeks after Frank, I was on, too. That was October 1976.

  “I have to say that it certainly did take me out of the role of being the one to burglarize their house. I was no longer a ‘criminal.’ So if people are worried about their car jackings and their crime, methadone is the thing. You can work with it. The Dead are on methadone, for instance. But somebody’s making a lot of money on this! The clinics are franchised like a McDonald’s. It costs a center fifty dollars tops for a month of methadone. In California now, it costs the client $285.00 a month. And some people will fall a little back into crime to make those fees. At these centers, there’s no service involved! They see you for maybe three seconds a day. So who’s making all this money? It must be the government that’s making this money. I know, you think, some junkie’s got a two-hundred-dollar-a-day habit, he’s lucky to be paying ten dollars a day, but that’s not the point.

  “On methadone maintenance they tell you not even to think of detoxing for at least two years. Frank and I found an apartment of our own. I went to work in the domestic service industry. Frank went to work fixing German cars. (Linda Ronstadt came in.) But without heroin, I realized Frank and I didn’t have a fucking thing in common. I mean, he did know movies, he did know books … but I just got bored. Frank would go to the clinic around seven, before he went to work, and I didn’t go in until about nine. And there was this extremely good-looking guy down there.… Well, I don’t have to tell you! You met Michael at Nate ’n’ Al’s. You must remember him … don’t you?”

  Yes, I remember Michael, small, dark-haired, and a hopeless druggie. Yes, I remember meeting them at Nate ’n’ Al’s, and Rose tried to borrow another twenty-five from me. Then she went off for her Vidal Sassoon haircut, and I went back to work.

  Rose fills me in on Michael, the love of her life. Latino, like Frank, slender, good-looking, and, improbably, third-generation Californian, a young man of what was once a good family. His maternal grandmother had grown up in the prosperous LA suburb of San Marino, “playing tennis with the white girls.” But his mother, Sylvia, had been wild, and run off with a zoot-suiter during the forties. Sylvia, spurning the hard-won privilege of her parents, settled down to what seemed to be the far more glamorous life of a crook.

  Her husband hung around long enough to give her a couple of louts named Louie and Keith, who would grow up badly. Then the husband waltzed off because he couldn’t stand the kids and his wife’s loose life. He waltzed back eight years later to sire Michael. Then it was adiós, Dad.

  Young Michael grew up neglected, repulsed by his mom’s generous habits with strangers, noticing that his older brothers were dealing wholesale heroin by the time they were fifteen and sixteen. When Michael was eight, cops wearing bullet-proof vests raided his house with smoke bombs. Both his brothers were busted, jailed, and (when they came of age) sent to the Pen.

  That left wild Sylvia and little Michael. But he could always visit his Grandma Elena, who spent her time doing charity work, domestic chores, and in prayer, ironing his pillow slips with her own hands, sprinkling baby powder between the sheets before he got into bed.

  When Michael was about ten, he was able to persuade his mother to move, with just him, Michael, up to Northern California. “Because he knew, from visiting his grandmother, that people didn’t have to live the way he and his mother did. On the other hand, his grandmother spoiled him rotten. He learned that the whole purpose of women is to be beyond reproach, and to make men happy, comfortable, and satisfied. I’m going to say that he was deeply religious, but the Devil won out.

  “When he was thirteen, it got to be the time that the brothers were getting out of the Pen. They followed Michael and his mom up to Northern California like a bad disease. Keith and Louie got jobs working in foundries. Once you get out of the Pen, you have a seven-year tail. You can’t do anything. You can’t afford to do anything. So they were the first ones in their family to fall into the methadone program. And Louie turned into a redneck. He had an RV and a five-bedroom house and five kids. You just couldn’t see the criminal heroin addict anymore. Keith had a white wife and he bought her a home but he didn’t change that much.

  “But Michael was
having a pretty good time. If you’re a kid who knows the ropes, you can do real good up here. Michael said it was like Disneyland. He went to school, he had friends. But somewhere along the line, when he was fifteen or sixteen, the government just let all the heroin in here. Berkeley was the big stop-off for it. Even though he knew what had happened to his brothers, by the time he was sixteen, he was hooked. By the time he was seventeen he was fighting charges of seven armed robberies. He got taught what little boys should never learn.

  “So it was Christmas of ’76, down in LA. Michael had come down to be with the rest of his family, his Grandma Elena. He was down at West Hollywood Maintenance, and that’s where I saw him. One day I was on my way to the neurologist in Beverly Hills, and I was walking to the bus. He said, ‘Can I give you a ride?’ We got there early because a car is faster than a bus, naturally, and we went for coffee at Nate ’n’ Al’s. Michael told me he was a working musician. He played for a band called Innovations, mostly jazz rock. He’d be playing a jazz club down in San Diego, and then fly up to LA to get his dose. I was impressed by that. I thought he was out of my league.

  “We carried on a big affair! Poor Frank’d be at work and Michael and I would be at the house fucking our brains out all day. It took a long time for me to get up the nerve to bail out. But Michael and I had so much more in common than Frank and I did. On the other hand, Michael was always getting in so much trouble for such little things! He was driving home one night and he had a mortar and pestle in the back of the car, like, what his mother used for grinding spices? He got arrested for carrying a lethal weapon. And another time he bought a hot stereo. Just these dumb little things! But I didn’t care, I was in love.

  “By this time Frank had wised up. He put a cheap padlock on the door, which we broke. We took my clothes and my cat. Off we went to San Marino and moved in with his grandparents. The old man was a trip! And Grandma Elena was a large Mexican lady. She prayed in her wheelchair all day with her rosary. But … Sylvia! Michael’s mom! She reminded me of our mother in a lot of ways. She thought she could have had a great life without her kids. She went on and on and on.