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

by See, Carolyn

  “He said, ‘Hey, Mom! I got a dead brother!’

  “By Tuesday I knew I had to call Sylvia. They were all up here the next day, Wednesday afternoon. Sylvia brought a hundred Valium with her. I was the one who had to arrange for the funeral, of course. All they did was send flowers, and even their checks for the flowers bounced. I paid extra money so that the Monsignor would come back from his vacation early. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the body, but I did put photos of me and of him, and tickets to concerts where we’d had a good time, and some guitar picks—I put all that in the casket. George and Delia didn’t come to the funeral, Max and Sasha didn’t come. None of the dope-dealer people came. But the poor guy who pulled him out of the pool came.

  “Sylvia and Michael’s brothers stayed around, Louie and Keith stayed for weeks. I didn’t mind.

  “Nine days after Michael died, the famous George and Delia were busted, up in their Orinda home. There were so many cops from so many agencies that they went out and bought special jackets so they’d know each other during the bust and not shoot somebody who was on their side by mistake. They got ’em all right. It was front-page Chronicle news. It had been Michael’s worst nightmare that something like this would happen to us!

  “Delia got out of jail right away, but George had trouble making bail. They were five thousand short to get him out. Michael had been dead a month. I gave them the five thousand. I knew it was what Michael would have done. After that, they were around the house a lot, but they didn’t help out any. I’d had the eleven thousand in cash and about thirty thousand in different bank accounts, and I just saw the money dwindling. One morning about six weeks after Michael died I saw Louie hanging around outside. He said, ‘Why don’t we go out for some coffee?’ I said OK, but then I saw he was just driving around, and I got it. I said, Take me home right now! But by the time we got home Keith had stolen my 280Z, the beautiful one! My own car! Later on, Sylvia told me they just wanted some of Michael’s money, and they thought I was keeping all of it. I said, Why didn’t you ask?

  “I started using heroin again, to get off methadone. Michael meant methadone to me, and it was the end of an era. I was smoking heroin instead of shooting, it was very expensive. Don’t ask me what I was thinking!

  “We’re into 1986 now, I guess. I started bouncing checks. I had OK jewelry and OK clothes and I still had the Grand Prix. I’d go into a Safeway and buy some food, and cash an extra fifty. I’d do that twice a day. After the money ran out I just wrote checks to get cash. I was finally picked up outside a Lucky’s in Walnut Creek. I told them it was all a big mistake. I went to jail, stayed for three days, and got out.

  “I thought the check thing was over, but it wasn’t.

  “I lost the apartment and I got a job as an au pair girl back in Orinda, working for two hotshot lawyers. Their house was on two levels and my room was down and outside, by the pool. I was only paid six hundred dollars a month. That woman worked me like a dog. She left at seven in the morning and didn’t come back until seven at night. She had a list of things I had to do that wouldn’t quit. Those poor little kids had every minute of their lives mapped out. I started using but only on the weekends. She got it right that I was having a performance problem that had to do with drugs, but it was the drugs that got me through it. I worked real well when I was loaded. When I wasn’t, I could hardly do a thing. They said I had to leave.

  “Max said, ‘I’ve got some stuff for you to do.’ He was facing a horrible federal case and he had to be extra extra careful. He rented this really nice hotel room in the Berkeley House. My job was to live in it. Once or twice a week a person would drop thirty thousand off with me. My job was to sit in the room. Now, we’re into 1987, and then he just abruptly told me, ‘I don’t need this room any more!’ But I understood what he’d been doing. He was looking after me the way Michael would have liked. And Max was the one who told me, ‘You’ve got to get yourself together.’ He rented me a room in Fruitvale, the Mexican district of Oakland. It wasn’t so bad.

  “I had really started getting my own little life then. I was mostly clean …”

  About this time, since I’m taking notes, I have the clear and conscious thought that I’m so glad I decided not to use a tape recorder. I’m so glad my glasses are on. So glad I’m focused straight down on the pages of my notes. Boy, I don’t want to think of my sister, thirty-six, all alone, flat broke, living in a furnished room in a place called Fruitvale. We’re sitting again on this balcony in Alameda, the sun is shining, the lagoon beneath us is pristine, and the mother ducks have hustled their ducklings in for an afternoon nap somewhere in peaceful green reeds. Safety! Stability. We have it now, but for how long?

  “Very rarely was I able to get high. I didn’t have the money or the opportunity. About that time I met a couple called Sharon and Mel. Sharon had a real good job at Easter Seal bingo games. They have these things called pull tabs and, you know, people pull them. Mostly old folks played, and if they’d win they’d tip you.

  “Sharon said, ‘Why not come and live with me?’ I stayed there until the summer of ’87. I started using again and I got busted in Concord. I wasn’t sweating my court date. I was still living at Sharon’s, so my court date was like a preliminary hearing. But then somebody said to me, could you just have a seat there by the bailiff? Time went by and went by. Finally I found out what it was. They had refiled those charges on the checks I’d cashed right after Michael died. They’d had a year to do it. ‘You have forty-two felony counts of check-bouncing in Walnut Creek.’ That’s what they told me when I got in front of this lady judge. My bail was something like thirty-five thousand dollars. I stayed in jail for weeks. I called Sharon and she had sympathy for me but she certainly wasn’t going to bail me out of jail. Then another judge put me out on my own recognizance. She said, ‘OK, Miss Daly, I’m going to let you out, but if you’re not back for your next court date, you can kiss your ass good-bye.’

  “Sharon had turned on me. I went back to the room in the Fruitvale district, but I was only there a couple of days. I needed a permanent address and a job. I was going up and down the street looking for work, and I met the famous Mr. Al Rodriguez.

  “We ended up having an affair. He was married, maybe forty-eight. I was thirty-seven by then. He had four kids—the youngest was sixteen. Of course, Al said that his wife—the usual spiel, you know?—that he and his wife didn’t make love anymore. And that his wife was a ballbuster. He eventually rented a little house for me. It was going to be his play house, and I was going to be his mistress there. He made sure I made my court dates. That’s what was happening all the way into winter. The case was getting ready to settle but it wasn’t looking good. I just saw jail, you know? I just saw jail.

  “About November I was coming up for sentencing. I panicked, and I didn’t go. Then, on New Year’s Day of 1988, we’d been drinking all night and we were into drinking all day. We were at the house Al rented for me with some Mexican guys. I drew the short straw, and they sent me to Safeway for more tortillas and brandy. That was 4:00 P.M. New Year’s Day, 1988. The brakes on the car were shot. This guy pulled in front of me, I swerved, hit a parked car, and hit my head on the steering wheel. I actually tried to get out of the car to run. The police came and arrested me for drunk driving. And I didn’t get out of jail until June.

  “I was in Contra Costa jail, it’s a rich county and it has a nice jail. It has a cable TV, and room for only two women at a time. It has a kind of nice living-room place, a weight machine, two little patios. I got a job in the laundry. It wasn’t too bad. Al would come and visit me.

  “In June of 1988, Al picked me up from jail and took me back to the house. It was like he had the ability to take me out of my life and put me in another whole one. A lot of crazy Mexicans came in and out of that house, but I didn’t mind, I was out of jail. I got a job as a hotel maid at the Apple Inn. It was horribly hard work. Then, about August or September of ’88, Al and I had a fight. I was all alone in t
hat house, so lonely. Al wouldn’t even come and see me. I’d be drinking but I wasn’t using. I drank brandy and Southern Comfort.

  “So, Sylvia and her son Louie came up to see me. I couldn’t drink by that time. More than two drinks and I’d get real sick. They said, ‘God! Don’t you think you should come back down to LA with us?’ I did not want to go. But I was sick, so I did. I was on probation in two counties, so I called up and told them where I was. The first place said, oh forget it. The second place said if you don’t get your ass up here, you can consider yourself absconding. I thought, oh, well.

  “So, on a Monday morning in LA some people and I were sitting on the lawn drinking beer. The cops came by to get us to go away. But I didn’t move. I waited for them to come up to me. I said, my name is Rose Daly and if you don’t find any warrants for me down here, look statewide.

  “They took me to the county jail. I wasn’t even under arrest. On the third night they came and started to let me out because Berkeley had declined to follow up on the warrants. But Contra Costa county had a no bail hold on me, like I was a murderer or something. They flew me back, just me and one officer. And they didn’t put cuffs on me. They had this whole other contraption, a big metal brace that goes on your leg to keep it stiff so you can’t run away. It has three or four leather straps on it, and every strap has a separate lock and key. It digs into your flesh. It’s so painful. I had to go through the metal detector at the airport and the officer had to hold up his badge and say he was a policeman and I was an escaped felon. It was horrible.

  “Up north, I went to court pretty quickly in front of a lady judge who they call the Black Widow. She gave me ninety days for absconding. This time I applied for work furlough in a halfway house. I was the landscaper out there. I met this nice white girl. She kept telling me to call Al again, to try and make up. I was scared to, but she said, just try.

  “He was excited to hear from me. His first words to me were, ‘When are you getting out?’ He was still in the same house, and in the summer of ’89, we actually had a while of living together. We had the funnest time! We did things together I had never done in my whole life. He took me fishing, he took me to the State Fair. He took me to Lake Tahoe. I’d never been in a casino before. He took me to the races.

  “But then, toward the end of the summer, he went off on a vacation with his wife. I enrolled in computer school, but I got lonely and depressed and I started using. My grades in that school went down. And one night Al came over and he just caught me. He hadn’t known I was using again. There was a whole lot of fighting. He left me there. I was so lonely. I started back with the old shoplift-refund deal. I got dressed up one day and went out to Neiman-Marcus in Walnut Creek. A customer saw me and they busted me for shoplifting again. I talked them into citing me out. Then the Oakland earthquake happened and the house sustained a lot of damage.

  “I realized that the end of the house was the end of that whole thing. The end of me and Al. The end of the end. I was facing another shoplifting charge which—with the first five or six other ones—probably meant that this time I was going to the Penitentiary. I put my name on the waiting list of every kind of rehab, hoping my name would come up on one of them before I had to go back to court. New Bridge called first. It was either the Pen or them. When the day came up, it was December 6, 1989. Al came and picked me up and drove me over there. He was real sad, but he said, ‘I think you’re doing the right thing.’ ”

  When I ask Rose what would be her favorite thing to do in this life, what would be her first choice if she had it to do over again, she says, “I wish Michael would be alive again, and we were back in business. I know I’m not supposed to say that, but that’s what I wish.”

  PART III

  … They could never be parted because their love was rooted in common things.… All the time their salvation was lying round them—the past sanctifying the present; the present, with wild heart-throb, declaring that there would after all be a future, with laughter and the voices of children.

  —E. M. Forster, Howards End

  10. HANGING IT UP

  John Espey. A class act

  During the week of Thanksgiving 1974, I drove down to Cardiff to see my dad a couple of days early. I popped open a beer and relaxed back in a chair—my father’s places to live always had this incredibly soothing capacity: the same books that I remembered as a kid, the same Botsford watercolors that shimmered with visions of easy living. And—thanks to Lynda—a cleanliness that seemed effortless and left room for the little notes and pictures my five-year-old half brother Bob brought home from school.

  Daddy’s new profession—writing funny, hard-core pornography—had paid off for him. He was supporting his family now, and underneath his careful bravado, his painstakingly laid-down barrage of jokes, he seemed happy. I thought that what I was going to say would cheer him up: “I’ve met this man, Daddy. He’s wonderful. He’s twenty years older than I am. He reminds me of you. He supervised my doctoral dissertation at UCLA. He was a Rhodes Scholar! I want to, you know, stay with him forever. Because I really love him!” And I thought by now I might even deserve him, since I’d spent six years in therapy, learning how to be sane.

  Daddy looked over at me with some chagrin. “Penny,” he said, “you mean you’re hanging it up?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “We both seem to want the same things. We want to travel. And we want to do some real work. And the kids like him OK.”

  I didn’t get it. I’d thought my father would approve. But then—like some bizarre medicine you soak up through your skin—I got it. For years, I’d been living his dream life. He’d (on a night in his bachelor apartment, after he’d left my mother, and couldn’t stay sitting up on his Murphy bed because he was too damn drunk) made the decision to go straight, to sober up, to stay married even if he had to give it two more shots. Any of those infidelities he hinted about were, after all, only hints. It could be that my high-living, womanizing dad was a respectable citizen, and I’d been the substance-abusing ding-a-ling, the person he’d always wanted to be. In my mother’s words, “just like my father.”

  A day or two later, when John Espey came down for Thanksgiving, it was Godzilla meeting the undersea monster all over again. Daddy and Lynda and I smoked dope, John and Lynda and I drank vodka. The two old guys glared at each other across a social abyss. They could both be very funny, but they weren’t going to be funny tonight. John pulled out his semibogus English accent. Daddy quoted Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus. Lynda and I looked blearily at each other. Of all the misfits I’d ever been associated with, Daddy picked this upstanding man not to like.

  It was the part about getting down to work that offended my father most. It had always been our unspoken but laid-down, absolute law that if you suffered too much you didn’t have to work. George Laws might have been a real novelist if his mother hadn’t exploded her head, if his brother hadn’t rotted away from typhoid, if his sister Nell hadn’t died, if a bullet wasn’t lodged beneath his own collarbone. But what if working just meant writing a thousand words a day, five days a week, for the rest of your life? To go to work, or even talk about it, was low betrayal.

  John and I went home, feeling strange.

  John Espey had been married thirty-five years, had been faithful to his wife, was a widower now, but he drank like the proverbial fish. The son of Presbyterian missionaries in Shanghai at the beginning of the century, his upbringing had given him perfect manners, a very kind heart, and an absolute disinterest in God. In any social gathering he always honed in on the oldest, saddest, most unattractive person and devoted himself to him or her for the rest of the night. (I hated to consider that this was why he might be here, now, with me.) He was a terrible dancer, because his zealot father had told him dancing often led to the creation of illegitimate children. John’s main rebellion against his rigid upbringing had been to drink, and to make up stories about the mission that were so forcefully clamped together by good humor that no one, not even th
e most pious Protestant, could object to them.

  It didn’t take a genius to notice that every sparkling little story told by John concealed a painful sore. There was a story about John and his then-wife going up to Ridgecrest to give his sister moral support at a Mormon wedding reception, because John’s nephew was marrying into that religion. The two families distrusted each other—Mormons sitting uncomfortably in a tasteful house full of Chinese antiques, with nothing but pink lemonade to open uncommunicative throats. But John carried a quart of hundred-proof Stolichnaya in the trunk of his car. He excused himself, went out, “hid” on the street side of the car, and drank down two long pulls of vodka made scalding hot by the sun. “After that there wasn’t a problem. I talked to everybody, and they talked to me.”

  When John’s wife was dying, he told of stopping at a bar near the hospital before his daily visit to her for three or four martinis and stopping afterward for another few, until he finally got picked up by a policeman, who asked him to recite the alphabet. John haughtily insisted on reciting it backward, and ended up in the drunk tank. If you looked at the whole narrative closely, there wasn’t much that was charming about a professor of English languishing alone in a San Fernando Valley jail while his wife lay dying a few more off-ramps down the line.

  And John’s stories of visiting his mother as she lay dying and he sipped on glasses of “milk” that were one half hundred-proof vodka, revving up his manic good humor to hurtle her wheelchair down gruesome hospital halls, since that was the only kind of movement she’d ever be likely to make again—that was a good story, but you didn’t want to have to think about it.

  John Espey had called me (a year and a day after his wife had died). He wanted to come up for lunch. He arrived with two grocery bags of mementos and scrapbooks—postcards I’d sent him from Mazatlán years before, a pictorial history of a mountain-climbing expedition he’d gone on with his brother-in-law (to prove he was still physically fit), one bottle of vodka and another of tequila. He looked terrified. He spoke in riddles: “Is it opening day in the Japanese kindergarten?” (That was the caption of one of the postcards I’d sent him long ago.)