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

by See, Carolyn

  At the end of ten minutes, Leo stopped us. “How did that go?” John and I saw with relief that we had about as much money as we’d started with, but in the exchange of money—only ten minutes long!—a lot of drama had been generated. Little kids and men had tripled their investment, taking twenties as they were passed to them and handing out ones instead, and there was a strong contingent of near-hysterical women who demanded their money back: “That was my cab money! I need it to get home! That was my rent money, someone has to give it back to me!” But no one in the crowd felt like doing it.

  “Didn’t you hear me when I said, ‘Take out as much money as you can be accountable for?’ Don’t you think you’ve been playing this game all your lives?”

  In the middle of the ensuing pandemonium, I (and a lot of other people) considered that we might at least have had a hand in creating our own reality. To think of it! That my stepfather burned my baby pictures as part of some dopey game. That I mourned Tom Sturak for six years as part of a goddamn game. But Leo said that if we’d spent lifetimes creating disaster, we could take a turn and have a go at creating its opposite.

  Oh, the embarrassing Californianness of it all! Do you think we didn’t feel it, with our scholarly ways, our high IQs, our own morbidly glittering histories of suffering? Do you think we didn’t feel dumb when we were forced to jump up and dance, singing inanely, “I deserve to be loved! Oh I deserve to be loved! Yes I deserve to be loved, loved all of the time!”

  Leo might have been callow but he wasn’t a sap. When, fifteen years later, Time and Newsweek ran stories about particle physics and chaos theory, we’d snort in disgust. “Leo knew that! He knew that years ago!” Leo would stretch out both his arms and wiggle first one set of fingers, then the other. “Move over here, it’s going to shake over there. See? Think of it as cosmic Jell-O!”

  At the end of the first night he sent us off to our hotel rooms with the injunction to repeat: “I’m a powerful, loving, and creative person, and I can handle it, and I can have anything I want.” We thought it over.

  Money was not the object in these four strange days. Leo thought—he knew—he had the universe aced. He was close to figuring out how it worked. But he had had no real education, he was an ex-con, and he spelled all right “alright.” Because he was a kid, and a guy, he was interested in spiritual muscle building more than anything else. He dearly wanted to levitate. We spent time making each other light (lifting up burly guys with our little fingers) or making ourselves heavy. One young man totally stumped Leo, who couldn’t lift him off the ground. Leo huffed and grunted and then walked around the guy. “How’re you doing that?” he asked.

  “I am an oak tree,” the young guy panted. “I have roots all the way down to the very center of the earth!”

  Clara and Lisa, dressing up as “excess baggage.”

  “Amazing,” Leo said, and then lifted the guy up. “Because I am the only power,” he said, “that can lift the roots of an oak tree out of the center of the earth.”

  We began to look at how people carried themselves—as victim or predator—and saw that each role was utterly silly. We got a forty-minute crash course in how marriages go wrong. We were sternly advised to give away 10 percent of our money to worthy causes. And life was a party, we were to remember that. A party where we were the guests of honor.

  John and I flew home to LA and found Lisa and her boyfriend Roy, back from Greece. Roy was yellow as a lemon, half-dead from hepatitis. He’d already almost died in the Vietnam war, and had his face covered up in a helicopter by a tactless nurse. The poor guy had been through the wringer. Lisa was on the edge of tears.

  But John and I responded with obnoxious New Age jolliness. “Surround your lives with a burst of golden light, and you’ll get well again!”

  Two weeks later Leo flew down to LA. John and I dragged Lisa, Roy, and Clara to see him. They were angry, and I didn’t blame them. Money was tight and here I was throwing it away. The first night, when Leo suggested that we might have had a hand in creating our own reality, Roy, whose liver count was still high up in the dangerous thousands, got mad. “Now wait a minute!” he growled. “Are you telling me they left me for dead and I got maggots in my spine in Vietnam because I wanted to?”

  Leo looked at Roy with a flicker of scorn. “You were in the Marines, weren’t you?”

  “Yes!”

  “I don’t believe you get drafted into the Marines. I believe you enlist in the Marines, right?”

  Clara, at Leo’s..

  Lisa, at Leo’s

  “Well, yes.”

  Clara absolutely wouldn’t dance. But Leo said, “How can you expect to have any fun in life if you don’t dance?” He pulled her twelve-year-old body up out of her chair. She stood frowning at him, her darkest Sturakian scowl. He blammed her with his own hip. “What’s the point of being so stuck? Aren’t you ever going to have any fun?”

  Scowling, Clara began to move, just a little.

  Later, Leo asked Lisa if she could have anything she wanted, what would it be? She didn’t answer right away, and kept her aloof look, which, once you really examined it, was no more than the very thinnest porcelain mask over the dearest sweetest face in the world. I thought with a pang of shame that probably no one had ever asked her what she really wanted, not once.

  “A house,” she said finally.

  “Then what?” Leo’s idea was that we’d been culturally limited by the idea of “three wishes,” that we could have all the wishes we wanted if we just asked for them.

  “Another house.”

  Then what?

  “Another house!”

  And then?

  “I’d like another house.”

  And then?

  How could I have not allowed myself to see how yearning for simple nurturing and shelter Lisa was? She wanted five houses, before she got around to a car, or world peace, or whatever came next.

  Thursday and Friday night, Lisa and Roy remained reserved. What a dubious procedure it was, after all, hanging out in a hotel room with a guy named Sunshine. But Saturday or Sunday, as Lisa sat in front of us, I saw what I still count as one of the sweetest sights in my whole life. Lisa laughed so hard, probably at Leo’s monologue about bad marriage—the stupid Frederico ruining the life of the luckless Marylou by spilling mayonnaise on her freshly waxed floor and Marylou retaliating by stepping “accidentally” on Frederico’s new fishing rod—that her long, rich, red hair began to shimmer and shake, and she laughed so hard she fell right off her folding chair.

  And Roy laughed so hard that on Saturday night, at one in the morning, he ate more than he usually did, and said he felt better.

  He felt so much better that the next Monday he went into Veterans’ Hospital to be tested. His SGOT had gone down from 5,000-and-something to a measly thirty-five. The only bona-fide “miracle” any one of us had ever seen—although my first stepmother had prattled on about them at length to anyone who would listen.

  All of us had an interesting time with Leo during the year 1977. What he said went to the very philosophical heart of the nature of suffering. What if you were just a little baby with your legs blown off? Leo dismissed that with an indifferent tut tut. You must have decided to get born into that situation, because children always chose their parents, for the lessons they’d get taught in this new life. He may have lost us right around there. But I thought, gee whiz! It’s easier to believe that than in One God in Three Divine Persons. Lisa and Clara looked faintly ill that they might have actually chosen the hand they were dealt, but they were good sports about it. And Leo didn’t pretend that he knew all the answers. He was just tinkering around with the universe, trying to figure out how it worked. He was obsessed with the shining frontier where art and physics and getting your own way met.

  El Protecto, Leo’s hand puppet, the physical embodiment of our elusive fears and most caustic self-criticism, told everybody all the bad things that could happen. Leo said repeatedly “If you get nothing else ou
t of this, just get it about El Protecto! He means well. But what do you do when he tells you about breast cancer or your bank account or the next earthquake or the next war? Or just that you’re too dumb to hold a job? Be polite to him! Just say thank you! Don’t get mad. Just say thank you.”

  John getting glitter on his head.

  Leo went away at the end of 1977. He took a trip to Egypt, spent the night in one of the Pyramids, poured a whole bottle of Brut cologne around him to get rid of the stink of urine. When he came back he was as boring as anyone else who’s been to the Pyramids. He said that he wanted to learn how to materialize wristwatches so that as they materialized they would exactly match the numbers on certain watches as they came off some Swiss assembly line. (The question was: why? Why not just go out and buy the watch?)

  All this wasn’t a game. It had to do with life, was life. When my father was diagnosed with lung cancer he had the chance to go with Dr. Simonton (stern taskmaster of visualization who has about a 50 percent death rate), or hike on down to the laetrile clinic in Tijuana, where, for twenty dollars a week, he could live with Lynda by the beach, eat yogurt, stop smoking, and probably live two years in relative suntanned, painless peace.

  But he chose to check into Scripps Hospital, go through terrible and expensive agony, and put his family through it too. His supervising physician called me on Christmas Eve: “Merry Christmas! I called to tell you it’s gone up into his brain!” Certainly some of this ghastly charade might have been avoided. But my father didn’t want to avoid it. It would have been cowardly, in his eyes, not to suffer.

  It was around this same time that Lisa and her friend Roy parted. A morning came when she sat outside at the top of our steep driveway, crying. “I’m not going inside there if I have to be your daughter and Clara’s mother again! I’m not going to get stuck with all the dirty work while you write!” A half-hour later she was in the house, laying down her terms.

  The years Lisa spent with us as a grown-up were some of the happiest in my life, and I think she had fun too. The three of us—she, John, and I, collaborated on those swashbuckling historical novels, and the three of us, at least, were crazy in love with our pseudonymous alter ego, Monica Highland. We were working out a whole new way of living. Taking endless television meetings, that led us into writing scripts that made us think we were in a bad Hollywood novel. We blabbed at women’s clubs, arranged publication parties. When John published a book of poetry, Lisa introduced so many people to one another at his party that she said she thought of herself as a human infinity sign: “East, meet West!” “Black! Say hi to White!” “Evil, shake hands with Good,” and captivated a man who would soon become her father-in-law. We were having some fun here. More fun than we’d ever had.

  Lisa got up at five A.M. to catch a new TV evangelist—she was doing an assignment for TV Guide—and woke us up at five-fifteen to catch the rest of the half-hour show. We saw a blond woman wearing a linen blazer directly under the flight path of the San Diego airport. She was standing in Balboa Park, by a stream, with some ducks. Terry Cole Whittaker had to speak up from underneath all those planes. She talked about doing treasure maps to get what you want. She talked about generating energy—going out and doing something with your life. She’d had a flock of husbands and talked about them with loving scorn. She’d once entered the Mrs. America contest to prove she was a perfect wife. She’d always wanted to be a singer, but hadn’t got around to it, not yet.

  She’d gone to Cal State, LA, the same impoverished set of Quonset huts that I had. She couldn’t stop laughing. The only places where she faltered were when she asked for money or when she quoted from Scripture. She always lost her place. She couldn’t make her text match her homily.

  Tagging along with Lisa down the coast while she interviewed Terry Cole W., we ended up at a small morning seminar of wealthy La Jolla matrons. “Every yacht has its barnacles,” Terry cautioned. “When you get the yacht you get the barnacles. And very often a drunk captain as well. You want to be sure that you’re up for all of it, not just the yacht.” And later, at a hotel in San Diego, we saw that Terry had herself a new assistant, the prancing man in the velvet suit who used to open for Leo.

  Because Leo was gone now. The story went that instead of leaving to learn to materialize wristwatches, Mr. Sunshine put together a cadre of his most devoted followers and went back to his old vocation, running drugs. They’d set up a semicircular route across half the world, from New Delhi to Montreal to upstate New York, to New York City and back. The run was successful until Leo himself was nabbed in upstate New York, where they didn’t believe in men who thought they could make themselves invisible. Then the story was that Leo had escaped in a garbage truck, and been caught again. Trapped in a dank, miserable upstate New York jail cell, the small, spoiled, undereducated, overinformed young man had given it his all, and melted through a wall.

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute,” my younger daughter, Clara, opined. “He probably said Baba Help Me Now! And went for it!” The story was that he returned to New Delhi, where he was seen several times in a beautifully tailored white suit, and was finally killed in a shootout.

  How could he have done that? How could he have taken away so much fun and put so much of what he said into moral jeopardy? But one of his more charitable followers said, “He was just a kid. He got loaded with too much information, and he shorted out.”

  But his material, his message, stayed around, considerably cleaned up by Marianne Williamson, who, despite her enormously successful best sellers, liked nothing more than to work a small obscure church on the West Side of LA like a late-night supper club: another inspired ditz, knocking herself out with her own jokes, talking about visualizations and affirmations and tithing and transforming the moment, dredging giggles from very sick men, because Marianne was and is into working with AIDS “victims,” guys who have been knocked silly by the greatest plague of this generation. There’s nothing wrong with helping people, she said often. “Why, some people, they’d call Mother Teresa an enabler!”

  The same material. You can transform the moment simply by transforming it, in a millisecond. You can confound darkness by bringing light to bear on the subject. When religion runs out, you can reach around for a fistful of particle physics. You can unite the abyss and the golf course in one sweet cosmic spark.

  —

  Two whacked-out women and one sociopathic ex-con. The embarrassing Californianness of it all! If we wanted something to believe in, why couldn’t we have just put on our Sunday clothes and hauled out to church? (When Terry Cole Whittaker threw an Easter service in a hotel down in San Diego, thousands of people showed up, with glitter on their cheeks and hair. The ushers wore bunny suits and squirting flowers on their lapels and zipped around on rollerskates, and the idea of skates had come from Leo, who loved to see his assistants zip around on skates.)

  Why not go to regular church? Because the churches were run by affluent heterosexual men (at least they advertised themselves that way). They had nothing to gain by change. The bottom two thirds of the American population was drowning, drowning, and the guys in the big churches knew it, as did everyone in America who ever turned on a television set, but the guys in the big churches didn’t give a vestment one way or another. It was just the embarrassing Americanness of it: all those people struggling with the social explosion that drugs, drink, depression, demoralization, and divorce had been detonating for over half a century like a nationwide string of firecrackers. All across the country, new ways of thinking and newly constructed belief systems were being chosen—systems that could possibly glue back millions of splintered lives.

  In the South, people began being “born again,” faster and faster, and a belief in a Satan as personable and charming as the young Christ himself also sprang up. All over the country, journalists wrote about Satan as if he was a Raiders’ halfback, only a lot more interesting, and why not? How else could you explain PCP, gang warfare, methamphetamines, the depletion o
f the ozone level, and the mass rape of nursery school kids?

  Me, at Leo’s. I know it’s not suitable, but there it is.

  And Blacks were taking up martial arts (said by some to be the one true cure for heroin addiction) and Oriental medicine (including acupuncture, said to really be the one true cure for heroin addiction) and homeopathy all united to be an alternative belief to big-hospital science which is just as dull and twice as scary as big-church religion.

  If you squint your eyes a little, this search for a new belief system that will once again make us members of a meaningful family might be the thrust behind the Pro-Life movement. The Pro-Lifers, with their relative lack of formal education, have been metaphorically orphaned. They have been tricked; they have been laid off, shortchanged, scorned. They know from their own lives what it is to have been scraped off. Maybe they think: there’s going to be an end to all the scraping!

  We will be a family again! A family like we seem to remember, with pigeons in the backyard, and a tree house and ballet lessons for the kids. And Mother in the kitchen or in the back bedroom, crying. We don’t give a goddamn where she is as long as she’s there. And Dad comes home at night.

  But all along, through a good part of this century, there’s been another belief system, perhaps the great modern religion of America today, where blind faith and high intelligence fit together with no problem; where it’s a given that most families in America have been smashed to bits by drugs, drink, depression, divorce. They are the ones who have smashed their own families, but they are the ones who can put new families together again.