Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  “Oh, a couple of days ago. We’ve been staying in your room,” my mother said with a smile, and then gave him a long hug. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  Jean-Pierre looked exactly like I remembered him, but since we saw him last he’d come out as homosexual instead of bisexual. My mother tried not to act surprised, while I tried to hide my relief. Jean-Pierre took an extra day off work to be our Parisian tour guide, leading us along the Left Bank, showing us the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Basilica. In the evenings, everyone in Jean-Pierre’s house cooked a huge feast and ate together at a long table in the backyard; these dinners went on for hours and hours, helped by the fact that it didn’t get dark until after 10:00 p.m. The lively chatter was all in French, but there was so much laughter that I couldn’t help but join in. These evenings reminded me of the communal dinners at the old Berkeley commune, but with more kids, better food, and more happiness.

  We traveled on by train, south to Spain. We were happy to finally be in a country where we spoke the language. I was rusty, having given up my Spanish as soon as we moved to Denver. But now that we were in Spain I was glad to have an excuse to use it again, and proud of how good my accent was. Our first stop was the northern Basque region; my mother wanted to see where the ETA—Basque Homeland and Liberty, the armed separatist organization—was from. We stayed several days at a hostel in San Sebastián, a scenic coastal city not far from the French border. ETA attacks over the years had scared a lot of the tourists away, but it didn’t bother us.

  From there, we hitched a ride to Madrid and then on to Córdoba. We rode with a bullfighter-singer, who told us all sorts of bullfighting tales but wouldn’t sing when I asked him to, and traveled the rest of the way with a caravan of truckers hauling huge loads of wheat. The truck drivers insisted on paying for our meals that day, as if we were their guests, and they were equally insistent that a civil war was coming soon. But the more intellectual types we met were sure the country was headed for social democracy. “Spain had a civil war once before,” my mother informed me. “The fascists won, just like Pinochet and the fascists in Chile.” We spent a couple of days strolling around Córdoba and visiting its famous mosque that had been converted into a church. We were relieved to find a bed for only $5 a night. At nearly fourteen, I was too big to share a bed with my mother, but it was worth it to help stretch what little money we had.

  We hitchhiked on to the southern coastal city of Málaga, and then waited in the hot sun for hours before we caught a ride to the port city of Algeciras to take the ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco. My mother and I kept getting lost in the narrow, winding, ancient alleyways of the Moroccan towns of Tangier, Tétouan, and Chaouen, which was both exhilarating and unnerving. What I remember most about Morocco were the swarms of children surrounding us everywhere, tugging at our clothes, hawking trinkets. As annoying as they were, I felt empathy for these little kids—only five years earlier I had been hanging out with street kids in Jauja, pestering tourists in the same way that these kids were now pestering me.

  Back in Spain a few days later, we splurged on a plane ticket to Barcelona, where we stayed at a cheap pension in the touristy Las Ramblas area. Barcelona was hot and sticky, but it was easy to enjoy the city without spending any money; we just strolled all day up and down the busy pedestrian walkways of Las Ramblas.

  “Why don’t we have nice places like this to walk in American cities?” I asked my mother. “Where it’s just for people and not cars?”

  “Because the big American automobile companies would never allow it,” she replied.

  We then traveled north to Belgium by train, where we visited Roberto, my mother’s Uruguayan ex-lover from Santiago, and his Belgian wife. My mother and Roberto had reconnected a couple of years earlier, and when he heard we were coming to Europe he invited us to stay with him. Roberto had moved to Brussels after escaping the military coup in Chile. He worked painting houses during the day and at a restaurant at night. He showed us around the city’s grand main square—including my favorite attraction, the Manneken Pis, a statue of a little boy pissing water in a fountain. Carlos, the other Uruguayan we had lived with in Santiago, had been given asylum in Sweden, and he came down to visit us in Brussels. It was familiar and comfortable being around Roberto and Carlos again, especially for my mother, who was eager to talk about their time in Chile together.

  The end of our trip was nearing, and I was determined to make it to Amsterdam. “I’d really like to see the Anne Frank House,” I told my mother, hoping she would be sufficiently impressed by my appreciation of history to say yes. But she didn’t want to go; said she wanted to rest up and spend more time with Roberto in Brussels. I persisted. “Please, it’s so close, only a short train ride. I could even go by myself.”

  And so I did. The next morning my mother put me on an early train with a return ticket for the last train back that night. After walking right past the Anne Frank House, I spent much of the rest of the day wandering aimlessly around the city’s famous red light district, gawking at the scantily dressed women sitting on display in their softly lit windows; walking through the Sex Museum; and trying to make sense of the strange toys and other contraptions in the adult shops. No one seemed to mind or even notice that I was there alone; I was just one more wide-eyed tourist in the crowd.

  I kept thinking to myself how much my mother would disapprove, even be horrified. I remembered her campaign against Denver’s porn shops, marching down East Colfax Avenue during a “take back the night” feminist demonstration she’d helped organize the year before. She also protested outside the Crazy Horse strip club bar, handing out anti-pornography leaflets. The photo of my mother in the Rocky Mountain News story about the protest identified her as “a woman who refused to give her name.” And for Halloween one year she had put on a costume and mask and dashed in and out of the porn shops on South Broadway not far from where we lived, screaming at the employees and customers that they were sexist pigs exploiting women.

  My mother met me at the Brussels train station late that night. “Did you have a nice time?” she asked.

  “Oh, it was great. I really liked the Anne Frank House.”

  * * *

  I was reluctant to board the plane home. I had never had a happier time with my mother than during those five weeks of traveling around, carefree and (mostly) politics-free, living for the moment rather than trying to find or make a revolution.

  I asked my mother, “Can we do this again?” I knew it wouldn’t be anytime soon. We had used up all the car insurance money, and we were now too broke to afford to buy another car. We would go without a car for the next couple of years.

  “Sure, Peter,” my mother replied. “We’ll take another trip like this someday.”

  We never did.

  Baker’s Dozen

  I SANG MY way through junior high. It turned out my voice was my ticket out of the west side. School was my salvation, and my choir teacher was my savior. I had the deepest voice in the seventh-grade choir class. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t read music—I could wing it by following along, singing bass, belting out tunes with gusto, and making my choir teacher proud. And it was an easy A, with no homework.

  By ninth grade, I was ready for the big league: the Baker’s Dozen jazz choir, with the boys sporting tight black polyester pants, puffy shirts, and red velvet vests. We sang at school events, at Cinderella City Mall and other shopping centers, and in fancy hotel lobbies. We were treated as though we were special; we felt special; we were special. We were the only school group featured in a full-page photo spread in the 1980 Baker Junior High School yearbook.

  I adored Mrs. Kates, the energetic, freckle-faced choir teacher with glowing shoulder-length red hair. One late-spring day, she asked me to stay after a Baker’s Dozen rehearsal.

  “Peter, where are you going to high school next year?” she asked.

  “West High,” I replied.

  “Yeah, I figured.” Then, after a long pa
use, Mrs. Kates said, “How would you like to go to East High instead? My son went there; he loved it. I think you would, too. It’s a much better school than West.” She added, “Maybe you could even be in the jazz choir, one of the best in the state. They’re called the Angelaires.”

  I loved the sound of that word.

  “But how?” I asked. “I don’t live in the East school district.”

  Mrs. Kates flashed me a knowing smile. “I have an idea.”

  When I got home that afternoon, I announced to my mother that I would be going to East High School, as if somehow that would make it true.

  “But why?” she asked. “What’s wrong with going to West High?”

  I knew my mother well enough not to explain that West High was probably the worst school in the city and East was one of the best. That was the last thing my mother would want to hear. Students who went to East often went on to college; students who went to West usually didn’t, and often had trouble even graduating. Unlike any other parent in America, this would convince her I had to stay at West. Instead, I said, “There’s this special voice class that’s only offered at East. Mrs. Kates, my choir teacher, really wants me to go to East so I can take that class and be an Angelaire. She knows some higher-ups in the school system and thinks she can get me a special transfer.”

  My mother wasn’t convinced. “Peter, I’m really concerned that if you go to a place like East you could become an elitist. And if you became ambitious you’re more likely to sell out to the system instead of fighting it.”

  “No, don’t worry, that would never happen,” I protested. “Come on, have a little faith in me.”

  “But wouldn’t West High be good enough? Maybe even better in some ways, since it’s a Chicano working-class school.” She added: “And there would also be less pressure to succeed; more like Baker. You like Baker, right?”

  I nodded.

  I kept pushing. “Look, it’s not as if I’m asking to go to some rich white suburban school, like Cherry Creek High, or live with my father and go to school there. So what’s the big deal if I go to East?”

  “I don’t know, Peter, this whole thing makes me uneasy, makes me question whether you really want to be with me instead of with your father. Your father would have no problem agreeing with what you’re asking for.”

  “Don’t worry, I don’t want to live with my father, but I really, really want to go to East. Okay? It’s not like I’m selling out or anything.”

  “Maybe we should talk about what you’re going to do with your life.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life,” I replied impatiently. “But I probably want to go to college. I’m probably not going to be a factory worker like Joel.”

  My mother nodded.

  “And I don’t want to spend my life filling gas tanks at a filling station.”

  She nodded again.

  “And I’m not going to be just like you. You’re too negative about everything, thinking everything in the world is a problem that needs to be fixed.”

  “Well, Peter, I suppose I do want you to do something about the world’s problems. But I don’t want you to do it just for me, I want you to do it because it’s sick not to.”

  “Mom, I’m only fourteen.”

  After more prodding and pleading, my mother finally, reluctantly, agreed.

  The transfer request was approved a few weeks later. When I arrived at East in the fall, I joined the choir, and later got into the Angelaires, but never actually took that voice class. No one noticed when I didn’t sign up for it, even though it was the excuse for the transfer.

  Denounced

  FOR ALL THE ups and downs in my relationship with my mother, I never doubted that I needed her and that she needed me. I’d chosen her over my father, if reluctantly. However, not all of her sons saw her that way. Ronald also lived in Denver, but we almost never saw him, and he was growing increasingly estranged from her, as slights imagined and real built to a breaking point.

  One day, when I was fifteen, Ronald suddenly announced that he wanted nothing to do with our mother. Now in his early twenties, he told her that she had been a bad mother and that he planned to move as far away as possible because there was “not enough room in Denver” for the two of them. Her unforgivable betrayal, apparently, was my mother’s kindness to Ronald’s girlfriend, Dawn, during a tumultuous moment when he and Dawn had temporarily broken up. Now that they were back together, Ronald announced, they were moving to the other side of the world: New Zealand. After years of conciliatory efforts by my mother, Ronald finally began communicating with her again, and she spent the rest of her life tiptoeing around him. Her diaries during this period are littered with self-tortured entries about what went wrong between her and Ronald: “I do feel guilt, lots of it, and for what I don’t know, except that he probably needed an extra measure of love.”

  It wasn’t only her, though. We all tiptoed around Ronald on the rare occasion that we saw him. No one could hold a grudge quite like he did: he had cut off contact with Grandpa Rich after Grandpa chastised him for not finding a job; he had a falling-out with Greg, his best friend and roommate in Denver, because of a perceived slight; he suddenly stopped talking to our cousin Alan, and this later continued even as Alan was dying of cancer. Ronald never cut ties with our father, but he was always critical and kept his distance.

  I hadn’t been close to him, either; had barely seen him since we lived together at the commune in Berkeley. In Denver, he did take me skiing a few times. He always insisted on racing down the slopes to see who could ski the fastest. The year I was fourteen, he gave me a lift ticket for Christmas. Joel came with us, though he’d never even been on skis before, and I myself had only skied a handful of times. As soon as we got to the ski area, Ronald took off on his own, leaving me to introduce Joel to skiing, though I was almost a beginner myself. As Ronald got on the lift, I shouted at him as loud as I could, “You asshole!” We didn’t see Ronald again until the lifts closed for the day.

  Joel was hopeless; the ski patrol ended up banning him from the slopes for recklessness. He didn’t mind—it was a “bourgeois sport” anyway—so he spent the afternoon watching football on the TV in the ski lodge. Hours later, Joel’s jeans were still soaked from falling—neither one of us owned snow pants.

  When Ronald finally showed up, he was fuming that I had called him an asshole in public. “How dare you insult me like that? How dare you! I should just leave you here.” On the two-hour drive back to Denver on I-70, Ronald kept threatening to pull over and leave me by the side of the road. “That would teach you a lesson,” he yelled at me as I slunk down in the backseat of his white Subaru. “You should be grateful I brought you skiing, but no, you insult me.” Joel stayed out of it. Ronald had never been much of a big brother to me, but this was the end of any pretense.

  Before he and Dawn moved to New Zealand, Ronald had a big yard sale. I told him our mother wanted a few small items they were getting rid of and asked if we could come pick them up in a borrowed car. Sure, Ronald said, as long as our mother stayed in the car. She did, parking in front of the house with the engine running. Ronald did not even glance toward the car. As bad as I felt for her, there was no point in confronting Ronald. It wasn’t going to change his mind. I quickly found the things my mother wanted and ran back to the car. As we drove off, my mother asked how Ronald was doing, whether he had asked about her, whether he had said anything at all about her. I didn’t reply—which was a reply of sorts—and her disappointment was visible.

  My mother took Ronald’s rejection hard, telling everyone that her son had “denounced” her. It tormented her. The more depressed she grew, the angrier I became at Ronald. Sure, he had grievances, I thought to myself. But didn’t we all? Well, yes, Ronald would say—he had urged me to cut her off, too. Maybe he blamed our mother for not being around to get him out of juvenile detention when he was arrested after fighting with his girlfriend. Or maybe he resented her for giving me more at
tention and letting him bum around South America by himself when he was only fourteen. Perhaps something else happened that I didn’t know about. Whatever had happened to Ronald, the middle child who got lost in the divorce and had basically been on his own since his early teens, I still thought he was being cruel.

  I did my best to console my mother. “Peter doesn’t like me wringing my hands over the situation with Ronald,” she wrote in her diary, “or to blame myself at all.” One day when my mother was especially down, I wrote her a letter to try to describe the person I thought she was, and to assure her that her youngest son still loved her, understood her, and would never give up on her:

  Mami, mom, mum, mama, Carol, Andrea . . . She is many people at different times of her life trying to figure out which person she wants. A mother, a housewife, a swinging single, an adventurer, a lover, a feminist, a runner, a saver, a peacemaker, a revolutionary. She likes a little of each person so she switches and adds and takes away from the various persons to make the next day a challenge and exciting experience. She survives day by day on hope and without this hope she would have no will to survive in the world. She fights for what she believes in but she slowly changes these beliefs over the years.

  She’s not attracted to older men because they have in them some of the things she rejected, so she is satisfied with her brief but sweet excitement with the younger men she falls in love with, a new challenge to change these men into the sculptures she wants until they go on to other adventures and new experiences leaving her behind or she leaving them behind while she heals her broken heart with new problems. It would be a dead world for her without problems.

  She sits back and watches her sons grow up, none of them the way she planned, and she wonders and watches her youngest son grow out of phases and clothes. She wonders at how he will turn out because he’s gone through so much with her, she hopes some good has rubbed off on him from her, she learns from him, he learns from her. She realizes that he’s started going his separate way and that he’s started to have a few ideas that are different from hers. She realizes she hasn’t kept him totally isolated from the evil American society, yet at the same time she’s glad he experiences everything because she wants him to be his own person for better or worse. She sees things in him, the good and the bad that will be with him whether or not he’s a revolutionary or a fink. She knows that her son will probably be somewhere in between, some good and some bad, but she also knows he loves her very much and that no matter what happens she’ll love him, too, just like she loves her other two sons, but he’ll never denounce her like his older brother has done.