Exit Laughing

by Victoria Zackheim

  Once we crossed that boundary, the remaining walls tumbled down, and we became a cohesive group. On the last meeting, we sat together and candidly looked back on our journeys. Each of us confessed measuring our grief against the others!

  It was suggested that we take a vote to determine which of us had the most tragic tale. We embraced the idea. Ballots were cast, and the votes tallied. We shared our last group belly laugh when the winner was announced: Young Pregnant Widow was a clean sweep.

  I left the group struck by the banality of death, even when it’s a more lurid death like suicide. The truth is, however we leave this world, we’ve left it. Death, in all its forms, was finally demystified for me. And I learned that even in grief there can be moments of humor. I also found out that my reactions—from what made me cry to what me laugh—were not unique, they were universal. It was a humbling experience.

  My fears, guilt, and grief were very much like those emotions experienced by everyone in my group. And even my shameful secret, which was my proclivity to secretly quantify death, was also shared. I went in thinking I was different, and I came out seeing that I’m very much like everyone else, ordinary in the most extraordinary way. And it was the ordinariness that made it extraordinary. I was human.

  DECCA’S POTTY

  — Kathi Kamen Goldmark —

  I could tell you how we met.

  I arrived to escort an author to a television interview and ended up sitting in a Berkeley kitchen with Maya Angelou and Jessica Mitford telling me about riding elephants together in a charity circus parade—two of the world’s best storytellers comparing their fantasies of wearing spangled harem pants and lounging in pillowed luxury versus the reality of being hoisted up to terrifying heights and hanging on for dear life. The elephants’ hide was rough. “It turns out you have to wear the stoutest of jeans,” giggled Mitford, the world-renowned muckraking journalist, former card-carrying member of the Communist Party, legendary civil-rights activist, and author of The American Way of Death, a book that revolutionized the funeral industry.

  I could tell you about the first performance.

  I had been asked to help recruit authors for a literary talent show to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Paris Review, and it happened that Maya Angelou was in town. I invited her to stay for a few extra days so she could be in the show.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “I can’t stay that long, but Decca will do it. Have you ever heard her sing ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’? No? Well then …” Dr. Angelou picked up the car phone and dialed a number. “Decca,” she said. “I’ve bought you a scholarship. You’re going to be in a show. Here, talk to Ms. Goldmark.”

  That was how I met Jessica Mitford (known to her friends and family as “Decca”) and became her record producer.

  She arrived at the Paris Review party in a glittery gown. My band was performing, and we did a journeyman’s job of backing up Leticia Baldridge on “La Vie en Rose,” Ben Fong-Torres on a couple of Elvis tunes, and Louis B. Jones and Nion McEvoy on a classic rocker. Herb Caen contributed jazzy drum stylings. We let George Plimpton plow through “The Minute Waltz” on his own. But Decca brought down the house singing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with Caen on cowbell. I looked over at David, my musical coconspirator and bandleader. He nodded. We had to record this for posterity. That’s how “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” Records was born—and went on to achieve CD sales well into the dozens—with Decca and the Dectones as our first project.

  I could tell you about the recording session.

  I couldn’t afford the gorgeous horn section required to duplicate the music bed on the Beatles’ arrangement of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” so I invited twenty Jessica Mitford fans to join us on kazoo instead. The Dectones, as we called them, performed double-duty on a second track, “The Ballad of Grace Darling,” a song Decca had learned in her youth that featured a large group howling “Help! Help!” on the chorus. We released Decca’s single with a blowout bash at San Francisco’s Paradise Lounge featuring a half-hour set of old protest songs, torch songs, and the grand finale, “The Ballad of Decca,” a parody which, in true old-Commie form, was written by committee with her husband, labor lawyer Bob Treuhaft. Sung to the tune of “Grace Darling,” it was the story of Decca’s life, minus the elephant ride:

  THE BALLAD OF DECCA

  (To be sung to the tune of “Grace Darling.”

  Lyrics by Kathi Goldmark, Bob Treuhaft,

  Audrey deChadenedes, and Tony Goldmark.)

  ’Twas on the grounds of Swinbrook, there dwelt an English maid

  Pure as the air around her, of danger ne’er afraid

  A prisoner of the nursery, as bored as she could be

  So, longing for adventure, she split with Romilly—and—

  She sailed away o’er the rolling sea, over the waters blue

  “HELP! HELP!” she could hear the cries of a cause so true

  Decca was very smart, integrity she craved

  She pulled away o’er the rolling spray, and her life she saved

  She settled in Oakland’s flatlands, accepting many a dare

  With Dinky, Bob, and Benjy, determined to make things fair

  When the Unamericans rode into town,

  Decca was there with a wink and a frown

  Taking the fifth (which became a noun) she never let her comrades down—and—

  Fearlessly she sailed into the fray—relentlessly brave and true

  “HELP! HELP!” she could hear the cry

  That echoed around and pierced the sky

  But she was ready with her reply, “You’ll never get me to testify”

  But when she sang the Beatles, her life turned upside-down

  With “Maxwell” and “Grace Darling” she makes a lovely sound

  So madly looking forward to singing here tonight

  Let’s put our hands together for England’s brightest light—as—

  She sails away o’er chorus and verse, accompanied by kazoo

  “HELP! HELP!” you can hear the cries of the Dectones, too

  With a true performer’s heart, and vocals strong and brave

  She’ll sing today in her dashing way

  And the show she’ll save!

  The kazoo chorus, proud Dectones all, became a signature component of the “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” sound, and I learned how to record and mix kazoo sound with an ambience of controlled chaos—a lost art, these days.

  I could tell you about taking the show on the road.

  Decca, Maya Angelou, and journalist Shana Alexander headlining a lit-rock event in Cary, North Carolina, along with Olivia Goldsmith and Roy Blount, Jr.; a gala at Slim’s to close the San Francisco Book Festival; a performance at the opening of the new San Francisco Public Library; a very strange gig on the roof of Virgin Records downtown, with Cyndi Lauper as the headliner; a glorious evening on the stage of Town Hall in New York on behalf of the Nation magazine; a CD release party in an Upper East Side New York town house; a follow-up recording, There Is a Moral to It All: Musical Duets, with Maya Angelou and Jessica Mitford singing English music hall ditties “Right, Said Fred” and “One Fish Ball.” There were always eager kazoo-tooting Dectones backing up our star, well into her seventies, giving “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” her all before an enchanted crowd.

  And I could tell you about singing old union songs with Decca and Bob in their Berkeley living room.

  Hearing great stories about standing up to the House Un-American Activities Committee and the early days of the American Communist Party; many delightful parties and dinners. I read her autobiographies and learned about the famously well-documented Mitford sisters and her extraordinary life.

  Decca was the daughter of the Second Baron Redesdale, born in Burford, Oxfordshire, in 1917. She was a self-described autodidact, educated at home by her mother. She told me about her sisters: Diana Mitford, who married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists; Unity Mitford, who became a close friend of
Adolf Hitler; Nancy Mitford, “the real writer in the family.” Decca developed left-wing sensibilities. She married Esmond Romilly, nephew of Winston Churchill, and the couple moved to the United States in 1939. Romilly joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was killed in a bombing raid.

  A few years later, Mitford married radical lawyer Robert Treuhaft. They both joined the American Communist Party and were active in the Civil Rights movement. They moved to Oakland in 1948 and had lived in the East Bay ever since, raising kids, fighting for social justice and the rights of the oppressed, and writing scathing, hilarious exposés.

  We became great pals.

  Meanwhile, I’d caught the record-producer bug and began working on other projects. Of all the quirky offerings on the “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” label, Decca’s favorite was the album Potty Animal: Funny Songs about Potty Training. She offered a blurb for the back panel and sent me cassettes of scatological ditties she’d collected from all over the world.

  Fast-forward to KPFA’s Berkeley studio, sometime in 1996. David Gans invited Decca and me to appear as guests on his Grateful Dead–themed radio show. We agreed, lured by the promise that we could bring our own music to play on the air. As Decca cued up her choice, Potty Animal, we could feel Deadheads turning off their radios in droves.

  A few months later, Decca went to the doctor with peculiar symptoms and was diagnosed with brain cancer. She had just a few weeks to gather her loved ones around her, to settle her affairs, and to deliver marching orders to those of us who visited her bedside—amounting to instructions on how to take care of one another after she was gone.

  I led my band of loyal Dectones, kazoos in hand, in a final tribute at the memorial, a spectacular event. Then I went home to try to figure out how to fill the empty space. No more playful faxes filled with corny jokes, or thanks for the “swell grub” after a dinner party. No more thrilling moments on lead kazoo, holding up the “Bang! Bang!” and “Help! Help!” sing-along signs beside my lovely star as she bellowed and vamped her heart out. No more Decca. And without Decca, there could be no more Dectones.

  A couple of weeks later, I got a call from Bob.

  “Can you come by this week? There’s something that Decca wanted you to have.”

  We made a date, and I wondered what the something might be. A trinket? A book? A letter about all the fun we’d had pretending to be rock stars together? Bob wouldn’t give any clues, and a few days later I drove to Berkeley to pick up what I was sure would be a small gift, a token.

  He pointed to an old, polished hardwood cabinet in the hallway. “That’s it,” he said with a smile. “I hope you have room in your trunk.”

  “Um, wow, thanks.”

  “Do you know what this is? Here, let me show you.” The front of the cabinet turned out to be two fake drawers on a hinged covering. Bob removed the facade to reveal—a porcelain potty.

  “It’s the Mitford family chamber pot. Decca loved your potty songs, and she wanted you to have this. It’s over a hundred years old, you know.”

  I wrestled my treasure into the car, thinking of all the aristocratic English bottoms that had graced this gift, going back over a hundred years. It remains in a place of honor in my dining room to this day, adorned with a 45 of Bernard Cribbins singing “Right, Said Fred” and a photo of Decca at her CD release party. Using a pair of red flannel cowboy boxer shorts as a hanky, she wipes her eyes while vamping on “Mean to Me,” her favorite torch song.

  The commode itself, of course, is filled with kazoos.

  MY PET DEAD MOLE

  — Zoe FitzGerald Carter —

  It’s early spring in Northern California—roadkill season—and it’s the fifth dead skunk I’ve passed on my bike this morning. This one is perfect, though, with no obvious signs of violence or bloodshed. Casually curled up at the edge of the road, it looks like it’s just fallen asleep. I have a sudden urge to stop, get off my bike, check it out, see what its face and its little skunk paws look like up close. Maybe even see how long its body is, if I stretch it out.

  I don’t stop. I am aware that it is neither hygienic nor completely normal to want to examine dead animals. But as I continue down the road, I realize that such conventional concerns haven’t always stopped me. In fact, there was a time—an incident really—when I gave full rein to my interest in dead animals.

  It was the year I turned nine, and I had flown with my family from Washington, DC, to Castle Park, Michigan, to spend spring break with my grandfather. He lived in an enormous yellow house that was part of a secluded enclave of palatial “cottages” along the shores of Lake Michigan. It was a lovely, old-fashioned house with multiple staircases, a vast sleeping porch, and a basement that reeked of the oversized rubber inner tubes that we hauled down to the lake each day. Adding to this exotic splendor was the endless, perfectly maintained lawn, complete with wending stone walls and a white wrought-iron bench around one of the trees.

  My grandfather was very particular about his lawn. In fact, unbeknownst to me, he had recently set out several spring-loaded traps to deal with an influx of burrowing moles. Out playing in the garden one afternoon, my sister, Sarah, and I were startled when my grandfather abruptly stepped out of the house, walked quickly across the lawn, and pulled up a trap from a hole in the ground. In its steel maw was a dead, but perfectly intact, baby mole. I asked my grandfather to let me see him and promptly fell in love. He was soft and tiny and utterly perfect, with sleek dark brown fur and a sweet closed-eyed little face.

  At this point, my memory grows a bit hazy. How to explain the fact that the dead mole wasn’t whisked away and tossed into the woods, or deposited in some unceremoniously dug shallow grave? All I know is that somehow, once I got my hands on him, he was mine. My only explanation is that it was the late sixties and my parents were “progressive” in their approach to child rearing, believing it was more important that my two sisters and I be interesting rather than conventional.

  Eventually, they did insist I put the mole in a plastic bag and stick him in my grandfather’s freezer, but only after promising that I could bring him back to DC when we flew home later that week. In the meantime, I found every excuse to nip into the kitchen and check on him. This usually involved taking him out of the box and balancing him on the table in a standing position, holding his frozen paws between my fingertips. If the coast was clear and I had time to linger, I would walk him past the sugar bowl and saltshaker, and even have him execute a few turns and pirouettes.

  Getting into the kitchen was nerve-wracking, however, because I lived in fear of running into my gruff, stooped, old grandfather. Despite his frail frame, my grandpa had a grumpy, intimidating demeanor. He always seemed to have a cigar in his mouth and, whenever he drove us somewhere in his big shiny Chrysler, he would gesture impatiently at the driver in front of him and mutter, “Tromp on the old mushroom!” And while I loved my mole—despite its being dead—I couldn’t help thinking my grandfather a bit mean for having killed him.

  By the time we were ready to fly home, my parents had taken an “Isn’t this hilarious?” attitude toward the whole thing, and my father thought it especially amusing that we had tucked the mole into a box that had “Figgy Pudding” printed on it. Once on the airplane, he asked the stewardess to put it in the refrigerator, which—this was the 1960s—she did. He then looked very pleased with himself and made jokes about what might happen if she got hungry and decided to steal some pudding.

  Meanwhile, I thought about my dead mole the whole way home, still astonished that I’d been allowed to keep him. As soon as we were in the taxi from the airport, I opened his box and was delighted to find that he had thawed enough for me to take him out and sit him on my lap. I loved that I could be so close to him (for some reason it never crossed my mind that “he” might have been female) and couldn’t stop looking at his little hands and feet, his tiny black nose.

  “You really are weird, Zoe,” Sarah said, in her big sister voice. She was only a year older but h
ad given up playing with stuffed animals, so of course she wouldn’t understand. “And that dead animal,” she said, poking at my mole’s flattened ears, “is disgusting.”

  “He is not,” I answered indignantly. “It’s not his fault he’s dead.”

  Actually, while I never would’ve admitted it, being dead was part of what made him so intriguing. The fact that he was a real animal, with fur and bones and blood, meant he was more “real” than my stuffed animals with their plastic eyes and foam insides. But being dead also made him less real than, say, our family dog. And so he existed in this strange middle place—more exciting than a toy, but not as thrilling as a live animal—and yet somehow more thrilling, because having him allowed me to quite literally get my hands around death, a topic that had long obsessed me.

  For months, I’d been driving my family crazy asking them if they would rather be shot or hanged, burned or drowned, left on a desert island with no food or attacked by a wild animal. I never understood why they would invariably tell me to go away, apparently not as fascinated by these hypothetical scenarios as I was. I think in my own way I was trying to understand death and, at the same time, manage my anxiety about it. Gruesome as my questions were, they assumed that we would have a choice about how we died and that we might even be able to pick the least painful or distressing option. My dead mole functioned similarly. Intact and seemingly unchanged by death—other than the fact that he couldn’t move on his own, of course—my mole somehow made death okay.