There in Ecuador, I had an affair with one of the women on the trek. Holly was observing us very carefully. On July 23, she wrote in her journal:Today’s my half birthday! I’m exactly 15-½ years old! Oh, yeah, I haven’t written anything about the only romance on the trip. Daddy and Dinah! They are sharing a room & Daddy says that if him & Mommy had treated each other as good as he & Dinah are treating each other they’d still be together. I know that’s bullshit but it’s a sweet thing to say and it’s nice to know things are working so well for them.
Daddy seems like a kid again, holding hands in the taxi & when they’re eating, little kisses on the cheek, and he’s so happy. Dinah is 29, really pretty & intelligent. Daddy says she reminds him of Mommy. She lives with her boyfriend. They really make each other laugh. I’m so happy for Daddy! For my “birthday” they gave me a rhinoceros beetles shell that they found . . .
Because Dinah and I both knew—and agreed in advance—that we would go our separate ways when the expedition ended, our affair had that much more intensity.
For the final week, our group lived deep in the jungle. Our home had belonged to a shaman who died a few months previously. The structure sat on stilts and had a sturdy thatched roof, but no side walls. A raised deck was the kitchen area. There was no toilet, except for a cluster of bushes, and the Cayapa River was for washing and—if you boiled the water for fifteen minutes—drinking.
Every day, three generations of the shaman’s family arrived early in the morning. These indigenous Cayapa Indians would sit serenely, as though posing for an official portrait. The women were bare-breasted. One was playing with the penis of her small child. Adults were required to live together for six months before they were permitted to marry. At their wedding ceremony, a couple would be given ten lashes each as a sample of the 150 lashes either would receive for marital infidelity.
We were like a bunch of Martians who had suddenly dropped in on their primitive culture. We were their live TV show. They were fascinated by one of us practicing Tai Chi. They listened to another singing “there’s a riot going on in cell block number nine.” They watched a psychiatrist taking notes on their curiosity. They had become the observers, and we had become their subjects.
As a Zen Bastard exercise, I once trained myself to laugh when I stubbed a toe. It had become second nature. I had been searching for an example of how humor could transcend language, and when I stubbed my toe and laughed out loud automatically, our hosts shared the universality of such an incongruous reaction to pain.
Shamanism goes back fifty thousand years. The curandero (healer) communicates with those unseen evil spirits responsible for illness. But it’s also a family business. Built into the overhead costs of our trip was the transfer of enough sucres to insure the privilege of participating in their healing ceremonies.
The Christian influence was evident in the name of one shaman—Jesusito. He wore a long silk shirt with short sleeves. In front of him was a shrine of hand-carved wooden figures—a soldier, a Mama Grande (female figure) with white beads, a policeman, a bishop, Otahulpa (the last Inca king)—bronze eagle-head staffs, polished stones, a prehistoric clay cast of an ox head, money, and a pair of holy objects: a gray, clamshell-like item that opened up to reveal a head of the Virgin Mary that could be lifted out in case you wanted to make Jello in the mold; and the most sacred of all, a sealed-beam headlight from an old Buick which was transformed into a kind of crystal ball. There were forty thousand Cayapa Indians, but none had ever seen a car.
Our journey would climax with a group ingestion of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic vine similar to yagé, used by shamans throughout the Amazon basin to have visions and communicate with jungle spirits during their healing ceremonies. Holly had hoped to participate. Wanting to be a responsible parent, I gave her some literature to read, including an article by Andrew Weil, author of The Natural Mind.
“Vomiting is the first stage of the effect of yagé,” he wrote. “It is not fun, and I say that as someone who likes to vomit in certain circumstances.”
He suggested fasting after breakfast, but our group ate lunch anyway, rationalizing that as long as we were all going to vomit that night, we might as well put something into our stomachs now to throw up later.
Ayahuasca means “soul vine.” It is innocent-looking enough, an inch or two thick, curving into and beyond a complete circle. Who can imagine how its psychedelic use was originally discovered? First it is chopped vertically, then horizontally, and then boiled. In Wizard of the Upper Amazon, Bruce Lamb wrote:Drinking a carelessly prepared extract would only cause violent vomiting, acute intestinal cramps and diarrhea, [an old Peruvian healer] said, and he went on to tell me that ayahuasca must be handled with care and reverence, simmered slowly in a special earthenware pot over a low fire under constant, proper attention.
However, ours was being boiled in an aluminum pot by a young Canelos Indian couple in the midst of a lovers’ quarrel. But we couldn’t very well tell them that they were preparing it the wrong way. A leaf, datura (similar to belladonna), was added to the potion, an unappetizing, rusty colored, muddy liquid which tastes so putrid that a bottle of rum must be held in your other hand for an instant chaser.
Inevitably, the sounds of our violent retching would echo through the jungle. One by one we would go outside and vomit as though we were wet towels being wrung out by invisible demons. When Holly’s insides declared that it was her turn to throw up, I accompanied her outside. It was a mini-volcanic retching that temporarily took over her body. I thought, I hope I’m doing the right thing.
When Holly finished, I began. The power of peristalsis possessed me so thoroughly that I vomited and farted simultaneously. Holly’s tears turned to laughter at my involuntary duet, which in turn made me laugh. There I was in the middle of the jungle with my daughter—vomiting, farting, and laughing.
“I think this is known as quality time,” I managed to say.
As we were walking back to the shack with our arms around each other and feeling weak, Holly said, “It’s nice to be near someone you love when you’re in misery.”
Under the influence of ayahuasca, the local people traditionally have visions of jaguars and anacondas (water snakes). But instead our group saw elephants and mice, spider webs of memory, and a woman wearing an 1890’s gown and a large hat, eating a loaf of French bread. The corrugated metal ceiling was moving like ocean waves for me. During the healing ceremony, two shamans kept sucking the poisons out of a patient’s head, and then, although the shamans didn’t actually vomit, they did make these awful sounds of regurgitation to get rid of those poisons.
All through the night, we were forced to divert our psychic energy away from exquisite visionary flights simply in order not to throw up again. The shamans were laughing at us whenever anyone succumbed to vomiting. A flash of paranoia convinced me for a moment that there was some kind of sorcerer’s trick being played on us.
Before we left, one of the shamans asked our medical doctor for Lomotil, to be used for diarrhea, and the cultural exchange was completed. Our return hike through the rainforest was accompanied by a tremendous rainstorm. While getting thoroughly soaked, Holly and I harmonized “Singin’ in the Rain” over and over and over as loud as we could.
After I had moved back to San Francisco from my Hustler stint, Holly remained in Los Angeles with Jeanne, so our visits to each other were much more frequent than when they were living in New York. They both came to a show I did in L.A., and just before I went onstage to perform, Jeanne said, “Paul, I have to tell you something. Holly’s not yours.” It was Jeanne’s way of saying, “Break a leg.”
Holly was attending Fairfax High School and working at a Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor just off Sunset Boulevard. She had come to know her hooker customers by their favorite flavors, and pointed them out to me as we walked along. “That’s Rocky Road. That’s Pralines ’n’ Cream. That’s Strawberry Shortcake.” Holly was taking on an almost scary sophistication. In a book report
for her English composition class, she wrote:The most important and interesting news that I found from reading The Victims were the statistics. They show that nine out of ten rape victims are emotionally unable to have sexual relations with men for at least one year after the assault. The time between the assault and when the women may want to participate in sexual activities is known as the Seul period, meaning ‘alone’ in French. The length of time of the Seul period may vary, the time depending on the intensity of the attack and the previous mental stability of the victim.
But, not only was there no such book as The Victims, Holly had also invented the Seul period. I was really quite proud of her.
One evening, when she was sixteen, Holly called me. “Hold on a second,” she said, then held her telephone to the speaker of her stereo. And I heard Carly Simon singing, “Daddy, I’m no virgin, and I’ve already waited too long . . .” Then Holly hung up quickly.
I began to laugh and cry simultaneously. I was laughing at the creative way she had chosen to tell me this news—my generation had avoided communicating with parents about sex altogether—and I was crying because I never got any when I was sixteen. The sexual revolution had still been just a horny dream back then. Now I was delighted to see its legacy in action, but I also felt a certain vestigial resentment. “Why, these young kids today, they just don’t appreciate the joy of yearning.” I had to be careful not to let the memory of my own blue balls turn into sour grapes.
When Holly visited me that Thanksgiving, I teased her, “Did you bring your diaphragm?”
“Oh, Daddy, even if I fall in love with someone, it doesn’t mean we have to go to bed right away.”
She had found her own place on the spectrum between abstinence and promiscuity. Still, she got in trouble for having a hickey on her neck during a gymnastics competition. When Holly graduated high school, she was designated “Class Flirt” in the yearbook, exactly the same title Jeanne had earned when she graduated high school. It gave one a sense of continuity.
Scoop Nisker managed to maintain his balance between current events and the infinite void. He was now the news director of KSAN, and his slogan was “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” He was also a practicing Buddhist, and his slogan was, “Stay high, but keep your priorities straight.” Together, we’ve led humor workshops at Esalen and other New Age resorts.
In 1981 Scoop persuaded me to attend a ten-day meditation retreat where I would have to do without any of my usual media distractions. I was afraid at first, and decided to go only in order to confront my fear. But then Holly called. She was now seventeen. She wanted to go to college in San Francisco and live with me again. So—keeping my priorities straight—I immediately canceled out of the Buddhist retreat. That whole experience would only have been polluted by my irresponsibility in not being home to help Holly with her re-entry.
I liked the way she challenged me. Once I was smoking a joint very early in the day, and she said, “Dad, how come you have to escape reality the first thing in the morning?” When I was a kid, my parents would refer to “a colored guy” and I would tell them that “Negro” was correct. Now, when I would refer to somebody as “Oriental,” Holly would tell me that “Asian” was correct.
She didn’t like small talk. “Oh, Dad, that’s trivial bullshit,” she would say. The vestigial old-fashioned parent in me wanted to chastise her, “Hey, you can’t talk to me that way, I’m your father.” But the contemporary New Age parent in me knew that Holly had made an accurate observation. What I had said was trivial bullshit. I took a deep breath.
“I’ll tell you something, Holly. I’m glad you feel free enough to tell me that what I’m saying is trivial bullshit, but I hope you’re glad that I’m free enough to recognize my own trivial bullshit when it’s pointed out.”
Nobody I knew had ever said “trivial bullshit” to their parents. Certainly I never said it to mine, even though they specialized in trivial bullshit. I had learned to pretend that my parents were a Buddhist monk and nun whose sole purpose on earth was to test my patience with trivia. So, when they showed me how many electric outlets were in the kitchen, I eagerly examined them. “Oh, look, here’s a three-pronger!” That way there was no friction between us. They felt good, I felt good, and what a commendable goal that was.
When my mother opened up the bread of a sandwich—while I was eating it—and put more food inside, I could only smile with gratitude for this whole new form of generosity to contemplate. And when my father gave me his old parka—literally showing me how to put the hood on—I didn’t remind him that I was no longer five years old or accuse him of freezing in his parental role. I just said, “Let me practice that a few times.”
Conversely, Holly gave me a pair of red cotton long johns for Christmas, and she didn’t show me how to put them on. I wore them for the first time when I was performing on a cold night in Sebastopol, and at one point in my monologue, I decided to show them to the audience. But when I turned my back and pulled my jeans down, the long johns stuck to the jeans, and I found myself accidentally displaying my bare buttocks, in a spotlight, to a large group of assembled strangers.
This was a very dreamlike moment, but I couldn’t very well flap my arms like wings as a reality check—not without resembling a human bellows. I was merely a victim of static cling. I had heard that phrase in fabric-softener commercials, but I had never actually experienced it.
Recovering my composure, I told the audience, “You see, actually, I came here to join the Moonies, and this is my initiation.” After that, I began to moon audiences deliberately, but only once in each city, because I didn’t want it to become a comedy gimmick. When I mooned the audience at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, Holly reminded her friends in a loud stage whisper, “That’s my Dad.”
“Fashion is fascism,” Abbie Hoffman once declared.
The political side of me had accepted that slogan as a truism. But Holly was interested in fashion—she had a definite flair for it—and her sense of justice was the antithesis of fascism.
She might glance at Vogue magazine, but individuality was the key to her wardrobe. She had bleached her blonde hair platinum, and when the roots grew in, she maintained a two-tone hairstyle. Later on, she dyed her hair pitch black and kept it in a style that completely covered one of her eyes. She wore a leather jacket with chains hanging from it, and plenty of makeup, including a multicolored lightning streak on one cheek. She wanted to get a kitten, which she planned to name Bonzo and dye pink.
Once I was visited by a stereotypical longhaired friend. He was sitting on the floor in the lotus position when Holly came home. They looked at each other. “Punk,” he said. “Hippie,” she responded.
Although Holly was going out to clubs and dancing away the nights, we still managed to play a haphazard version of the domestic game. We had taken to piling up the paper bags from shopping on the kitchen table—neither of us would bother to flatten them out and put them away—but one time Ken Kesey came over and just crumpled all the bags up into one big bag which he tossed out the back window into our magic garden.
Kesey teased Holly and said she looked like a neo–Hell’s Angel, but she got truly hassled from all sides. On one occasion a woman wouldn’t let her in the subway door, calling Holly a “punk bitch!” Another time we were walking along and a real punk with green and purple hair called out to us from her window. “Hey, will ya tell that girl stripes are out!” I had come to understand how easily rhetoric could take the place of reason.
Abbie was wrong. Fashion is not fascism. Dress codes are.
One afternoon, Holly and I were waiting at a bus stop, on our way to a movie, and there was a luscious teenage girl also waiting for the bus.
“Ooh, yummy,” I whispered.
“Daddy, she’s my age!”
Her words echoed around in my cranial cavity. Lust for teenagers permeates the culture. Over the years, I had slept with four seventeen-year-olds, but now I found myself caught betw
een a line of dialogue in Stripes, where Bill Murray mentions getting “wildly fucked by teenage girls,” and a line of dialogue in Tempest, where John Cassavetes says, “If you touch my daughter, I’ll kill you.”
When Holly got involved with a new boyfriend, they cooked spaghetti in our kitchen, and they threw a few strands up at the ceiling, where they stuck, thereby passing the gourmet chef test. She spent a lot of time at his place, and my moment of truth arrived, not in a bullfight ring, but in the form of a question from Holly. She wanted to know if her boyfriend could spend the night at our house. I pretended to be nonchalant. I prided myself on being a permissive parent. Holly and I had agreed that I wouldn’t tell her what to do unless it involved health, safety, or the rights of others. And now she was calling my bluff.
“Okay, sure,” I said, “but tell him that he can’t smoke cigarettes in the house.”
At least I felt justified in exerting some parental authority. When I was Holly’s age, I used to lie in bed wondering if my parents did it. Now I lie in bed knowing that my daughter was doing it. She was no longer my little girl saying, “Daddy, would you scratch my back?” She was no longer that innocent youngster standing on a porch and calling out for a cat, “Hitler! Hitler!”
Since then, she had read The Diary of Anne Frank and seen Holocaust on TV. Now she was going to audition for a New Wave band called The Vktms. One of their song lyrics went, “Hey, you know I ain’t no martyr, but I ain’t no Nazi.” She also wanted to change her stage name to Holly Hard-On, but she had the flu that week, so her audition and name-change became moot. Ah, yes, but she would’ve been following in my footsteps. Introducing Rumpleforeskin and his daughter Holly Hard-On.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 41
