by Robin Green
Her complexion was sallow, her face a mask of tics, her jaw working, forehead creasing—what my brother would tell me later was tardive dyskinesia, uncontrollable facial movements resulting from all those years of Thorazine, Stelazine, Haldol, and other antipsychotic drugs that had been pumped into her. She and Richie both looked rough and haggard and, well, crazy.
I managed what I hoped was a welcoming smile, but I don’t think it fooled her. In any case, she didn’t smile or look at me as she told me the van would be fixed tomorrow and the man at the gas station had said it was okay for them to sleep in it tonight. I said to at least come home with me and take a shower if they wanted, have dinner. They said they’d come but they couldn’t stay long, they had to feed the dogs. They put the big mutts in the van and Richie got out a heavy rucksack and the two of them sat silent in the Impala on the drive back to West Knoll.
They disappeared into the bathroom with the rucksack and came out after a short time in a change of clothes, their hair wet from the shower. Ronnie sat on the couch and let out a sigh, looking more like herself. Richie sat close beside her. They told me about their trip cross-country, how her father had bought them the van, how they’d stayed with Ronnie’s great-aunt Fanny in Providence, how she’d left some of her paintings with Fanny “for safekeeping.”
Their plan was to visit people they knew along the way, see the country, and end up in Los Angeles to try to get into the music business. They’d spotted the Capitol Records tower from the freeway and taken the exit toward it when the van broke down, and they’d pushed it into the gas station.
And then, out of nowhere, Ronnie said, “We bought a gun in West Virginia.” At which Richie started and gave Ronnie a stern look. My eyes found the rucksack.
“I can tell her,” Ronnie told Richie. And then to me: “Because of the bears.”
“Bears?” I said.
“In the campgrounds,” she said, “where we stayed sometimes.”
“Wow,” I said. “Right.” But all I could think was I’ve got to get these two out of here. Mitch would be home from work any minute. Would he see what I had when I first saw them at the gas station? Crazy desperadoes? Who were, as I now knew, armed.
“Hey, you know what?” I said brightly. “Why don’t you take the car and go get some food and feed the dogs and whatever you need to do? Really. We don’t need it. I can come get it tomorrow.”
They looked at each other and Richie slowly nodded, and they did, they took the keys—and the rucksack—and drove away in the old Chevy. When Mitch got home, I told him what I’d done and he understood. We didn’t hear from them at all the next day, but Ronnie called the day after that.
She said she was sorry about the car. She said it was in the parking lot of a grocery store on Fountain and La Brea. She said that while the van was being fixed, she and Richie had driven to the market to get some cereal and some food for the road and left the dogs in the car and that when they came out, they saw that the dogs had destroyed the Impala’s front seat, completely tearing up the cushions.
“Oh, Ronnie,” I said.
“I’m really sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Please forgive me.”
And, to my everlasting regret, I didn’t say, Of course. Or I love you. What I said was “What choice do I have?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and hung up.
Mitch and I got the car from the supermarket parking lot and drove to an auto shop, where we bought a fitted blue nylon cover for the front seat.
A week or so later, Ronnie’s mother, Pearl, called to tell me that Ronnie was dead. That she and Richie had been camping in Leo Carrillo State Park and she had shot herself under the chin but survived and that Pearl and Frank had flown out but that Ronnie had died in the hospital. She said Richie had disappeared, they didn’t know where he was, and no, there were no dogs. She wanted to know if I wanted the van. I didn’t.
I was afraid for a long time that Richie would show up at our apartment in LA and kill me. I thought I deserved it. I worried that Mitch might get hurt. I wondered if Richie had been the one to shoot Ronnie. I decided that if he had, it would have been because she had asked him to.
Ronnie’s younger brother, now a sixty-five-year-old man, says he thinks her whole trip across the country was a farewell tour, though he didn’t know who else she had seen along the way besides Aunt Fanny. He also thinks the whole thing was his fault, that something he’d told her had set the trip in motion. He told me things I didn’t know, how she had called him nearly every day for years and how every day he had to talk her out of killing herself, telling her that she could do it tomorrow. He said he tells people she had trained him for his profession as a psychiatrist.
What he had told her that he thinks set her off was that he was getting married in February of 1980, and it might have been the last straw, the thought that she was losing him.
My brother, also a psychiatrist, told me that mental pain is real pain, pain that can become unendurable. He thinks that Ronnie was in pain. He says that’s why she killed herself. My brother also told me that months before she died, Ronnie had called him out of the blue, after years of silence. She said she wanted to tell him that she had discovered the secret of great sex: Artane! Which is one of the drugs given for the Parkinson’s-type side effects caused by the antipsychotics.
He said that he remembers exactly where he was when he spoke to her: standing up against a counter with the telephone to the left of him in the kitchen of the first saltbox in Vermont he and Sue had built, the one in which we all celebrated his son’s bar mitzvah. He said it shows how weird the call was, that he remembers it like the Kennedy assassination.
She stays with me too. I tell her story to every new friend. Is it a story to warn people that I won’t be a good friend? Or is it that Ronnie, even from the grave, is making it impossible for me ever to have another best friend besides her? Everything reminds me of her, but that was true even before she died. When at Iowa I read Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” I thought of Ronnie and how, like the Hunger Artist starving himself in a straw-filled cage, drawing an audience, she was the true artist, and we—her friends and family and everybody else—were her audience. And how, as with the Hunger Artist when the audience lost interest and moved on to other things, we all somehow abandoned her. And when the Hunger Artist was finally abandoned even by his handler, who had always forced him to eat at some crucial point, he was free now to starve as long as he wanted, withering to nothing in his cage, his hand only “a small bundle of knuckles” (even this reminded me of her, her small, dry hand in my warm and fleshy one when we were children), until the Hunger Artist all but disappeared into the straw, and, as he had become to his handler, she had become dead to us. And then she actually died.
I didn’t mourn Ronnie then. I don’t know if I have completely yet. At the time, however, I was about to learn that I had problems of my own. I was pregnant.
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
Therapy
In the winter of 1983 I climbed off a man named Brian and into therapy. Brian was a philosophy professor at USC, refined, erudite, soft-spoken, whom a friend had introduced me to the day before.
“So, you’re from England,” I’d said when I met him.
“New Jersey, actually,” he said with a dimpled, self-deprecating smile, “but I studied at Oxford. I must have picked up the accent.”
Like Kit Carson (and Jerry Brown too, for that matter—what is it with these guys?), Brian had once studied to be a Jesuit priest, and his monkish apartment in Westwood reflected it—polished wood floors, Persian carpets, desk, books, reading chair. We were in his sparsely furnished bedroom and I was astride him on the bed, going through the motions.
“You’re not at all engaged,” he said in his English accent, looking up at me. I admitted I wasn’t and climbed off. He told me, in a kind way, that I really should see a shrink, and when I said I couldn’t afford it, he told me about a place that trained therapists and offere
d patients sliding-scale fees.
I’d been to a shrink a few times before. Once was at the clinic in college, where I told the doctor I was unhappy, and when he asked me what I thought he could do to help me, I had no idea and never went back. The next time was in Berkeley, a few months after David Leach and I returned from Mexico and I had smuggled back a hundred Valium, which you could buy there without a prescription, and I popped them like popcorn, loving the release from anxiety they brought.
I wasn’t much of a druggie—diet pills in high school doled out by a quack above a five-and-dime in Warren, Rhode Island; Miltown in Manhattan (a mild tranquilizer) procured from a friend of David Leach’s. Mescaline, LSD, and other hallucinogens were more than recreational, they were instructional, mind-expanding, showing you the colors that, as the song says, were really there. They facilitated conversations with God—well, only one, actually, and we had a good laugh, He and I, and, yes, He was a he.
Then came coke and it was everywhere and stayed that way. I loved the exclusivity of it, the clubbiness and hipness of being invited to do a line. But not so much the drug, which seemed to make users edgy and mean and superior in their attitudes toward the square nonuser. Timothy Leary himself, on the pages of Rolling Stone, posited a future in which only the psychedelically evolved would be allowed aboard his spaceship to a safer planet when humans destroyed this one, and I remember thinking: But then my brother won’t be allowed on. I wanted off.
I like to joke that I was lucky no one ever offered me heroin because I would have loved it. I loved downers, loved junkie music—the Cowboy Junkies, the singer formerly known as Antony who sang with the Johnsons, Chet Baker. But the truth is, I was too straight for heroin, too square even to be around it. Lightweight that I was, ten milligrams of Valium was as far down and chill as I wanted to go.
The trouble was that when the hundred Valium ran out, the anxiety they relieved returned tenfold and with it an even more acute paranoia. I felt crazy. Not right in the head. I went to the outpatient clinic at Herrick Hospital and was assigned to a pudgy fledgling, a Freudian wannabe complete with tweed sport coat and goatee. He was mainly interested in how I masturbated, and when I demonstrated my hand position, he told me that the way I held two fingers of my right hand in my left fist indicated penis envy and the fact that I wanted to be a writer—the pen being a phallic symbol—did as well. He freaked out when, on the second visit, bored, I got out of my chair to check out his bookshelves.
“You can’t do that!” he said. “Go back to your chair!”
I sat in the chair for a few minutes and then left, never to return.
Christine Maginn, studying for an advanced degree in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Wright Institute in Los Angeles, the place Brian recommended in 1983, was a different story, a soft, warm, poised, and pretty blonde I was to spend the next eleven years sitting across from twice a week, through her Wright training, following her into a private practice in Glendale.
Mostly I cried, spilling thirty-some years of unspilled tears and untold woes, and Christine watched and listened and nodded with complete patience and empathy, holding out the Kleenex box as I blubbered on week after week, year after year, explaining to me in time that it sounded like my mother—and my father too—were okay with me as long as I was cheerful and pleasant but that I’d been banished at any sign of upset so that I’d learned to keep it all in.
Well, now it was coming out, all those backed-up years of whining and whimpering and complaining. I don’t know how Christine stood it, but she gave me a comfort I’d never known. She re-mothered me and I was grateful. It must be a feeling like this, I thought, when people say they love their mothers.
“I don’t do shit,” my mother had said on the phone one day after telling me about an incident with my father who was slowly withering away in their bed at home from prostate cancer that had spread to his bony skeleton, rendering him unable, finally, to make it to the bathroom. He had shat the bed and she had had to strip the sheets and then lift his diminished legs, hold them up in one hand by the ankles, as you would an infant, then, with the other hand, wipe his ass while my father, my handsome, immaculate, sweet father, even morphined to the gills as he was, wept in humiliation. It was the day my mother called in hospice.
She didn’t do baby shit either, which was why she’d brought home a new immigrant from Cape Verde named Beatrice Gomez and paid her ten dollars a week to change my diapers, to keep me clean and neat, to get me ready for school each morning, brushing and braiding my hair into pigtails. I can still remember the sensation of running my fingertips over those tight, perfect braids, the Braille of love.
As therapy went on, I began to understand my mother, even to feel sympathy for her and appreciation for her struggles, et cetera, to realize on some level that she had done her best in raising me and to admit that I had come out mostly all right, things had eventually worked out for me. But even in that regard, even after my professional and financial and marital success and even after all those years of therapeutic re-mothering and counsel, I still resented her, still bristled when, as a very old lady in assisted living near my-brother-the-doctor in New Hampshire, she would for the thousandth time get all smug and say, “Look at my two kids, look how well you both did, better than anyone else’s” (meaning anyone on the East Side of Providence), which would be followed by the inevitable self-congratulatory lip-smacking: “I must have done something right.”
This is a woman who had told me when I set out from Providence again and again that only losers left town, but I had left anyway, and now, in LA with Mitch, broke and barely making ends meet and pregnant, I had proved her right.
The abortion was performed in an office building on Sunset on the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills that then housed a Hamburger Hamlet, where Dean Martin, who was said to live nearby, ate and drank at night. In the waiting room of the abortion clinic upstairs, a young woman wept softly into a balled-up tissue as the woman next to her, probably her mother, sat unmoved. I was called to a cubicle and asked if I had thought this through, if I was sure this was something I wanted to do.
I was shown into a small operating room, where I changed into a hospital gown, and the procedure was explained to me as I was positioned on the table, feet in the stirrups, knees up and wide apart, and given anesthesia. I awoke in another room with other woozy girls, one of them, a different one, crying softly. I felt only a mild throbbing below, like period cramps. Three months later, I discovered I was pregnant again. Talk about being a loser.
I didn’t want another abortion. I didn’t feel I deserved it. Even though I had the same misgivings—that I was in no position to bring a child into this world, financially or psychologically—I decided I’d go through with the pregnancy. But what felt like my martyrdom ended a month later in an explosion of blood and tissue in the toilet of the bathroom on West Knoll.
The doctor who examined me at that same abortion clinic explained that the fetus was still inside me and there was a possibility the pregnancy was still viable. Still, I was cramping so violently that my only thought was to get rid of it. I was saved another abortion only because the fetus spontaneously aborted right there and then on the exam table.
Years later, Mitch and I landed a job rewriting a Showtime movie about abortion, which aired as Critical Choices, and in the course of our research we went to a demonstration in front of a downtown LA abortion clinic—placard-carrying Right to Lifers chanting and praying, red-faced with fury, met by a line of counterprotesting red-faced women, screaming and yelling back at them.
And I saw what I’d already thought, if inchoately—that they each had right on their side, that the issue was complicated, that the entities of church and state, kept so guardedly and rightly separate in our democracy, met squarely right there, or right here, I should say, in a woman’s womb. I am and was pro-choice, but as a practical matter; women, myself included, were going to choose to have abortions anyway, always had, always would, no mat
ter what their beliefs, so shouldn’t they be able to have them legally and safely? Amen.
Mitch and I moved from West Knoll to a nice little side-by-side Spanish duplex with its own backyard a few blocks away on La Jolla. We worked full-time at the PR agency now. Mitch ran the computer department and I’d started writing press releases. Home and office computers were then in their infancy, and we were helping introduce MS-DOS to the world, floppy disks and all. Bill Gates was one of the agency’s clients, his privately held company then worth a mere fifty million dollars.
I was good at writing press releases and it felt good to be writing again, even something like that. Someone at the LA Weekly, an underground rag, knew my byline from Rolling Stone and I wrote something for them and that felt good too.
Things at home were not so good. I’d started a conversation with myself: If I didn’t want this man’s baby, if I didn’t have that kind of faith in him, in the relationship, what was I doing with him? Maybe it was myself I didn’t have faith in. Maybe I had work to do. To become a person. A nonloser. A writer again. Maybe being with him was holding me back. I didn’t want to sleep with him anymore. I started sleeping in the back bedroom and he soon left and this time I didn’t stop him.
I got a job downtown, a respectable one editing a newsletter for the Music Center Foundation, a collection of filthy-rich donors who helped keep the Mark Taper Forum, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and the Ahmanson Theater afloat. I bought a used Chevy Vega and found a place in a cheesy fifties apartment building on Beachwood Canyon, far from Mitch and West Hollywood (but only blocks from the gas station at Franklin and Argyle, where Ronnie and Richie had landed) to start my life over yet again.
Unlike David Leach, who never spoke a word of protest when I pulled away from him, Mitch pleaded with me not to. I did anyway. What followed was the year in which I climbed off Brian and into therapy. Also the year it became undeniable that the prostate cancer with which my father had been diagnosed the year before would kill him.
