A Room with a Darker View

by Claire Phillips

  As we drove through Daly City for the fogbound Outer Sunset, Dad suddenly remarked, “If you don’t like San Francisco, you have no soul.”

  My ears pricked up. Never before had my materialist father remarked on the numinous.

  24 Divisidero

  My father finalized his divorce from my mother the year that I left for college. I rented a room in a third floor Victorian flat on Pine Street, two blocks from Divisidero Street in the Western Addition, a primarily African-American neighborhood then; one now experiencing gentrification with the development of high rises. At seventeen years old, I was the youngest member of my household comprised of SFSU students, aged twenty-five to thirty-two. I reveled in my mature off-campus city lifestyle, away from the fogbound dorms. My rent, a mere $135 a month, was less than half of what it would cost to share an absurdly small room on campus with a same-aged student. And, as the younger “sibling” of my adult roommates, I was taken to parties, art shows in South-of-Market warehouses, and nightclubs.

  Mass transit made the commute to school easy; I traveled through the Western Addition on the 24 Divisidero bus for Market Street and Castro, where shiny metal escalators descended underground into the Castro Street Muni station, allowing me to complete the second leg of my journey on the M train. In the late afternoons, as the fog rolled over Twin Peaks and I waited to board the bus for home, I would observe leather-clad men descending upon the local bars and restaurants under the cover of rainbow colored flags, an exciting, transformative scene.

  1982–1989

  I remained in loose contact with my family, distancing myself as best I could from our saga. I don’t remember exactly how or when my brother came to live with my father. What I do remember is that my father had finally taken my mother to court to fight for custody of my brother and had won.

  What happened to my mother after my brother moved to Pasadena is mostly a blur. I remember hearing about how she was staying in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles when she was robbed of a family inheritance, thousands of dollars in gold Krugerrands that she carried on her person in a small black purse. I also learned that Mom lived in hotels or short-term rentals in the San Fernando Valley. Before following John to Los Angeles, she had become rail thin, having pretty much stopped eating. Because of her appearance, he confided in me, she struggled to find someone who would rent her an apartment or even allow her to book a room in a hotel.

  My brother’s weekly visits with my mother were typically punctuated by her desperate pleas not to be left behind. When my father would arrive in his white economy Mazda GLC to pick up his son, Mom would wedge herself into the open car door, demanding that he allow her to come home with them. The three would then agonize for some time in the middle of the street before my father could persuade my mother to step out of the way and let him take John, leaving her standing there.

  Perhaps this was around the time of “the nudie nightie incident,” as my brother refers to it, when my mother was found wandering in a confused state around her Encino apartment building at night. After this, my brother recognized the need for my mother to get psychiatric help. At sixteen years old, John was too young to get the police involved, so he convinced my father to help him call 911 and have my mother declared a danger to herself and involuntarily committed. She was taken to UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital where she finally received proper treatment for a formerly undiagnosed mental illness.

  After her release, with the help of cousins living on the Westside, she found an apartment in Beverly Hills. Continuing to struggle with no sense of place or direction, she routinely flew between Los Angeles, Texas, and New York, landing on her sisters for months at a time until finally, after she had lost her bags in the Dallas Airport, she collapsed. Catatonic, she was again involuntarily committed for several months. Upon release, she then went to live with her parents in Zimbabwe, where she finally stabilized.

  “Your mother suffers from manic depression accompanied by the feature of paranoia,” was more or less how my father explained it to me. The diagnosis served in some small way to contextualize the past. “Neurotic” had never done justice to my mother’s symptoms: the bouts of senseless laughter, sleepless nights, paranoid accusations, disturbing hallucinations. However, I would not learn about the full scope of my mother’s illness until I was twenty-four years old.

  Miracle Baths

  In the second year of college, I was lucky to find a part-time job to supplement my $450 monthly stipend sent to me by my father. Through a friend in my English class, Linda Landels, a returning student at thirty-three years old, I came to work for two Nebraskan transplants, women and romantic partners in their late twenties who had moved to San Francisco at the end of the 1970s to pursue the dream of an alternative lifestyle.

  I booked appointments and folded towels at the first spa in the city to garner a reputation for its healing arts, as opposed to those known for sexual activity. A forerunner of the day spa, Miracle Baths was a vibrant place to work. Everyone bestowed great admiration upon the owners, Penny and Kathy. One blonde, the other raven-haired, they dazzled us all with their bohemian, thrift store know-how: the 1950s clutch purses, vintage cars, kitschy outfits, cowboy leather jackets. Endowed with Midwestern DIY decorating skills, shuttling between city and country homes—albeit modest ones—my first real employers, “lipstick lesbians” as they called themselves, struck me as model feminists. Women I dearly sought to emulate.

  Unafraid of the rigors of work, for the first five years of their entrepreneurial adventure they toiled around the clock, six- or seven-days a week, twelve hours or more per day. The spa’s rates were affordable, giving credence to the term “community sauna.” Sadly, they did not invest in buying their property and would later lose out to a bigger, brasher gentrifying force, one capable of buying the building and replacing the spa with a store merchandizing unforgettably frivolous items like soap-on-a-rope. Even more dispiriting was the loss of life endured by the community when several of the staff members and close associations passed away—Jerry, Jose, Marshall and Tommy, one after the other—from the scourge of a then-insufficiently researched and cruelly stigmatizing HIV virus and its virulent later stage of untreated symptoms, AIDS.

  My mother is a witch

  While my mother worked to piece her life back together, I bloomed precariously into young adulthood: traipsing about a picturesque, easily navigable city; studying poetry, philosophy, interdisciplinary arts; frequenting night clubs in the Tenderloin; and falling in love unexpectedly with a budding female poet while my mother continued her battle with an illness for which the treatment was rudimentary at best.

  These were difficult, unhappy years during which I resisted my mother’s presence in my life. She was still fairly manic. Her persistent calls, her alarming and indeterminate living situations, threatened the tenuous stability I had carved out for myself. I knew my mother would call me every day, several times, if she could. I knew how depressed I would become.

  San Francisco State did not turn out to be the hotbed of social and political activism that it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. While I took women’s studies classes from celebrities like Angela Davis, overall the atmosphere on campus after the election of Ronald Reagan was downbeat, with an ever-increasing crop of students interested in obtaining MBAs. For two years, I successfully dodged my mother. She never did get my phone number in that time. I moved so often then, keeping it from her was not exactly difficult.

  In my third year, I remember being seated at my small black desk in the bay window of my Hayes Street apartment at my electric typewriter, reveling in the ecstatic California sunshine. This was my mother’s typewriter I had somehow inherited, the Selectric with the missing “g.”

  “My mother is a witch,” I banged out, in the midst of typing out a poem, when the phone rang. Having grown weary of my disappearing act, my brother had given her my phone number.

  Hearing my mother’s voice on the line, I knew then that I would always be her daughter. I knew
I could no longer run away.

  G-spot

  I will never forget the glory and shame of working on that particular typewriter. Unable to afford a new one, or perhaps unwilling to spend my weekly part-time cash on something practical, painstakingly I wrote in all of the “g”s of my academic papers by hand. This took time. Only when my philosophy of science teacher made a cutting joke about my “g-spot” in reference to one of my frenetic-looking, hand-edited papers did I finally put some of my part-time earnings toward the purchase of another typewriter.

  I still remember the poems I wrote, and the disorienting quality the hand drawn “g’s” added to the work. One in particular stands out in my memory—“And it was running thin,” a poem I wrote under the influence of the Language poets working in the Bay Area at that time: Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Leslie Scalapino, and Jim Hartz, the director of the Poetry Center at SFSU, to name a few. My allegiance to their work was immediate, mainly because a strict adherence to realism was anything but the point. I had space to claim the page for my own needs, to express the inexpressible through disjunctive and surrealist techniques. The writer who compelled me most, though, was Kathy Acker, a tough, satiric pop maven, whose intertextual collage techniques and recursive themes of an abandoning father and a hateful mother, appealed to my psychic wounds as well as to my preference for dank intellectual chaos. This writer was fucked up and unafraid of the fact, harnessing her erotic feminist heresy and taking it into uncharted territories.

  Aside from Acker, the Language poets were a fairly hermetic group that held the commercially successful, arguably macho, narrative-based writing of the Beats in contempt. I found myself mutely adhering to the experimentation of the Language poets, while my poet girlfriend managed to breech the divide, making in-roads in both communities. It was not lost on me that the Language poets operated in a narrow tranche of experimentation that in some small measure reflected back my family’s elite intellectual background.

  1986–1987

  Shortly after my mother’s eerily timed phone call, we reunited. Again, the memory is mostly shrouded. Did she come to see me in San Francisco? Did I go to see her in New Jersey where she finally decided to settle after coming to terms with the loss of her son to college and the West Coast? I cannot say. I do remember that I took full advantage of our rekindled bond when I went to spend a long weekend in New York City with my best friend from SFSU, budding experimental filmmaker Mark Taylor. We stayed with Mark’s cousin in the East Village, visiting art galleries, punk clubs like the Pyramid, and museums. His dewy-eyed cousin served us free margaritas at the East Village Mexican restaurant where she waitressed. We hardly slept, and visited another friend, Jonathon Rosen, an illustrator whose ability to make a living at his art impressed me to no end.

  Soon Mark and I ran out of money, so I quickly organized a meeting with my mother in the hopes of borrowing some more. She took us for a steak dinner at a restaurant in the World Trade Center. At one point she dumped out the contents of her purse, with its heavy collection of coins, on a marble counter in the lobby in order to find subway fare. The time it took for her to release the purse’s contents was stupefying. Glittering coins by the handful clattered loudly onto the long marble counter as my friend laughed brightly, utterly charmed by my mother’s eccentricities. A side effect of the medication she was on, my mother struggled with the adroit use of her hands. I adored Mark all the more for his ability to find humor where I could only find despair. Was it $100 or $200 that she loaned me? I cannot recall.

  Whatever the amount, I recall it endowing me with a feeling of ease and profligacy that I relished on that short, glorious visit. After this, I came to appreciate my mother’s generosity on more than one occasion. She never required that I pay her back, even though she subsisted on a limited alimony, and later, social security payments, both of which afforded her little more than the ability to pay her rent and purchase the expensive pharmaceuticals her disease demanded, despite being insured.

  By the end of my years at SFSU, my mother and I had crossed over from a terrible time into a markedly better one.

  1984–2011

  Even so, the time we spent together was strictly regulated. As the recipient of the nurture and assistance of numerous second-wave feminists, I declined my mother’s attentions in favor of so many glorious others. In college, there were the women associated with Miracle Baths; later on in Los Angeles, a woman who ran a Pilates studio long before it became a popular exercise was determined to see me become more agile and fit after years of unhealthy smoking and angsty brooding.

  I always felt grateful to these self-sufficient women who willingly befriended and mentored me. That they had taken the time to assert their independence, running businesses that took the majority of their waking days made these “unchilded women,” in the words of Adrienne Rich, my feminist heroes. I was aware that the work it took to raise children properly was a parent’s necessary sacrifice, something my mother did not care to or was unable to do. But a capitalist system that did not provide reasonable daycare left women of this generation few choices as they carved out their identities.

  Out of filial duty, I would see my mother once a year. Visiting her in New Jersey at first until this became too much for me, for a variety of reasons. Top of the list: my distress in seeing my mother living far below the economic station of my father, alone in a small, one-bedroom apartment with little comfort or grace. Chatham, New Jersey, where she finally ended up after years of living in a red brick apartment she would sarcastically deride (Time to go back to the hovel), had too much in common with the provincial Berkeley Heights of my youth, with its massive trees and narrow winding roads, a town that symbolized for me endless psychic despair.

  Mom, I would say over the telephone from Los Angeles, where I was making my living as an adjunct professor, I can’t visit. I’ll get depressed.

  I understand, darling, she would routinely respond, her voice softened now by the years. Don’t come.

  Uncomplainingly, she would make the long journey by air to visit me in California. This was never easy for my mother. She suffered from varying degrees of alogia, an inability to make decisions. If a relative invited her to Passover and she had to travel by train, she would suffer over her decision to go for weeks in advance, changing her mind often.

  Go, Mom, I would insist, knowing how much of her time was spent alone. A short weekend visit with family would provide her a much-needed break from the endless monotony of living alone without meaningful work or nearby family.

  L.A. Weekly

  During college I had not given much thought to making money. After a number of half-hearted attempts at working in an administrative role for corporate America or as a “girl Friday” for this or that Hollywood charlatan, I found myself working at the L.A. Weekly, founded in 1978 by Jay Levin. It was here that renowned writers and critics made impressive contributions to the literature of Los Angeles; among them, Steve Erickson, the film critic and cult fiction writer, and Jonathan Gold, Pulitzer Prize winning popular food critic. This independent weekly newsprint tabloid was widely known for its tawdry glut of phone-sex ads juxtaposed with its hard-hitting investigative news articles, strong arts criticism, and comprehensive calendar of arts and music events. This was the one and only publication in Los Angeles, with the exception perhaps of Larry Flynt’s Hustler, where a progressive young writer might get her start.

  After three years of working for the permissive, alternative women of Miracle Baths, where prayer circles were not an uncommon reaction to adversity, I was hardly cut out to work anywhere that smacked of corporate routine. My entry-level messenger job at the L.A. Weekly had all the glamorous appeal you might expect. I spent exasperatingly long periods of time alone in my aged Toyota Corolla, manual windows cranked down, inhaling a gross number of Marlboro Light cigarettes in the smog-tainted heat, tracking down advertising money from small businesses in Hollywood and the Westside, and when especially unlucky, the gridded Valley, wh
ere I felt adrift on the long, lonesome roadways. Because advertisers, typically small business owners, were loath to pay their bills, picking up checks was essential. Hired at $6.50 an hour plus mileage (where the bulk of our real earnings came from, and which our tenderhearted rocker boss, Luke, allowed us to inflate at the end of the week), I could afford little in the way of anything, really, subsisting on a steady diet of canned Rosarito refried beans and a steady stream of cigarettes.

  As far as thrifting went, I relied heavily on the meager holdings of a $5 clothing store located in a stucco strip mall at the busy Vermont/Hollywood intersection. This consisted mainly of patterned mini-skirts and brightly colored Lycra tank tops. For footwear I succumbed to the ubiquitously worn cowboy boots of the Exene Cervenka-driven 1980s. My long brown hair was dyed a shocking pink, the result of a catastrophic professional hair-dying incident—a fantastic color that secretly repulsed me.

  The upside of this unskilled job, a position held almost exclusively by male rockers of the Guns N’ Roses variety—with the exception of one petite raven-haired girlfriend of an up-and-coming rock star, who stopped coming to work the moment her makeup purchases were satisfied—was that I had the ear of talented editors who allowed me to sidestep the unpaid intern process and be paid for my writing, the rate then being about ten cents a word. Writing short articles for the paper, I was schooled in the basics of journalism.

  Again, I found a friend and mother, or mentor, in a former dancer and artist named Marilyn Amaral. Marilyn worked in paste-up with her “hag sisters” Donita Sparks of all-girl punk band L7 and dreadlock-sporting Pollyanne. A cousin of Miles Davis, the daughter of a renowned Tuskegee airman and former Solid Gold dancer and La MaMa performer, Marilyn was statuesque, brilliant and unspeakably beautiful, determined to live a life of great highs and lows. Having endured the regular beatings of her would-be-actor husband of ten years who suffered from manic depression, she eventually separated from him to make a life of her own as a makeup artist. No matter what challenge confronted me—rent troubles, boyfriend torments, editorial tiffs—I had a kind and charming confidante in Marilyn.