Independence Day
On that Wednesday in August when I left Hot Dog Heaven, I was inside of myself, knowing and forgetful at the same time. I shot like a gray bullet through the basin and over the grapevine and right up the gut of the Central Valley with the hot gritty wind in my face. The Dodgers were in Cincinnati, I remember, still three and a half games up on Atlanta in the West. I lost Jaime Jarrin in the third somewhere north of Bakersfield, and I was forced to listen to Vin Scully, my old god, on KNBC. I had to admit it was comforting to hear his voice again, warm and steady with a touch of the nasal. A voice to lean into, whose calm authority and unwavering confidence called down out of the ether, inspiring a sense of well-being in an increasingly chaotic universe.
The Dodgers were up two–zip when I lost Scully around Kettleman City. After that I just listened to my thoughts and the riotous wind rocketing past my ears. And crossing the Golden Gate into Sausalito I tried harder than ever to see the future. All I saw was a tollbooth.
The sun had already set when I reached Willow’s condo, which looked identical to the condo next to it, with the lone exception of a lighted walkway.
Big Bill’s girth soon filled the doorway, a nimbus of light from the foyer wrapped around his head. He wore a beard, with little flecks of gray. The ponytail was gone. His hair was lopped off in an even line in back, like he cut it with a buck knife. He wore his bangs like Ray Conniff. My people are shape-shifters, I guess. You never really get used to it. I could hear the television in the living room, and something smelled like onions.
He looked down at me and shook his head grimly. “Darnit, Tiger, you driving up here doesn’t change a thing.”
“I want to see Lu.”
“She needs rest. We’ve been through this for weeks. Now I’m sorry, I really am. I wish I—look, let me give you some money for a ho—better yet, let’s go to dinner first, you and me.”
“I’m not hungry. Let me in, Dad, I have to see her. You have to let me see her.”
“I can’t do that, Will. I promised your sister. C’mon, we’ll talk about it at dinner.”
I tried to push my way past him into the house, but he blocked my way, clutching one of my wrists. Breaking free of his grip, I took a step back, and no sooner did I step back than I rushed him again. But he caught my head under his arm and held it there in a rather gentle headlock, as if my head were an Egyptian vase, until I stopped squirming. He released me slowly and stood me up straight, holding me at arm’s length. He smiled sympathetically.
“Not now,” he said. “Give it some time, Tiger. Give your sister a couple of weeks to recover. You’re not helping her by being here. I know that may sound harsh, but that’s the truth.”
“You can’t do this.”
“I’ve got no choice. Now c’mon, we’ll grab a bite and get you a hotel.”
I tried to rush past him again, and he restrained me in a bear hug. He lifted me, effortlessly, it seemed, and carried me kicking and squirming outside to the driveway, where he set me down like a mannequin. His patience was wearing thin.
“It’s over,” he said. His shortest ending yet.
I darted past him for the door. He clotheslined me from behind and tackled me. We tumbled across the walkway, flattening the low hedges on our way to the grass, where the sprinkler was making its rounds. I was no match for Big Bill. Despite his girth, he was quick. I tried to roll away through the soggy grass, but he had me covered. He sat on my stomach and pinned my arms to the ground and looked down into my face. I struggled halfheartedly to free myself. We were both breathing heavily. I could smell his aftershave. He had onions on his breath.
“We need to talk,” he said.
We crossed the bridge silently until about midspan. After a year, the minivan still smelled new. Big Bill looked more hulking than ever behind the wheel. My back was wet, my pride smarted. I was an incorrigible prisoner, beaten but not defeated.
“Where are we going?”
“The city,” he said.
“Where in the city?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t got that far. The Haight, I guess.”
“Goodie. What for?”
“To talk.”
“Why do we have to go to Haight-Ashbury to talk? Why not the living room?”
What did it say about the Millers that we were forever driving off somewhere to talk? Anxiety drove us to the open road. At the first sign of crisis we were off and running, over bridges, into deserts, always into our past.
No sooner had I asked than Big Bill provided the answer.
“I don’t know. Just because.”
I gazed sullenly out the passenger window, away from the twinkling city and out over the mutinous Pacific toward the horizon.
Big Bill released the breath he’d been holding. “Will . . . sometimes life comes at you pretty fast. Things happen. Sometimes a lot of things at once. You’ve got to manage it all somehow so that you don’t lose everything. You try to do the right thing, but sometimes there’s not a right thing. Sometimes just a less-wrong thing.” He cast a sidelong glance at me. There was something hopeful in it.
“Keep talking,” I said.
“Okay. Good,” he said. “Good.” He was gripping the wheel tightly. His knuckles looked old. There were blue spots on his hand. The muscles of his forearm had grown sinewy. “I just need you to understand that . . . I thought I was . . . I didn’t know that— Oh, Christ, Will, all of this is my fault. It was a big mistake, all of it. Not telling you, letting things go on so long like they did.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Lulu. I’m talking about . . .”
“What about her?”
“Oh, Will, damnit, all about her,” he groaned.
“Such as what?”
“Such as . . .” He broke off to sigh, and when he did his throat rattled. “Such as you’ve got to let go of her, son. You’ve just got to. It’s just not healthy. It’s not . . . right.”
“What’s not right?”
“The letters, the notebooks, the rest of it. Yes, I’ve read them, Will. I know. I’ve known. I should’ve put a stop to it years ago.”
“Years? You’ve known for years?”
“I thought it would pass. It didn’t. Now it has to. You’ve got to stop loving your sister the way you do.”
“She’s not my sister.”
“She’s your half sister.”
“So what?”
“No, Will,” he said, leveling a meaningful gaze at me. “Listen to me: half sister.” He gave the statement a moment to sink in. His eyes were drooping like a bloodhound. “I’m her father.”
Abruptly, the green of the Presidio closed in on both sides of us. My ears started ringing. You really can’t assume the conformity of the future with the past. Sometimes there’s an invisible line between cause and effect.
“I did it to protect your mother,” he said. “She never knew.”
“What are you saying? You did what?”
“I was going to . . . I intended . . . we intended, Willow and I, as soon as you were old enough, to . . . explain it all.”
“So what happened to that plan?”
“You’ve got to understand, Tiger, when your mother died . . . you lost so much. I couldn’t see depriving you of something you never knew you had in the first place. What good would it have done? All this explaining about the past? It would only create more confusion. And there was confusion, Will. Chaos. And if it hadn’t been for Willow—”
“And what’s her excuse?”
“She doesn’t need one. She wanted you to know all along, ever since Annie died, anyway. She wanted Lulu to know.”
“So she told her.”
“No. Yes. It was Vanessa, Grammy. She let something slip. Lulu started asking questions.”
“Vermont.”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. Well, what—how come—at that point, why the hell—”
“You were your mother’s son, Will. You were her pride and joy. Her little man.”
“Forget about me! Forget about Mom! What about Lulu? She didn’t deserve to know who her father was?”
“It was the only way.”
“How? How was it the only way? How was it that I got the honor of having you as a father, while Lulu got to find out when she was fifteen years old that the guy she thought was her new stepdad is the father who never claimed her in the first place! How is that the only way?”
“There’s more to it than you understand. It was more complex. I just didn’t ever want you to think . . .” He trailed off into a dense silence.
We hit the tunnel in a rush of sickly light. Everything I never understood about Lulu was illuminated in an instant—her eternal ambivalence and her maddening evasion, all of it had a context at last. The little girl in the yellow socks had died in Vermont, and poor Lulu had been changing ever since. People really do change. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. That the future does not conform to the past is not the exception, but the rule.
By the time we emerged at the far end of the tunnel, I understood for the first time, with excruciating clarity, everything that Lulu endured, all that she owned in the name of illusion. I understood why she mutilated herself and disfigured herself, and why she ultimately tried to destroy herself. She did it all to push me away. To make herself ugly so I wouldn’t want her. That’s how much she loved me. And I thanked her by never relenting, no matter how hard she tried to repel me.
Neither Big Bill nor I ventured to speak again until we were skirting the park on Fulton.
“To think what?” I said. “What didn’t you want us to think?”
“That I was unfaithful to your mother. That I ever loved anyone else, that I ever loved any of you less than completely.”
“Were you unfaithful?”
He didn’t answer right off. He swung a right on Stanyan and continued down the hill. “No,” he said. “Yes. Technically, once. It was . . . there was more to it than—it was an ending with Willow. It wasn’t a fling.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I dated Willow before your mother. It means she introduced me to your mother at a party on Oak Street, not four blocks from here. They were good friends, best friends at the time. That was 1967, the beginning of the end. It was awkward, Will. We were all friends for a while, and . . . damnit, I don’t know, it’s all so complex, and so far in the past.” Big Bill squinted, as though trying to intimate the past. “You’ve just got to understand,” he continued. “Willow and I were on different paths at the time. We were broken up. It just . . . happened one night. It shouldn’t have. I loved your mother so much, and Willow knew that, she loved her too. She was okay with raising Lulu by herself. She was. She told me that. She wanted a child, not a husband.”
He hung a left at the golden arches. “I always sent support for Lulu, every month for ten years. Your mother never knew that, either.”
“If you loved Mom so much, why didn’t you tell her anything?”
“I couldn’t tell her.”
“Why not? Why couldn’t you tell her?”
“She was pregnant with you, and we were getting married, and it just seemed . . .”
I turned away, looked out the window. “It wasn’t fair to Lulu. It was a dirty trick.”
“I only meant to . . . I thought I was doing the right thing, Will. I thought it would work.”
“Work? What does that mean, work? That you’d get away with it?”
“No. Not . . . I don’t know. I didn’t want to muddle things. I loved your mother more than I ever—look, I didn’t want to screw it up.”
“If you didn’t want to muddle things, you should have kept your dick in your pants in the first place!”
He stopped the car in the middle of Haight Street and looked out his side window at nothing. “Okay,” he said calmly. “I deserved that.”
“Of course you did! And why didn’t you tell me Lulu was pregnant? Why did I have to hear it from Troy?”
Big Bill piloted the van slowly forward, then stopped again and looked me dead in the eye. “Because that was Lulu and Troy’s business, now, wasn’t it?”
And what could I say to that without laying bare my own shameful secret?
We parked on Cole Street and sat in the darkened car without speaking. Silence is the sound that gravity makes. I was comfortably numb, strangely peaceful and accepting, like a guy who’s fallen off a cliff and broken his neck and lies in the dust watching the buzzards pinwheel above him. I was outside myself again in the silence.
After a moment Big Bill started drumming incessant little rhythms on the steering wheel with his fingers.
“Stop,” I said.
He stopped. But the silence had fled.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Of course he was sorry. What else could he be but sorry? I was ready to give short endings a try. Why not? What the hell did long endings ever do for anybody? Big Bill was right. I felt his giant hand on my shoulder. I wouldn’t look at him. I looked instead at the sloping black dashboard, the tape deck, the missing cigarette lighter.
“I know you are,” I said. “It’s over. Now drop it.”
“You’re okay with this? You understand?”
“No and no. Of course not. It’s just too much, right now, all of it. It’s stupid. I should’ve known it all already, whether or not you ever explained it. Somewhere in me I did know, and just didn’t want to.”
“I should have told you,” he said.
“Yes, you should have. But you didn’t, and it doesn’t matter anymore. So now what?” I said.
“Let’s walk.”
We walked down Cole, then west on Haight with a gentle breeze at our backs. Big Bill remained silent for the first half block, but then he began making little peace offerings along the way.
“That used to be the Straight Theater . . . That used to be the Trib . . . That used to be I/Thou.”
To these offerings I only grunted, which was encouragement enough for Big Bill. “Jesus, the way times change. I still can’t believe there’s a McDonald’s right here. Boy, I should’ve seen that one coming a mile away. It’s a damn shame. Humph. You hungry? I’m kind of hungry.”
If crises drove the Millers to the open road, resolution made us hungry. And food always inspired in my family a spirit of philosophic inquiry, as was the case with Big Bill at the McDonald’s on Haight and Stanyan.
“Is it my imagination,” he wondered aloud, midway through his third Big Mac, “or have Big Macs shrunk? It seems to me they’re smaller. I can hold two in one hand—see, look at that. I didn’t used to be able to do that. Also, is it just me, or does everything taste like French fries now? Everything. The milkshakes, the pies, even the ice water tastes like French fries. Have you noticed that? So, do you guys have a special sauce? I mean, for your hot dogs? How does that work?”
After McDonald’s we went across the street to the grocery, where Big Bill bought a jug of Carlo Rossi sangria. We crossed Stanyan into the park and walked up Hippie Hill. At the top of the slope we sat in the grass and Big Bill unscrewed the jug and immediately took a long pull and passed it my way.
“Good stuff,” he said.
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and took another slug.
“Oh, okay. Give it here.” I took the jug and drew a small sip. It tasted like diabetic grape candy.
“See? What’d I tell you? Annie and I used to drink this stuff back in ’67.”
He patted me on the back, and scratched the scruff of my neck, and finally mussed up my hair. “You’re a good man, Tiger. I’m proud of you. I’m really
glad we’re doing this.”
“Yeah, this is great, Dad. The park, the wine. Maybe we can hop a freight afterward.”
Big Bill smiled. “You got that from your mother, too. The quick wit. Annie had a nimble mind. She was funny right up until the end.”
“I guess I missed that part.”
He kept calling her Annie, which I’d never known him to call her in life; it was always Ann, but then, that was 1967, Starship was Airplane, and the moon was still the final frontier.
I listened without comment as my father began meandering somewhere between regret and nostalgia, recalling his Lower Haight days some more—before the fall of love, before Grace Slick was giving drunken blowjobs to microphones and puking onstage, before the Hells Angels were working security, before the junkies were epidemic, before the ad moguls cashed in with their VW buses and Coca-Cola, and suddenly love was not free anymore, and hippies were a demographic. He explained how Willow met Annie, and how Annie met Not-So-Big Bill, and how soon everything was a little more complex. Annie got pregnant with William, and Willow got pregnant with Lulu. Yet in spite of all its complexities, life was simple because it seemed you had forever to sort it out, or a while, anyway. And even as darkness set in, and the whole world—from Vietnam to Buena Vista Park—seemed like a great big maybe, and the word we suddenly meant a lot of different things, and the word me started popping up a lot more in everybody’s vocabulary, even then Annie and Willow perused maternity magazines together, exchanged paint swatches and childcare books. And when the babies were born there were outings to zoos and planetariums and Half Moon Bay, afternoons of peanut butter sandwiches cut into tiny squares, plastic bags of green beans, sticky strollers, baggy dresses, skinned knees, throw- up, hard-to-find public restrooms, Kodak moments involving carousels and duck ponds and Pier 39.
But nothing lasts. Indecision is not a fate in itself. Just ask the Prince of Denmark. Eventually you choose. You act. You define your life. You, Big Bill, touched down in Santa Monica with Annie (or was she Ann by the time of your departure?) and eighteen-month-old William (destined never to be Little Big Bill), and in doing so, turned your back on Lulu. You chose to call Santa Monica home, 436 miles from Willow and Lulu, because, you reasoned, it had been home all along. You know how distance is, you know how jealousy works, you know how time erodes everything in this world, including memory, which is not made of meat, though it may as well be. Everything may as well be. And you learned, finally, that it doesn’t matter how big you build yourself up, what you mold yourself into, how strong you think you’ve made yourself, love will kick your ass anyway if you give it the chance.
All About Lulu Page 28
