And I type back:
Right. Non-violent afterschool television. Non-sugary cereals. Flex time. Universal daycare. That’s all Political Women ever talk about. Universal daycare. And guess what—daycare is over by age five…Followed by 13 YEARS OF PUBLIC SCHOOL. What about public school? Why do not Democratic women care about public school? Is it because they don’t SEND their kids to public school?
I believe we have a bunch of very fucking rich women who run everything now!
Naomi Wolf…Are her kids in public school?
Gloria Steinem…Does she have any kids in public school?
And Bruce types back:
Gloria Steinem does not have any children in public school as she does not have any children.
And I type back, lamely but defiantly:
See!
8
Malibu
I stand in the lobby of Disney Hall, a soaring golden cathedral of arches, waves, rivulets, angles, arcs, bishop’s hats, all conspiring together as if to yell…
Frank Gehry! Frank Gehry! Frank Gehry!
It’s yet another great soaring bird of a building, where wings fly you up to the third floor, then swoop you down into the underground parking. Disney Hall and all the other great flapping-bird buildings. They are Los Angeles, and I am but a flea on their backs. But I am grimly hanging on.
Held aloft by the second-level balcony, I look down twin ribbons of escalator into the maw of incoming concertgoers. Who look, to my increasingly rheumy eyes, to be white, white, white. Leavened through with Asians.
And finally, there they are, I can tell them by their painfully slow gait alone, like stunned insects, and a certain tattered shabbiness. My eleventh-hour Hail Mary pass. The guy who’s going to save our ass.
My eighty-five-year-old retired Chinese engineer father, with his third Chinese wife—a sixty-five-year-old Manchurian lady named Alice.
Although technically Asian, like so many other rabid classical music fans, my father still sticks out in this crowd. Even though he has been in America for fifty years, he’s still 100 percent immigrant. He doesn’t blend with the beautiful porcelain Asians, properly be-suited and be-spectacled, the highlanders, the professionals, in their Lexuses. They are not like us, the lowlanders, hearty and tanned and roughed up from all that walking! And all that bus riding!
Which is to say, yes, my dad and Alice have taken public transportation, here, to Disney Hall. From Malibu. I know from experience that it will have taken them twelve transfers, four days, and at least five tattered paper bags of food scavenged from grocery store Dumpsters. You need to carry groceries with you, as you never know when a bus might be two hours late, or when there might be a Ralphs produce workers strike (aka poor harvest in the Dumpster).
In addition to the grocery bags on his back, my father is carrying his customary old wrinkled white plastic UCLA bag of what appear to be toiletries. He attaches it to himself by means of a yellow-and-blue bungee cord he found on the beach. Straining forward with the bungee cord around his neck, he looks like Jack LaLanne pulling a tugboat, except that the UCLA bag he is carrying is no larger than the size of a small airline pillow and is about as heavy as a bag filled with used Kleenex. Which it may well be. My father hates to waste paper by blowing his nose into a tissue just once.
As they ride up the escalator toward me, ever closer, I am relieved to see my father is at least wearing a turtleneck, jacket, and slacks. However, his dentures…appear to be wandering. Oh no! My father has exactly one tooth left. We’ve pled with him to get a new set of dentures, but he always raises one gnarled hand, dismissively…“Bah!” But last time he PROMISED…! Argh!
His dentures are just one of many unresolved medical issues, like the pacemaker the doctor insisted he get or he could fall over dead at any moment. That was two years ago. Yes, he frequently passes out and is unrousable. Then six minutes later he pops awake and starts yelling at us. His resting pulse rate is already a subbasement-like 48. What can you do? The man is barely alive as it is.
I guess the bottom line is, he’s eighty-five and stuff is just falling off him. It’s just going to fall off until all there is left is a shoe. An orthopedic shoe. Yells the shoe, waving a strap: “Leave me alone!” Speaking of which, the bunions. The bunions are so frightening, I close my eyes at night and picture them and I scream…knowing that if I am lucky enough to make it another forty years, my reward is that…these will be my feet.
Of course, when my Nightmare on Dad Street meets me at the top of the Disney Hall escalator, he says, “You put on too much makeup—I can smell it!”
Alice, by contrast, is excited by the rare specter of me in actual lipstick. Alice excitedly points her flash camera at me, to commemorate the rare phenomenon—
And my dad angrily pushes the camera down and snaps at her in Chinese—something like: “Da da da da da David Robertson!” Aka: Don’t waste film on anything not David Robertson!
“Now I have to go to the bathroom!” he exclaims angrily. And off the two of them shuffle, lost again in the crowd of the giant bird. Great. Another wait.
David Robertson. David Robertson is the reason I was able to get my dad out of the house. David Robertson is the card I’m playing. David Robertson, the world-renowned conductor. My father’s long-lost son. Not that David Robertson is aware of it.
Because it turns out my born-in-a-Shanghai-gutter father, falling-out-dentures and all…is a snob. From his tooth to his bunions.
Understand that my father is not the sort of Chinese immigrant who has ever suffered low expectations for his children. Ever since I was little, it was clear that if we girls could not actually bring home the Nobel Prize in physics, then becoming head of NASA or president of Harvard College would do. Or if we had to feed a wild, artsy, creative urge…conductor of the London Philharmonic.
He favored professions, for his spawn, where one sits at a vast 757-sized board of controls, commanding at least two hundred people at a time, and convening frequently with heads of state. In Stockholm.
I used to laugh this off, but unfortunately, the older you get, the likelier it is that kids you grew up with may actually start becoming…these impossible-sounding things. Which is to say David Robertson, who attended Santa Monica High School, at the same time as my sister, Kaitlin? He has won the universal career lottery.
First of all, conducting. As opposed to, say, female desperate-buttons comedy performance, conducting seems to be the sort of career where conductors keep moving higher and higher, from Minneapolis, to Phoenix, to Lyons, to Grange aux Belles, then suddenly, at fifty-two, there you are, named head of the Chicago Philharmonic! An overnight success! You’re like their youngest conductor ever! At fifty-two! All you need is one grayish lock of foppish hair and now you’re a heartthrob!
Meanwhile, understand that 90 percent of my father’s waking hours are spent watching PBS…which I realize might not be saying much, what with my father’s resting pulse of 48 and all the naps taken literally in the middle of sentences. Anyhoo, the other 10 percent of my father’s waking hours, aside from gobbling spoiled food, involves leaving frantic phone messages on my machine about what I am missing THAT VERY MINUTE, on PBS—! His voice is always garbled, distorted, hysterical…“Channel Eight!” he’ll exclaim. “It just started! A four-hour biography of Arthur Rubenstein!! Rubenstein!!” Or sometimes he’ll just bellow, in a cryptic verbal semaphore, “Firebird! Firebird! Firebird!”
To PBS, I just want to send out the good news that you’re a hit with the eighty-five-year-olds. Some forty years younger, a mother who has to get up in the morning, I myself am unable to keep up with my dad’s insanely demanding PBS-viewing schedule. (Although recently I did catch a show called The Cheese Nun. Because, as you know, nuns are a little edgy, and the topic of soft cheese is highly controversial, not at all comforting. But when you put them together—Oh, now I feel better…“CHEESE Nun!”)
But this time, the frantic SOS-you’re-missing-it-on-PBS! message was: “David
Robertson! David Robertson! David Robertson!”
My dad taped it for me, on a battered VHS tape that looked as though it had itself been to Shanghai.
The tale told, about David Robertson’s meteoric ascension, was mesmerizing. It was a pushy Chinese parents’ wet dream.
Picture Carnegie Hall, sold out, the old famous conductor suddenly becomes ill, topples off the podium, kidney thing, twang of cellos, blat of trumpets. Who hops on the red-eye but this unknown young ringer—a mere boy!—with but twenty-four hours to learn this terrifyingly complicated modern score, the sort of score that toppled that guy in Shine and sent him to a mental institution. Basically, classical music is such an intense world, people are always popping too many pain pills and toppling. Nadja Salerno-Salonjo, didn’t she topple? Or was it that female cellist who slept naked with her cello, toppling? I keep getting all my Fox October Searchlight films mixed up.
Anyway, point is, the young boy ringer—he does not crumple weeping and get hauled off to the looney bin. No, in twenty-four hours, he doesn’t just deliver the score, he nails it—The audience is electrified—! He gets four standing O’s—
Next, on camera? Beverly Sills. Her hand is over her heart. Her voice is husky.
She is blown away by this brilliant young conductor, who is…
“David Robertson,” she murmurs. “David.”
And sitting there in front of PBS at possibly midnight, my dad, gallon of long-expired mint-chip ice cream in hand, may well have had an aneurysm.
So now David Robertson is in town, conducting the L.A. Philharmonic at Disney Hall. And my dad calls me with the wildly illogical, poorly though-out idea that we should actually go. He lives in Malibu; I live in Van Nuys. Disney Hall is completely sold out—However, although I work in theater, which counts as nothing, lower than the gypsies, I do have my PR friend Kenny—my secret connection—my dealer, if you will, in fame, connections, and house seats.
And this will give me a nice occasion to let my dad know the happy news that Mike and I and the kids are moving in. Because that way, come September, gas bill in hand, Hannah can attend the local Malibu elementary. Hands down adorable, green lawns, fluttering American flag…API = 842! One hundred percent free! And legal!
My dad and Alice appear in the mob again.
“We’re lost!” he exclaims. “We’re lost!”
“No you’re not!” I yell. “Come this way! Walk toward me!”
It’s true that moving to Malibu is a last resort. Plenty of work lies ahead. My father bought his house in Malibu in 1963. Five bedrooms, with fireplace and peek of the ocean, just one block from the beach. For this house he paid $47,000, and since then, into remodeling, he has put about ten dollars. And those were hard to part with, what with the great lumber and plumbing parts you find…in Dumpsters!
Which is to say this is a 1960s tract house that has not been updated. It has all the original sparkling cottage-cheese ceilings, sixties shag carpeting, and sixties starburst linoleum. In true engineer style, cracked glass shower doors have been patched with duct tape; bathroom mildew has been gently spackled over…and over. The lawn is actually, horror of horrors, fertilized with my dad’s own pee. The David Lynch House, is what I used to call it.
Never mind. It’s still worth a zillion dollars now. And we are set to eventually inherit it but…not in time for kindergarten. Unless I’m prepared to commit a murder, I’ll have to…speed the process up. Share the communal space.
“I have the tickets!” I yell. And, grabbing both my dad’s and Alice’s frail arms, I gingerly guide them down into the orchestra section, into the belly of the soaring bird, trying not to slide down one of the hidden chutes in the bird that will spill us suddenly, as if through a warp hole, into some dingy pocket in San Pedro, some dark underground cellar beneath a Thai restaurant, with air ducts and leaky pipes and snapping fluorescent non–Frank Gehry lighting.
“So,” I say as we settle ourselves into our—I must say—excellent and cozy orchestra seats. “Remember how I was telling you about our problems finding a kindergarten for Hannah? About all of L.A. Unified like a Saigon, collapsing, in flames, the plunging API scores, the soaring La Cañada real estate—Remember Jonathan? From Caltech? And his gifted children? With the violin?” I throw in, to get a rise out of my Asian dad.
I should mention that one of the problems with my eighty-five-year-old father is sporadic, sometimes it seems to me almost selective, deafness.
“What?” he stabs out suddenly in alarm.
“Kindergarten!” I hiss. “Hannah! In kindergarten!”
“No!” he replies. “The Dvorák!” He taps his program in agitation. “We’ve lost the Dvorák! Look! We’ve lost the Dvorák! We’ve lost the Dvorák! We’ve lost half the concert! Tonight—it stops with the Beethoven!”
“That’s the point of Casual Friday!” I explain, my voice swooping upward like a perky airline hostess trying to calm passengers on a nose-diving plane. “At Disney Hall! Casual Friday! Casual Friday is a somewhat shorter and more CASUAL program. To give working Los Angeles professionals a chance, after their busy week, to get home early…”
I look into my dad’s horrified face, a retired senior who has nothing BUT time. This is an eighty-five-year-old man who will ride three hours to avoid using a single first-class stamp, a man who rode approximately five thousand hours to get here. I realize this description makes it sound like we, the classical music lovers, are getting gypped by the lazy, laconic, too-tired-on-Friday-night, BlackBerry-wielding professionals. And I suppose we are. What else is new?
I amend my clearly upsetting tale.
“Casual Friday. It’s a shorter concert so that afterward we can mingle with the L.A. Philharmonic. In the café.”
“In the café? WHAT?” my dad asks.
“That’s the great thing about the Casualness,” I press on, with my sunny sales pitch. “Today’s classical musicians are not the standoffish ones of yore. Pshaw. Look at this flier”—I pull out a brochure I picked up in the lobby—“of the people in this orchestra in turtlenecks, doing high kicks, flying through the air, juggling…Isn’t it funny? A clarinetist? Juggling!” Today’s new kinder, gentler classical musicians…They’re clearly a hell of a lot of fun. I wonder what will be next. “For just a small fee you can take a French-horn player Rollerblading, or a bassoonist for a skydive!”
“Why is the symphony wearing jeans?” my father asks, waving his hand in dismay, as the L.A. Philharmonic files onto the stage in their Casualware—Hawaiian shirts, clogs, sandals…Is that a tank top?
I pat his arm soothingly. I lower my voice, in hopes he’ll get the idea to lower his.
“It’s because they yearn to meet us, to mingle with us, afterward in the café,” I repeat. “And hey, you know who I bet will be there?”
“Who?” my dad says suspiciously.
I take a beat.
“David Robertson!”
His body stiffens with the blow. This is his weak spot. He knows I have him.
“All right,” he says resignedly, even bitterly.
Alice is bent over her Ralphs bag, and pulling out…a bruised banana. She waggles it at me. “Hungry?”
“Food is not allowed in Disney Hall and—Oh my God,” I say. “Is that from the Dumpster?”
“Very clean!” Alice insists.
“Very clean,” my father agrees, lifting out of his bag a not-so-fresh-looking Starbucks cup. “Today we have hazelnut,” he says like some demon barrista. “It is a hazelnut-vanilla combination. This morning at the Malibu Starbucks, I poured together two cups people left behind.”
“Oh my God,” I moan.
“L.A. Times,” he says, pulling out a grease-stained newspaper. “Also I took from Starbucks. Very clean!” He taps it. “That’s where it lists what we lost. The Dvorák!”
“The Dvorák, he’s just not very…CASUAL,” I flail.
He grunts.
“How much were the tickets for this Casual concert show?”
It seems gauche to talk about money in this setting, Frank Gehry’s swooping bird. I’m actually afraid the bird is going to hear me, bringing down a tsunami of more birds—The Birds.
“No,” he snaps irritably. “I want to find out now before I forget.”
I lean in to whisper.
“Ninety-six dollars.”
My father lets out a bellow reminiscent of a bull being gored:
“Ninety-six dollars!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
At least six people in the row in front of us, all old white people with white hair, lean forward in dismay. One man bearing a stark resemblance to the late Eddie Albert, in an elegant dark blue sort of yachtsman’s jacket, with red cravat, puts a startled finger on his whining hearing aid.
“Ninety-six dollars!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And no DVO?
RÁK!”
I find myself losing it.
“Yes,” I hiss. “That’s what art costs now. You need to throw down a hundred dollars, two hundred dollars, ten thousand dollars! Art is expensive now! It’s not like the loosey-goosey days of yore when just ANYONE could have some!” “All right,” my dad replies, prickly.
He reaches down into his grocery bag, begins to rattle around in it.
“You don’t have to pay me back now,” I hiss.
“Ach,” he grunts, “you’re giving me a headache!”
And right there, in the middle of the orchestra section, in front of the ENTIRE CITY OF LOS ANGELES, my dad counts out $192 cash for me for two L.A. Philharmonic tickets in arduous twenties, tens, fives, even ones!!!!!!!!!
I try to snatch the cash quickly from him so we are not sitting so exposed in Frank Gehry’s soaring cathedral of Art, with the many small, crumpled, immigrant bills flapping around us—
But our hands hit each other midair and the cash goes flying.
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 20
