Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  “Félix, do you see the moral? You should have done the same thing with Charles. You should have let him stay in prison rather than fight for his freedom. That was your great mistake. You thought he would be good when he was freed. He begged you and you believed him and took pity on him. And now the result of your mercy will be the blood of the innocents …”

  Book Two

  THREE WOMEN

  CHAPTER TEN

  South of Los Angeles, edging the Pacific, small towns hug the sand like mussels clamped to rocks. They spill into one another, like the bleeding colors of Madras cloth, and it is difficult to know when one is left and another is entered. The landmarks are the same—a taco stand in Huntington Beach is scarcely different from a taco stand in Redondo Beach, and the same can be said by and large for the children. They are beautiful, the young of Southern California’s beach communities. Their heads are bleached gold by the sun, their bodies are lithe and coppery, they are for a few blessed moments graceful creatures who dance on the sand and wash in the sea, with no more commitment required than the duration of foam left behind by a crashing wave.

  On Cabrillo Beach, below San Pedro, in early 1970, the boys strapped themselves to wings of crimson and yellow and glided off cliffs, sailing insolently over those youths balanced on surfboards. The girls, at whom most of this spectacular endeavor was directed, pretended indifference, clustered instead about transistor radios. They listened and sang along with “Angel Baby.” They oiled their bodies and toasted in the sun. They combed their hair. They puffed on cigarettes, legal and otherwise. They laughed and flirted and waited—although few if any could answer what for.

  One of the memorable girls of Cabrillo Beach that season was, on occasion, Jennifer Maria Candace Bolliver. Jennie. Everyone knew her. Everyone liked her. She was petite in a forest of young women, standing barely five feet tall. And she was different, a little “off center,” as she described herself. When the other girls obeyed the dictum that feminine hair must be long, lank, ironed on a board and the color of sand or wheat, Jennie chopped hers off, affected kinky curls, and dyed it all flaming red, like the strawberry wine passed around at beach parties. Her body was full and well curved, more like an hourglass than a surfboard, and her “black tan” was widely admired, olive skin kept gleaming year round. Her friends chose terms of effervescence to describe Jennie. She “bubbled.” She “sparkled.” She “lit up dark rooms.” She was a “bell ringing in a mission tower.” When Jennie was very young, her father called her “penny candy,” for she was scarcely bigger than a peppermint stick. Later, her grandfather dubbed her “T.T.,” for “tizzy tosser.” Jennie’s temperament was quickly aroused.

  In the anonymity of her beach town, Jennie was unique, for she was not totally committed to the mating dance of the sand. Or to much of anything, for that matter. She transferred her loyalties from one social caste to another, never taking full membership in any. The surfers knew her and liked her and sought to have her grace their “woodies,” those ancient station wagons with paneled sides weathered gray by sea and salt. But then, so did the cheerleaders and the “smarts” and the class officers, even the “low riders,” those tough and pretending-to-be-tough youths whose ladies wore razor blades in their beehives and who cruised Highway 1 in lowered ’55 Chevies with tumbling dice and dancing dolls on the dashboards. Jennie was comfortable in street talk, but then again she often preferred to sit content and alone in her room, reading poets as disparate as Auden, Ferlinghetti, and Omar Khayyam. Ordered in the tenth grade to write a composition about her community, Jennie began: “My town is a melting pot—Italians, blacks, snobs, wetbacks, purples, freaks, hoods, slobs—and me.”

  A hidden and unspecific hunger chewed at Jennie, and she was unable to find lasting nourishment in any of her divergent “crowds.” But no one suspected it. Jennie thought she was the only girl who had to wear masks at the age of sixteen to make people think she was normal—and happy.

  She was the firstborn child of a deep sea diver named Ralph Bolliver and his wife Sandra, a grocery checker/part-time manicurist. The father was a vigorous man with strong arms tattooed in hearts, crosses, and mermaids. He smelled strongly of the sea, and he could hold his daughter over his head with one hand, until she could touch the ceiling. When Jennie was young, he took the child on his boat a time or two, but she was frightened and clung to his legs so tightly that he was unable to tend to his duties. When Jennie grew older, she remained afraid of the water—be it ocean or swimming pool—a curious phobia for a child who grew up within sight of the Pacific. She would only go to the edge, no further. Once, when she was in her late teens, on an evening when she was deeply stoned on mescaline and lying on harem pillows in a duplex in Venice, California, Jennie remarked on her fear. “I think I must have gone down on the Titanic a couple of lives ago. I don’t even like to drink water.”

  One reason, perhaps, was that the ocean symbolized her father’s long absences from the series of frame houses that the Bolliver family occupied in a nomadic trail up and down the West Coast. When Ralph was away, Jennie had to deal directly with her mother, Sandra, a sullen woman who smoked three packs of cigarettes each day and who continually complained of being tired. She was as gray in mood as the smoke that curled about her. There were three children to raise, and never enough money, and a husband more often gone than home, and two jobs that kept her occupied from before the sun until after the dark. By twelve, Jennie was housekeeper and substitute mother to the other children. She was expected to return promptly from school, clean house, prepare dinner, and then stand by as witness to the intensifying quarrels between Ralph and Sandra. Once she recalled them vividly in conversation with a girl friend: “They were real knock-down-drag-outs.… And then I would have to bring Mama a Valium and sit with her until she went to sleep—and remember to lock the front door from the inside so Daddy couldn’t get back in the house.”

  When Jennie entered her teens, the marriage broke, Ralph departing for Canada to nurse his wounds, Sandra finding a new husband in the construction business and moving to Texas. Grudgingly Jennie endured a few lonely months in Texas, fended off her father’s attempt to transfer her to a workers’ camp in the wilds of Canada, finally achieved what she really wanted—a return to California. “I want to finish school there,” she pleaded with her mother. “I want a place to go back to for reunions.” In her sophomore year of high school, Jennie settled in with her grandparents, they being a peg-legged fisherman named Cap and his red-haired wife Maggie. Home again, on familiar turf, Jennie moved quickly to seize some kind of identity and independence. She renounced the Catholic Church of her childhood, informing her saddened grandparents that religion held no more appeal for her. She rebelled at any hint of grand-parental authority, refusing to obey curfews or perform dictated chores in the house. Her grades plunged. “I remember when you were unhappy if you got less than an A in any subject,” complained Maggie. “You were Little Miss Perfectionist. Now you come in my house reeking of marijuana smoke and you’re either asleep or playing that damned rock music so loud my eardrums hurt.”

  Maggie knew barely half of it. For most of her sixteenth year and considerably beyond, Jennie was stoned. But hardly unique. Marijuana in 1970 was as common among the young of her town as cola. It was smoked en route to school, on the grounds, and on the way home. Jennie was stoned in class, at the beach, standing outside movie theaters waiting to see Fantasia or the last half of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was no secret. Drugs were as integral to the youth culture of the beach as bikinis and troubadors. America’s attention was focused on drugs during the 1960s, for they seemed a clue to the mobs of children cursing LBJ and trying to stop a war. But when a new decade began, drugs faded from public cognition, not because they were less used, but because the media had tired of them. Jennie did not limit herself to grass: she used mescaline, LSD, cocaine if some friend was prosperous, amphetamines, barbiturates, even a snort or two of heroin. She also sold drugs, not being a dealer on any
grand scale, but merely a participant in the established custom of one kid selling a lid of marijuana to another—and making a couple of dollars’ profit. Once, at a party, a boy held out a fistful of assorted pills and Jennie ate them all. “I’ll try anything once,” she said. “That’s my motto.” Within an hour she had passed out and slept for two days in a friend’s garage while Maggie frantically combed the neighborhood. Her best girl friend, a lush creature two years older than she named Carmen, would one day recall these shadowed moments of Jennie’s young life:

  “For a time there was Sunshine Acid from Berkeley, so strong you could lick a tab and ‘get off,’ and then still sell it if you were able to function … You could buy anything you wanted if you had the money—and money was no problem. Jennie spent her lunch money on drugs, or her clothes money, or the money her grandmother gave her to go to the movies. Or she sold five tabs of acid at a dollar fifty each and got one free as commission. And if all else failed, there was always somebody who would share. The whole point of doing drugs was to do them with friends and share the experience.”

  Carmen was also Jennie’s guide into the playing fields of sex. One night, when the two girls were at a slumber party, with eyelids rimmed red and heavy from grass, Jennie revealed that she was still a virgin, at sixteen and a half years old, making the admission sound like a secret disease. It must have been a difficult confession, as Carmen loomed sexy and widely experienced with men. She smiled, rather tenderly. “My first time was not until I turned eighteen,” she said, “and it was with a guy I didn’t really give a damn about. It just seemed I had waited long enough.” Carmen had a piece of advice for her younger friend: wait for, if not marriage, the moment when Jennie really loved someone. “If the first time is the product of love, then sex will always be beautiful,” counseled Carmen. Jennie threw her arms around her friend and said, “You’re so right. I’m going to wait. I want everything to be beautiful.”

  But a few weeks later Jennie called Carmen in tears. She had not heeded the advice. Jennie had succumbed to the exhortations of a lifeguard; their pallet had been a blanket in the back of his station wagon. The experience was humiliating. Not only had it been quick and furtive and painful, a highway patrolman had driven up in mid-coitus and shined a spotlight on the young lovers.

  Hearing distraught guilt, Carmen rushed to Jennie’s house. “It’s all right,” she soothed. “The world’s not over. There’ll be better ones and worse ones. Just look at it this way. The pressure’s off.” From there, Jennie handled sex as casually as her peers. She said “yes” or she said “no” depending upon the currents of the moment. Birth control pills were not difficult to obtain, certainly not in a community where sleeping pills were as easily purchased by youngsters as aspirin. And, helpfully, the two girls became friends with an older boy named Cope, who was a little past twenty and who worked, fortunately, for a small pharmaceutical house. He was the candy man, pills jiggling in his pockets, always available for trips up, or trips down, or trips into a psychedelic world of exploding color and fragmented mood. Moreover, Cope was an experienced traveler into various Southern California schools of weirdness, hypnotism being his vogue of the moment when he met Carmen and Jennie. The girls declared passionate interest in being hypnotized, and Cope agreed. At his apartment, a one-room studio in Santa Monica with no furniture save pillows and more candles than on the altar of any given Catholic church, Cope directed Jennie and Carmen to remove anything “binding”—belts, bras, shoes, glasses. Then they stretched out on pillows and obeyed Cope’s dictum of absolute silence and concentration. “Now start to concentrate on my two fingers,” he said, holding them like a narrow V before his bearded face. His voice was gentle, reassuring. When the experiment was over, Cope was eager for their reaction. Carmen pronounced it disappointing; she was aware of everything said and done. “So was I,” agreed Jennie, “but it was beautiful. I felt a glow all around my body. I felt warm and content, like being wrapped in a baby blanket.”

  The three—Cope, Jennie, Carmen—formed a secret society to accommodate their interests, meeting regularly to discuss their hypnotic experiences. Cope taught the girls how to perform self-hypnosis and they practiced it each day. When Maggie wondered what three young people were doing in her house, sitting on the living room sofa and staring into space as if their heads had been emptied of sense, Jennie answered patiently, “It’s got nothing to do with anything bad, Grandma, it’s just something we’re studying. We’re all searching.”

  “Searching for what?” asked Maggie wearily.

  “For ourselves,” said Jennie.

  Often the girls slept over at one or the other’s home, and traditionally they put themselves “under” for several moments before surrendering to sleep. “We could lose time, space, and sometimes see in all directions at once,” remembered Carmen, who treasured these moments, particularly for the “vibrations” she received from her friend. “Jennie’s spirit was more tangible when we did self-hypnosis. Jennie was warm, female, loving, giving. God must have had his eye on her. There are no lukewarm spirits—only good and evil. In Jennie there was good—shining, radiant good.”

  Maggie and Cap, relieved their home no longer contained drugged children, were good-humored about their entranced granddaughter. For a few months, Jennie was quiet and gentle. “Drugs don’t interest me anymore,” Jennie told someone on the telephone, while Maggie overheard. “I don’t even drink coffee or tea. Nothing can interfere with what I’m learning about myself.”

  Then two events occurred within one week that brought an end to hypnotic fascination. At a party in Marina del Rey, the Los Angeles suburb that houses singles and the nautically inclined, Jennie met a USC medical student who began speaking of hypnotism and its possible key to the locked doors of past lives. Listening attentively, Jennie had an interesting question: If a person dies, and the body is cremated, what can possibly be left to reincarnate? Do the ashes and bits of bone form new tissue, and, if so, what happens to those powdery remains of a corpse kept in a crypt or a bronze jar on someone’s mantel? The student shrugged. He had no answer. Presumably, if one went along with the notion of reincarnation, it occurred by utilizing something intangible, some cell or seed or genetic particle that contained a person’s entire life experience—a “diary,” as it were—and passed on to the next life. But hidden in the subconscious.

  “Hypnotize me,” begged Jennie. “I’m a classic subject.”

  The medical student demurred. He did not perform party games. Besides, an element of danger might be present.

  “Just for fun,” pleaded Jennie. “See if you can take me back to another life. Beyond the womb.” She was hard to turn down. Jennie was vivacious, persuasive, and so enthusiastic as she neared seventeen that usually she got her wish. The aspiring doctor and his subject went into a bedroom and locked the door. Jennie stretched out on the bed and the student routinely began regressive hypnosis, noting that the girl fell immediately into a deep hypnotic state. He asked a few questions, leading her carefully back to a well-remembered twelfth birthday party, then to the age of six and the first day of school, through the painful memory of a fall from a playground swing at three. With each step into her past, she winced.

  “Have you always been called Jennie?” he asked. On the bed, Jennie stirred uneasily. A shudder passed across her body. The hypnotist pressed. Did she ever have another name? Could she remember it?

  “No,” said Jennie firmly. “Not now … I don’t want to … I’m very thirsty.” Then her eyes, which to this point had been obediently closed, flew open in terror and she stared wildly at the hypnotist. But she seemed to be looking through him not at him. The student was rattled by the serious turn that had come to the experiment. He asked once again if she ever had another name.

  “Stop!” cried Jennie. “Stop pushing!”

  “Can you remember before you were born?”

  “Why should I tell you, my prince,” answered Jennie, coyly. “You know my names are all secr
et.” She began to cry, softly, her eyes filling with tears. Then she nodded, almost imperceptibly. And she said, “Yes.” A few moments of silence passed. “I am called …” Jennie suddenly spoke in a voice several notes lower than her regular pitch, and it was strange—tinged with a guttural foreignness. She said a few more words, either nonsensical or of another language. With that, the student wisely elected to terminate the experiment. He commanded Jennie to leave her trance. When she returned to the present, Jennie rose immediately and left the room, running out of the apartment. She did not speak of the experience until years later, when she was more sophisticated in the land of the unanswered and unexplained. And then all she said was, “I saw things that night I shouldn’t have. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was drowning …”

  Whether frightened, or confused, or simply thrown into territory that had no road map, Jennie compensated by abandoning psychic exploration, and returned to drugs. She refused to see her regular friends for a long time, filling her dance card instead with delegates from the junk pile. Jennie ran wild, as if fleeing from an approaching storm. Her appearance, which up to now had been merely colorful and in the mode of her friends, now turned to emulation of Janis Joplin in an opium den. On her nose Jennie perched granny glasses. Her hair grew out long and natural, but with infrequent washing and care, its natural shade of ash blonde turned to mouse gray. She put a gold slave bracelet on her upper arm (and set something of a school fashion), draped brilliantly colored bedspreads from India about her waist and called them skirts, found shawls at thrift shops, wore lace-up boots from the Gay Nineties, festooned more junk jewelry about her neck and arms and fingers than would be worn by any fortuneteller at a PTA carnival. “I don’t know who or what you’re trying to be,” decided Cap, her grandfather, “but you look like what we used to scrape off the bottom of boats.”