I knew all this because the adults always talked in front of me, as if I weren’t there.
AT FIRST, Liam and I were the only little kids in the commune. We lived in a ranch house on top of a hill. Every downstairs bedroom had a couple in it, and the attic, divided into three or four bedrooms, was stuffed with couples too. One guy lived in an old mail truck in the driveway: Doug McMillian, a civil engineer who practiced yoga and stood on his head for ten minutes a day, and taught my dad how to stand on his head for ten minutes a day, and who eventually changed his name to Battso Gornu. We had electricity and running water, but for heat it was a fireplace and a wood stove. My dad did a lot of the cooking, training without realizing it for the day he would leave the commune and move back to Berkeley, where he would open his own restaurant.
The commune people didn’t believe in toys, but I had a little banana-seat bike my dad taught me to ride when I was four, and a Tonka truck, my prized possession. The bike was propped up against the side of the shed. One day I grabbed the handlebars and climbed aboard. He showed me how the pedals worked, then started to push me, running along beside me, holding the seat. When he saw that I had no trouble balancing, he gave me a little push for good measure and I was off.
I loved being outside. The bright yellow grass, the pond where everyone swam naked, the river running through our parcel, dry in the summer, raging in the winter. Everyone in the commune kept an eye on me, which is to say no one kept an eye on me. There was a garden where they grew vegetables and marijuana. We had a cow named Luna. My dad milked her every morning and he showed me how, and also how to throw the feed out for the chickens, how to hold my hand just right so the feed was broadcast over the sandy ground of their pen.
I learned so much about making plants grow and tending the livestock that they started calling me Luther Burbank, after the world-famous botanist and horticulturalist who developed over eight hundred new strains of flowers, fruits, grasses, and grains.
The other thing this new Luther Burbank liked to do, which I’m sure was not a hobby of the famous botanist, was to kill little animals and dissect them. I ran around the property all day long looking for snakes and scorpions, and waded into the sheep watering pond hoping to find some fish. My feet sank into the muddy bottom, rooting me in place, perhaps saving me from drowning.
I murdered Geraldine’s goldfish in cold blood, and for a few days the talk of the commune became how my mom could prevent me from becoming the next Charles Manson. I was only three and didn’t have the words to say that I was upset at no longer being the baby, that I missed being the sole focus of my mom’s attention. It was incidental that I also liked cutting animals open to look at the organs, those small pulsing gems. My mom decided to love it out of me, and rather than putting any negative energy toward my behavior, the next time she found me on the back patio trying to cut a lizard open with a butter knife, she drew me to her and hugged me so fiercely I thought I might get smothered.
I was further saved from my grisly enthusiasm by the Head Start school run by the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, who lived in a nearby town called Stewarts Point. After they got word that there were some kids running wild nearby, they sent a driver to pick us up. I loved Head Start. No one was worried about me or much of anything there. One day we were driving down the hill and one of the other kids in the backseat opened the door and fell out and rolled down the highway. The driver just drove to where he had stopped and scooped him up. They also allowed me to collect scorpions. I preserved each one in a glass jar filled with alcohol.
My mom and the Head Start Indians may have succeeded in turning me away from a life as a serial killer, but I still like to hang geckos from my ears, their tiny jaws gripped to my lobes like clip-on earrings, hanging on for dear life. If I’m in the mood to watch someone’s eyes pop out of their head, I’m still not above allowing a centipede to crawl up my tongue and into my mouth.
WATERMELON SEED ON MY DING DONG
I WAS FOUR WHEN I took my first hit of marijuana. At night the adults smoked pot for recreation and someone would usually sing and play the guitar. It was part of the household routine, what they did after the dinner dishes were done and put away. They sat in a circle on the living room floor and passed around the chillum. There were some other kids in the mix by then: Sevin, whose parents lived down the hill in a geodesic dome; and a girl named Luba I’ve managed to stay in touch with.
Pinballing around the circle, probably buck naked, I looked over and saw the pipe resting between the fingers of someone’s hand. But the next person wasn’t taking it, so I lurched over, reached in, and grabbed it and sucked on the end. Someone leaned over and took it back from me, some stoned-out-of-his-mind commune person, and I ran out of the house over the bright yellow grass. It must have been summer. It was hot, the sun low and glinting between the pine trees. I was super thirsty, running around on the lookout for something to drink.
I saw some milk jugs lined up by the shed; usually we filled them with water there. One was only half full and I could lift it up to my mouth. I held it with both hands and took a few gulps. Something wasn’t right. My face felt scorched, nose burning, insides stinging. I, who rarely cried, yowled like the losing cat in a fight. Grown-ups appeared. I still held the jug of what was, obviously except to me, kerosene or gasoline. One of the commune moms scooped me up and took me into the kitchen and forced real milk into me. It was cold and chalky. I was dozy and nauseated. Where were my mom and dad? I don’t know. I wasn’t scared, and neither were the women holding me and forcing me to drink the milk. They were surely too stoned to emit a sensation of fear, even if they were feeling it. I’m a father myself now, and had my son swallowed kerosene I would have raced him to the hospital. Instead, they pressed more milk down me. I could hear someone playing the guitar in the other room.
Around the same time there was a big sweat-lodge party. Our sweat lodge was low-domed, a pole frame covered with burlap bags, a fire pit dug deep in the center. It was run by a Native American guy who lived in one of the rental units. Down by the sheep pond my dad built a fire to heat the rocks. When they were red hot, he brought them inside the lodge, arranged them at the bottom of the pit, and poured water on them to make steam. So many people came to these sweat parties they had to take turns in the lodge. They showed up from all over: hippies strolled over from the adjoining parcels of land; emerged from the vans and trucks parked around the property; carpooled from as far away as Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco. The Stanford psychiatrists showed up, and also a muckety-muck from Ghirardelli who brought chocolate.
That day started no different than any other day for me. I run around naked and unsupervised. It’s watermelon season, and I swoop by the table where one of the women is cutting up slabs. I eat my way through one piece after another, down to the rind. I move on to a bag of milk chocolate buttons. They fit right in my sticky palm.
At nightfall someone breaks out the peyote. That was how you knew it was a happening and not just a regular get-together. Pot was the everyday drug of choice, but peyote was for special occasions. Like the milk chocolate, the button fits snug in my palm.
Down the hatch.
It doesn’t taste any different than a lot of the other stuff I pick up off the ground and eat, bitter and earthy. But suddenly everything that had been on the inside of me was on the outside. A geyser of pink and brown spews out of me. Watermelon and chocolate and peyote. Someone rubs my back. I remember looking up and seeing birds with colored wings flying overhead, and the leaves of a nearby eucalyptus tree shaking like chimes. Then I look at my penis and see a watermelon seed stuck there. I can’t stop laughing.
MAD BOB
ONE DAY WHEN I was four, my mom was hanging laundry and I was running around beneath the wet skirts and flowered shirts. A tall man with glasses and curly hair walked up and introduced himself as Mad Bob. A dead raccoon hung from one hand. He explained that he hit the raccoon while driving up from Cazadero, but instead of leaving it by the sid
e of the windy road, he thought it might make a mighty fine barbecue. Perhaps because she was used to my habit of catching creatures and dissecting them for amusement, my mom didn’t bat an eye, just directed him to the fire pit.
Mad Bob arrived with a woman named Carol, who may or may not have been his old lady. She set up a teepee on the property, where she lived with her baby, Joaquin. My mom, the original free spirit, found Carol to be even more so. She had once been married to a guy who manufactured PCP and with the profits bought a Bentley, but now they were divorced. Despite my parents’ casual infidelities, my mom thought marriage was forever and was interested to meet a woman who’d gone her own way. My mom never supposed she would divorce my dad, but it was the free love era, so there was also no expectation that they would remain faithful and true.
Mad Bob was more adventuresome than my dad, indulging my mom in a way my dad never would. Together they traveled around the county stealing fruit from orchard trees and picking up hitchhikers to bring home to help with the canning. She wanted horses. One day Mad Bob showed up with a pair of brown geldings.
My mom was happy enough, but she was growing tired of the rainy winters in Sonoma County. She craved a warm climate. Winter days could be gray for weeks on end, and the land around the house got so muddy you could easily lose your shoes if they weren’t tied on. Then her mother died, she received another inheritance, and Mad Bob said they should go to Mexico for the winter. My mom wanted my dad to come along, but he wasn’t having any of it. He was a guy who liked to stay put. He said, “You took me from New York to Massachusetts, Massachusetts to Berkeley, Berkeley to Cazadero, and now I’m happy and I want to stay here.”
They decided to divvy up their children. I went with my mom and Liam stayed with my dad. My mom had discovered LSD, but my dad thought that I was old enough to fend for myself; whereas Liam, who was still a toddler, needed more reliable care and attention. He built a tiny house for the two of them on the side of a hill on the far side of the property, with a wood stove and a spring-fed shower. The second floor had a vinyl window through which you could see the ocean on clear days.
My mom and I lit out with Mad Bob and his two daughters. Christina and Cathy were a little older than me, grade schoolers. The three of us sat in the back, girl-boy-girl. The VW van broke down on the first day, and pretty much every day after that. Mad Bob would pull over to the side of the road, get out, open the rear engine hood, and stand there with his arms folded staring at it, and I would do the same. Then someone would pull over, or we’d get a tow to some gas station, and I would watch someone fix it. The bottoms of my feet developed calluses from standing on the hot asphalt day after day, and I also began to understand how engines work, knowledge I still use.
We made our way across the border at Mexicali and cruised/broke down/cruised/broke down along the Mexican mainland, camping on the beach. I slept between Christina and Cathy on a bed Mad Bob built for us on the roof of the VW van. Those girls taught me my numbers to one hundred, counting all the stars. We stayed for a while at Guaymas. Mad Bob was a film nut and he said this was the place where a movie called Catch-22 was filmed. One night the grunions were running, tiny silver fish that squiggle themselves up on the sand as part of an elaborate mating ritual. We caught them with our hands and Mad Bob fried them up on the beach. Thinking about this now I appreciate the simplicity, and my mouth waters remembering those crunchy, salty little fish.
Mad Bob and I were wading in the shallows one afternoon, looking for a fish to spear for dinner, and I saw something big and silvery flash by, with an ugly gaping mouth and a fin that looked like a hand with long skinny black fingers. It looked like a prehistoric monster, hairy and mean, and it scared the hell out of me. I leaped back onto shore and resolved never to go back in the ocean again.
“That’s just a roosterfish,” said Mad Bob.
We kept driving south, every day the sun beating down harder, the sand like yellow sugar and the water a warm electric blue. I played in the surf with Christina and Cathy. We held hands and spent hours jumping waves. I told them to look out for the roosterfish. I was sure they were up there with sharks on the list of sea creatures to be feared. I was sure if we went too deep one was going to lunge for me and bite my ding dong.
One day, in a tiny outlaw town near the Guatemalan border, some locals rapped on the side of the van and told us that it wasn’t safe parking on the beach. Would we like to park in their driveway? My mom and Mad Bob weren’t shy about taking people up on their charity. This family, probably looking at us three kids, coffee-bean brown with washboard ribs, thought we could use a good meal or three. They fed us big dinners every night: rice, beans, and iguana tamales. Or that’s what they said they were. One evening my mom discovered they were selling chickens from their little coop to buy enough food to feed us. We moved on down the road so their charity wouldn’t bankrupt them.
Every morning Mad Bob and my mom bought fresh rolls for breakfast from the local panadería. There was always a neat stack of tarnished peso coins on the dashboard of the van, set aside for just this purpose. One morning, awake before anyone else, I swiped the coins and hid them in the back pocket of my raggedy shorts. There was a dingy shop in town I’d spied a few days earlier that sold cheap souvenirs and fireworks. I had just enough for a polumna, a triangle-shaped firecracker with a thick red fuse. I paid for the polumna and the old man behind the counter included a book of matches. Across the street there was a little park with a few iron benches and an empty concrete fountain in the center. I lit the fuse, pulled my arm back major league pitching style, paused for a minute as I tried to figure out whether I wanted to throw the firecracker down the street or try to hit the empty fountain, and in that moment it exploded in my hand. I smelled the sizzle of skin. It felt like someone had socked me in the jaw. I went down on one knee. After feeling my ear I expected to see blood but there was nothing, only a high-pitched whine that wouldn’t go away.
I ran back to the van. My mom popped out of the door, her hands on her hips, and I showed her my hand. She said it served me right for stealing the breakfast money. It was the first time I’d heard about karma, and how what we do comes back to us. My hand healed, but I lost some hearing in that one ear, which I suffer from to this day.
IN GOD’S HANDS, MORE OR LESS
MAD BOB DROVE SOUTH. Our days were ordered around finding a fresh tortilla shop. Kilos of fresh corn tortillas; no GMO worries then. We ate them with cheese and beans for days on end. No one consulted a map that I could see. The only thing that dictated our direction was the location of the next bank, where my mom would receive her monthly inheritance check.
Somewhere along the way we picked up a guy named Luis. He was from a well-off family in Mexico City that made its riches manufacturing wood paneling. He was on a mission, scouring tropical jungles for cedar and ceiba to take back to the factory. My mom was the kind of woman who hit it off with people, and she and Luis stayed up all night talking. Whereas Mad Bob was all about adventure, Luis liked to talk and talk in English so heavily accented I couldn’t understand him. He decided he liked the sound of our journey, and also my mom, so he joined us in the van.
Mexico turned into Guatemala. The people there were the most helpful we’d come across. The starter in the van wouldn’t turn over anymore, and when people saw Mad Bob and Luis pushing it down the road to jump-start it, my mom behind the wheel steering, they would stop what they were doing and silently join in. Once the van sputtered to life, they would just as silently return to their business.
One day we stopped to get groceries and other supplies in a village near the border with a river running through it. A guy named Jose Pepe approached us as we stood outside a little shop that sold everything from sweet bread to motor oil. What he saw: two men, one a tall hippie with curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses, the other a short, broad-chested Mexican who kept his arm clamped around the shoulder of my mom; she, slender and deeply tanned with sun-streaked blond hair; two grade-school
girls with scabby knees in faded sundresses; and me, blond curly hair, now deaf in one ear, trotting a circle around our assembled group, searching for a lizard or some small creature to torment.
“Excuse me,” Jose Pepe said, “I couldn’t help but hear your plans to camp by the river. I’m afraid that is a little dangerous. There is no doubt you will be robbed. I have a ranch not far from here. You can stay there.”
Mad Bob and my mom and Luis thought that was a fine idea. Jose Pepe helped them push-start the van, and we followed him in his pickup truck down a rutted road through the jungle. We eventually came to a clearing, and there was a long low ranch house and a pasture with a herd of long-eared white cows standing in the middle staring at us.
They cooked us up a big steak dinner and had spare rooms for us to sleep in, with actual beds made with actual sheets that tucked in around the edges. The next morning Jose Pepe took us horseback riding, and took his time choosing the right horses for us three kids. Mine was big and yellow and swaybacked, and had a thick pale-yellow mane that fell in his eyes. He was the kind of horse who would take care of you, instead of waiting for you to tell him what to do. Jose Pepe’s wife gave me some long pants that belonged to a slightly larger child, to protect my legs when I rode.
Two days later my mom and Luis and Mad Bob and his two daughters, who were afraid of the horses and were anxious to get back to the ocean anyway, push-started the van and chugged off. They were headed to the next bank to pick up my mom’s check, and would be back soon. I was happy to be left behind. My fear of roosterfish was starting to get exhausting, and there was no threat of roosterfish at Jose Pepe’s cattle ranch in the jungle.
Hound of the Sea Page 2
