One sentence stood out to me as I read on the edge of my bed. I marked the page: “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” It made me think of the Secret Place, the place I hide with Robert Smith. I know this face. I’ve learned not to tell anyone at school about Synanon or Dad in prison or Paul dying or Mom in the bed staring up at the ceiling.
It’s a mask, this face you create for others, one you hide behind as you laugh at jokes you don’t understand and skip uncomfortable details, entire years of your life, as if they simply didn’t happen.
I brought up the quote in our next discussion, raising my hand in class for the first time in my life, my heart pounding trying to sound serious, keeping an eye on Laura Dorset. Mrs. Chavez said I hit the major theme on its head and she wrote it on the blackboard for the class.
Next was Lord of the Flies, then Of Mice and Men. I wondered how the authors dreamed these stories up. It seemed like writers have the most important job in the world, to make books, to create a connection, a kind of telepathy between two minds in which one can inhabit the other. It doesn’t seem like a thing that exists in the real world, to be an artist. The only careers we ever hear about are doctor or teacher or lawyer or banker or engineer. What does a writer do all day? Where does he pick up his paycheck? How does he even start? There are no answers.
I was shocked, as surprised as I’ve ever been about anything in my life, to find I liked school. I liked the books and the discussions in English. I liked learning about ancient civilizations in history class. I liked science with our microscopes and cell diagrams, the mystery of life explained. I was fascinated. What started as a kind of future goal quickly became something I loved for its own sake.
I would find myself up at eleven or midnight reading on the bed or taking notes from a textbook. Dad would lean in with a glass of milk and some crackers, shaking his head. “How’s it going in here? You going blind from all this reading yet?” I would point to the book and he would nod and leave me with my studies.
Some nights he seemed proud and others he seemed almost confused. I knew I couldn’t ask him for help with geometry or an essay, the way the other kids from class could, the ones whose parents had college degrees. And very quickly, after my first few report cards, a new feeling began to emerge over this, a shame like Dad was something to be hidden, something I had to fight against if I wanted to go to college. Because that was all I cared about, getting out, getting into college, finding a way to do something new. And being a Jollett man, the very thing that made me feel dangerous and cool, like I could flout all rules and conventions, suddenly felt like a liability and college—for a Jollett man whose uncles, brother and father had all been addicts who’d gone to jail—was nothing but a pipe dream.
* * *
WHEN WE GET to Black Boy, I work up the nerve to ask Laura Dorset on a date. To my surprise, she says yes. The class discussions all week center on how Richard Wright’s family treats his ambition like a dangerous thing, so he learns to hide it. In the rural South at the turn of the century that ambition could get him killed. Still, he’s driven to move up, to find a better station in life. I can’t help but be inspired, to think if he can face the horrors he had to face, I can at least stay up late studying. Tanisha Campbell says this is how it’s always been and that white people don’t understand struggle because they don’t have to deal with being poor, with living on food stamps in a broken home or a father in prison.
When Wright’s mother tells him she wants to die, his body goes blank, his feelings frozen inside him while she lies still in the bed. This teaches him to be suspicious of joy, a feeling like he had to keep moving in order to escape the nameless fate trying to overtake him. I am breathless because that is exactly how I felt in Oregon when Mom would go into her depressions. I want so badly to be on whatever team Richard Wright is on. I know he faced things I never will, that I have the advantage of this white face I can wear like a mask, that when teachers or cops or my peers look at me, they don’t see the food stamps and heroin and lineage of men who’ve gone to prison, all they see is my blond hair and my green eyes, the picture of a suburban white boy. And that Tanisha Campbell and my black peers, no matter how focused on the future they are, no matter how safe, settled, upwardly mobile their home lives are, when authority figures see a black teenager, what they see is a million stereotypes. So I know Richard Wright and I are very different and I am lucky in this way. But still, the feeling I have when I read the book is one of being seen. I recognize something of myself in his private world and his private thoughts. I admire him and I wish so much we could be friends, that his locker was near mine and we could have lunch together.
Laura and I pass notes between classes all week and before long I ask her to be my girlfriend, leaning in to her locker, the air thick with the smell of her perfume, my heart pounding as I place my hand on that tiny waist and stare at that little ski jump nose.
She says yes and it feels like the crashing of a thunderhead, this new world I glimpse at the edge of her locker in the E Building of Westchester High School beneath the flight path of those rumbling jets. Within a couple weeks, we are spending every minute together, holding hands in the hallways, staying up late to talk on the phone while I read her the lyrics to “Just Like Heaven” by the Cure. We eat lunch alone on the edge of campus, away from prying eyes, a great romance taking place beneath the eaves of the school library. A universe in a raindrop.
Some days I go to her house after school to study. Laura is a straight-A student and she explains to me how to take notes, how to keep track of assignments in a weekly calendar, how to budget time and plan assignments. I feel like a caveman learning about tools for the first time. When she gets stuck, she asks her father for help. He is an engineer at the Hughes Aircraft facility on the edge of the hill that leads up to Westchester. I think of Dad in his garage, surrounded by the engine parts and dirty rags, his red Craftsman toolbox and blue shop towels.
Her mother is a housewife with cropped black hair and a kind of birdlike anxiety. She follows us from room to room asking if we need food or water or help studying. It’s an odd feeling, to be tended in this way. I feel like an amoeba in the presence of gazelles. Like these graceful, organized people are better than I am. Like they know something I don’t. Like there is a code here and if I can just crack it, if I can learn to have a conversation with her, then I can gain an advantage.
Her mother interrogates me and I try to hold that face, the one I know I have to show the world, the one that quickly crumbles under her questioning.
“So what does your father do, Mikel?”
“He managed a tire shop for a while.”
“That’s a good blue-collar job you can do with just a high school education. Good for him.”
“He didn’t go to high school.”
“He didn’t?”
“He dropped out in eighth grade.”
“What did he do all day?”
“At first he just got in trouble, I guess, but then he ran drugs to Mexico and stole cars and credit card numbers. But he’s clean now. Has been for years.”
“What do you mean, clean?”
“It’s kind of a long story.” There is no way out of this. I am a circus freak. Step right up and see the child raised without parents in a cult. He will never be anything but precisely this.
“Um, well, when he got out of prison, he wanted to get clean from heroin, so he went to Synanon, which was this commune where he met my mom.”
“Oh. Well, she seemed very nice when I met her the other night.”
“That was Bonnie. But I call her my mom too.”
“What does that mean? Where was your real mom?”
“Bonnie is my real mom. They both are, for different reasons.”
“Okay, where was the woman who gave birth to you?”
“She was in Santa Monica, in the main Synanon facili
ty there. It was an armory on the beach.”
“Where were you?”
“Tomales Bay. That’s in Marin County. North of San Francisco. In a different Synanon facility.”
“And your mom was okay with this?”
“She was very sad. That’s what she says.”
“That doesn’t sound like a school. That sounds like an orphanage. How old were you?”
“Six months.”
“Six months! And this school … who ran it?”
“Other people in the commune.”
“You mean other drug addicts?”
“I guess so. Not everybody was a drug addict. Some of them wanted to change the world. A lot of those drug addicts were great people.”
“Did they go through a background screening to make sure they weren’t criminals or abusers? Were they monitored? Were they fingerprinted? Was there a training? Educational requirements? Certifications? Oversight? Anything like that?”
I feel a hot shame on my neck and I want to run away. I don’t know how to explain to this woman that these people are people I love and they’re not weird in the way she imagines them, that she is the weird one with her coupons and life out of Leave It to Beaver.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t like that. They were nice. Bonnie was there.”
“What about when Bonnie wasn’t there?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if Bonnie worked there, then she had to go home sometimes, so who was with you then? How do you know it was safe? How did your mom know to trust these people who ran this orphanage with her six-month-old baby? Where was your dad?”
“It, well, I, uh, I don’t know. We were children of the universe.”
It’s strange to hear the stories we’ve been told about Synanon deconstructed in this way, to see them through the eyes of someone else, how quickly they fall apart under scrutiny. We’ve been told so many times that we were raised “in a school” and that it was a “a great school.” No one ever stopped to think that maybe the kids were hurt by that school which wasn’t a school but a group home or an orphanage. I can’t help but think how much worse it would sound if she knew more.
I know she likes me. I even know that she approves of me in her way. I can smile a perfectly white smile now that my braces are off and my teeth are clean and I have a jaw instead of a mouth like an ape. I have a haircut and new clothes instead of hand-me-downs. I’m getting an A in honors English. I can repeat the words I know I’m supposed to say, the ones I learned from Drew. He’s on the baseball team now, a star pitcher, and he’s taken to wearing Cure T-shirts to school. Now that I’ve stopped being such a “bad kid,” we’re able to go to his house after school, where we study or shoot hoops in his backyard. I hear him talk to his mother, who is the president of the PTA, and I’ve learned the words I’m supposed to recite, the ones that speak to my plans, my goals, my future, my worth: “Yes, I’d love some toast, thank you … We’re gonna hit the books. No, I’m not sure if I want to go to a UC or a private school yet.”
She doesn’t know how we waited in our beds for someone to pick us up. She doesn’t know the shame of it. She doesn’t know about Phil in the driveway. She doesn’t know we had to run and hide behind the mountains. She doesn’t know about Paul or the rabbits or food stamps or Mom frozen in the bed, how she told us it was our job to take care of her and we felt ourselves go numb as we slipped into a stone tower in the sky. And I will never tell her. I want to bury it like a key you drop in a well. I want to hide it under a hundred feet of water and brick. And it seems I can. Because all she says is what my teachers say: How remarkable it is that I’m choosing a different path for myself. How exciting it is that I’m pursuing a future. She doesn’t know that the past isn’t over. She doesn’t know that it’s a mask, this face I hold to the world.
CHAPTER 31
MORE HORSE THAN JOCKEY
There were moments running down a trail with Paul on a crisp fall day at Minto-Brown Park in Salem at eight years old when I felt like I could run forever. The smell of mud and dried leaves on the ground, the way the snot would trickle down my face and I could feel my heart pounding through my chest as if it was about to carry me up into the sky by the sheer force of its beating. I wondered where the red line was, when my stomach would cramp or my asthma would flare up and we had to walk or lie still on the trail. How hard could I push? When did the body take over and say no? More often than not the pain was part of it: the fire in my gut as I jumped over a log or cut between bushes and roots, the feeling so palpable, of being alive, as I turned a corner and disappeared into some forgotten corner of the forest.
Running on the beach the first week of track and field practice has a similar feel to it. There are so few distance runners on a team dominated by sprinters and jumpers and throwers, the leftover remnants of the standout football and basketball programs. We awkward distance-running few are misfits mostly, too thin, too short, too clumsy for other sports. The distance runners are mostly the immigrant kids, the misfits, the ones who could never make the basketball team. We are Guatemalan and Ethiopian, Mexican, Salvadoran, Korean, and Italian/Dutch/French/Dope Fiend. Getahun is the only other serious runner on the team, the only other one who wants to win races and isn’t just trying to get out of PE. He escaped the civil war in Ethiopia and moved to the United States where he lives now with an uncle in Inglewood, goes to school and works a job at a tuxedo shop in the Fox Hills Mall. We become fast friends. I stopped hanging around the kids from the Bowl after the motorcycle accident. They’re not bad guys but I knew I wasn’t going to make a change if I didn’t change the company I kept.
Getahun and I climb over steep hills in the empty neighborhood cleared of houses beneath jumbo jets hanging in the sky above us heading out to sea like rumbling pterodactyls while we sweat and pant in the salt air heavy with the smell of decaying seaweed and the occasional rotting seal washed up in the sand. The runs are pleasant. The thirst, the ancient feeling of movement, the commitment to the Hard Task, the relief as I stretch in the grass after a six-mile run, exactly young, exactly a body in the sun.
Interval workouts are something else entirely. They are a brush with death, with failure, with the pain that keeps a body earthbound despite the heady plans of the mind. Halfway through the second interval of the eight-by-four-hundred-yard set we are given the first week of practice, as I begin to tie up, it hits me that there is going to be nothing fun about this. It’s just going to hurt. It feels unfair because I’ve already joined the team. I’ve already told the family, Laura, Drew, everyone, that track is my sport and I can’t very well quit because interval training is too hard. By the fourth interval, an ache begins to set in, a depression that there is no refuge. A sinking nausea. A weight in my legs as I feel the burn of lactic acid like I’m fighting against taut cords, fluttery and rigid, pulling me backward. By the eighth interval, the physical pain turns to confusion, a tendency to lose track of time. I look around for a soft place for my thoughts and there is none.
It’s here in this place, in this quiet frenzy at the edge of my body’s limit, that I find something surprising. Anger.
A recurring image comes to mind. There is an empty room with three wooden chairs in it. My father is sitting in one, my brother is in the next, and there is a third chair, which is empty, reserved for me. They look up at me as if to say, “You’re next.” There is a blue floor and a shaft of light falling from a high window and I realize the room is a jail cell. I pump my arms and grit my teeth, feeling the spit fall from my mouth, and think, I. Will. Not. Become. You. I round the turn, dizzy and out of breath, focusing on the empty room and their faces, sad, expectant, like a prophecy I can’t avoid.
This becomes my ritual on the track after school on interval workout days. A light fog falls over my brain, a quiet storm in the distance as Getahun and I warm up. There is a sphere in my chest, a small defined space that floats quietly, containing something. I think about remaining small forever. That I will never
grow. That I will never be taller. That I will be here, stuck forever. There is no future for me. No options. No choices. I consider the dream of faraway people and places, the chance to walk among them, a chance I will miss because I am destined for mediocrity, for prison, for rehab, for jail and a squandered life. I squeeze my eyes hard and put it all in the sphere. And then, with sweat falling in my face, when the burn in my lungs sets in and I see the final straightaway, the white wooden stands to the right, our coach standing at the finish line with his stopwatch while my legs tie up and my lungs burn, I let it out. I empty the sphere. And there on the track, I feel the anger consume me, the helplessness. The desire to break free becomes like a scream turned to movement. I pump my arms, I feel something electric in my legs and I lean forward and picture the room, the chairs, the place waiting for me, the place I am destined to end up no matter what I do, a feeling that makes me able to run until I fall over.
* * *
I DON’T KNOW if this place is one my brother is going to leave behind since he was kicked out of rehab after nine months for having a girlfriend. They moved to Oregon, he and Tiffany, where the rent was cheaper and they could get a place together. They stayed with Mom awhile then found an apartment on the edge of town between the fairgrounds and the railroad tracks. He got a job working at a mobile home plant that he says isn’t so bad except that it’s cold when it rains because the plant is outside and he accidently drove a nail through his hand one day.
“Man, I don’t know if this is what I want, little bro,” he tells me over the phone. “I mean, school sucks but this sucks more.” He tells me he’s still sober, which is good because we were all scared he was going to die and now he merely seems miserable.
I met Tiffany once at a sober dance in the Clare courtyard. “Sober dances” were what they called the parties they had without drugs or alcohol. There was a DJ setting up lights when I got there, people putting out sodas and pretzels when Tony emerged from a hallway screaming, “Little bro!” He ran to me and hugged me hard like I was his best friend on earth. “The man has arrived! Let’s get you some punch! You ready to rock this town?”
Hollywood Park Page 25
