Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  So I’m not prepared when I get the call. I’m not ready for it. I’m stretching in my dorm room when the phone rings and a polite woman asks me my name and explains she’s calling to tell me my mother has checked herself into their facility. I’m not prepared for the polite voice, the instructions, the details about the treatment facility where she will be staying for the foreseeable future.

  She is safe and unable to harm herself. She is in excellent care. She is going to undergo treatment and it’s important that my brother and I visit her soon because she will need our support. There are so many questions: Is this some kind of nervous breakdown? Is she in a loony bin? Has she finally just lost it?

  I’m simply not prepared.

  There is a particular week for family visits, the voice tells me, and we should mark the week on our calendars because it’s “an important part of her recovery.” She needs to know that we support her, that her needs are important, that her feelings are real, that her struggles, her pain, her life are important to us, that we are thinking about her and ready to take care of her in whatever way she needs, because she’s been through so much.

  I hang up the phone and try to feel bad. I know I’m supposed to. I know she’s severely depressed and in need of more from me. I know I’m supposed to take care of her, that this is what is required of the son she raised. But I don’t know why she’s going somewhere so far away. I don’t know what led up to it. I only know that every time I think of the trip I’m supposed to take to the treatment facility in Arizona, or of the abusive man she married, or of the million ways in which I must pretend to be the person she wants me to be, I don’t feel anything but the sense of an oncoming storm. I can’t sleep. I can’t study. I can hardly focus my eyes from the exhaustion most days. And I’m suddenly so angry I could scream.

  * * *

  THE MAN HAD on a blue shirt. He had a black beard. He wore small wire-frame glasses. He had a soft face, a kind face. He was sitting in the circle of family members who’d come to watch the “family share.” His job, like everyone else’s in the group, was to reflect upon what he’d heard when the two people had finished speaking to each other while sitting in the two wooden chairs placed three feet apart in the center of the circle. Our turn came and I spoke to Mom for about ten minutes. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I tried to be honest, truly honest about how inconsequential I felt as a child, how she did not show interest in my well-being, that my life was not my own, that my body was not my own, that I was made to do things I did not want to do, to play a role I did not want to play, that it was always clear to me that my needs weren’t important, whether those needs were for sympathy or love or food or basic safety, I always felt like my only job was to take care of her and beyond that to go on and do something in the world that would reflect well on her. It was time now to listen to people “say what they heard” in my statement. An old man said, “It’s time to cut the apron strings, lady.” A woman said, “It sounds like your son feels overwhelmed by your inappropriate demands.” One of the teenagers said, “I think he’s a little mad because he had to take care of you for so long and so he never got to be a kid.” Then the man in the blue shirt spoke. He had a black beard. He wore small wire-frame glasses. He spoke kindly.

  “You’re gonna have to accept that your trauma caused him trauma. It’s hard for kids to deal with emotional abuse. You crossed all boundaries. You neglected his needs. You made him your caretaker. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s abuse.”

  He spoke quietly, staring at his hands, fumbling with his fingers with his head down. Mom said nothing. She only looked at me with her sad puppy-dog eyes, as if searching for something. I felt the breath leave my body as the words hung in the air.

  Somebody said something else. Each in turn, one after the other, but I couldn’t hear it, only the words spoken by the man in the blue shirt, until it got to Tony, who had just finished his own “family share” with her. He shook his head and lifted his hands as if to say, I don’t know what else there is to add.

  I looked around the room because I wondered why I couldn’t breathe.

  Am I supposed to say something? Am I supposed to answer? The group moved on and it was time for the next share. We all stayed in the circle and I caught Mom looking at me several times as if desperate to communicate something. I looked away. I looked down. I closed my eyes.

  Emotional abuse. What does that even mean? We read Oedipus Rex in my classics course at Stanford. The man who wanders the earth blind after gouging his eyes out when he realizes he has married his own mother. I get that. I get that you would need to do something drastic, that the situation would mark you, curse you even. I feel a curse falling over me. Children of neglect. Orphans. Inappropriate demands. Physical boundaries. There is the sense that something is off, something indelible. That I missed it. I missed something essential, something everyone else can see.

  I think maybe I can pretend the words weren’t said or I didn’t comprehend them. So many things were said by so many people. Maybe these particular ones can be avoided, just swept up with the detritus of dust from the desert coming in from the open windows.

  Tony and I eat quietly in the lunchroom, staring down at our food, surrounded by the low beige walls as if they are closing in on us. “That was pretty fucked-up,” Tony says. I nod and chew, looking down. “Why are we even here?” There’s a tightness in my chest and I don’t have a good answer, just a sense the room is spinning.

  The man stared at his hands. He didn’t look at either of us. She had on a thin green shawl and she was leaning forward in her chair. Her face was sad but searching as she looked at me with, what was it? Guilt? Is that what I saw?

  Each morning we take a city bus from our motel at the edge of the desert to the treatment facility. It is a series of low southwestern-style buildings, decorated with Native American art, framed by cacti and the mountains in the distance. We walk in silence, Tony and I. I can feel the hot shame like the dry heat on my face. I don’t know why we feel so bad. The stillness is oppressive.

  It was almost a relief when she had checked herself into this place, a relief to just be out with it, to give the nameless thing a shape, like a fog that reveals the outline of a previously invisible object. Oh, so that’s the problem. She’s mentally ill. At first, I thought it was a mental institution, but it turns out it’s more of a “recovery facility,” a place for people to get clean off drugs or deal with major depression, schizophrenia, addiction, trauma. I don’t know where she fits into this, other than the major depression, the long days staring at the ceiling or crying, but the outline has taken on a new shape, a larger one. I noticed in the group that she calls herself a “cult survivor” now. And I know she became too depressed to work, too depressed to leave her house, her bed. It seems like coming here was raising a white flag of surrender.

  The man seemed like a nice person. Maybe late forties. Maybe he worked in some kind of mental health field, which is why he knew so much. Maybe he had a family of his own. It was a kind face. An unassuming voice. He meant well. He said the words matter-of-factly, like he was trying to deal with a problem, like how to fix broken shingles on a roof in the rain. He was trying to be helpful.

  I can still hear his voice, the precise cadence. It was soft, what Bonnie would call “nebbishy.” He was right. I knew he was right the minute the words left his mouth and filled the space between us.

  * * *

  THE OCEAN IS vast on the other side of the windshield of the white rental car parked on top of Sandpiper Hill under the westbound flight path of LAX. There is a black oil tanker parked to the south and tiny sailboats dotting the blue expanse to the north. “There it is. My ocean,” Mom says, smiling and taking in the view. It’s been three weeks since she left the facility in Arizona. “My ocean.” That’s what she always called it on trips to the Oregon coast or down the Pacific Coast Highway in California. We’d emerge from the mountains and see the Pacific appear in front of us and she’d yell o
ut, “There’s my ocean!” I often wondered if one person could own a whole ocean. If there was room for me to love the ocean too, to bodysurf with my dad or run down the sand on long afternoons before my knee injury. Is this hers too? The whole fucking ocean?

  She tells me she wants to talk about the family share, that a man had mentioned a term and it was maybe something I didn’t understand because I don’t really know psychology very well and she does. The term was “emotional abuse.” She says these things get thrown around and you can’t pay attention to them because people don’t really know what they mean.

  I think, so she knows.

  I’ve been swimming two miles a day trying to maintain my exercise habit that Tony says is just like being a dry drunk, the thing I do to “deal.” My arms are tired and I’m glad for the exhaustion.

  “So just don’t put too much stock in it, Mick. It’s good that you came to see me. I really needed your help.” She says she’s feeling better, that she’s going to go to graduate school in Portland and get another master’s degree, this one in religion. “I just want to shepherd others, to teach them the wisdom I have,” she says.

  I try to block out the feeling I have like anger turned inward. This hazy, blank white nothingness. I nod and mutter something about people oversharing, overanalyzing, as if I don’t remember his face, the shirt, the beard, the voice, the precise sense I’ve had since that day that I am frozen in place.

  I can feel her studying me. I’m surprised by how suddenly aggressive it is. How quickly she turns from victim to prosecutor. I want out of the car. I feel such an intense discomfort, like my body is not my own, like it is being invaded by her stare, by the intensity of her probing questions.

  “So you understand that you were not abused?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “You and your brother were lucky. You had a mother who loved you and took care of you. I did my best, you know. It wasn’t easy to deal with all that and still have two kids to raise.”

  “Yes. I’m very grateful.” I just want out. I just want to be anywhere else in the world. I want to run screaming from the car, but I don’t have the words. I can’t form them, not in her presence. It’s been too long. The words just won’t come.

  She drops me off at the house in Westchester where I’ve been living all summer. Drew and I and the rest of our misfit music crew from high school worked as camp counselors at the YMCA and I’ve grown a beard, having developed a sudden urge to hide my face. I wear vintage flannels torn at the shoulder and Dickies cut at the knees. My favorite shirt is a blue short-sleeved collared uniform that reads “LA County Jail” across the back. I wear it open, with a white tank top underneath. I like the idea of people being scared of me. I’ve gotten a few more piercings into which I put safety pins and I’ve grown my hair out. Our group went to a music festival and I’d gone into the big pit near the front of the stage with Eddie. It felt good to be tossed among the bodies, to writhe and sway with the crowd, to throw elbows and high knees in the circle pit, to emerge muddy and bleeding and spent.

  I’ve decided to bring my skateboard and guitar back to Stanford. I’ve been sitting alone and playing songs again, just staring at the wall and strumming chords, hoping words will come. I’m trying to prepare for the school year, for the training room and the pool, the infamous BioCore for biology majors known to separate the “lambs from the sheep,” the challenging string of classes that awaits me back at Stanford. But it all seems overwhelming and there is an intense sense that I should not look inside myself, that I must keep busy. Keep running or, because I can’t do that anymore, keep swimming, keep kicking—whatever thing a person does to keep from drowning.

  * * *

  THE DREAM AT the front of campus looks different from behind my dark sunglasses as I skate by and try to ollie off a curb. The facade and the dish and God are all still there. I know this idea exists for most of my peers. I don’t mind them. They are mostly hardworking, cheerful people. I don’t begrudge them their square clothes and pop music. The khakis and cardinal-red Stanford Ts. I don’t mind their stares, the ever-present assumption that I am on drugs. I must seem spacey, riding my skateboard around campus at midnight, trying to study in the gutter outside my dorm. I just want to be outside, to be distracted.

  I fail my first midterm in biochemistry. I studied twenty-four hours straight for it, but I skipped most of the lectures and, as it turns out, studied the wrong things. My knee hasn’t gotten any better. Five months of rest and it still hurts to jog. I blew my shoulder out from all the swimming and I can’t even do that anymore so I find myself walking five miles a day, doing laps around Campus Drive in headphones, trying to quiet my anxiety, listening to Nirvana and Bowie and the Stone Roses, hoping to get enough exercise to sleep.

  I have the recurring image of simply walking into the sea and disappearing. It’s a comforting thought, this idea of escape. But what am I escaping from? What did I mess up so badly about this life of mine? Why do I suddenly feel so worthless? Over and over again I think of drinking a mess of pills or jumping off the top of Hoover Tower. I don’t know why I feel so marked, so alone, like nothing I’m ever going to be or do could change the simple fact that I am a broken human being and I do not deserve any good things.

  After my third MRI, the Stanford doctors schedule me for knee surgery. They are planning to cut my lateral meniscus to change the way my patella tracks across the cartilage of my knee in hopes they can stop the progress of the arthritis. They’re not sure it will work but nobody knows what to do and I’m just so desperate to run I’ll try anything. I’m so tired of the ice and the physical therapy and the stretching, the electro-stim, the ultrasound therapy, the feeling that I am cursed to move lamely through the world.

  It’s a strange surgery, to simply cut a muscle and hope that the mechanics of my stride will work themselves out. I feel uneasy as I attend the pre-op exam the night before, as the kindly doctor pulls on my heel and asks me about my level of pain. He tells me to skip dinner and try to get some sleep. I toss around on my bed in my dorm room at Toyon Hall, my roommates from the track team sleeping in the next room. I’m beset by the feeling that something is very wrong, that I need to stop running, that there is something else I must face and the surgery suddenly seems desperate and strange.

  My mind races through a wilderness.

  What do you do when you’re a scared-shitless kid that’s been faking it for so long? You bury it. You polish your smile and study until you can’t even focus your eyes. You buy yourself a big red sweater with an S across the chest, just like the Superchild you once were. You try to prove them all wrong. But you laugh at the wrong part of the joke and they see you trying too hard. You attempt to outrun it. But then you get injured and your mom goes insane and a kind man in a blue shirt with a trim black beard uses the words. Emotional abuse. Crossing physical boundaries. Trauma. Neglect.

  I feel like a blank space covered in skin. There is no place for this walking blank thing among the warm beings, the ones with something inside, the people who can have a drink and laugh at a joke and look into their futures and see something other than the wretchedness I see in mine, the day that immeasurably thin skin falls away and I simply disappear. Into the ocean. My ocean. The one that will swallow me whole if I let it.

  I sit up straight at 5:00 A.M. and call the Stanford Medical Center to cancel the surgery. The attending nurse sounds surprised. “So you want to reschedule?”

  “No.”

  I hang up the phone and turn on a desk lamp, grabbing a pen and a notebook to write out a letter. “Dear Mom, I can’t talk to you anymore … I need space to live my own life. There are too many things I am angry about, too many things to name … Do not contact me. Do not write me or call me. I don’t know when I’ll be in touch again, if ever. Your son, Mikel.”

  I put the letter into a white envelope and place a stamp in the upper-right-hand corner. I grab my skateboard and head downstairs, emerging from the dorm just as the sun is com
ing up. I skate to the center of campus, feeling the wind in my hair, the possibility of morning, the freedom of being alive as I make my way to the post office. I drop the envelope into the slot and turn to face campus.

  It looks different. Brighter. Bigger. Cleaner. I can feel the sun on my face. The warm orange light is rising over the quad, reflecting the morning over all that wonderful architecture as I see my whole life in front of me like that road in eastern Oregon disappearing into the horizon.

  I look around, stunned at how free I suddenly feel. I can take any of these roads wherever they lead. I take a deep breath of the crisp air, holding my skateboard against my knee as students shuffle to class around me.

  Fuck it. Maybe I’ll just drop out.

  * * *

  I SHAVE MY head with a pair of clippers and dye the buzz cut purple. I drop two classes and get put on academic probation. I meet some kids from Foothill College at an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting I attend off campus in a desperate move to seek answers. One of them is a drummer. I buy a used amp and an electric guitar and we start to jam in a garage in Menlo Park. I change my major from biology to history and psychology. My history studies focus on Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. I can’t explain my interest in Jewish history except to say I think it makes me feel closer to Bonnie, closer to the Posners, my adopted Jewish family who treat me as their own. The big joke among the Jewish studies majors is that I am the “Tarzan of the Jews. He was raised by Jews and he walks among us, though he is a goy.”

  I enroll in Psych One, then Social Psychology, then the Psychology of Addiction, then the Psychology of Mind Control. We study cults. We read about Jonestown and the Peoples Temple and Vietnamese prison camps. It all feels familiar, like reading your own family history. I write my term paper on Synanon, reading Escape from Utopia and Synanon, the two dusty volumes everyone says are the definitive books on Synanon. I find myself scrolling through endless microfiche at Meyer Library, reading old copies of the Point Reyes Light, the newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize reporting on Synanon.