by James Brown
When she meets up with us outside the theater, her cheeks are flushed and she’s smiling. She’s also with one of the other actors, a man considerably older than her. He has long hair. He wears bell-bottom jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt and I have the feeling that he’s trying too hard to be hip. Our mother puts her arm around Marilyn and hugs her.
“You did good, honey,” she says. “But how come you can’t act in something like Hello, Dolly! Or Bye Bye Birdie? How come you let yourself get mixed up in these junky little plays? It was so hot in there Jimmy almost passed out.”
“I did not,” I say.
“You did, too.”
“I see Barry didn’t make it,” my sister says.
Clearly she is disappointed. For her, Barry is already a highly accomplished actor, and she yearns for his approval, his attention. As a brother. As a teacher. But she rarely gets it anymore, not since he moved out, and sometimes it angers me—that he doesn’t seem to care about her more.
“Mom,” she says, “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
This friend will be the man Marilyn one day marries, and at first I don’t like him any better than our mother does. For one thing, he’s too old for her. For another, I know what he’s after with my beautiful young sister, and I don’t trust him. At the same time I can see that she’s happy with him, and in Barry’s absence I’m somehow relieved that he’s here for her tonight. In light of his presence, however, our plans to take Marilyn to dinner are dashed, and the last thing I remember about this night is my sister climbing onto the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. It’s a classic image from a thousand movies: two lovers speeding down the boulevard and disappearing into the bright lights of the promised land.
It’s around nine or ten at night and I am home alone. Marilyn is out with her boyfriend, the one she will eventually marry. My mother is also with a man tonight. After years of not dating, she has finally taken off her wedding ring, the ring she wore to ward off suitors, and allowed another into her life. I’ve only met him twice, when he came to the apartment for her, and he seems nice enough, well dressed in a suit and tie. Really I have no opinion of him one way or the other except to say that I don’t begrudge my mother for dating, as children of divorced parents so often do.
As for Barry, of late he plays an even smaller role in my life. This is still the summer of 1970 but he has recently landed his first starring role in a movie and is gone now shooting in Kansas. He won’t return for several months.
In some ways I prefer it like this. The privacy. The freedom that comes with being alone. I have my own key and most of the time I come and go as I please, do what I want when I want. But I also miss them, and lately, more than ever, I’ve come to miss my father. It is quiet in the apartment, and tonight, as I wander into my room, undress and climb into bed, I find myself thinking about him, wondering if he’s alone at this moment, if he’s asleep already or up watching TV.
Then my mind drifts to Tito and the things we stole. The eight-tracks come from cars parked around the neighborhood. The TV and stereo belong to someone who lives in a groundfloor apartment across the street. The big stuff—the Selectrics, the Dictaphones and the adding machines—come from an office building in North Hollywood. I think about the good part of stealing, the adrenaline rush, the fear of being caught and the exhilaration of getting away with it. And the money, all the easy money. But when I close my eyes I see the man who lives in that apartment coming home after a long day’s work and finding his place ransacked. I picture the people who work in the office building in North Hollywood and the look on their faces when they discover the same scenario.
They are shocked.
They are disgusted and outraged. I bet they think that a couple of punk kids are responsible, the kind of kids who shoot dope in parked cars at Griffith Park, who might wind up in prison someday, deservedly, and they would be right.
In the living room I hear the familiar sounds of my mother returning home. The clatter of keys tossed on the coffee table. The fall of her pumps, first one then the other as she removes and drops them on the carpeted floor. My bedroom door creaks open and a moment later she is leaning over me. I smell her breath, the sour odor of alcohol.
“Jimmy,” she says, “you asleep?”
But I say nothing. She kisses me lightly on the forehead. She arranges the blankets around my shoulders, and I wait until she steps back, turning to leave, before I call to her.
“Mom,” I say.
“What is it, honey?”
Up until tonight the thought has never occurred to me. It has never even crossed my mind, and so it startles me, wherever it comes from, as I am sure that it startles my mother.
“I want to live with Dad,” I say.
My mother sits on the edge of the bed and looks at me. “Are you sure?” she asks. “Is this what you really want?” And what I say next hurts, it hurts us both, that one word, that simple yes.
At night Los Angeles is a blanket of lights. From my seat, on this plane, I look down on the neatly sectioned streets and the endless procession of cars snaking along the different freeways. I can see the glowing orange ball of a 76 Union station. I can see the green playing field of a neighborhood park bathed in bright flood lamps. But over the ocean, as the plane continues to rise, the sky falls into darkness, and for a while I find myself staring at nothing. I have made a choice, and this choice, for me, is a kind of death. At fourteen I am shedding one life to embrace another.
Though confident with my decision, I am nonetheless worried and confused. My mother agrees that a boy my age should be with his father but tells me that if, by chance, it doesn’t work out, she will welcome me back. Barry also supports my decision—by phone from Kansas. “Dad,” he says, “needs you as much as you need him.” The only dissenter is my sister, who thinks I am making a mistake. Our father, she tells me, is not the man I imagine him to be. He failed us once when he let our mother take us from him and he will fail again with me. Prepare for disappointment. She reminds me that he is likely still seeing our old baby-sitter, the woman she believes ruined our parents’ marriage, and she accuses me of disloyalty and desertion. I am running away—from myself, she says—when I should be grateful for the ones who really love me, who have been there for me in the past.
I will miss my sister.
I will miss my mother and brother. But I am also lonely for my father and have been for some time. What I need, whether I’m aware of it or not at this age, and I believe I am, is a stronger sense of belonging, of home. Intuitively I know that my father can fill this need and I am drawn to him despite my sister’s warnings. The flight is a short one, just under an hour, and soon the lights of the city of San Jose appear outside the window. I am one of the first to unboard, and I spot him before he spots me. He is standing toward the back of the crowd, dressed in his work clothes, khaki pants and khaki shirt. On his face is the look of anxiousness, and when I approach he smiles, opening his arms to me.
In the summer of 1970 I learn to hang drywall, tape, sand and texture. I learn rough framing. I learn how to roof a house and pound a nail straight and true. Each day, until school begins in the fall, I work long hours with this man I call my father, a man who up until this time I know little about.
At home I am expected to pick up after myself, to help with the dishes, laundry and cleaning. If I go out, I’m expected back at a certain hour, and if I’m late, I am grounded. I like the discipline. I like knowing that someone cares, and though I continue to miss my brother, sister and mother, I feel I’ve made the right choice. On workdays we rise before the sun and he makes us a breakfast of eggs, hotcakes, bacon, sausage or ham. Then we climb into the truck and head to the lumberyard for material or go straight to the job. My father doesn’t believe in midmorning or late-afternoon breaks so we only stop for what he calls supper and I call lunch. Either way we rest only long enough to eat our sandwiches. He is a driven man. He has always been a driven man but now that drive is motivated at least in
part by the fear of time.
My father is a dreamer.
My father believes that if he just works hard enough he will somehow dig himself out from under his bankruptcy and reclaim the wealth and security he lost because of our mother. But he is already at an age when most men retire and his possibilities are limited.
We live in a rented house on the east side, the poor side of San Jose, and for the first month after I arrive, until we can afford another bed, I sleep with my father. At night he tells me stories about when he was growing up in the backwoods of Oregon and how he used to hunt for deer and fish for salmon. He tells me about the years he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and laid tracks through mountainous terrain that up until then no white man had ever seen. He tells me about the Cherokee, how he admired and respected their love of nature, and he teaches me to count to ten in their language. This is all before he moved to California. “I came for the work,” he says. “For greater opportunity. I met your mother, we fell in love and raised a family. There were good years, many good years.”
Now he dreams of returning to Oregon. He wants to get money enough ahead to build a summer house for Barry, Marilyn and me on the Chetco River and bring us together again as a family if only for a few months out of the year. My father has a talent for detail, and as he describes the Chetco River, the salmon leaping out of the water, the sun glinting off their backs, as he describes the mountains of his youth and the beauty of a grazing deer, I am there with him. It is real to me. It is a fine place, and I live in his stories as I will someday live in my own.
At seventeen I will leave for college. A few years after I graduate he will die. Looking back, I see myself at fourteen in bed beside him. The room is still and dark. The kid who shoots heroin, robs and steals is getting drowsy, his father’s voice slowly fading, and when I fall asleep and wake up thirty years later as a middle-aged man, I realize that this brief time I spent with my father has much to do with why I am still here and my brother and sister are not.
Summer 1996
MIDAIR
On that warm night in July you lift yourself up to the rail of the overpass above the Los Angeles River. All you’re wearing is a T-shirt and panties. In the distance you hear the cars moving along the Hollywood Freeway and beyond it you see the glow of the city lights. I want to believe that you can feel the coolness of the steel rail beneath your bare feet. I want to believe that as you fall you feel nothing more than the wind rushing up against your face. There is no pain. No impact. In my dreams you are suspended in midair.
You are forty-four years old the night you storm out of the house in the heat of another fight with your husband, the last fight you will ever have, and end your lifelong battle with alcohol and drugs. That it happens in July, the month our brother lost this same battle, is no coincidence. You have never been able to reconcile Barry’s death, you see it as I do, as a kind of desertion, as betrayal, and your pain only deepens through the years. You have been to psychiatrists of every bent and persuasion. You have exhausted the long list of pharmaceuticals, checked yourself in and out of rehabs and halfway houses, and none of it has been of any lasting help. I know it is more complicated than this. I know there are other roots and causes for your illness and that the first symptoms came earlier, in childhood, but when I look back over your life I see Barry’s death as the trigger for your destruction. You’re only in your twenties at the time, you have a child and a husband, and your dream of becoming a successful actor is still very much alive. Then one morning soon after he’s gone you tell me you are standing at the sink doing dishes and it sweeps over you, like a wave, this knowledge that nothing will ever be the same. At that moment something dies inside of you and you know that you will never get it back.
The night I drive in from San Jose for Barry’s funeral you are high, as I am, we are both very high, and a few months later, when mourning is no longer an excuse for drowning your sorrows, you have already slipped across that line into addiction. Your husband follows. He is a plumbing contractor and makes enough to keep you both well enough supplied. Of course I am not far behind. In another year, when I graduate from college and return to Los Angeles, I will be in that dark place right alongside you. Your husband will give me a job digging ditch and running pipe, he is generous with his dope, and almost every day for the next several years I will be strung out and wired. At night I work on my novel while I drink to steady my nerves and then in the morning, after a few restless hours of sleep, the process begins all over again. Sometimes after work, instead of returning to my apartment, you and I hang out in your living room and get loaded. Behind the liquor and cocaine you talk freely where normally you are quiet and shy. You have never thought of yourself as pretty. You have never had confidence. Growing up our mother tells you that your nose is too big, that your breasts are too small, and for your sixteenth birthday she buys you a long blond wig to wear when you go out on auditions. “Maybe it will change your luck,” she says. “I’m only trying to be helpful, honey.” But when you’re high the shyness disappears and you feel pretty, you feel smart. You like to talk about actors. You like to talk about the movies you’ve seen or the books you’ve just read or the play you plan to audition for at that little theater on Lankershim, the ninety-nine-seater. I encourage you, try to build you up.
“Go for it,” I say. “I know how good you are. I’ve seen you act.”
Compliments make you uneasy, and when you smile, when you give a nervous laugh, you cover your mouth with your hand because you are self-conscious.
As proof of your talent I remind you about your close call for a role in a Woody Allen movie and how he found your shyness charming and took you for a walk around the block to help put you at ease before you read for the part. And you did well. You said so yourself and you are anything but a braggart. I don’t mention that this close call was years ago or that you haven’t auditioned for anything since. The longer you are out of the loop, the harder it is for you to regain the courage to get back in, and I worry that you have given up. You live in our brother’s shadow but you have your own dreams and I know that if you let them slip away you will be bitter with regret for the rest of your life. So we have another drink. We do another line. What we share, you and I, is a sadness for our brother and this constant need, this craving to somehow make ourselves feel better.
The odds are against you and have been for some time. At nineteen you marry the first man who shows you love, that one who rides the motorcycle. He is fifteen years older than you and you tell me you marry him because he is a tradesman and reminds you of our father. That you like his rough hands. But the real reason is to escape from our mother and begin a new life. That you are already two months along only makes the decision easier, and over the weekend you fly out to Reno, to one of those gaudy chapels along the strip. Afterward you get drunk on champagne and they kick you out of Harrah’s for gambling because you’re underage and you laugh it off, you get drunker, and by Monday you’re back in L.A. with your husband just in time for him to go to work.
For a while you are happy in your new role as housewife, as mother-to-be, and you spend your days getting the room fixed up for the baby. You hang wallpaper with bright rainbows and big white clouds. You take down the old blinds and replace them with curtains that let in more light. You shop for cute outfits, jumpers, bottles, diapers, and a mobile of stars and moons to hang over the crib that you’ve already put on layaway at Sears. These are good times. They fill you with a sense of pride and satisfaction in a way you’ve never known before. Then the baby arrives. It isn’t as easy as you thought and you don’t get out much anymore. Movies and restaurants seem a thing in the past. You want to be the best mother you can, and you try, you really do, but when the newness of it all wears off you start feeling frustrated again. Where you were once quick to answer your baby’s call, now you sometimes shut the door and let her cry herself to sleep. Soon your house, like your life, seems smaller, and you feel as if you’re caged in. There
are moments when your heart races for no apparent reason and you can’t quite catch your breath. Your doctor says it’s just a typical reaction to the stresses of motherhood and prescribes Valium. He tells you that you need rest.
A drink in the late afternoon takes the edge off your hectic day, and when you mix it with the Valium it works even better. So long as you keep it to one or two, and no more than a bottle of chardonnay at dinner, you don’t see the harm. God knows it’s not easy caring for a colicky baby, and of course you love her, that’s not the issue. It’s just that sometimes you feel overwhelmed and it creeps up on you, especially late at night when the house is quiet and you’re stretched out in bed with your eyes wide open, staring into the darkness and wondering if this is what it’s all about, if this is all there is. As your husband lies beside you snoring it comes over you again, this vague sense that something is wrong, something is missing and maybe, just maybe, you married the wrong man. These feelings scare you and you want them out of your head, you want them gone now. A nightcap will help, just a shot or two of vodka in a little warm milk. That and another Valium always does the trick.
But when you wander down the hall to the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet you find that the bottle is empty. You can’t believe it. You don’t understand. Just last week it was close to full. You’re certain of it because you remember explicitly how the pharmacist cautions you about refilling it early again and has to call your doctor. He puts you out. He makes you wait and it’s all for nothing, since you end up getting exactly what you came for anyway. You give him a curt smile as you pay, and you pay quickly so he won’t notice the trembling in your hands. In your car you take double the dose and swallow them dry. The taste is acrid and bitter and nearly makes you gag. You remember that part too well.
