She is a strong woman with many weaknesses who is critical of everything whether good or evil. She is confused because she doesn’t understand life, but no one else understands it either.
After reading it, my mother didn’t say anything but just gave me a warm hug, holding me tightly for longer than I ever remember her doing. More than two decades later, right after my mother’s sudden death, I was sorting through her belongings and came across a sealed envelope with the words For Peter handwritten across the front. Inside, I found that letter, with a photo of the two of us stapled to it.
Saving Raul
THOUGH WE HAD left Raul for good in Peru five years earlier, he and my mother were still legally married, and part of my mother’s heart was still with him. They wrote to each other constantly, starting as soon as we moved back to the United States. One of Raul’s letters was some fifty pages long, a heroic recap of his entire life history of political struggles—handwritten using a quill dipped in lemon so that only my mother could read it. He sent a separate letter with instructions on how to decipher it above a fire, with the heat turning the invisible lettering brown. When she wrote him back, asking how much of that long letter, which she had labored hard to read, was actually true, he replied, “At least 90 percent.”
My mother insisted on updating me on Raul’s life, even as I rolled my eyes and told her she should forget about him. At times I secretly feared that my mother might even try to take me out of school again and move back to Peru, but I knew that this time I would not have gone with her.
“I know you think Raul is crazy, and maybe he is,” my mother said to me. “But he’s the only man who ever really loved me. Your father never even told me he loved me. He never even gave me an orgasm!”
“Mom, I didn’t need to hear that.”
“I know, but I really want you to understand.”
As I was getting older, it seemed like my mother was trying harder and harder to explain and justify certain things to me. Maybe she worried that I would grow to resent her like Ronald did. She especially wanted me to understand why she had left my father. The truth was, it was difficult for me to imagine that the two of them had ever been together in the first place. Now that I was a teenager myself it was even more clear to me that twenty-one-year-old men should not be dating fourteen-year-old girls, and no one should marry at age seventeen.
Raul’s first letter after we moved back from Peru claimed that he had gone into hiding because the authorities had ransacked our place in Huertas a few days after we left, taking documents and books, and even shooting bullet holes into the cloth portrait of Lenin. Raul mailed my mother the Lenin portrait pockmarked with holes, though with Raul it was hard to know what was true. My mother never put that portrait back on the wall.
Raul also wrote that he had been arrested while leading a demonstration during a national strike and charged with “attacking the armed forces.” He spent more than three months in prison until he was released after a hunger strike. My mother sent him money while he was scraping by in Huancayo selling and distributing the radical newspaper El Diario Marka; the next year, when Raul became a father, he named his daughter after my mother and asked her to be the godmother—and so my mother sent more money.
“What did Raul do this time?” I asked my mother when she told me he was in jail again. “Did he join Sendero?” My mother was currently working on a book about the role of women in Sendero Luminoso, the rapidly expanding guerrilla insurgency that began in the Peruvian highlands. She was delighted that so many of the guerrilla commanders were female.
“No,” my mother said, “Raul’s not disciplined enough or committed enough for Sendero; they would never take him.”
Sendero did take Raul’s younger brother Lucho, who had lived with us in Comas and was killed in prison a few years later. Fearing Raul might meet a similar fate, my mother was determined to save him. She saw to it that hundreds of letters and petitions addressed to the Peruvian authorities were sent from the United States calling for Raul’s release. As always, there was no response. She made dozens of copies of a leaflet with Raul’s name and picture on it; in the image, he was holding up his clenched fist. The leaflet called him a “prisoner of conscience” and demanded his release. She became even more concerned about Raul when she learned from friends in Huancayo and Jauja that local authorities were threatening to send him to El Frontón, Lima’s island prison.
For months, my mother wrote tirelessly to U.S. congressmen, telling them that Raul was her husband and pleading with them to make inquiries. She kept showing up at the office of Colorado senator Gary Hart until eventually she gained his support. She finally received a letter from the Presidencia de la República in Peru informing her that Raul was being held pending investigations of accusations of terrorism, but never specifying exactly what that meant. She then turned to Amnesty International. An Amnesty chapter officially adopted Raul’s case, and Amnesty representatives in Peru were able to visit Raul in prison. They reported that Raul was in good health and good spirits—indeed, he had apparently fathered his second child while in prison, but not with the mother of his first child, who visited him regularly.
Raul was soon let out of prison; it was never entirely clear whether he had been convicted of anything. It also wasn’t at all clear whether my mother’s lobbying effort had anything to do with his release. It didn’t matter. “Raul is free, he’s finally free!” my mother said to me triumphantly one afternoon when I got home from school.
“What’s he going to do now?” I asked.
“He says he’s going to stop doing political stuff and open up a restaurant in Huancayo. I told him the revolution still needs him, that he shouldn’t give up on that.”
Meanwhile, though my mother was still officially married to Raul, she was never too lonely in Colorado—far less lonely, in fact, than I believed at the time, given how many men she wrote about in her diaries. There was skinny Chris, who liked to dance barefoot and designed and carved tombstones for a living; there was Seyed, the Iranian student she seduced, who smiled at my mother from the front row of her Sex Roles class (thanks to her, he decided to switch his major to sociology from chemical engineering); there was Josh, the Canadian who took my mother around town on his motorcycle and played improvisational piano just like Keith Jarrett; there was her fling with another Iranian, Houshang, who did free oil changes for us after we finally got a car again; there was Enoch, the black security guard she met at the bank a few blocks from our house; and there was Viviano, the Peruvian who was even younger than Raul. Many years later, long after I had left home, my mother married Viviano—when he was in his early thirties and she was in her early sixties—so that he could live and work legally in the United States, but she then immediately divorced him after finding out he had a girlfriend and a child back in Lima.
My mother’s assorted men since Raul had two things in common: they were all in their twenties or thirties, several decades younger than her, and their relationships with my mother were short-lived, lasting from weeks to months. Whenever my mother mentioned her latest love interest, the first thing I asked her was “How old is he?” hoping that the response would be at least within a decade of my mother’s age. “Oh, Mom,” I would tease her, “when are you going to find someone at least close to your own age?” Her only response was the sparkle in her eye.
My mother’s various love interests over the years were a recurring topic in her diary, often overshadowing her preoccupation with revolutionary politics. In one entry in late 1980, when she was in her late forties and having a secret affair with one of her students who was in his twenties, she wrote:
I’m tired of chasing the man who shows some interest in me. I should be more like Inca [our dog]. She’ll go chasing off to smell out a dog, and she’ll lead anyone who’s interested on a merry chase and play hard, shake them out of their lethargy if she can, but she never goes off moping if they’re not interested. Her self-esteem isn’t dependent on their response.
Peter says, “She just knows she’s better than them if they’re not interested.” Of course, Peter sees my situation differently. He says I have to expect problems if I like young men because it’s not reasonable to expect them to be satisfied with me as a sexual mate. Can I accept such an assessment graciously? Is it even true? There are plenty of young women who are very loyal to older men lovers. Am I homely just because I have wrinkles and spots on my skin?
The next day, my mother’s affair with her student ended. As she explained the breakup in her diary:
He was able to tell me that he always had the recurring sense that our relationship was wrong because of the big age difference. I asked him if he thought something was wrong with me for ending up so often with young lovers and he said, “No, I’d like to have young lovers, too.” But he advised me, more or less, to seek someone my own age.
My mother never took his advice, or mine. She kept chasing younger men, usually much younger. But no matter how many came in and out of my mother’s life, nothing made her happier than receiving another poetic, pages-long letter or collect call from Raul. As much as I never wanted to believe it, he was, indeed, the only true love of her life.
Fitting In
ON MARCH 30, 1981, I was sitting in Mr. Miller’s tenth-grade Medieval History class at East High, learning about the crusades, when another teacher burst into the classroom and whispered into Mr. Miller’s ear. He stopped scribbling on the chalkboard and turned to the class with a solemn look. His voice was heavy and slow. “There’s been a terrible tragedy. President Reagan has been shot.”
The entire class fell silent—except for me. “Yes!” I blurted out spontaneously, almost instinctively, raising both my fists high.
Everyone looked at me in horror. Mr. Miller, my favorite teacher that year, turned bright red, his thick neck bulging more than usual. And then the bell rang. Realizing what I’d done, I thought I could sneak away quietly, as if nothing had happened, but Mr. Miller quickly walked to my desk and hovered over me, twisting the tip of his wavy white mustache as I put my notebook away. “You should not disrespect our president like that, young man. That is not appropriate behavior.” I mumbled an apology without looking up at Mr. Miller and left quickly. How could I explain it? I felt embarrassed for having caused a scene, though it did not make me feel more sympathy for Reagan.
For my mother and pretty much everyone else we hung out with, Ronald Reagan was evil personified, what my mother called an “evilmonger.” For someone who never used foul language, “evilmonger” was a top-shelf insult, worse than “sellout,” “fink,” “reactionary,” or even “pig.” And Reagan embodied the most evil of all evils—American imperialism.
When I got home that day, my mother was listening to NPR news on the radio. The media was reporting that shooter John Hinckley was psychologically disturbed, and obsessed with the teen movie star Jodie Foster. “I can’t believe they are trying to portray this guy as some sort of psycho case,” my mother complained while adjusting the antenna. “They act as if there could not be obvious political motives.” She then added with a sigh, “It’s just too bad Reagan managed to survive.” I’m not sure my mother could have pulled the trigger herself if given the chance, but she admired those who could and certainly was not going to join the loud chorus of condemnations.
Mr. Miller seemed to forgive me, and I eventually took every class he taught. He loved the Medieval History term paper I wrote about the origins of Oxford University, and even encouraged me to consider going to college somewhere like that. My outburst in class notwithstanding, I was doing everything I could to fit in at East. That was also true, of course, at the dozen or so other schools I had attended up till then, but in this case I was better at it and enjoying it more.
I was not only fitting in, I even felt kind of cool. East High was a magnificent old school, one of the oldest in the state. At lunchtime, the students hung out together on the sprawling grassy esplanade. The school had an open-campus policy, meaning we could spend the lunch hour wandering up and down East Colfax Avenue. East was full of school pride; it had graced the cover of Life magazine decades earlier as one of the top public schools in the country, and was now celebrated as a model of successful busing: a socially and racially diverse inner-city school with a majority of students who went on to college. We proudly thumbed our noses at all the boring generic white schools in the rapidly expanding suburbs.
To really be accepted at East I thought I needed to play a sport. Running around kicking a soccer ball in the dirt streets of Peru didn’t really prepare me to try out for the soccer team; most of those kids had been playing soccer together on organized teams with real coaching for years. Besides, what I really wanted to play was American football. So I showed up for the first day of football practice tryouts. The coach took one look at me and said, “Maybe tight end.” The next day I was so sore I could not even get out of bed. That marked the end of my football career.
As a last resort, I tried tennis. I had swung a racket a few times in junior high gym class, so I knew the rules and some of the basics. I had picked up a metal Wilson T2000 tennis racket at a garage sale; it looked exactly like the one Jimmy Connors played with. I was not very good, but neither was the East High tennis team. I’m not sure our coach, Mr. Rasmussen, even knew how to play tennis. And so I made the cut, barely, and was matched with a doubles partner who fortunately was much better.
To fit in even more, I started doing all sorts of extracurricular activities. Besides choir and the Angelaires, I joined the speech team, and kept at it even though I never did all that well at the weekend speech tournaments. My father sent me some of his old polyester ties and sport jackets. The jackets didn’t quite fit me and the ties were too fat, but at least I had the proper attire. My mother, though she frowned on ambition and didn’t seem to care if I won or lost, was always supportive of my performances. In a diary entry she wrote, “Peter was chosen to represent East High in the citywide ‘extemporaneous speech’ contest—will be accompanied by the school principal. I told him I couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to put himself under that much pressure, and he said, ‘it’s ego.’ Also said he’s ‘getting to be a good B.S.’er.’ ”
My mother especially liked my involvement in school plays because they reminded her of Raul and me doing street theater back in Huancayo. Performing with the mime troupe, I wondered what Raul would think of me now, putting on the face paint again just like he taught me, but on a school stage rather than on the streets with him. Those were my best memories of Raul.
I also started working for the student newspaper, the Spotlight. When I interviewed teachers, coaches, or staff for a story, I felt like a journalist rather than a lowly student. I always enjoyed the challenge of coming up with catchy headlines; best of all, my reporter status entitled me to a highly coveted hall pass. I’d simply flash my Spotlight card at the faculty hall monitors and they’d leave me alone, assuming I must be working on some story for the paper. By senior year I was editor in chief and had my own column, “Pete’s Point,” though no one ever called me “Pete.” I also often struggled to come up with a point—one column was a blow-by-blow, middle-of-the-night account of procrastinating about writing the column, which was due the next morning—and I’m not sure anyone ever actually read it.
I proudly sent a copy of the newspaper to my brother Joel (who had moved a few years earlier from Oakland to Birmingham, Alabama, to join another Marxist-Leninist group), but he wrote me back saying he was disappointed I wasn’t using the paper as a “platform to mobilize students to challenge the system” like he had done at Berkeley High with the alternative student paper, The Rag, before he dropped out. It was then that I realized that the only thing that would ever truly impress my brother was if I also dropped out of school—or, even better, got kicked out of school—for some radical political cause. That was the last time I tried to impress him; I finally accepted that I never would.
Part of fitting in meant avoiding having many f
riends over to our tiny one-bedroom duplex on East Second Avenue. A few months into tenth grade, my mother and I moved from the west side to a better neighborhood on the east side of Broadway so that I could be close to a school-bus stop and not have to take public buses. I could then walk a few blocks to catch the bus in front of Sherman Elementary School, where I worked for a while mopping floors for an hour or so early each morning before my bus arrived. After a couple of years without a car, my mother bought a 1977 light blue VW Rabbit, which meant that we no longer had to borrow wheels from my mother’s friends. She let me drive it to school once I turned sixteen and got a driver’s license.
My mother gave me the bedroom. Her bed was in the living room, right inside the front entrance, and doubled as the couch; a bookcase full of her radical books served as a backrest. We had no dining room; the kitchen in the back accommodated a round, four-person table. The bathroom, which at least we had to ourselves, housed a small tub, but no shower. Our roof leaked, every faucet in the house dripped, the paint was peeling badly inside and out, and the patch of grass in front was half bare and overgrown with weeds. Big cracks around the doors let cold air in, and when we added weather stripping, the doors wouldn’t shut. My mother did all she could to make the place nice and homey, with framed pictures on the wall, lots of plants, colorful tablecloths and throw rugs, but it remained a cramped and poorly maintained one-bedroom rental. We paid $200 per month plus utilities—much more than double what we had been paying on the west side.
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