WHITE-KNUCKLE ZEN

A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Faculty

of

California State University, Hayward

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts in English

By

Jeffrey J. Syrop

November, 1993 WHITE-KNUCKLE ZEN

By Jeffrey J. Syrop

Date:

ii CONTENTS

Mellow Maui 1

Three Fathers 84

One Mother 110

iii MELLOW MAUl

Most of the waitresses at Maui's Hyatt Regency

Pavilion restaurant couldn't see me, the new waiter; I was invisible to them. Mavis, the lovely hostess, could see me, but Kevin told me not to get too close to her, because she was local. Kevin was a handsome local waiter who talked like a haole, from doing a long stint in the military. He took it upon himself to be my advisor. But he couldn't help me with women, because he couldn't get any women, either.

My problem at work was that I was too philosophical.

I was always thinking about nuclear weapons and toxic waste, while my coworkers thought about sports cars, cocaine, surfing Maui's wonderful waves, and sex. When I'd pick up an order from the cooks, I might ask them: "Do you think there will always be war?" While passing a busy waitress, I might drop the question: "Is it right to let people in poor countries starve to death to stabilize the world's population?" I would ask my manager: "Is enlightenment possible for everyone?"

1 2

Sometimes, in a lighter vein, I'd ask all the waiters, waitresses, cooks, and the hostess to decide which character on Gilligan's Island they were. Everybody started calling me "Cosmo" because they thought I was spaced out and because I talked about cosmic things. Reagan had just been elected for the first time, and I thought I was living in some kind of dream world. How could people not be amazed and troubled? What was more strange was that out of the army of young, attractive, fairly-weII-educated waiters and waitresses at the Hyatt, only a few had voted, and then, for

Reagan. I was reading Crime and Punishment, while my colleagues were reading High Times and Surfer magazine.

Finally, out of pity, a young waitress who I thought was shallow but attractive asked me to a party at her house.

I went, very self-conscious about how I dressed. The casual

Maui look is not an easy look to achieve. One must not, by any means, cross over the line of looking like a tourist. I didn't fit in at all. Most of the people knew one another well. I was among the few who were clearly not welcome to go upstairs when the cocaine was being served.

There was one woman at the Hyatt who did find me interesting. Lucretia was the most desirable of all the waitresses. She was statuesque yet lithe as a cat. Her hair was wild and reddish-blond, her complexion flushed and healthy. The keen features of her face radiated confidence and beauty. Her orange cotton Aloha uniform dress seemed to 3

have been thrown over her goddess body as an afterthought.

You could see her beating boys at baseball or having sex with a billionaire.

She could wait on ten tables without writing

anything down, and she charmed the tourists by talking like

a local--"You like more da kine?" (Would you like me to

refill your coffee?)--even though she was a white girl who'd

spent most of her life in an affluent neighborhood in Santa

Cruz, California. She loved philosophy. And she loved

having a man at work who would talk to her. I was the only

waiter stupid enough to talk to her.

Her boyfriend was a pure-blooded Hawaiian, Nathan,

the best surfer on the island. His father had prospered by

selling a small tract of beach-front property to Canadian

developers, but Nathan hated the haoles taking over the

island. Lucretia joked to me that Nathan's goal in life was

to get a machine gun and kill a bunch of white people. He

never worked, except to water his marijuana plants. He

drove around Lahaina in an immaculate yellow Jeep with a

picture of a demonic green dragon on the back of it. He

never wore a shirt. His skin was very dark, and his muscles

glistened.

He beat Lucretia from time to time, she confided to

me, and wouldn't allow her to have any male friends. How

was that supposed to make me feel? I must be such a wimp

that I don't count. Or else Lucretia and I are conspirators 4 having an intellectual tryst behind Nathan's back. Nathan was a non-philosopher. He ate philosophers for lunch.

I'd only been on Maui for a few months. I moved there on a whim in the days when I was a young man traveling around. I had been working graveyard shift as a clerk at a depressing motel in L.A. and didn't really have anything going on when my uncle called me from Lahaina and told me what an idyllic life he had there. Uncle Glenn, my stepfather Leroy's brother, said he had a taxi he'd let me drive. The only thing I knew about Hawaii was that stupid music and tiki necklaces came from there and that the

Japanese bombed it once. I had gotten stoned and missed most of high school, and the few junior college literature courses I'd taken had left me pretty ignorant about geography. until my plane got close enough to actually see

Maui, I had thought it was a little island that you could walk across in about five minutes.

Taxi business was slow, so I got a job as a busboy at the new Hyatt Regency Hotel. They spent millions of dollars building that place. There were lOOO-year-old

Buddha statues everywhere and live peacocks walking around or running from tourists with cameras. A beautiful beach had been created from sand and palm trees brought in from another island, and there were water slides and three swimming pools right on the beach. The Hyatt had five restaurants. In Swan Court, the waiters had to wear tuxedo- 5 like uniforms created in Chicago by designers who didn't consider Maui's tropical weather. These sweaty waiters cleaned the mirrored glass table tops with squeegees after each party left. They could easily make $150 dollars a night in tips. Since I was inexperienced, I was hired at the bottom-of-the-line restaurant, The Pavilion. I got to wear a comfortable orange Aloha shirt with a Hyatt badge that said "Jerry." Even at the Pavilion, a side order of macadamia-nut pancakes cost five dollars, which was a hell of a lot of money for pancakes in those days.

I was the busboy for a nice local waiter named

Derek. He was polite and competent, but he had trouble talking to the customers. He'd never been to the mainland, and his pidgin English was just too different from the language of American and Canadian tourists. I was so bored lining up forks and knifes on napkins, filling salt shakers, and carrying heavy trays to the busing station, that I began having conversations with the diners. Derek didn't mind because he noticed his tips increasing. Soon, I was promoted to waiter even though I knew little about the job.

On a hot Christmas Eve night shift when I was still new, I completely panicked when a planeload of New Yorkers arrived and filled the restaurant, including my whole section, all at once. It was horrifying when their tour guide led them in a mass chant of "Ah-Io-HAl" The other waiters and waitresses were used to it, but I freaked. 6

Suddenly I was swamped, and everybody was screaming at me.

My manager, the customers, the other waitresses and waiters, and the cooks were all screaming. Everything was dim and in slow motion. It was like one of those dreams when you try to run but your feet won't move. I realized that the waiter whose section was next to mine was stealing my orders as soon as the cooks put them up. I'd bring an order to one person in a party of four, while the others at the table had to wait up to an hour for their food, which had been stolen, to be cooked again. Some people stormed out without paying.

On one of my unpaid guest-checks, a customer had scrawled:

"This is the worst service I've ever had in my life." Time stood still that night, and I almost sneaked out of the restaurant.

Eventually, everybody left, and the restaurant quieted down. Nobody paid any attention to me. I found my time card on the giant wall of time cards, punched out, turned in my uniform, and rode my bicycle six miles home to

Lahaina.

The next day one of the cooks saved me. He taught me how to deal with my section as a whole rather than madly running around trying to deal with individual customers.

The work got better, and I started enjoying it. I had full medical insurance, made a fair salary, and got about $70 dollars a night in tips on top of that. I began saving money for a round-trip plane ticket to visit my stepfather, 7

Leroy, who was teaching at a college in Thailand. I didn't

know where exactly Thailand was, but Leroy's post cards made

it seem interesting.

After a couple of months, I was beginning to feel

comfortable at the restaurant. Mavis, the hostess, clearly

liked me, and it was fun to talk with her when business was

slow. Kevin, ever my advisor, warned me not to go to bed with her, though. He said her brothers would make me marry

her and I'd never leave the island alive if I didn't.

Our restaurant had three walls and a ceiling, with

one side open to the sea. The flagstone floor extended out

into a patio covered with tables with big umbrellas on them.

Tape loops of mellow tourist music played over and over

again, putting us all in a trance and making us be good

wait-robots. I heard "We're going to a hukilau, huki huki

huki huki huki hukilau" a million times. When tourists

constantly asked, "Do you live on the island?" instead of

answering rudely: "No, I live in L.A. and commute to work,"

I would politely say, "Yes, I live in Lahaina near the sugar

mill." Invariably, their next question was: "Do you like

it?" Instead of saying, "No, I really feel quite lonely and

alienated here because nobody seems to want to discuss

global politics with me and I'm invisible to women," I

answered, "Yeah, I love it. The sunsets are so beautiful,

and I love to body surf the big waves on the north shore." 8

I no longer ate alone in the employee dining room.

The amazing left-over salad and day-old pastry that had been made for the rich and famous tasted even better with

Lucretia's charming company. Her sparkling brown eyes set off by her sun-bleached lashes and eyebrows made me glad to be alive.

Cowardly by nature, I rarely considered pursuing

Lucretia as a girlfriend. And I think she preferred the strong, macho type, anyway, even with the beatings Nathan gave her, to the pseudo-intellectual hippy type. I was still looking for a girlfriend. I was desperate for a girlfriend.

One afternoon I rode my bicycle to work early, picked up my uniform from the uniform clerk, showered and shaved, and went to the employee dining room to get a bite to eat. Lucretia was there, sitting alone. I joined her.

We discussed Spinoza and Nietzsche today, and then jumped to Rajneesh. I was reading this guru/superstar from

India's latest book and pronounced it wonderful and powerful.

"Do you actually pay money for that guy's books?" asked Lucretia, incredulous. "He's such a phony. Do you know he has over 50 Rolls Royces and an army of bodyguards with automatic weapons ln his Oregon commune?"

"Yeah, I know. But don't you see: he's purposely making himself a parody of a guru so that he can undo the 9 concept of gurus--so that the human race will do away with gurus, and individuals will take individual responsibility for their spiritual enlightenment and their behavior on this planet."

"Come back to Earth, Cosmo. I just saw him on the news driving one of his Rolla Royces, and he looked as happy as a child. He can't even drive them straight; I hear his men have to pull him out of ditches all the time. His commune is just a sex and drug playground for a bunch of bourgeoisie born-again Hindus."

"Well, maybe you're right, Lucretia, but if you could internalize what I've learned from reading his book, you wouldn't be afraid to leave your house and you wouldn't be getting beat up by Nathan, and you probably wouldn't be wasting your incredible mind memorizing the orders of fat tourists."

"What about you? That sounds like your job description, too. You. "

"I'm not as smart as you, I've got a crappy education, I'm not beautiful, and I've got no money and nobody in my family willing to help me. But you, with your rich parents, you could go to any college you wanted. You could be a lawyer, a professor, a scientist, anything.

Instead you let some moron stud who doesn't even know the earth is round run your life and make a slave out of you."

"Come on, Nathan's not that bad." 10

"I know that bruise on your shoulder isn't from surfing. It looks like a thumb bruise. Rajneesh teaches us the amazing power we get from realizing--"

"Yeah, right."

"Let me finish. You get,power from realizing your oneness with the universe if you realize it in a tangible way. I mean it's like you're one with the creative force, and once you really feel it, you take control of your life.

You feel empowered because you are empowered."

Lucretia was starting to show some feeling in her pretty face, not because of what I was saying, which she thought was hippy space-cadet rambling, but because I cared about her happiness and her dignity as a human being.

Somebody else started to show some feeling, too: a large, scary-looking busboy from Swan Court was giving me what they calIon Maui "stink eye."

From hitchhiking allover the United States and riding in the cars of many a madman, I'd learned to trust my intuition. This guy had to be a friend or relative of

Nathan, and he meant me harm. Lucretia didn't see him. He was sitting at the table directly behind her. He could hear everything we said.

"Anyway, Lucretia, you should check out this book.

I'm almost finished with it~ I'll give it to you tomorrow."

I remembered that it was time to work. "Are you ready to feed the turkeys?" 11

"No, but we'd better go." But she didn't move from her chair. She looked at me strangely, almost as if she were considering that I was a man and not just a philosophical sparring partner. She knew my need. "It doesn't make sense for you to live on Maui and not have

fun," she said. "If you were a surfer or a scuba diver, maybe we could ••• maybe if you got into the swing of things on Maui, we might • Listen, Jerry. I like to talk about philosophy, but not all the time. Don't you ever

just have fun?"

My shift went great. One of the cooks shared some cocaine with me, and it made me talkative. I talked a lot to the wife of a famous baseball player, who was eating alone, and almost seduced her without trying. I was

sweating from talking so much and working so hard, putting

on a different show at each table. I'd be laid-back if the

people wanted privacy, or an entertainer if a couple were

bored with each other and having a terrible time. As usual,

though, at the end of my shift, I had $70 dollars, and

Lucretia had way over $100.

In the shower room, I saw the big local guy again,

and again he gave me stink eye. I had seen so many haoles

get their lights punched out by locals that it didn't take

any stretch of imagination for me to see myself crashing

into lockers and having my head slammed against sinks and

urinals and into the tile floor. I realized there was 12 nothing for me to do but continue taking my shower. I rubbed some of the rich Hyatt complimentary shampoo into my hair.

I saw him again as I walked down a long underground hallway to the laundry room to turn in my uniform. Now I knew I was in trouble. I couldn't think of anything I could do, though, to prevent the beating that I saw coming. Maui was too small to escape from someone who wanted to get you.

What could I do? Call the cops and say that somebody who might know somebody else who might want to kill me gave me stink eye? I walked outside into the cool night and unlocked my bicycle. Every sound was magnified as I began riding out of the parking lot and onto the paved bicycle trail that ran along the beach. I knew that somewhere on this trail I would be attacked.

I made it to my apartment without mishap. I would have been almost relieved for the local guys to have gotten it over with. For the next week I tried to stay away from

Lucretia, but we ended up talking a few times anyway. Now that I'd broken the ice and gotten her to let some of her feelings come up, she was using me for a free therapist and saying things that might get me killed if Nathan's friends happened to overhear. Riding home at night was starting to make me neurotic.

After a month of not getting beat up, I forgot to worry about it. The big local busboy wasn't looking at me 13 anymore. Maybe everything was cool. The ride home had been the best part of my day, and it was nice to enjoy it again.

One night, after a hard shift, I stopped at Wahikuli

Park to swim in the ocean. The moon was almost full and the water temperature was just right to refresh me and remove all the tension built up during hours of serving food and drink to tourists. I swam a long time.

I got back on my bike and began riding home in my wet shorts and T-shirt. Everything looked surreal in the moonlight--the shiny black rocks at the shore, the palm trees, the grass of the park, the park benches and barbecues, and the yellow Jeep silently sweeping through the park between the trees and the park tables. I began riding as fast as I could. I was pumping so hard that the frame of my blue Peugeot lO-speed felt like liquid. I made it out of the park and started racing through the old Japanese graveyard. I wondered if it would be my place of death.

The yellow Jeep was right behind me. Nathan cut off onto the gravel beside the bike road and then back in front of me, and I crashed into the tailgate of his Jeep, right into the demonic green dragon. I shook my head, and as my vision

returned, I was looking into the dragon's red eyes.

"Why you crash into my Jeep, bra?"

"Man, you cut in front of me. But I'm sorry I hit your Jeep. I think it's beautiful." 14

"I tink it beautiful, too, bra. So answer: why you hit da kine?" "You want to hurt me because I talked to your girlfriend. But listen ••• " A major kick to the head, effortless on Nathan's part. A major kick to the ribs from Nathan's friend. (It's the busboy; I was right.) I'm on the ground. Hard kick to the stomach; it feels like it's going through my stomach; I can feel it all the way to my backbone. In spite of the pain, I'm seeing this happen to me in slow motion and analyzing it like a sportscaster giving a blow-by-blow at a fight: "Jerry takes another kick to the ribs. Yes, this time some ribs are broken. aaah, and a great kick to the back of the head. possible damage to the occipital lobe, which might result in permanent vision impairment. What do you think, Jerry? Yes, I agree, although I've seen harder kicks that didn't damage the brain. Wow, and there's another kick to the head and one from the other guy to the face. Do you think they're going to have to kill him, Jerry? Well, Jerry, it looks that way. They've done enough visible damage that Jerry can sustain an assault-and-battery charge and put them in jail. They're probably going to have to kill him and dump him off the cliffs north of Napili. Well, I don't know, Jerry. I think they've got him just at the point where he'll be too terrorized to call the police, especially because he knows Nathan is related to half the 15 police on the island. Well, you were right, Jerry, they appear to be leaving. Wait, Nathan is bending down to say something ••• "

"Listen, broddah, you call da police, maybe I go jail, but you die, bra."

"OOOOh, and another kick to the stomach," says the sportscaster. "Well, that's all for tonight folks, because we're losing consciousness. "

When I woke up, it was still dark. I pushed and dragged my smashed bicycle to the highway and waited for a taxi. Finally an off-duty cab came by and stopped for me.

It was Jeannie, a friend of my uncle's, driving unit 13, a station wagon. The car was so full of good marijuana smoke that I got high just from riding in it. Jeannie was a pretty blonde with a foul mouth. She was very down-to-earth and fun to talk to. But I really couldn't talk much because my ribs were starting to hurt and my upper lip was cut. It was painful to breathe. I told her I'd had a bicycle accident. I was sitting in the front with her. When she noticed blood dripping on my thighs from my cut lip, she stopped the car and got a first-aid kit from the back. In the dim glow of the dome light on the ceiling of the car, she cleaned the wounds on my lip and forehead.

While she worked, Jeannie told me about the famous people she'd met and/or sold cocaine to lately at the exclusive restaurant where she worked part-time as a room- 16

service waitress. The voice of the dispatcher came over the taxi radio: "Are you out there Unit 13? I need you to pick up a six-pack of da kine and bring it to the dispatch

station."

"Fuck you, Freddy," said Jeannie into her microphone. She told me that she was pregnant and that

Freddy might be the father. "Now he thinks he owns me."

When I got to my apartment, I told Jeannie I'd pay her the next day, because my money was all wet from swimming with it in my pocket. She helped me get the wreck of my bike out of the back of the cab. I got a good look at it under the parking-lot lights and realized that it was totaled. I left it sitting by a dumpster, then painfully I

pulled myself up the stairs. When I got inside, I looked

into the full-length mirror, and I was shocked by my

reflection. It was as if my whole body had been rearranged.

It was hard to say what exactly was wrong, but I just didn't

line up right anymore. It was like somebody had reshuffled me. I took five aspirin and washed them down with a beer

and went to sleep. I woke up an hour later in excruciating

pain. I took a taxi to the hospital in Wailuku and got my

ribs taped up and some Percocets to numb my pain for a few

days.

My rent was incredibly expensive for the little

apartment I lived in, even though I shared it with a

roommate who paid half. Apartments were dear on Maui and I 17 was lucky to have it. When the doctor told me that I had several serious rib fractures and that I'd have to take five or six weeks off work, I started worrying about how I was going to make it. Rent was almost due. My Uncle Glenn had just lost his apartment because the owners had converted it into a condo and put it up for sale, so he was happy to move into my place, and I took the money I would have spent for rent and put it in the bank.

I moved into Kobotaki's, kind of a flophouse where many of the cab drivers lived. Most of the tenants lived in a large plantation shack built on stilts, or in places adjacent to it. The dwelling spaces that made up Kobotaki's had interesting names that pretty well described them: The

Cave, The Closet, The Van, The Tree House. I lived in

"Freddy and Dorrita's Place," named after the passionate couple who once lived there; it was one of the luxury suites of Kobotaki's. I had a refrigerator, a cold-water sink, and a stove.

My rent was only $100 a month, utilities free. This was quite a bargain on Maui, where sometimes waiters were living five people in a one-bedroom apartment to save money.

The reason it was available to me was that I was related to a cab driver--so the coke dealers and marijuana growers at

Kobo's knew they could trust me not to get them busted.

Also, I could tolerate the giant roaches that roamed freely throughout the complex. I didn't mind the communal 18 bathrooms and showers. And I wasn't terrified by Russ, a wild haole marijuana grower who, supposedly, could beat up any human on earth.

I took it easy while my ribs were healing. I planted some primeval-looking cycads to add to the Garden­ of-Eden ambience around our meager hovels. When I was hungry, I could go outside and grab a mango or a papaya, and the fresh bananas off the trees were sweet and refreshing.

I cooked brown rice and tofu, read Eastern philosophy, and meditated a lot.

In order to meditate without being eaten by mosquitos and centipedes, I built a meditation protector. I bent coat hangers into a cube-shaped frame big enough to cover my body and draped it with mosquito netting. I would raise and lower my meditation cube by a rope-and-pulley system I'd attached to the ceiling. I read the books of

Rajneesh and talked to my guru, Jim Black, about enlightenment.

Jim Black, who lived in The Cave, had no runnlng water and had to use a hot plate. His dwelling had been constructed by putting screen and wooden walls around the stilts that supported the main shack. His floor was dirt with a carpet over it. He had a good tape player, and he played reggae music so loud that the whole place could hear it. Jim was living in his sorry $50-a-month cave because he'd egoed out on cocaine and lost his taxi business and 19 gotten into extreme debt. After he started to realize that he was the Messiah, it was hard for him to see the use of sitting in a hot cab all day and taking tourists from

Lahaina to the hotels in Kaanapali and back. When he did drive, his long, long beard and crazy uncombed hair were upsetting to tourists from places like Nebraska and

Wisconsin, and when he preached to them, they'd become frightened and forget to tip. "We are all in a maze that does have a way out of itt" he would proclaim.

The thing he used to say that struck me was that

"Enlightenment is possible. The path through the maze in which each individual is wandering lost actually exists at this moment. It's just hard to figure out what the path is."

To discover his path, Jim did a lot of LSD and coca1ne. He smoked big joints of Maui buds. If I took only two hits of one of his joints, I would be incapacitated for half the day. One time I had to crawl back to my room. In this overly-stoned condition, I watched Reagan on TV and thought I was actually seeing the devil.

After he lost his taxi and spent some time in jail,

Jim didn't think he was the Messiah anymore. Jim was taking a vacation from the fast pace of being a cocaine dealer. He was cutting down on cocaine, and his new work was good exercise and quiet. He got a percentage of wild man Russ' marijuana profit for simply carrying water up the mountain 20

on his back and watering Russ' plants a couple of times a week. Being a farmer's helper was a good way for Jim to support himself while he did his "real" work as guru and astrologer.

While my ribs were healing, I got a job dispatching for Pacific Taxi, the company Jeannie and my Uncle Glenn drove for. It was fun to talk over the radio to the stoned­ out drivers. The drivers were presentable and friendly, and the tourists never suspected that all of the young drivers and a few of the old were smoking killer bud joints all day between runs. The night drivers added alcohol to their high. I liked the challenge of maintaining order among the ten to twelve insane drivers that were on the road during my day shift.

The dispatch office was a little stall in a small industrial section of Lahaina. It was a meeting place for the drivers to make drug deals and sexual liaisons with each other, and meet to share a joint. It was right next door to

Bob Giso's TV repair shop, where huge round Bob lived and worked in a maze made of garbage and broken TVs stacked five and six high. If you'd bring him a pizza or some other take-out food, he'd come out of his maze like a smart laboratory rat and rub his eyes in the sunshine. He'd get your taxi radio working again for free. His assistant,

Crazy Robbie, would usually greet you with some insane 21 exclamation. Robbie's standard greeting was, "Have you had an enema today?"

Motorcycle Mike lived at Kobotaki's right above my head when I looked out my window. He lived in The Tree

House. He was a serious alcoholic and always down on his luck. But he was the nicest guy to talk to and pretty smart. His slanted studio hovel, an actual tree house in a big mango tree, went for $50 dollars a month, like Jim's cave. I saw inside it once, and it was like a trash can half full of beer cans and cigarette butts and packages.

But one thing that Mike always had that was perfect was his motorcycle. It was a cherry 1500 c.c. Suzuki that could go

160 miles per hour on a straightaway.

Mike was famous lately because he had lost the police on a high-speed chase that went almost all the way around the island. In those days, the police drove their own very fast cars, and it was especially hard to lose them.

They had customized Camaros, Mustangs, and GTOs with slicks on the back and chrome pipes on the sides, and some of the cars actually had flames painted on their fenders. The cops were subsidized hotrodders. If a woman was in sight, they'd burn rubber when the one traffic light in town changed to green. Anyway, Mike was pretty cocky lately, so cocky that he kicked Russ's dog when it attacked him while he was crossing the field to the liquor store. It would have been 22 much better to have let the dog bite him a few times than to have to face Russ after kicking it.

Motorcycle Mike came into the dispatch office while

I was working. He was shaking and white with fear. He passed me in the narrow room and stood with his back to the wall facing the entrance. He was holding a large hammer.

Someone had told him that Russ had found out that he had kicked his dog and was on his way to obliterate him. My ribs still ached, and I was torn between my duty to man the dispatch office, and my sense of self preservation. I decided Mike was hysterical and that Russ would not appear.

Russ walked up in his rubber slippers, surfer shorts, and his Lahaina Mongoose baseball team shirt and approached Mike. The dispatch office was so narrow that I was between Russ and Mike, in striking distance of both men.

Now it was too late to move. I was afraid to breathe lest I

somehow set off the conflagration. As Mike raised the hammer to defend himself, Russ, truly calm, said, "Mike, drop the hammer."

Mike dropped the hammer, and it clunked on the floor right behind my chair. Mike didn't even make a move to stop him as Russ slammed him against the wall with one hand.

Mike crumpled to the floor, unconscious. Actually, he got off easy. When I got home, I found out that earlier that day, Russ had thrown a young cab driver into the dumpster behind Kobotaki's, and the young man had sustained a 23 concussion and a broken shoulder. Mike was perfectly OK when he came to, and after a few drinks and a few high-speed half-block-Iong wheelies on his motorcycle, he was as good as new.

When my ribs got better, I went back to work at the

Hyatt, but this time I did the breakfast and lunch shifts.

I didn't want to see Lucretia anymore. I had to be at work early for the breakfast shift; I usually wouldn't eat breakfast before I left my place. I would think I could hold out on a cup of coffee, but the smell of the good, expensive food there would always end up making me feel ravenous. I'd grab half-eaten macadamia-nut pancakes off the plates I was bussing and carefully stuff my mouth, biting from the opposite side from where somebody had eaten.

Then I'd have to walk around and act like I wasn't chewing so my manager wouldn't know I was eating on the job. I felt unbearably hot running around in this restaurant in the daytime, and because the tourists were generally sober during the breakfast and lunch rushes, my tips were decreasing. I decided to go back to the night shift.

Luckily, Lucretia had moved up to Swan Court. For some reason, the Swan Court waitrons didn't hang out in the employee dining room with us lowlifes from the other four restaurants. And Mavis, the hostess, had quit, so I didn't have any dangerous temptations to deal with. The only problem was that since my bicycle was ruined and I hadn't 24 been working for a while, I didn't have any vehicle or money to buy one. I rode to work on a blue tourist bus, but to get home at night I had to hitchhike.

My first night back on the dinner shift, I heard a gorgeous woman in the employee dining room say she was an artist. Desperation overcame my shyness, and I immediately began talking to her about art. I didn't know much about it, but enough to ask her questions.

Her name was Marilyn. She worked in one of the

Hyatt's many gift shops, selling gold chains and jewelry to tourists. Even under her Hyatt smock, I could tell she had a body like a California bathing-suit model. Her shiny light brown hair flowed around her big green eyes and high cheekbones. Her nose was large and her lips were full. I fell in love at first sight. She told me she had some paintings in a Lahaina gallery that we could see sometime and agreed to meet me in the Hyatt parking lot when we both got off work. We could ride somewhere to get a drink, she said. Apparently she had seen me riding my bicycle home from work before I had my run-in with Nathan.

She was waiting for me when I came outside to the parking lot. I thought it was a little odd that she introduced me to her bicycle: "This J.S my bike, Skippy!" she said. "Where's your bike?" "My bike J.S totaled. Let's take a cab--I'll pay." We put her old bike in the back of an

Alii cab--Pacific Taxi's rival company--and got a ride into 25

Lahaina. I paid the driver, and we went to the Blue Max to have a drink. When we got there, the place was going nuts.

Elton John was playing an old piano on the balcony, and

Front Street was completely stopped for blocks each way.

People piled out of their cars to stand by the seawall and look up at this famous performer. He was playing amazingly hot. He had the whole street rocking. Marilyn and I crowded in. I drank beer and she had Pepsi. Then I walked her and Skippy home.

She lived with an old Hungarian man who played the violin and was supposedly a gifted psychic. I found a guitar in the house and played music with him that night, and Marilyn was impressed.

Marilyn was strange, though. We went out a couple of times, and she told me that she didn't want to hold hands or kiss. She washed her hands a lot, I noticed. When she came to Kobotaki's to see my garden and my cycad plants, I could hear her when she used the toilet. She flushed it the whole time she was on it so nobody would hear her bodily sounds. Afterwards, she washed her hands for about five minutes.

We spent a lot of our free time together, but it became obvious that this young Canadian woman wasn't going to go to bed with me in the near future. This was quite frustrating. I began to realize why she was so available that she'd even go out with a guy too poor to buy a bicycle. 26

However, even though there were disadvantages to this

relationship, I enjoyed her company and becoming friends with her roommate, the old Hungarian psychic. In him I

finally had somebody safe to discuss philosophy with.

One night when I was hitchhiking home from the

Hyatt, a black Volkswagen stopped, and I got in. The driver

had interesting, strong features and straight jet-black

hair. It was a dark night, and his instrument lights were

burnt out, so the only light you could see inside the car was from the red digital readout on his cassette player. It made his pale face look ghoulish. He wore a black jacket

over a black shirt and black Levi's. As he drove towards

Lahaina, I told him I'd just gotten off work waiting tables.

I asked him what he did for a living, and he said he was a

stage hypnotist. I had just checked out a book on hypnosis

from the library that day, and I thought it was amazingly

synchronistic that this guy was the one who picked me up.

I told him that I was very interested in learning

how to hypnotize people. He said he'd be glad to show me.

He pulled off the highway and drove to the end of a little

street that went right up to the beach next to the Buddhist

temple. He began talking about some techniques and said he

was going to hypnotize me. Just when he was ready to start,

a car full of locals raced down the little street, and when

they got to the dead end, they did a screeching burnoff,

turned the car around, and took off, narrowly missing the 27 black Volkswagen. The hypnotist suggested that we drive somewhere more quiet. I thought this was a great idea. I was wired from waiting tables, and I didn't have anything better to do.

We got on the highway and headed back in the direction we had come from. _We passed the Hyatt and the other hotels and the golf courses in Kaanapali and kept going until we got past the condos and restaurants in

Napili. We were now on a barely-paved road surrounded by jungle and rocks, and there was no traffic. It was about one in the morning.

He grabbed a long black metal flashlight out of the car, and we walked out to some high, rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean that we could dimly see far below.

The ocean seemed agitated tonight, crashing loudly against the rocky shore. He told me to sit on a rock and relax. He asked me to take 100 deep breaths, very deep. I did as he asked. I thought this was an odd way to hypnotize somebody, but I wasn't suspicious of this guy because he seemed so nice. Suddenly he was behind me with both hands on my neck pressing hard with his fingertips to block off the blood flow through my jugular vein. I realized the guy was nuts and that I was in great danger. I pretended I was Captain

Kirk on Star Trek, being tortured by aliens, and I resolved not to lose consciousness no matter what. I started passing out and slid off the rock I had been sitting on. The 28

hypnotist was on top of me, and his large white face was

descending towards my face to kiss me.

"Stop. I don't want you to kiss me," I said. I

tried to hypnotize him by eye contact and calmness. "I have

a girlfriend," I lied, "and I'm not interested in men this way." I knew that he could smack me with his flashlight and

do anything he wanted and then throw my body off the cliffs.

There was no reason for anybody to be driving out there at

night and no chance of a witness. I looked at his shiny

black boots as he slowly stood up above me.

He surprised me by being very contrite. He helped

me up, and after apologizing sincerely, drove me back to

Lahaina. We talked about child psychology and the

importance of the first three years of a child's life.

Because of this hitchhiking experience, I decided

that I didn't want to deal with transportation to and from

the Hyatt anymore, so I quit my job. I started driving

Number 9 for Big John, a fat Danish man who wanted to be a

writer but who was too drunk most of the time to write. His

car smelled so bad after he finished his day shift that it

took me a half hour to disinfect it. I brought my own

towels and spray cleaner to clean the grime from the seats

and where his fat arm had worn the paint off the top of the

driver's-side door. The rear axle was so worn that when you

went around a corner, the body of the station wagon taxi 29

would slide from one side to the other and clunk. The tires were bald.

I did very well. Since I didn't smoke marijuana very often and was too poor to take lunch breaks, I was

always in the car from about four in the evening until two

or three in the morning. I'd get the long runs taking rich

drunks to hotels on the other side of the island, in Wailuku

or Kahului, or down the coast to Kihei. I drove in shorts

and beach slippers, and now that I was free of the Hyatt

dress code, I could let my hair and beard grow out. Soon

other owners were vying for my services. I was the only

young driver who wasn't stoned all the time. Maybe mY drug

was depression. For months I had The Idiot by Dostoyevsky

on my dashboard, for reading when business got slow.

When one of the two major tourist seasons came to a

close, the only way to make it in taxiland was to sell

marijuana. I usually had a few ounces under the seat to

sell to tourists. I had a way to figure out if they were

plainclothes cops or not. Cops would usually start talking

about drugs soon after they got 1n the car, but tourists

were shy about it. If I had young male tourists in my car,

I'd wait until the run was about two thirds over and then

put the one tape I had--some heavy-metal band--in the old 8­

track and crank up the volume. Always, when they heard the

music, they'd think I was cool and say, "Do you know where

we can get some Maui Wowie?" "No problem," I'd say, 30 reaching under the seat and producing a huge bag of bud leaf or a beautiful big bud that I'd hermetically sealed in my uncle's kitchen vegetable sealer. I was starting to make good money again, and my dream of traveling to Thailand became, once more, a possibility.

I was finally starting to enjoy living in this tropical paradise. This was the first job I'd had that didn't seem like work. I'd cover my dashboard with huge,

sexual-looking night-blooming sirius blossoms and give them to tourist ladies. Their husbands would take pictures of their wives holding the beautiful blossoms and standing next to the nice hippy cab driver, and of course I'd get huge tips. I'd tell interesting stories about the island and entertain the people in my cab by telling them things that other drivers wouldn't say. I told them political things

about the island and things about the culture that the

Chamber of Commerce didn't want them to know. Tourists get

sick of having everything be too perfect, too much like

Disneyland, and they really enjoyed hearing about the non­

idyllic side of life on Maui.

"If you'll look up towards that mountain on your

left, you can see jungle vegetation. Those mountains used

to be covered with teak wood, but the missionaries and

European businessmen exported it allover 100 years ago.

You know what the biggest cash crop on Maui is today? No,

not sugarcane, no, not pineapples. Give up? It's 31

marijuana. Those hills are full of marijuana planted by

growers who must hike up precarious jungle trails with water

on their backs several times a week. Some of the growers were vietnam veterans, and they have put what they learned

in Vietnam to good use. Just yesterday a grower had his leg

blown off by a booby trap wh~n he accidentally got too close

to a rival grower's plants. That beautiful island off to

your right is Kahoolawe, an ancient burial place of Hawaiian

kings. Since World War II, the u.S. Navy has been using it

as a bombing range, and now there's so much unexploded

ordinance there that it's too dangerous for a person to walk

on it. There ~ a few brave goats living there, though.

Kahoolawe has become a rallying point for local people, who

are becoming more conscious of infringements on their

rights."

Since there were economical tourist busses running

regularly the six miles between Lahaina and the hotels, most

of the people who chose to ride taxis were people who could

afford it. It was odd to be talking to rich people every

night. It was fun to surprise them. Jeannie's huge German

shepherd, Pax, knew the difference between Pacific and Alii

Cabs. He'd actually leave his home by jumping in the open

window of any Pacific taxi he'd find parked at the little

market near Jeannie's house and ride to town. He'd cruise

town for a while and then jump in the window of another

Pacific taxi heading towards Jeannie's house. The tourists 32 would be shocked and amazed when this huge animal would

suddenly jump in my window and sit beside me licking my

face. "Howzit, Pax! How's my buddy?" My passengers would decide that Pax was part of the local color and relax.

They'd get a big kick out of it.

One night while I was cruising the hotels, Jeannie called me on her taxi radio and invited me over for dinner.

When a woman cab driver invited you over for dinner, it meant sex for sure, so I was kind of overjoyed. I radioed the dispatcher that I'd be off the road for a few hours.

Then I remembered that she was pregnant.

Jeannie lived in the country in a Quonset hut left

over from World War II. It was comfortable inside with good carpeting and nice furniture. She cooked a great dinner,

preceded and followed by bud joints. I was so sensitive to marijuana that I was putty in her hands. I was easy to

seduce, even though I had reservations about going to bed with somebody I hardly knew. I'd never been to bed with a

pregnant woman before, and I had mixed feelings about it.

She didn't look pregnant, though, and after Dorrita, she was

the prettiest driver in the company. You would think

Jeannie was the archetypal wholesome blond girl-next-door,

until she started speaking sailor language and rolling big

bud joints like a Rastafarian.

I said, "Is your old boyfriend Freddie going to come

here and kill me for being in bed with you?" 33

"That asshole couldn't hurt a fly. Besides, he's forgotten about me and the baby because that fucking backstabbing bitch Dorrita just came back to the island."

On that romantic note, we indulged in blissful marijuana-powered sex.

I started staying at Jeannie's house a lot to escape the weirdness of Kobotaki's. Every day there were little rainstorms followed by glorious rainbows above the green mountains. Across the highway from Jeannie's house was a postcard-perfect beach that nobody seemed to know about.

I'd walk her dog, Pax, meditate, and swim nude in the clear blue-green ocean. Jeannie and I camped, hiked, had sex a lot, and sailed in rented sailboats. Her cocaine income was a boost to my impoverished lifestyle. She dressed me like cool Maui guys are supposed to dress, and through her, I suddenly had friends.

Jeannie always had the TV on, so reading

Dostoyevsky, Camus, Malamud, and all the other depressing writers I liked became impossible. I became tan, strong, and more normal. I wasn't always thinking about politics, and I avoided looking at Reagan on TV.

For my birthday--I was 24--Jeannie rented a large sailboat and invited a bunch of people, including my Uncle

Glenn. Uncle Glenn, my stepfather Leroy's brother, was a short, handsome, hairy man who had hundreds of gorgeous, perfect tourist girls during the year I lived on mellow 34

Maui. He brought some mushrooms and buds and had us all out of our minds (and out of our clothes) by the time the boat was out of the harbor. Usually, when Jeannie and I rented sailboats, I was the captain, but it was my birthday today, and I didn't know who was driving. But the boat went along nicely. Dolphins played around the boat and swam in formation as we headed out to sea. I played syncopated rhythms for them on the hull of the boat as I sat on the bowsprit, taking in the beauty of the universe. Then, I don't remember how it happened, but I suddenly realized that

I was in the water. I think it was Glenn who put a good diving mask and snorkel on me, gave me a rope to hold on to, and pushed me into the ocean. I absolutely became a dolphin. I was under water and could see perfectly with the mask and breathe easily through the snorkel. The ocean caressed my naked body as I coursed through it as fast as the boat could pull me. I could see colorful coral and exotic fluorescent tropical fish. I could see my brother and sister dolphins. The mushrooms I'd eaten were starting to kick in, and the cosmic feeling of being a sea creature again after all these millions of years was so beautiful that I had tears running down my cheeks inside of the diving mask. Somebody must have pulled me out eventually to see if

I was still alive. It was the best birthday I'd ever had.

I loved Uncle Glenn and Jeannie and all her taxi, cocaine, and marijuana-grower friends. 35

Over the months, as Jeannie got bigger with child, we could no longer body surf, camp, or run on the beach. We both began to realize we had very little in common.

Her mother flew in from Seattle and joined us.

Margie, who was very successful in real estate, planned to stay with her daughter for a_long time. She'd had her sleek black BMW shipped over to Maui in advance so it would arrive when she did. Thinking Jeannie and I were a real couple rather than casual lovers, Margie treated me as if I were a son-in-law. She nagged at me until I rewired the whole house, put on a new roof of corrugated tin, and caulked the windows. I stayed away for days at a time, only to be drawn back by Jeannie's cooking. On Wednesdays, I'd go with

Jeannie to her Lamaze natural-childbirth class.

I began studying Transcendental Meditation, which was big on Maui at that time. It only cost $165 dollars to get my secret mantra from one of the Maharishi's official TM teachers, a mantra which served me well as I sat cross­ legged every morning and silently repeated it in my mind thousands of times. Even though TM was pretty much a scam to help Maharishi catch up to Rajneesh in Rolls Royces, the fact that it cost money made me be more disciplined about it than I was about the Zen meditation I already practiced from time to time. It was an amazing experience for me to just

stop and clear my mind on a daily basis. I began to feel 36 more calm and focused than ever before. But I also began to feel a kind of spiritual hunger.

Even though I was having a good time, I was still lonely. I confused my spiritual hunger, my longing to be in love with a woman, and my political concerns; they all mixed together in my mind. Reagan's "doublespeak" was as intense and exaggerated as that in Orwell's 1984, only this was real life. I felt guilty for the hedonistic life we were all living on Maui. "If there's a revolution, it's sure not going to start here," I thought.

The streets of Lahaina remained violent, even as the world as a whole. On my nights off, I'd walk up and down

Front Street alone, listening to the music coming out of the bars, watching the beautiful women in their island wear, and feeling drained and hot and frustrated. No matter how peaceful the town seemed, there was always the possibility of sudden violence. It was not unusual to see haole guys get beaten half to death by locals. Sometimes, when I was working, the fights would come right up to my taxi at the cabstand across from Anchor Deli.

Once, I saw two white guys win. They walked back and forth like proud roosters. They were tourists who knew martial arts, and they had easily dispatched two local guys, beating them soundly but doing no real damage to them. The local guys ran off down the street. A moment later, though, a car full of locals pulled up to finish the fight; haoles 37

can never win a fight on Maui. The white guys were beaten

to unconsciousness.

Sometimes, there wouldn't be any fights for weeks.

Front Street would be full of tourists milling up and down

the sidewalk, going into the picturesque buildings of the

old whaling town to buy T-shirts and souvenirs. But always

there was the yellow Jeep. I'd make a right turn on Front

Street and find myself directly behind Nathan's Jeep in

traffic, looking into the red eyes of the dragon. There was

still a scratch on the dragon decal where my bicycle had made impact. Sometimes the Jeep would be behind me.

There was a big concert at one of the hotels one

night, and Nathan's Jeep must have been out of order. He was standing in front of Anchor Deli watching the traffic,

looking for a friend to take him to the concert. He was

good friends with the son of Big John, the owner of the cab

I drove, and he must have recognized the car as I drove by.

He must have flagged me expecting a free ride, but I never

saw him. Later in the evening, I stopped at Anchor Deli to

grab a beer to drink in the cab. I left the keys in the

ignition as always. Why would anybody steal a cab on Maui,

especially an old slimy one like Unit 9? When I came out

with the beer, I noticed the keys were missing. Nathan and

a haole approached me. The haole was Roger, Big John's son.

Nathan had the keys in his hand, tossing them up and

catching them. 38

"Why you no pick me up, bra?"

"I didn't see you or I sure would have picked you up. "

"You drive right past me. How come?

"I really didn't see you, man. I'm sorry."

Whapl--a karate punch to the mouth. I, with no shame, kind of bowed, duplicating the body language of a child towards an angry parent. "Don't hit me," I said, backing up very slowly. I could see myself being destroyed in front of the cabstand where so many others had met a similar fate. "I'm really sorry. If I'd seen you, I swear

I would have stopped. Anytime you need a ride, just flag me down. "Whooshl--a kick to the head, but a light one.

Nathan was lackadaisical this time about beating me up--I wasn't even a worthy punching bag for him. He threw the keys at my chest and he and Roger walked away.

Motorcycle Mike, driving unit 13 that night, was parked next to me at the cabstand. He had a .45 aimed at

Nathan's head the whole time from the window of his cab.

It's lucky that Nathan was in a good mood that night. If he had hit me again, Mike would have shot him. Mike and I leaned against our cabs and drank beers while I settled down and stopped shaking.

I told Mike I was OK and not to say anything about what had happened, but he couldn't keep his mouth shut, and he told everything to Big John, who was drunkenly 39 dispatching that night. Later, when I turned in my car,

John was furious. He saw my swollen lip and said, "That does it. I'm going to kick my fucking son out of the house once and for all."

"What does my getting beat up have to do with your son?"

"Mike told me Roger was there with Nathan. He should have stopped Nathan. That fuckin' Nathan is nothing but a criminal."

"Don't kick Roger out of the house. It's no big deal. I'm OK."

"No, my mind's made up."

The next morning, Crazy Robbie from the TV repair

shop next to the dispatch office came tearing into

Kobotaki's on a bicycle with a big stick bungee-corded to the rack. "Jerry! Jerry! Nathan's coming with a whole

bunch of mokes to get you." Robbie was going to protect me with that stick.

"Thanks, man," I said. "You'd better take off

before they kill you. I'll call the police. Don't worry.

I've got a gun." I was relieved to see Robbie ride away. I called

the police. Then I looked through the box of things I'd

brought from the mainland and found a .25 caliber woman's

purse gun I used to carry when I made my rounds at the L.A. motel where I had been a desk clerk. It was an automatic 40 that held about six or seven shots. I removed the clip and loaded it. I cocked the pistol to put one in the chamber, removed the clip, and added another bullet. Then I sat on the floor watching my front door, ready to shoot Nathan and his friends if they got here and tried to break in before the police showed up.

Two cars full of locals and the police arrived at the same time. I left my gun inside and walked out to meet

Nathan and two big officers. The cops got out of one of the new uniform cars, a boring Ford LTD in light blue, and looked very serious.

Nathan was upset that his friend had been kicked out of his house by Big John because of me. Big John's son,

Roger, was a local haole. Since he'd grown up on the island, he spoke pidgin, fought with his feet, and was accepted by the locals of Asian and Hawaiian descent.

"What kind of trouble is my nephew in now?" asked the bigger cop, putting his hand on Nathan's shoulder.

In my most refined vocabulary, I told him what had happened. I felt like a pioneer. with two armed officers standing beside me, I thought: "This is the first time a haole has actually had the opportunity to reason with angry locals without getting beat up mid-sentence."

I talked about the suburban neighborhood in

California where I grew up, how fights were very rare and then only for the most serious of reasons. "Just because I 41 accidentally passed you in my taxi when you needed a ride is no cause for violence."

Nathan discussed his neighborhood when he was growing up, where you had to maintain face and respect. You could get beaten or stabbed just for looking at someone wrong. "You giv'um one guy stink eye, he cut you, bra."

I could hardly understand Nathan's pidgin English.

I began to feel that even though Maui had an American flag stuck in it, it was still a foreign country in many ways.

The cop advised me to go to Big John's and talk him into letting Roger move back into the house. After the two cars full of locals and the police car drove away, I did so immediately. Big John relented.

Now I was driving taxi with a loaded gun by my side.

This was definitely not what I'd come to Maui for. The Jeep was everywhere. I was almost afraid to look in my rear-view mirror when I drove down Front Street. I decided to go to

Jeannie's place and hide out for a while.

A few mornings later, I was sitting on Jeannie's bed doing blissful Transcendental Meditation as the aroma of an excellent breakfast being cooked by Jeannie and her mother wafted into the little bedroom. Suddenly I heard Pax barking and snarling wildly. I looked out the window and saw some cops disguised as hippies stomping through the side yard. One was carrying a ladder. I jumped out of bed and ran to the living room window just in time to see one of the 42 cops shoot Pax right in the forehead. Another cop pounded on the front door.

They had found several large marijuana plants on

Jeannie's roof. In the Quonset hut next door, rented by

Jeannie's friends, they found several pounds of buds under a pyramid in a room devoted to imparting cosmic pyramid power to marijuana. An officer reached under the pyramid and took the pot. We sat indoors all day while the police investigated. Jeannie was sobbing hysterically about Pax, who she could see lying out in the front yard bleeding from the head. She desperately wanted to hold him, but they wouldn't let her go outside. I was broken hearted, too.

Pax had been a lot warmer towards me and more fun than most of the humans I'd met on Maui. They took Jeannie and her neighbors to jail, but believed me when I said that I had nothing to do with the marijuana growing. One of the officers found a little hashish pipe in Jeannie's dresser and asked me if it was mine. "I don't need to smoke marijuana," I said. "I've found the inner peace of merging with the Godhead through Transcendental Meditation as practiced by my spiritual master Maharishi Mahesh. "

Now I was alone at Jeannie's house with her furious mother, Margie, and a dead dog to bury. Why did everything

have to be so weird on Maui? I wondered.

Margie and I watched the news on TV as we sadly ate

our dinner in the living room. Suddenly Annette's face came 43 on the screen. Annette was a Pacific Taxi driver and tour guide. The newscaster said that she'd been raped and left for dead. Two men had hidden inside her VW-van taxi when she got out to go into a convenience store and kidnapped her when she got back in. They threw her unconscious body on the highway when they were finished with her, and a tourist who almost ran her over in a rental car saved her and brought her to the hospital.

I saw her a few weeks later. She had a dull look on her face. She talked slower and had become a born-again

Christian, but otherwise she was alright.

Things were getting too intense. I decided I needed a vacation. Five million tourists a year can't be all wrong, I thought. I asked Margie if I could borrow her BMW

for a few days. She said no problem.

I walked to a pay phone so Margie wouldn't hear and called Marilyn, the pretty artist who worked at the Hyatt

gift shop, to see if she wanted to go. Sure.

I picked her up in town the next morning and we took

off to circumnavigate the island. We headed off towards

Kihei, drinking beer and laughing as we lived the rich

tourist life in our big BMW, a good tape blaring through the

speakers of the Blaupunkt stereo and the air conditioner on

high. If I had taken a look at the map, I would have

remembered that part of the highway around the island wasn't

paved. Part of it wasn't even a road. At first the dirt 44 road wasn't too bad. The black BMW was covered with red volcanic soil, but that could be washed off.

I was a little too drunk by the time we got to the rough part. I went the wrong way around a huge hole and the car slid down a rocky bank, crashing into a kiawe tree. Now

I was sober. Marilyn was pissed off. She walked down to the ocean and washed her hands in it. I figured we were about 10 miles from the nearest phone, which would be in the town of Makena. I looked at the map and realized that I could take a shortcut and make it in about five miles by walking across the Ulupalakua Ranch. But this would mean walking through marijuana territory.

I decided that Marilyn and I looked enough like lost tourists that we wouldn't be perceived as marijuana thieves, and I was getting paranoid about the possibility of staying out there in no-man's land all night trying to sleep in a steeply-slanted German luxury car. We started walking across the rough terrain in our rubber sandals. It was very hot and we had no water, only a warm can of beer each. We had a bag of Maui potato chips and a couple of tofu sandwiches in my day pack. Almost immediately, we came into a place of rich and varied vegetation. As we examined blossoms and seed pods, we became excited botanists and almost forgot our problems. We didn't even notice that we were just a couple of feet away from a marijuana plantation. 45

Suddenly a very white man, maybe an albino, wearing camouflage pants and wielding what looked like an AK-47 assault rifle, appeared over a hill, accompanied by a black

Doberman. The man went down on one knee and aimed his rifle at us. We both ran through the rocks and vegetation as fast as we could go. One of my sandals fell apart, and I kicked it off. I ran in a ridiculous scared-rabbit pattern while

Marilyn made a beeline towards the BMW. Bullets whizzed through the thick foliage and pinged off rocks. I don't think the guy was really trying to kill us, but I'm not sure. We both made it back to the car and got inside, as if somehow the car was going to save us. We cautiously peeked out of the car and saw the man standing on a cliff above us.

He was laughing. Marilyn's feet were cut pretty badly.

Mine were OK, but one of my big toenails had broken in half.

It was really easy to get staph infections on Maui, so I always carried a tube of antibiotic ointment in my day pack.

I washed Marilyn's feet in the ocean and gently rubbed the ointment on her wounds.

In spite of our troubles, God must have been smiling on me. I had discovered Marilyn's erogenous zone: her feet!

We made love in the sand and in the ocean and in the car.

She dug her fingernails into my back aggressively. I was glad that she was always so scrupulous about washing her hands. We shared one more warm beer that was in the car and 46 went to sleep--she in the front seat and me in the rear-­ with our legs slanting down towards the ocean.

The next morning we flagged down some local guys in a four-wheel-drive pickup, and they towed us out. I thanked them and gave them a plastic film-container full of good marijuana. Our vacation was over. We raced to a body shop in Kahului and left the car. Marilyn and I hitchhiked back to Lahaina.

We got off near Marilyn's house, and I walked her home. When we got there, I invited myself in and had a glass of water. "Jerry, I want to show you something."

She led me into her room and opened her desk drawer.

From the drawer she removed an airline ticket folder. She opened the folder and showed me a one-way ticket to Canada.

My heart started pounding. "I'm leaving for Canada soon,

Jerry. You are very special to me, but my time on Maui is over."

"Is it because of what happened on our trip?"

"No, I was going to leave anyway."

"When are you leaving?"

"Next week."

"Why do you want to freeze your ass off in Canada when you could spend the winter with me on magical Maui?"

"If you must know, I have ovarian cancer, and I want to go home to have the operation." 47

"Well, they've got good doctors here. Why don't you just have the operation here?"

"Because if you talk to anybody who has had surgery on this island, they don't have a lot of good things to say about the doctors. And besides, I'm a Canadian citizen, and

I can get my operation for fr.ee in Canada."

"will you come back? I hardly know you, but I want to know you, I want to be with you." I was crying, but it wasn't really about Marilyn leaving. I found myself thinking of Lucretia and thinking more of my dread of loneliness than actually missing Marilyn and her stupid bike, Skippy. My back was beginning to smart from Marilyn's nails. She had actually broken the skin in a lot of places.

"Everybody is crazy here, Jerry. Nobody's really happy here. The tourists are mostly hot and depressed, frantically trying to fill up their time, turning themselves into red lobsters under the sun so they can go back to the mainland and show off their tans. And all of us haoles in the tourist business don't belong here, either. We're just long-term tourists. How many locals do you know? Are you friends with any of them? We're just hiding out from reality here because we're afraid to grow up."

"What's so good about growing up?" I asked. "When you get back to the mainland, you'll remember: everybody's crazy there, too. And maybe you haven't noticed lately, but you're pretty crazy yourself. You're right, though. We 48 don't really belong here. I have one local friend--you know

Kevin at the Hyatt--and he's as American as apple pie. But what am I going to do? Go back to L.A.? Even San Francisco is too cold for me. There's no way I could make it in

Canada, even if you wanted me to go with you."

She was touched by my crying, and for the first time she asked me to spend the night at her house. I was too freaked out about the car and how I was going to get the money to fix it. There was no way I had the courage to tell

Margie that I'd destroyed the side of her perfect car. I needed to be alone to plan out my next move. I hugged

Marilyn tightly and kissed her and walked off down the highway past the sugar mill and down the little street that led to Kobotaki's.

It was about four in the afternoon. I hadn't actually told Margie when I'd return with her car, so I figured I had about two more days before she'd worry enough to call the police. I went up the stairs to the landlord's place at Kobotaki's and knocked on the door to borrow his phone. Teddy answered the door and invited me in.

"Wanna smoke a joint." It wasn't a question on

Maui. I took one small hit so I wouldn't get too zoned-out to take care of business and asked if I could use his phone to call my uncle. I shouldn't have mentioned my uncle, because Teddy hated his guts. Teddy had recently come close to killing him because Glenn had picked up a good airport 49

fare that the dispatch office had given to Teddy. He had

found Glenn later that evening 1n the Pioneer Inn and had thrown him from his bar stool. He ~raised a huge wooden chair to bring crashing down on Glenn's body. Then Teddy remembered his last stretch in the penitentiary. He carefully set the chair down and walked out of the bar. But he didn't say anything about it to me. "Sure, you know where the phone is."

I called Glenn and asked him if he would lend me

$2000 dollars. He said he could only lend me a thousand.

He was pretty pissed off. When he started criticizing me

for being stupid enough to drive a good car on the back

road, he sounded just like my stepfather, Leroy.

I had about $800 dollars in the bank, which would

also have to go towards repairing the car. The winter

tourist season wasn't going to start for a while, and the

police were cracking down on marijuana, plus there was a dry

spell and marijuana was hard to come by for prices that made

it profitable to sell. I was pretty worried, but I was sure

everything would work out somehow. The owner of the body

shop knew me because I'd brought a couple of taxis to him

for repair; he'd give me credit. His estimate for the BMW

was $3000 dollars.

I took another hit of Teddy's joint and sat down in

front of his big color TV. He was watching hockey. Teddy

ran the place kind of like a prison, with him being the 50 toughest prisoner. Madman Russ was his lieutenant and respected him. Even Motorcycle Mike paid his rent on time.

Teddy used to be in the Hell's Angels and had done two terms in penitentiaries for murder. Now he was middle-aged and more laid back, but everybody, even Russ, was afraid of him.

He had the best taxi on the island. Crazy Robbie used to wax it and wash it for him down at the dispatch office.

Robbie would even wax the engine. Teddy hardly ever drove.

Most of his money came from supplying cocaine and marijuana to taxi drivers to sell. He had a cute, sweet, live-in girlfriend named Katherine, who was half his age. Katherine was pregnant, and Teddy was very proud. He started to take on a married look, bigger in the middle, greying at the temples, his curly black hair cut short and conservative.

Little Katherine didn't do much of anything, except watch TV with Teddy and smoke bud joints. She and Jeannie had become friends because they were pregnant together. Before Jeannie had gone to jail, they liked to smoke pakalolo together and go shopping for maternity and baby clothes.

It was a very hot afternoon, and Teddy wasn't wearing a shirt. I noticed that he was starting to grow breasts. This wasn't that unusual on Maui; the marijuana was so good and smoked so frequently that it seemed to affect the hormone balance of even the most macho of men. I read in Time magazine that it decreased the testosterone level. Judd, a hairy ex-con who drove Glenn's taxi from 51 time to time, also had a pretty nice set of breasts, bigger than Jeannie's.

Teddy was a good story teller. I was most interested in his prison stories, but when I questioned him,

I felt like I was walking a tightrope. He seemed like he could snap at any moment. H~ invited me to sit on the stairs outside his front door so we wouldn't wake up

Katherine, who was taking a nap. I asked him what prison was like. How did it feel to be there?

"When I was 19 I got in a fist fight with my boss because he burned me for five dollars, and he ended up dying, and I went to the penitentiary in Arkansas. The guards there were fucking morons and sadistic motherfuckers.

The police used to bring in the dead bodies of drunks they'd find on the streets on skid row and the guards'd put us in . work details assigned to bury them. The only problem was that some of them weren't all the way dead. I was burying this guy, and he actually lifted his arm up through the dirt and was struggling to get out, and I called one of the guards over and said, 'Hey, this guy's not dead.' The guard said, 'Bury him anyway or I'll bury you.' I said, 'No fucking way, man, that guy's alive!' The guard hit me very hard with his shotgun and I fell into the hole. He said,

'Bury the faggot, guys.' And the other prisoners started throwing dirt on top of me. I decided to stay in there for a while and scare them, but they kept shoveling and I got 52

scared. I'm right above this drunk guy that's still alive

and I can feel him moving, so I jump up and throw the dirt

off me and start digging with my hands where I think his

face is. The next thing I knew, the guard hit me in the

head with a shovel."

The marijuana I'd shared with,Teddy made me hyper-

sensitive and emotional. This was worse than any I Dostoyevsky book. Tears were pouring from my eyes, and I wasn't trying to hide them. I could feel Teddy's anguish,

even though what he was telling me about happened long ago

in a prison thousands of miles away. I didn't need to ask

him more questions; my eyes were speaking to him: I was

incredibly interested and hungry for what he had to tell me

about his weird experiences of humans relating to humans.

"I woke up in solitary confinement," he continued.

"I was always in and out of solitary confinement, but this

time it was really a bummer. Usually, I'd put tobacco and

rolling papers and a couple of matches in a balloon and

stick it up my ass, but this time I wasn't prepared. Also,

I think I had a concussion, because I kept throwing up a

lot. Anyway, while I was in there, they only fed me bread

and water, and I never saw any light, so I didn't know if it was day or night. But I started doing a kind of yoga. I

didn't even know what yoga was, then, but that's what I was

doing. I got real limber; I could turn myself into a

pretzel. 53

"After I got back to my regular cell, I started practicing. I'm a good escaper, and now that I knew this yoga, I was very flexible. There was a grate in the laundry room that the guards thought no human could fit through, so nobody worried about it, but I knew the grate went out into the yard. A friend greased me up with pig fat, and I used a knife and took the grating off and squeezed into the hole.

It was almost impossible, but I was so skinny from being in solitary and so flexible that I was able to bend my

shoulders enough to get through. I hid behind a storage

shed until about four in the morning and then ran across the yard when the tower guard was sleeping, and I dug under the

fence with a pancake turner and a screwdriver. I escaped and dyed my prison shirt in a creek with some food coloring

from the cafeteria, and I walked into Little Rock and got a

job at a carwash that same morning. I was free for about a week before some cop came into the carwash in his private car and recognized me. He busted me right there, and then I went back to the pen, this time in a high-security area that

I couldn't figure out a way to escape from."

Teddy went on to tell me how two guards tortured him

to find out the name of another escapee. After beating him

and kicking him until he was bloody and semi-conscious, they

clipped electrical wires to his testicles and cranked one of

those old telephones to generate voltage. 54

Teddy felt good telling me that story. He wasn't allowed to cry, but it was as if I had cried for him. I was surprised, then, that he told me, after sharing a beer with me, that I had to move out of Freddy and Dorrita's place because they wanted it back. "Remember, I told you it was just temporary, Jerry."

"Yeah. I remember. Do you have any other places?"

"Only The Closet."

"How much is it?"

"Fifty. "

"I'll take it."

It only took me about 15 minutes to move; all I owned was a good guitar, a large backpack, an old typewriter, and one box of junk from my life on the mainland.

A couple of days later I took a tourist bus to

Kahului and picked up Margie's BMW. It looked almost as good as new. I drove it out to Jeannie's place, parked it, and pushed the keys under the door. I wasn't in the mood to deal with Margie.

Now I was totally broke, in debt, and living in

Third World conditions. I was living right next to the communal kitchen. But it wasn't really communal because handsome Sam and his lovely wife Karen lived across from it, and they dominated it. Sam lived in a termite-infested shack with the rest of us low-life cabbies because he was a 55

big coke dealer and he liked the anonymity that came from

living in the old plantation house where people came and went without last names and often without histories. Sam was funny because he talked like a Chicago gangster from the

movies, even though he'd grown up in Newport Beach,

California. The old wooden walls of the rooms inside the

plantation shack were about a half-inch thick; I could hear

every coke deal and every time Sam and Karen had sex.

My apartment was the size of a closet, hence its

name. My bed was accessible by a ladder. The wooden floor

had holes in it which I had to step around. I used a shaky

TV dinner table for my desk, and I had to watch it while I

was typing so that one of the legs wouldn't fall into a

hole. I had no running water or refrigerator. I bought a

styrofoam ice chest to protect my food from insects, but the

big, flying Maui roaches burrowed tunnels right through the

styrofoam while I was sleeping. They broke through the

plastic wrapper of my bread and made tunnels through the

whole loaf. I began hanging my food and my toothbrush from

the ceiling by strings. Every night when I'd come home from

driving taxi, I'd find roaches everywhere and remove my

sandals to bludgeon them. Coming home to my welcoming

committee of teeming verm~n was extremely depressing. I ate

out a lot, which was a drain on my income and health. I got

a chronic sore throat and spent a lot of time hitchhiking back and forth to Kahului to get a welfare medical card and 56 have tests done. It turned out I was OK. After having every test that several doctors could think of, a tough female doctor looked at me and said, "There's nothing wrong with you. You're just depressed. You need counseling."

She set up a counseling appointment for me the next weekend at a church in Lahaina. My counselor turned out to be a little old lady. I told her the story of my life on

Maui, and she didn't have much to say about it. She asked me if I wanted to see her next week, and I said, "I'll think about it." I walked out of there feeling better. Just putting all the chaos I'd been through lately into organized sentences helped. I felt a sense of resolve that I was going to do something.

I spent the day lying on my uncomfortable bed, surrounded by four dirty wooden walls with ancient green paint cracking off them. The fourth wall had a little screen door with a curtain over it for privacy. Gecko lizards hunted on the wooden beams of the old ceiling, chirping like birds when they scored a mosquito. I saw a glowing, fluorescent blue centipede about eight inches long, the kind that had put Jim in the hospital for two days, go down one wall and into a hole in my floor. A filthy black electric fan swept noisily back and forth blowing hot air over my sweaty body. I could hear Sam and Karen screaming at one of their coke customers. I heard Sam cock an automatic pistol, and I curled up in the fetal position. A 57 bullet would go through Sam's wall and my walls as if they were paper. Introducing a gun into the conflict helped bolster Sam's gangster self-image and made him happy and more magnanimous. He told his customer he'd let him slide for another week. I fell into an uneasy sleep. I awoke hearing Russ yelling at his fat, homely wife, telling her that she'd been unfaithful. I heard him put the bolt into his hunting rifle. I didn't have to resume the fetal position because I was already in it. I just lay there and thought about my life on lovely Maui.

I could hear Motorcycle Mike's stereo from up in his tree house. He was playing the Doors; Jim Morrison sang with life-and-death intensity: "Day destroys the night /

Night divides the day. / Try to run, try to hide / Break on through to the other side •. "

That's it! I thought. It's so fucking obvious.

I've got to break through, no matter what the cost. The world is doomed if there isn't some kind of major breakthrough in consciousness.

I decided to fast for 30 days atop 10,000-foot-high

Mount Haleakala overlooking the moon-like volcanic crater on

East Maui. 40 days was for Jesus, and it seemed too long.

I wanted to break through, not die. I figured that there were a lot of old people alive who had lived through

Hitler's concentration camps; certainly if I had enough water to drink, I could survive for 30 days. 58

I felt like telling somebody about my great plan.

Nobody at Kobo's would understand, so I walked over to tell

Marilyn and the old Hungarian man.- The Hungarian man pretended to be highly psychic about my mission; he knew I was naive enough to buy his act.

"Jerry, you can accomplish what you seek to do in four days," he said in his oracle voice. "It's not necessary for you to stay for 30 days."

Lazy by nature, I was kind of relieved that I could save the world in a mere four days. Marilyn and I walked to

Burger King to celebrate with one of thier fake ice cream sundaes.

"Are you a prophet, Jerry?" she asked.

"Yes," I answered. I actually said "Yes."

Marilyn wasn't even surprised. There were a lot of guys who thought they were prophets on Maui in those days.

We walked for a long time and she listened to me pontificate about the state of the world. Reagan's nuclear

"Peacekeeper" missiles, global warming, pollution, the death of John Lennon, and the greatness of Rajneesh.

We kissed goodbye. She would leave for Canada before I returned from the wilderness.

I went home and loaded up my backpack with three plastic gallon-bottles of distilled water and one little box of raisins in case I ran out of strength and was unable to hike back down the mountain after my fast. I called up my 59

local friend, Kevin, and asked him to meet me at the Pioneer

Inn. Over beers, I told him about my plan. He thought I was nuts.

"It's winter, bra. You'll freeze to death up there.

Every winter they carry down dead haoles who froze to death in their sleeping bags."

"I feel like it's God's will for me to go up there,

Kevin. I think God was talking to me when I heard that

Doors song, and everything will be alright."

"Well I think you're crazy. But if you go up there, take two sleeping bags and a tent, or I'm telling you, you will freeze to death."

Early the next morning, I set off carrying my overloaded backpack to the highway. I had borrowed a tent and an extra sleeping bag from my affluent coke dealer neighbors, Sam and Karen. I got a ride to Kahului pretty quickly, but after that there was little traffic on the highway. I put my large backpack on and walked for a couple of miles, just thinking. I'd never fasted before. I wondered what it would feel like. I purposely didn't bring anything to distract me from my spiritual mission--no pencil, no paper, no harmonica, nothing but what I thought

I'd need to survive.

My shoulders were aching. There was no way I'd be

able to make it to the summit carrying so much weight, so I

jettisoned two of my three bottles of water. Now, I 60 realized, I had a new problem: not enough water to last for four days of fasting, especially after the arduous hike to the summit.

A nice haole guy picked me up in a new Toyota. We began talking and he tried to sell me his company's new home-water-distilling system. I said I was interested, and he gave me his card. I told him I was going to the mountaintop to fast for four days and that I wished I had more water. He said just a second and stopped the car. He got out, opened the trunk, and took out a gallon of distilled water bottled by his company. I hooked a bungee cord around the handle of the plastic bottle and secured it to my pack and thanked him. I thought the fact that I'd gotten picked up by someone with distilled water and dropped right at the trail head to the top of Haleakala was a definite sign from God.

I hiked for about five miles singing "Om Namah

Shivaya," Sanskrit for "I bow to the Godhead/to myself." I hadn't had anything to eat, and I was starving. When I reached the summit, I was alone. There were often tourists up there, but the tourist season hadn't quite started yet, and all was peaceful and surreal. The red volcanic land stretched out below in an eerie otherworldly scene. The crater was below me. I could see the dots of some backpackers traversing it. 61

I set up my tent, took out my sleeping bags and my miniature camp stove, and lay down to take a nap. When I woke up, I was still hungry, so I decided to meditate. I did several yoga sun-salute exercises and used one of the sleeping bags still in its cover for a meditation cushion.

After meditating, I felt in control of my hunger. Then I noticed some dark clouds approaching my tent.

I didn't know anything about Maui weather at 10,000 feet, but I supposed that if the clouds reached me, I might freeze. They moved towards me, and then retreated. I felt

God was protecting me while I did God's work; I almost felt

I could stop the clouds with my mind.

The sunset was awesome; it was the first sunset I'd ever seen from the rocky peaks of the crater-marked planet

Maui.

That night was freezing. I put on all my clothes and a heavy jacket, zipped myself into two sleeping bags, and zipped the tent closed. I was still freezing. I opened a place for the fumes to get out and lit my little camp stove. I could only burn it for a short time or I wouldn't have fuel to last me the whole four days.

I managed to get through the first night without too much discomfort. But the next morning the clouds came again. And this time God didn't care if I froze to death or not. The clouds covered my tent, and I began freezing to death in earnest. The problem was that both of the sleeping 62 bags I had were really cheap and old, and the little two-man tent was one of those K-mart specials that you can buy for ten dollars.

Lack of food was making it worse. I propped myself up in my sleeping bags and prayed to God. I made myself perfectly still and followed my breathing, and my body stopped shaking so badly. After a few moments, the clouds went away and the sun made my tent hot and stuffy. I was back in shorts and T-shirt in moments. I walked around my campsite and admired the awesome scenery. There were still no tourists about, so I took off my clothes and lay down between two big rocks to shield my body from the wind. When the wind died down, I walked around and explored my campsite. I was the first man. The sky was clear and the sun was beating down. The sea was royal blue in the distance. I sat on a rock and began singing at the top of my lungs a reggae song I'd heard often on Jim's stereo at

Kobotaki's:

We had gold, we had silver, we had cultural

things,

Before there was slavery, there were black

queens and kings.

Our black civilization will rise to the foe.

Our black civilization will rise to the foe!

I was really getting into this song when suddenly two fat Australian tourists, a man and his wife, seemed to 63 come out of nowhere. They walked along the trail right up to where I was singing. I stopped and said, "How's it going?" I was beyond being embarrassed, a naked white boy

from the suburbs singing about black liberation.

"Fine. It's really beautiful up here," the man

said.

"Yeah, it sure is," I answered.

They set up their tent in a campsite right next to mine. I was pissed off, but I realized that God must have had some reason for sending them to me. The reason soon became apparent: I was going to freeze tonight without their white gas for my camp stove. The dark clouds approached

again, and the wind came up. I put my clothes on and went

to borrow the fuel. We ended up talking in their tent

almost until sunrise. I went back to my tent and slept for

a while. I dreamed of food, of eating mahi mahi at the

Ocean House restaurant in Lahaina, and drinking good wine.

I woke up a couple of hours later and watched a magnificent

sunrise. My hunger was gone, and I felt clean and pure. I

cried at the beauty and majesty of nature as the clouds

turned fiery red and lavender.

For the next two days and nights, the weather was

fine. The Australians moved on to hike down to their car.

I meditated, walked, and sang religious chants. I forgot

all about my little package of raisins. I thanked God and

felt bliss. I felt I had truly broken through to 64 enlightenment. I drank a cup of hot water and prayed for world peace.

On the fourth day, I packed up my tent and began the hike down to the highway. I no longer felt hungry, but my strength was gone. Still, I didn't eat the raisins. I chanted "Om Namah Shivaya" whenever I thought I couldn't go on, and I finally made it down to the highway. Immediately

I got a ride from some young tourists headed for Hana, who only wanted to know where they could get marijuana. I told them I couldn't help them today, but, "Have you ever tried meditating?" I might as well start saving the world here as anywhere, I thought, as I rode in the back of their rented

Jeep. They let me off on the highway near the house of one of Uncle Glenn's old girlfriends.

Allison knew me pretty well, but she hadn't seen me for months, not since she'd moved to the other side of the island. She had no idea that I had been in the mountains or that I was going to drop in on her. But prophets don't need an invitation. In my mind, she was lucky to have me. All I owed her was enlightenment. I was so tired that I slept in my clothes on the wooden floor of her small living room without a sleeping bag. I dreamed of Jesus and Buddha with boxing gloves on, fighting.

When I woke up the next morning, I looked at the clock on the wall of her kitchen and realized that it had been exactly four days since I'd eaten, so I asked her if 65 she had anything to eat. I still felt clean and pure and incredibly tuned in to my body. All she had were some Maui potato chips, good coffee, and ciga~ettes. She said she was on the way to the store. I ate the whole bag of potato chips in a matter of minutes and washed them down with rich

Kona coffee. Then I bummed a_cigarette from her. Now I was beginning to feel like myoId self again. I was still starving, so I asked her if I could go to the store with her. She was glad to have me accompany her because she wanted to get rid of me. Just as we were ready to leave her house, she said, "I'm expecting company, and I'm sorry but I really can't invite you to stay."

"That's OK," I said, as I went for my backpack in the corner of her kitchen. I was practicing equanimity, one of Rajneesh's main teachings. I actually wanted to stay very badly because I remembered she was a great cook. At the little market, I bought a health food sandwich made out of tofu and alfalfa sprouts on whole-wheat bread, a quart of carrot juice, and a big greasy donut. Everything there looked delicious. I waved goodbye to Allison as she drove back towards her little house, and I sat down in front of the store to have my feast.

I was very tired and sick from the food and another cigarette I'd bummed from Allison, but I had to get on the road so I could make it home before it got dark. I was afraid of being picked up by locals in the night. 66

A Volkswagen van full of Maui hippies picked me up, and we drove along the winding jungle roads until we got to

Makenna Beach. There, we sat on a-seawall and passed around a bag of psychedelic mushrooms. I was beginning to feel famished again, not so much for food but for the idea of food, the act of chewing something solid. Our conversation was animated, and each time the plastic bag of mushrooms came around to me, I forgot they were a psychedelic drug, and I ate them as hors d'oeuvres, as food. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had eaten enough psychedelic mushrooms to make 20 hippies very high. I walked around. I was walking on mountain ranges, stepping over oceans. I could hold planets in my hand. Then I stepped off the sea wall and fell 10 feet to the shiny black rocks below. I fell in slow motion, and the rocks I landed on were made of chocolate pudding. I was totally unhurt. The hippies came and retrieved me and drove me home in their rented van. I stuck my head out the window and threw up allover the side of their van, but they were cool about it. They were glad to be rid of me when we got near Lahaina, though. They were staying at a campsite in Olowalu, so they didn't take me all the way into town.

Around Lahaina, I'd actually become kind of famous.

The marijuana-smoking crowd had an altered sense of time and didn't know if I'd been away in the mountains for 30 days or three minutes. The next car that picked me up was driven by 67 a young waiter. I told him I'd been camping on Haleakala, and he said, "Aren't you the guy who fasted on Haleakala for

30 days?" I answered dejectedly, ~It was more like three days, and then I fell off a seawall." "Far out."

I returned to my Closet and thought about what my next move should be. I was out of work, my plans to travel to Thailand and see my stepfather were dashed, and I felt not only depression, but terror. On my first night back,

Teddy threw somebody through the plate glass window of his second-floor apartment, and the body thudded on the ground right in front of me as I walked up the path to the part of the plantation shack that contained The Closet. The person got up off the ground and limped away.

I decided I had to leave the island.

My guitar was an excellent hand-made Spanish classical model that I knew Kevin liked a lot. The next morning I sold it to him for $300 dollars. I sold a gold necklace I'd bought from Marilyn at the Hyatt gift shop to

Teddy for another hundred. I paid the guy at the body shop as much as I could, saving just enough for a plane ticket and some pakalolo to sellon the mainland to get up enough money for an apartment and a car. I was getting out of here. I was going back to L.A. where it was safe.

I got a cheap one-way ticket through a travel agent friend in Lahaina and bought a big box of bud leaf, almost useless on Maui but a desirable, strong drug on the 68 mainland, from Russ. I walked to Nagasako's market and bought some ground coffee and some plastic trash bags. On the way home, I walked through the-old Whaler's Graveyard and found a piece of broken gravestone.

Apparently, the police dogs they had at the airports and post offices couldn't smell marijuana if it was packed in coffee. When I got back to Kobo's, I dumped the marijuana into a plastic bag and sealed it tightly with one of the little twist wires that came with the bags. I put some coffee into another plastic bag. Then I put the bag containing the marijuana into the bag containing the coffee and sealed the coffee bag. I put this bag into another bag of coffee, and so on, until I had four layers of coffee around the marijuana. I wrapped this package in a blanket and placed it all into a strong cardboard box to which I added the piece of a gravestone for weight. A light box from Maui was almost certainly marijuana, and if a mailman ripped me off, there'd be nobody I could report it to.

Finally, I put in an anonymous note to my brother in L.A. saying that this marijuana was a gift from some grateful person who he had done a good turn for in Hawaii last year, something like, "If you hadn't helped me get my car started, we would have missed our plane and our whole vacation would have been ruined." Since it was a felony to send pakalolo in the mail, I didn't want my brother to get busted if the cops came into his house while he was opening it. I taped 69 the seams of the box carefully and addressed it to my brother. I used a false return address.

I caught a taxi just leaving from Kobotaki's and went into Lahaina to mail the box. There was a long line of tourists in the post office, and it was very hot and stuffy

in there. Several people had big coconuts with the green hulls still on them, the addresses of their friends and relatives written right on the coconuts. I stood holding my

large box and wondering what was that strange sweet

fragrance I was smelling. I'd never smelled anything like

it. Suddenly I realized that the aromas of the fresh­

roasted Kona coffee and the marijuana were mingling into a

pungent odor that was filling the whole post office. The

nice old postal clerk, Leilani, was looking at me. She knew me and my uncle by name. She was old but she was sharp, and

I started to wonder if I could get away with this. I'd

heard that local guys inside of prison were pretty hard on

haoles. I noticed Crazy Robbie standing in a second line

right beside me. "Hey, Robbie, howzit?" I said.

He turned around, happy to see me, and said "Howzit

Jerry. Whatcha got in that box? Marijuana?" He had no idea

that there was really pot in the box. A few people turned

and stared at me and my smelly box. I was sweating and

trying to look normal. "No, it's just some clothes and Kona

coffee for my brother's family," I said. It was my turn to

go to the counter. Kindly, grandmotherly Leilani looked at 70 my box and didn't comment on the sweet, sickening, extremely unusual smell emanating from it. "How's your uncle, Jerry?"

she asked. "Oh, he's just fine. Still driving taxi and going out with tourist girls." She placed postage on the box, stamped it, threw it in a bin, and took my money. "Bye bye, Leilani," I said, knowing that she might just be playing it cool until I left the post office.

When I got home, I got a message from Teddy that

Jeannie had called and that she was being released from prison in Honolulu to have her baby on Maui. Jeannie wanted me to be there for the birth. I called the airline and canceled my flight indefinitely. I caught a blue-and-white bus to Jeannie's and welcomed her back. Margie kind of scowled at me. Later I found out that the doors didn't line up right on her car and that the new paint didn't quite match the old. She didn't want to ruin Jeannie's homecoming by talking about it, though. The TV was on as always, and the dinner was great. Jeannie seemed subdued and sad, not her old happy and positive self. She said she was going to be allowed to stay out of prison on probation. I was bored hanging out at Jeannie's house for the next few days, but I was just about broke, and her rich mom was paying for the groceries, so I didn't complain. Jeannie found our old

Lamaze notebook, and we practiced her breathing and me timing her contractions. 71

Jeannie woke me up at two in the morning. She was

having labor pains. Her mother drove as Jeannie sat in the

front passenger seat tilted all the way back. I sat in the

back seat timing her contractions and her pulse and

reminding her to breathe deeply.

The birth was the first I'd ever witnessed. It

seemed to be going fairly well and quickly, but when the

baby's head came out, the doctor was visibly shocked. The

baby had a large tumor on its head, the size of a tennis

ball. Jeannie was cool, but she was afraid that I would

faint. After the baby was born, she told me to go into the waiting room and tell her mother that it was a healthy boy

and that everything was fine. I did so, asked for a

cigarette and the keys to the BMW, and drove around Wailuku,

thinking. Like all humans, I wondered if God punished

people randomly or on purpose.

After I was sufficiently relaxed, I returned to the

hospital to find out what was happening. The doctors had X­

rayed the baby's head and found that, luckily, the tumor was

separated from the brain by the skull. The baby would be

OK. They said not to worry; the tumor would gradually

diminish in size and disappear by the time the baby was

five.

Jeannie was allowed to bring the baby home, and I

played father for a couple of days. She was so proud of her 72 baby. Her old strength and indomitable spirit were returning. She named him Sean Gerald (after me) Hewitt.

Margie was worried about the big, ugly, veiny tumor.

She had me use her good Polaroid camera to take a picture of it for her to mail to Children's Hospital in Seattle.

Jeannie was sad that I was leaving Maui, but she accepted it. Everybody was always leaving Maui; you get

"rock fever" after living there for a while. She kept it a secret that Teddy was having a big going-away party for me.

Jim Black was there, his blonde hair in dreadlocks like a Rastafarian. Crazy Robbie, Motorcycle Mike, Russ,

Big John, Uncle Glenn, the passionate lovers Freddy and

Dorrita, even Sam the gangster and Karen. I played Teddy's guitar for everybody and sang a funny song I'd written about

Freddy and Dorrita. Cocaine and pakalolo were abundant, as well as Primo Beer. Jeannie was there, and she had tears in her eyes as she watched me playing and singing. Kevin, my local friend, was there with his new girlfriend, Mavis, the hostess from the Hyatt. No wonder he hadn't wanted me to go out with her. It was a good party, and I felt very touched and sad to be leaving Maui. I started to have second thoughts about leaving, so

I delayed making new flight reservations. I knew I'd leave soon, but in the meantime I picked up a few shifts in various taxis just to make enough money to live, and I enjoyed the beautiful white beaches and the refreshing 73

water. But a few things happened that renewed my

determination to leave.

Jim Black, my so-called guru, who lived in the Cave

at Kobotaki's, surprised me by inviting me flying. I didn't

even know he had a flying license. He had rented a plane to

take a sexy blond tourist girl flying for her 18th birthday.

When I saw the clear pill container with six neatly-rolled

joints in it that he was planning to bring aloft with them,

I declined the invitation. The plane Jim rented stalled when he was doing aerobatics above the coast of Kihei, and

he crashed into the sea. When divers found the plane about

100 feet below the surface, Jim and the woman were still

strapped into their seats. They looked perfectly OK, the

woman's long blonde hair flowing in slow motion in the ocean

current that moved through the broken windshield of the

plane.

within that same week, Motorcycle Mike blew his

brains out with his .45 automatic.

Teddy's girlfriend's baby was born with an extra

thumb.

And then Jeannie had to leave for Seattle

immediately. Jeannie called me on Teddy's phone and told me

that when doctors at Children's Hospital saw the picture I'd

taken of the baby's deformity, they had told her to get the

baby on a plane for Seattle immediately so they could

operate. They said that without an operation, the baby 74 would die within a few weeks. The large veins inside the tumor were making his heart work too hard.

Yes, it was definitely time for me to go. Uncle

Glenn had just been punched at random by a local in a bar.

The Boeing Hydrofoil Seaflight boats were grinding up dolphins daily. My friends were dying or leaving the island. And a Japanese corporation was building a 12-story condominium on the exact spot on Makena Beach where I had

juggled the spheres of the universe. I got my things together and special requested a-Ball, Glenn's taxi.

Uncle Glenn, accompanied by two tourist girls who looked like models, drove me to the airport and kissed me goodbye. I cried when I we parted. He was a good uncle.

Somebody flagged him down at the airport, so he took off with a fare in his car and didn't see me to my plane. I took a small jet to the Honolulu airport on Oahu and waited around in a bar where they were playing "We're going to a hukilau."

When it was almost time for me to board my plane, I walked through the long corridors past gate after gate at

Honolulu's international airport. I was a little early for boarding, so I stood around and watched people, wondering what their stories were. Somebody tapped me on the

shoulder. I turned around and looked up at Lucretia. She was wearing regular Levi's and a blouse, but they were both dyed a strange, rich purple color. 75

I was leaving for L.A. in 15 minutes from Gate 25, and she was leaving for Oregon in 20 minutes from Gate 21.

I didn't see Nathan around, so I h~gged her tightly.

"Lucretia, I love you," I said. She had a kind of detached

love in her eyes, and she answered, "I love you too, Jerry."

It was obvious that her love was the kind of love one has

for mankind, or God, a general kind of love, not romantic.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm going to Oregon; I'm going to stay with some beautiful people who love me."

"What about Nathan?"

"He doesn't know I'm leaving. He thinks I'm at his aunt's house helping her cook for his father's birthday party. How about you? Where are you going?"

"I'm going to L.A. to stay with my brother. I can't take it here anymore. Too many strange things keep

happening. And I'm lonely here; I really don't belong."

"Everybody belongs, Jerry. We're all God; we're all

the same being looking at itself from different angles."

She was starting to sound like me, and it sounded

silly, even to me. I wasn't sure if she was making fun of me or not. I was so attracted to her, though, that I would

have done anything for her. On an impulse, I unzipped a

pocket of my backpack and got out a solid-gold cross my

grandmother had given me. It was over a hundred years old.

"Here, Lucretia. I want you to have this. And I want to 76 see you again someday. After you get settled in Oregon, call me up. Here's my brother's number," I said, as I wrote it on a page from my litt~e notebook and wrapped the cross with it. "Good luck, Lucretia."

"Nahmaste," said Lucretia. She was acting strangely. It wasn't like her to speak Hindi.

Once my plane reached cruising altitude, I sat cross-legged as best I could in a coach-class seat and meditated. At 30,000 feet off the ground, I accidentally found my way out to the maze that Jim Black had spoken of.

I completely merged with the Godhead and knew all. What I knew was that all of reality was in my own mind; it was like a thick dream that only seemed substantial; the whole universe was merely a movie that I was projecting for myself to live in.

As my legs started falling asleep and a seatbelt buckle distracted me by digging into my thigh, the responsibility of being God and holding the whole universe together suddenly became too much; I was afraid I couldn't even hold the plane I was riding in together. I started to become my miserable, skinny, hippy self again, yet I still had the awesome responsibility of holding the universe together. Suddenly, I saw the huge jetliner break up midair. People, luggage, and seats tumbled towards earth.

I was belted into my seat as I plummeted through the lovely blue sky and soft white clouds. I forced myself out of God 77 consciousness and back into being a regular person just in time for the plane to make a normal landing.

My brother and his wife met me at the airport in

L.A. They had just become born-again Christians, and they started preaching to me before I even got my backpack from the luggage carousel.

Tim said, "Jerry, you can't believe the difference in your life once you find Jesus. It's so great, that there's no way to describe it. I'd be happy if you were hit by a truck and paralyzed for life, if that led you to becoming a Christian; that's how great Christianity is."

Madye chimed in, "Do you know how long eternity is?

Can you imagine being tortured for eternity just because you couldn't accept the gift of God's own Son, who sacrificed his life so that you could live in heaven forever?"

I said, "I already believe in God, but I get closer to God from meditation than from studying the Bible. Don't you realize that there are many bibles on this planet?

You're just coming from the culture that emphasized this particular Bible. Hinduism has heaven and hell, and even a god, Krishna, who came to earth in the form of a man and did miracles for holy purpose--"

"Meditation is of the devil," said Madye. "A still mind is the devil's playground. And all those other religions are false. Does any other religion have a Messiah who was able to rise again three days after his death?" 78

"Well, actually, yes •• " But she didn't want to hear it. Tim was glad to see me even if I was a heathen.

When we, got to their apartment, Tim showed me the box that I'd sent from Maui. It had arrived a week ago.

"What's in it, Jerry?"

"Pakalolo."

"What's pakalolo?"

"Da kine."

"Come on, what's in the box?"

"Marijuana, my brother."

Madye scowled. "I'm sorry, Jerry," she said, "but we can't have that box in this house. Marijuana is of the devil."

"Then why did God create it?" I asked, but her mind was made up. Tim compromised and said I could keep the box there for one more day until I made other arrangements.

After they went to sleep, I found a couple of baggies and weighed out a couple of ounces on Madye's kitchen scale. I walked out to a busy cross street and waited for a taxi with a young driver in it to come by.

Finally one came and I flagged it down. I showed the driver my marijuana and sold it to him for a ridiculously-low price. He drove me to my brother's house, where I picked up my box of weed and my backpack. He took me to a cheap motel. I used the money he'd paid me for the dope to pay the driver and for the room. 79

The next day I called up everybody I knew and sold all of the dope. My prices were so good that nobody could refuse; they could break up the fat ounces I was selling them and sell quarter ounces for what they were paying for the whole ounce. That evening, I bought a '63 Rambler station wagon, with overdrive, that I found in the classified section of the paper.

Now that the pot was gone, I could move back in with

Tim and Madye. They preached to me in stereo, standing on either side of me every evening as I washed the dinner dishes. I felt very weary.

I'd gotten a job at a big department store loading and unloading trucks. The loading dock was under the massive building, and I felt buried alive after the clean and natural beauty of Maui and the freedom of being a cab driver. I remembered how I'd park my taxi and jump in the ocean any time I got too hot.

The freeways were a nightmare. I had forgotten how ugly parts of L.A. were. It seemed inconceivable to me that humans could live in such ugliness. The air was so filthy, and the background noise after about six in the morning seemed deafening.

On my days off, I walked around like a freak, wearing big, loose drawstring pants and faded Aloha shirts.

My hair was long and light from the sun, and my skin was tanned brown. The transmission on my Rambler died, so now I 80 was working just to pay my brother back for the repair bill.

I started riding the bus to work so I'd have more time to read. I read a 2000-page biography of Hitler.

One night, Tim told me there was a woman on the phone who wanted to speak to me.

It was Lucretia. "Jerry, how are you?" I was dumbfounded. I stammered that I was fine and that I missed her. "Come and visit me. Here's my address."

I told her I would after I got my finances in order.

In a few weeks, I'd paid my brother back and had a couple hundred dollars left. I said goodbye and thanks to

Tim and Madye and took off for Oregon. Now my Rambler was only running on five cylinders, but I made it all the way to the little town where she said she lived.

A gas station attendant had an odd look on his face when I asked him how to get to the address Lucretia had given me. He looked at me like I was some kind of criminal.

His directions led me out into the country, and I was starting to think he'd purposely sent me on a wild goose chase, when I saw a road sign that said "Brahma Road," the street Lucretia had told me to look for. Hindu street names in Oregon? This must be it. I noticed a pickup truck going the other way. The man and woman in it were wearing purple clothes. I turned into what seemed to be a large ranch and was stopped by two men at a guard shack. They both wore purple clothes. They asked me if I had any sound-recording 81 equipment or cameras. They searched me for weapons and did a thorough search of my car. Then they said "Nahmaste" and pointed me in the direction of Lucretia's house. I pulled in front of an old two-story house and parked. When I got out, I heard a hissing sound and watched one of my tires go flat right before my eyes. Well, at least my car got me here.

As I approached the house, I realized that there must be a big party going on. It sounded crazy in there. I knocked, but nobody answered, so I opened the old front door and entered. Everywhere were attractive young people in purple Levi's, shirts, dresses, and robes. Some were dancing, some were playing musical instruments. One guy was sitting alone in the kitchen eating a whole chocolate cake.

A young man with a pale-green complexion was sitting on a sofa next to a large ashtray, smoking cigarettes. I watched him light a new one from the butt of the last.

Every time somebody noticed me, they would say

"Nahmaste" and hug me as if I was their dearest friend and then go about their business. There were many rooms in this house, and something was going on in all of them. In one room with its door ajar, I saw two women making love, in another two men and three women in the same bed. In another room, a naked young man was being Rolfed--having a deep massage from a Rolfer who was pushing her hands so deeply into his muscle tissue that his body was turning black and 82 blue. Everybody here seemed to be involved in questionable behavior. I didn't see Lucretia anywhere. She wasn't expecting me on any certain day--I'd wanted to surprise her.

In another room, a young man was meditating and screaming at the top of his lungs while another young man rubbed his finger in tiny circles around and around the screaming man's "third eye" in the center of his forehead.

I walked down some stairs to a large basement. There were at least 50 purple-clad people wearing pink blindfolds and dancing to loud electric sitar and synthesizer music pumped through powerful stereo speakers. They were dancing with total abandon since nobody could see them, they thought, and since they couldn't even see themselves. It was very freaky. They danced frenetically, intensely, insanely, a primal movement of beautiful rich kids going crazy. By now,

I'd seen about 20 worshipful oil paintings and posters of

Rajneesh on the walls. I knew where I was. This house was part of the massive Rajneesh commune. I guess Lucretia had read my book after all.

I continued to watch the dancers leaping, bumping into walls and one another, spinning, reaching, writhing, shaking spasmodically. Abruptly, the recorded electronic music came to a halt, and everybody immediately lay down on the floor in the yoga "corpse position." Apparently, the point of going from frenetic motion to stillness was to release suppressed feelings. Many of the dancers were 83 sobbing uncontrollably, while others did their lying-down meditation in silence. I could hear the hissing of the blank part of the tape playing through the speakers. After a few minutes, Rajneesh's nasal voice came through the speakers. It was a lecture about religion in the world. As he built up to his main point, there were tears in his voice: "Organized religion is pathological for the human race." I walked back up the stairs, through the weird house, and sneaked out into the night. I followed a cement walkway to the back of the house and peed behind some trees.

I was suddenly blinded by a spotlight, and two of Rajneesh's perimeter guards jumped out of the bushes and ordered me to lie face down on the cement. One of them had an Uzi machine gun. They searched me carefully, looking for cameras, recording equipment, weapons, or maybe perfume, which

Rajneesh was deathly allergic to. They allowed me to go back to my car. I changed my flat tire in the dark and drove away. THREE FATHERS

-1~92 -

There are three men who call me their son. Each man introduces me: "This is my son, Jerry."

- 1939 -

1. When little Gerald Truman Smothers Jr's. cat scratched him, he threw it hard into the bathtub and ran scalding water. The cat paddled as eight-year-old Truman pummeled its head with his fists. Then Truman strangled the cat. Gerald Truman Smothers, senior, owned several banks ln

Arizona and Nevada. Little Truman was an only child, spoiled by his mother. Truman wrote a sweet essay in the third grade called "Why I love my mother" and won a prize.

Truman: my biological father.

2. Young Leroy Jack Steiner, wearing the suit his parents had bought him for his bar mitzvah, was walking home

84 85

from temple. He cut through the park, where he noticed a boy walking on the frozen surface of the lake. The ice cracked, and the boy fell in. The boy was drowning, so

Leroy jumped into the freezing water and saved him. When

Leroy got home, his mother made him take a hot bath. She held his head under water and almost drowned him for ruining his new suit. Later, she whipped him with the cord from the electric iron. Al Steiner, Leroy's father, was a watch repairman who moonlighted as an elevator operator. He pickpocketed watches in the crowded elevator and never got caught. The Steiners were a poor family in the Bronx of New

York. Leroy was beaten if he got caught stealing, but not for stealing. Leroy read the family's set of Encyclopedia

Britannica from A to Z before he turned 15. He had a fantastic memory. He taught himself to play the trumpet.

Leroy: my first stepfather.

3. Richard James Dunham, using only a screwdriver and a hammer, was trying to change a tire on the Model A flatbed Ford. His father, Charles, sat on the truck bed

looking down at little Richard, who was furiously trying to turn the lug nuts by driving the screwdriver into them at an angle. Charles had forgotten the lug wrench at the cabin.

They were driving around the Arizona desert looking for old

radiators to sell in town for the copper they contained.

"You stupid little bastard, let me do it!" screamed Charles. 86

The father grabbed the tools from his ll-year-old son and set to work, shaking with anger at himself. He missed the

screwdriver with the hammer and tore his knuckles. Richard

laughed. His father chased him around the truck, screaming at him, and tried to hit him with the hammer. He threw the hammer at Richard as hard as he could, and it missed and went flying off into the brush. Silently, Charles got into the truck and started off towards the cabin, driving on the

flat tire. Richard ran to catch up and jumped on the back.

When they got home, Richard's mother and sister were miles away, camping with the bee hives to protect them from poachers. Charles made Richard dig a hole behind the cabin.

Richard's punishment was to be buried up to his neck.

Charles tamped the dirt down, stamping around Richard's head with his big boots, and drew his foot back to kick Richard

in the face. Richard winced and closed his eyes as tight as

he could, waiting for the blow, but it didn't come; the

father turned and walked back into the cabin and left him

buried like that all night.

It was a terrifying night. He couldn't fall asleep

or coyotes might eat his face. Every time he'd think he heard a coyote, he'd make terrible sounds to scare it away.

Charles took off in the truck early the next

morn~ng. Richard was left immobile in the rocky sand under

the Arizona sun that heated up the sky as soon as it rose

above the mountain. He cried and sweated and became 87 delirious, seeing coyotes and lizards coming to get him.

Finally, after school was over, an Indian kid came and dug him out. He'd heard the strange sounds during the night, even though his family's cabin was almost half a mile away.

The water pump was broken, so Richard used rags to clean himself, and he went to school the next day with a red, sunburned face that embarrassed him more than his shoes with the soles taped on. Richard is my second stepfather.

1950 - 1970

1. Truman became a newspaper reporter. He worked in Albuquerque, Phoenix, and in Las Vegas, where he met my mother, who looked like a movie star. I was born nine months after they married. They were Unitarians and then

Christian Scientists, and Truman experimented with yogic meditation. I remember sitting ln a little car seat that was clamped onto the front seat of his big Buick and runnlng my fingers around the frame of it in front of me, where the plastic coating was bunched up around the corners. I sat between my parents as they screamed at each other. Truman's face looked purple as he drove and shouted. They got divorced while he was going to chiropractic school when I was three. Truman was devastated by the divorce. He moved to Arkansas to avoid making child-support payments, and he enrolled in a Bible college. 88

2. Leroy met my mom when I was three and a half.

He was a rough and loud intrusion into my life. He took me fishing and mountain climbing when I was only four. While we were growing up, he lectured to my brothers and me while our family ate dinner. He used a chalkboard beside the dinner table to illustrate his points. When I was five, I already knew the orbits of the planets, what molecules and atoms were, and I probably knew more than any other five­ year-old about the construction and function of land mines used in the Korean War. Leroy Steiner, who had trouble getting Top Secret Clearance from the government because his mother had signed a socialist document in the late 30's to get a free can of food, did finally get Top Secret

Clearance. He was a very good explosives chemist. When I was 12 o~ 13, he developed an explosive charge to work in conjunction with some other kid's father's invention, a device which sensed when a napalm bomb was 50 feet above the

Vietnamese ground. The idea was to scatter the napalm as far as possible. This work didn't sit well with Leroy, especially after he smoked marijuana. He took my brothers and me to peace marches on the weekends. Once, for variety, he took us to a pro-war parade. Some people had carefully painted signs which they taped to the sides of their cars in the parade: "Kill a Commie for Christ." Leroy stole explosives from the company he worked for and sold them through a fictitious corporation. We were the first family 89 on the street to have a color TV and a built-in pool. My mom had a wardrobe that matched her white Cadillac. Leroy worried about money and screamed when lights were left on.

His neck got very red when he screamed.

Leroy and my mom got divorced when I was 16. He went to live in Tahiti with a very pretty 21-year-old woman.

He brought along a book by Buckminster Fuller that showed how to make geodesic domes. Leroy and the woman lived in a dome, and Leroy hunted shark with a spear gun and planted marijuana seeds wherever he roamed. His taste for women, good dope, and good food eventually led him to Thailand, where he became an English teacher.

3. Richard Dunham drank a Michelob as he stood with the other white-shoed, gold-spectacled Chevy dealers and their wives watching the Hawaiian dancers at a luau at the

Maui Sheraton. Richard's second wife, my mom, a beautiful blonde with a surgically-rejuvenated face and silicone breasts, stood by his side, smiling. I was happy that they trusted me, now 17, to stay home and take care of my brothers without Richard's mother coming over.

It was a good opportunity to try LSD. It was supposed to be cool to see your face melting in the mirror, but I found it quite horrifying. The walls and ceilings were alive with changing patterns. The dentist's daughter from next door, a Seconal addict, came over at three in the 90 morning to see if I had any lighter fluid for her to huff.

I did, so she squirted some on a sock and inhaled deeply.

Talking with her kept me from going out of my mind completely.

- 1981 -

1. Truman, now Brother Truman, started up the old

Jesus van, a '72 Ford Econoline. He clicked on the CB radio and mentally went over the sermon he was going to preach to truckers on Jesus Channel 19. He pulled off the highway at a rest area atop a hill.

He strained and forced his faltering voice, never for a moment doubting that there were scores of truckers hearing his message. "You are teetering, my sinner friends, on the brink of the flaming fiery furnace of hell," he rasped into the microphone. "Imagine the smell of burning human flesh, the sound of gnashing teeth and screaming; imagine burning in the Lake of Fire for all eternity, where the damned are lined up in long corridors and packed so tightly together that they are unable to move; they are helpless even to remove from their eyes the worms that gnaw on them! Imagine the blood boiling in your veins, your brain boiling in your skull, your heart bursting in your chest, and your eyes bubbling in their sockets! There is only one hope and He is Jesus, the Son of God. He loves you 91 so much that He died on that terrible cross to save you from your sinsl Accept Jesus as your Savior and bind the devil and his hellish demon spirits and cast them far from youl"

Bro. Truman had worked up a good appetite preaching.

He went to a truck stop for some pancakes and eggs. As always, he carried a wooden cross, two feet by one foot, and plunked it down on the table next to the place mat. He tried to remember what he had said over the CB so he could use it later in the day for his sermon on the local radio station in Bandon, Oregon. Although he was quite well-to­ do, he left only a glossy Jesus tract as a tip for the waitress. He budgeted the money he'd inherited from his parents so that he'd be able to buy time on the local radio stations for a long time to come.

I wrote to him occasionally, and sometimes he answered. I met him, once, when I was hitchhiking through

Oregon, and he looked dangerous. I asked him if I could borrow some money to buy a motorcycle, and he told me something about Jesus riding a donkey, and I gave up.

2. Leroy went into the lobby of a storefront in

Bangkok, Thailand, and saw through one-way glass 100 or so lovely young women dressed in evening wear. They sat on carpeted tiers, facing their own reflections in the opaque side of the one-way glass, watching a big TV. Each woman wore a red plastic badge the size and shape of a poker chip. 92

Each badge had a different number on it. Leroy had just gotten paid for a week of teaching English at the Police

Academy, so he decided to splurge. On his far left were the younger girls. There were a few 10-year-olds, but that seemed wrong to him. He settled for three 14-year olds. He told the man at the desk the numbers of the girls he wanted.

The man tried to charge the American rate and was surprised that Leroy could read the Thai on the price list. Leroy said in passable Thai: "I live in Thailand; I want to pay the Thai rate." The man went into the carpeted room to fetch the girls and then led the girls and Leroy down a hallway into a nice room with a high bed and a sunken bathtub made of tile. The girls bathed Leroy and did everything he wanted. He knew how to talk about sex and

food in Thai very well.

3. Richard had lost his Chevy dealership in San

Mateo, California, when people started switching to Japanese cars. He lost his airplane and his money. He had, however, a $12-million-dollar parcel of land to fall back on in his hometown of Bauxite, Arizona. He and my mom moved there and developed the land and bought a honey business and a gold mine. After a few years, their cash flow was back to

normal, and Richard bought a twin-engined airplane, which he

kept in a hangar on his own airstrip. He had over a hundred

pairs of fine cowboy boots and shoes in his closet. 93

Shortly after Richard became mayor of the town of

Bauxite, which he practically owned, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He kept her at home as long as he could, but eventually she had to be hospitalized. Richard had always worked long hours and had never had much time for my mother, but now that she was 80 miles away in a rest home and didn't even recognize him anYmore, he was disconsolate.

To save his sanity, he fixated on singing. Every night after his 16-hour work day, he would sing country music into a special amplifier that had a tape deck in it. He played tapes that had the music tracks of hit songs without the vocal tracks, and sang along in place of the famous singers.

He sang with local musicians in the little bars. It was an amazing thing how badly Richard sang, but since he was mayor of the town, and everybody either worked for him or owed him money, nobody ever told the emperor that his voice was wearing no clothes. He screeched and stretched; he speeded up and slowed down. Even when he sang his favorite Merle

Haggard songs, he was a parody of a bad singer. "I got over you, just long enough, to let my heartaches mend / Then today, I started loving you again."

(Still 1981)

I traded myoId Rambler to a guy at a bus station in

Medford, Oregon, for a one-way bus ticket to Denver. I knew 94 some rock musicians there, and I thought that maybe I could play electric guitar in a band. I felt there needed to be a rock band that played radical political songs. When I first got to Denver, I didn't have a guitar or enough money to buy a decent one, so I applied for a job as a taxi driver.

Driving taxi on Maui had been the easiest job I'd ever had, and I thought that it wouldn't be too much different in

Denver.

I was hired by the Zone Cab company. I got the job by cheating on the map test; I had maps up both my sleeves.

I'd only been in Denver for a few days. Once I started working, I learned the city pretty quickly, but it was hard to make money because I didn't payoff the dispatcher like some of the drivers did. Red, the night dispatcher, was an ugly old man with a big red nose. He was an alcoholic, known to go on long amphetamine binges that would end when he finally totalled his big Pontiacs and wound up in the hospital. During recuperation, he'd have to be carried up the stairs to the dispatch office. The day dispatcher used a child's magnetic chalkboard and little plastic numbers in primary colors to keep track of the 60 cabs in the company.

Red didn't need to use the board. He could keep in mind the locations of all 60 cabs. He knew whether they had fares or were empty and their estimated times of arrival, and he could remember which driver was in each cab and how much of a bribe each driver had paid him at the beginning of his 95 shift. I could be waiting first-up on the radio, and he'd get a great call, say a $40-dollar run to a restaurant in

Aurora, and he'd save it until he got a shitty run to give me: "35, pick up at Arapahoe and Larimer." Maybe it'd be a laundry run in the projects. A woman with big bags of laundry and four children. She'd pay me in change, counted out a nickel and dime at a time, and wouldn't even be able to cover the amount on the meter. Red would wait a couple of minutes to make it believable and then give the good call to the second-up driver, who had tipped him at the beginning of his shift. with his mind, I think he could have been a grand master chess player.

I always tried so hard to please Red. For some reason, I wanted his approval. He'd mumble an address to me over the radio, and I'd drive around for an hour sometimes, looking, rather than call him on the radio and admit that I couldn't find it. I figured out one night that I was putting him in the role'of a father and trying to get a father's approval from him.

I leased the cab for $55 dollars a night and paid for my gas. Like the other drivers, I tipped Kathy, the cute blond gas girl, a dollar when I filled up at the end of my shift. If I played my cards right, I could make this money back 1n my first five or six hours. The rest of the money I would make would be mine, so I usually drove 10 hours a night. 96

Once I got wise to tipping Red, I usually made a hundred a night for myself. I'd get out of the cab and look into the night sky. If there were lots of jets, I'd gamble on waiting in line at the airport. Otherwise, I'd hang out in front of the White Spot restaurant on Colfax, the absolute center of strangene~s in Denver. I'd take the runs from Capitol Hill, where most of Denver's gays lived, that the other drivers didn't.want; most of the cabbies were manly types who went to the dog track at some point during their shifts to drink beer and play the dogs, and they didn't like gay passengers. I preferred gay fares: they tipped better and were more polite and more interesting to talk with.

The mUS1C1an friends I stayed with made me feel less than welcome. I was kind of an embarrassment to them because I was still a hippy. They were part of the trendy

New Wave scene. Musicians wore tight black clothes and played World War Three music. Electronic keyboards did most of the work. The lyrics sung by handsome lead singers or sullen blondes 1n black miniskirts were not political, or

just political enough to be cool. I gave up on the on the rock scene and bought a classical guitar like the one I had on Maui. I rented a room in a house. The guy who owned the house had a large, padded primal-therapy box. He'd go inside, close the door, and scream and cry in there for half the day. It was creepy hearing muffled screams all the 97

time. I was happy to ride my new bicycle to the taxi office

every evening.

Instead of the affluent middle-aged tourists who

rode in my taxi on Maui, I now got to meet people from all walks of life. But some of my customers wore me down. I tired of the drunks with their hospital Zone Cab vouchers

(no tip) who reeked of vomit and/or shit. Prostitutes were depressing. And it wasn't unusual to get ripped off by young men who told me they had to "run into the house to get

their wallets," only to disappear through a side yard.

Masturbators were sickening, especially the ones who talked

to you while they did it. I felt degraded by drunk

businessmen telling me in explicit detail about prostitutes

they'd just fucked, filling me in on important data such as

vagina tightness and whether the prostitute "swallowed it"

or not.

I had wanted to interview thousands of people and

find out, naive as this may sound, what America was about,

what was the General Will. It was making me pretty cynical.

with coca1ne increasing 1n popularity, I guessed that there

would be an increase in motivated cab robbers. It would be

real easy to get a knife in the back or, like one young

driver, have my head pounded in with a hammer.

One cool summer night, I was getting a lot of fares

and having a pretty good time. I was driving fast and

getting into the rhythm of the night's business. Suddenly, 98 someone threw a brick through the front passenger window, showering me and the black businessman riding in the back seat with glass. I thought it was a shotgun blast. I felt a sharp pain in my right elbow. I pushed the accelerator to the floor, praying for speed in the old Checker cab. I finally stopped the car and gave the businessman a Zone Cab business card, in case he wanted to sue the company. He had some glass in his eye, he said. I found the brick on my clipboard beside me. My arm throbbed.

My next fare was a prostitute. I took her from place to place; she was searching for some heroin. She kept smoking marijuana to take the edge off her craving.

After several good runs from the airport, I decided to go off the road for a while. I was starting to get cold.

I radioed Red and told him that my window was broken and asked if I could come to the taxi office and switch cabs.

He said there weren't any extra cabs that night. "You can bring your cab in early if it gets too cold for ya, Jerry, and I'll give ya a break on your lease," he said. I felt proud that he'd used my name over the radio. I wanted him to like me, though I certainly didn't like him. I didn't believe him about there being no extra cabs, either.

I parked in front of the Mercury Cafe and went ln for a beer. It was a huge, dark warehouse; a live reggae band was playing exactly like Bob Marley: "Get up, stand up!

Stand up for your rights!" Beautiful white kids from good 99 families, with their fists raised in the air in the power salute, packed the huge dance floor. And there was blond, blue-eyed Kathy, the gas girl, dancing alone in overalls and a white T-shirt, right up front by the band, almost worshipping them. I still hadn't had the courage to ask her out. I knew that every cab driver in the company had a secret crush on her. At the Mercury, because it was a hippy club, it was OK to dance alone, so I danced near to the goddess of the Zone Cab gas pumps. She noticed me, and I shouted hello. She recognized me and shouted hello back and allowed me to dance with her in the dark room, a blur of noise and color. A large black bomb was suspended over the dance floor by chains from the rafters. Kathy, hardly aware of my presence, kept her eyes on the band, especially the lead singer, who was a white guy with his hair in dreadlocks. The other musicians looked like real Jamaicans.

I finished my beer and radioed Red that I was back on the road downtown.

I felt warm now from dancing in the crowded club.

The cool night air felt good. I drove by the neon palm tree sign on the Tiki bar on East Colfax and thought of Maui. I used to look out of my taxi and see palm trees, rainbows, and beautiful sunsets over the royal blue ocean, and now I was driving in an urban-industrial hell.

An urge to meditate carne over me, and I parked ln front of the White Spot. I didn't care that it looked weird 100

for a cab driver to be sitting cross legged in front of the

White Spot restaurant on East Colfax doing Zen meditation

behind the wheel of a taxicab. I wanted to create a new reality. I'd written some articles for a New Age magazine put out by a left-over hippy named Anand. Through him, I had met a bunch of people who-were, like me, stuck in the

60s. Their guru was Amy. Anand (who used to be Ed) played

sitar at Amy's church, and his stunning girlfriend, Camala

(who used to be Karen), sat like a high priestess on Amy's

left, to attract young men into the congregation. Amy

taught that reality was just something that you created and

projected; it was like a thick dream that only seemed

substantial. I was trying, in my dismal cab, to create a

less-slimy reality.

When I finished meditating, I opened my eyes and saw

a beautiful woman come out of the White spot. She came up

to the open front window on my side and said in a man's

voice, "Hi, Jerry." I realized that this was Paul, a

"Christ Brother" who I had spoken to months earlier. I had

met him in a park while he was applying antibiotic cream to

a festering wound on the foot of one of his disciples. I

had told him: "Christianity doesn't require that you and

your followers go barefoot and wear identical white robes

and smoke the same kind of hand-rolled Bull Durham

cigarettes. Jesus is about flexibility. That's the whole

thing," I said, challenging his ego in front of his flock, 101

"connectedness: 'I and the Father are One.' It doesn't matter what clothes you wear or what kind of job you have."

I told him about some cool cafes in Denver that always needed waiters. The next time I saw him, he was a waiter at Muddy's, a bookshop/cafe where Jack Kerouac used to hang out. He gave me a paper he'd typed about

Zoroastrianism. Now, months later, he was a sparkling transvestite.

I smoked part of a joint with him and dropped him off at a hotel, where he had a date with a businessman.

Then I cleared with Red and headed back for Capitol Hill.

"35 off-and-on Capitol Hill," I radioed. "You're fourth up," Red answered. Business was slowing down, and I knew I wouldn't be getting any calls for a while, so I pulled into a closed gas station, into the corner where two cement walls

joined.

I was a little high from smoking marijuana with the

Christian transvestite, and I suddenly felt so weary. I lay down on the grey vinyl seat. A faint smell of vomit wafted up from the floorboards. I curled up into the fetal

position and listened to the hateful, metallic voice of Red

on the taxi radio. He was a poet tonight: "I need a cab at

Five Points / No rain no snow /A man with a gun 1S a free man. Gotcha, 14. 51 pick up at the Brown Palace." I got

up and started the motor. I just drove around, thinking. I

felt a lot of evil around me, then noticed out of the very 102 corner of my eye a black bat-like wing move inside of the cab at the far right of my windshield, as if some demon had almost materialized right in the fucking car. Whooo. Jesus

Christ, get me out of here. Red, shut up! But I couldn't turn off the radio; Red, my horrible surrogate father, was my link to the world at that particular moment.

I felt an urgent desire to talk to my real father.

Maybe my father could help me decide what to do with my life; maybe he could guide me out of this bleak existence.

This was problematic: I had three fathers to choose from.

Let's see now, Truman is out; I've had enough hell lately.

Leroy? I think he's somewhere in Japan or Thailand, and I still don't have enough money saved to fly to wherever he is. Richard? No way. He'd probably put me to work managing one of his trailer parks for minimum wage. Or maybe he'd have me cleaning out bee hives. Truman? Dad?

Richard?

I took the cab back to the office, too early to tip

Kathy. When I got home, I noticed a letter from Leroy in my mailbox. In it was a one-way plane ticket to Thailand.

30,000 feet over the ocean for hour upon hour, lovely Malaysian women serving me free champagne and bringing me hot wet towels and good food, life was already looking up. The junk American movies I watched on the double-decker jumbo 747 reminded me of the land I was 103 leaving, but I had no mental picture of the place where I was headed. I really hadn't given Thailand much thought.

All I knew how to say in Thai was "Saw wahdee, cop": hello.

r looked excitedly out the window as Bangkok came into view. I quickly exchanged addresses with a lovely young Thai woman who sat beside me. She was a business major at Denver University on the way home to visit her parents for the summer. Her eyes sparkled as we said our goodbyes.

Leroy met me as I emerged from the plane into the hot, crowded airport. He looked like a weird Thai gentleman, in a silk shirt with no collar, western slacks, and expensive shoes. His hair was a lot grayer than I remembered, and his mustache was bushy and came down past the sides of his mouth in exotic points. His fingernails were very long. It seemed like he was wearing a lot of gold. He hugged me tightly, and I noticed that he was

getting fat.

We got in his little Toyota. It was so rusted out

that I could see the road rushing by under my feet. It had

a great sound system, though, and he was playing an Elton

John tape. It made me feel strange to be sitting in what

for me had always been the driver's seat, yet having no

control of the car, since the steering wheel was on the

right. It was disconcerting that we were driving on the

left side of the road. I felt giddy. We stopped at a 104

Buddhist temple that had a standing Buddha the size of the

Statue of Liberty, and Leroy had somebody take our picture together. I felt shy putting my arm around him to pose; we hadn't seen each other for a long time.

We drove through Bangkok towards Sam Prahn, 30 miles northwest. Everything in Bangkok looked so foreign to me.

The Thai words on the brightly-colored signs on the buildings looked psychedelic, curling every which way, insane. The sidewalks were crowded with people, everyone with black hair and brown skin. Tuke-tukes, noisy three­ wheeled two-stroke taxis, careened by, belching clouds of gray smoke; the hot streets were packed with people on bicycles, people on foot, and animals. I saw a family of four riding on one Honda 50 motorcycle.

After driving through a few miles of farmland, we reached the town of Sam Prahn. A young cadet on guard duty at the gate of the Police Academy saluted Leroy. As we drove through the Academy, I felt as if I were on the grounds of an American university. We parked, and Leroy carried my suitcase up the stairs of an American-style apartment building. Inside his apartment, there were books and Buddhas everywhere. On one wall was a large framed color photograph of Thailand's king and queen. I went to use the bathroom, a little tile room with a hose for bathing and for flushing the squat toilet. 105

Leroy showed me where I could put my guitar and backpack and told me about his new computer. Then, true to form, he said, "Do you wanna smoke a joint?" I'd just had a one-day stopover in Malaysia, where they had recently executed two Australian students for having less than an ounce of marijuana.

"Is it legal here?" I asked.

"No." I could see myself rotting in a filthy Thai prison. "But we won't get caught."

"OK," I said.

It was too weird being stoned. Leroy was trying to tell me about Thai money and a little about the military governments that changed after each coup; the new governments would always allow the king and queen to remain in their palace. The Thai people loved their king and queen. While he spoke, I was transfixed by the royal portrait on his wall. The queen was so beautiful, I couldn't believe it, and so incredibly foreign, regal, and wise. The king looked like some kind of computer

programmer. Leroy said the king had been a sax player ~n

New York until somebody died in one of the coups. He was contacted and informed that he was the new king. The marijuana had broken down my defenses, and I was starting to

feel the strangeness of a different culture.

The next day, Leroy left for Chicago to translate

for some Thai businessmen who wanted to buy gigantic 106 machines for making tires. He gave me a little book called

"Thai in 10 Minutes a Day," and he was off. I had his apartment and bicycle. This town, Sam Prahn, was far from the tourist track, and I was the only white person in it.

There were no bilingual menus, and not even the bankers spoke English. Every day when I'd get hungry enough, I'd ride Leroy's bike out of the quiet grounds of the Academy and into the bedlam of downtown SamPrahn, reciting over and over again in my head how to ask for an omelet with tomatoes.

The waitress (I found out later) thought I'd said,

"I'd like an egg with a hole in it," and started to laugh.

She tried to understand, but gave up and came back with another waitress. "Koon poot alai? (What did you say?)"

"Ow kow pahk kai cop," I answered. Then she went to get still another waitress. Now three of them stood and laughed good naturedly as I tried to order. Finally, one of them went and got me some spicy chicken, rice, and vegetables, which was fine with me.

I went there every day and studied Thai from one of the pretty waitresses. One day, all three of them came up to my table, and the waitress who was my teacher asked me which one of them I'd like to marry. I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so I said in Thai, "All of you."

The restaurant was on pontoons, floating on a brownish-river covered with water hyacinths. The sky was 107 always misty and yellow grey. Small, old people poling ancient boats silently across the water passed by as I wrote in my journal. Sometimes an ancient boat powered by an American v-a would blast by, shattering the silence.

I rented a motorcycle and rode north to Cheng Mai, where I got a tour guide to take me into the mountains. He took me to a village near the Burma border, where I saw lovely native girls wearing tribal dresses with angular patterns in intense reds and purples. They used small knives with blades shaped like quarter-moons to scrape the opium off the pods of dazzling, colorful poppies growing on the hillsides. Women washed clothes on the rocks and bathed in a little stream. Girls took turns removing the hulls from rice using a large crusher, a lever-and-fulcrum device made from logs.

That night, I smoked op~um with the village chief, who wore a digital watch. We lay on our sides, facing one another, and took turns smoking from a little round water pipe that sat on the floor between us. My bed was the floor of bamboo poles in a hut built four feet above the ground.

Beneath me, I could smell the pigs and hear them moving around. I was awake all night. The opium made my thoughts substantial, almost as vivid as real things. Sometimes the movement of the pigs or the coughing of children would disturb my ruminations, but mostly, my mind was free to wander, create, and study. 108

I felt extreme loneliness. I had come to see my father, and my father was gone. I wasn't feeling bliss from the opium, only a heightened sense of alienation. The

United States, the Denver streets, Thailand, all seemed foreign to me.

When I got back to Sam Prahn, Leroy was home. He had a day off from teaching, he said, and suggested that we go for a drive. It was a chilly day, and the sky was white with fog. We drove for several hours, talking about our lives. Leroy parked the car at the end of a wharf that extended out into the river. The fog was so thick that we could see nothing outside of the car. Occasionally, it would clear just enough to give us a view of the dark river.

We smoked a joint and listened to music from the 60s and

70s, the Moody Blues, Jackson Browne, and Crosby, stills, and Nash, "Teach Your Children."

I told Leroy how when I was a kid, I thought he was a cool guy, but that I imagined he would have thought twice before running into a burning building to save me, while

somebody's real father wouldn't have even considered his own

safety. "Why didn't you ever talk about college or careers with me like other kids' fathers?" I asked.

He took a big, greedy hit from the joint, as he

always did, had a prolonged coughing spasm, thought

carefully, and answered. "Because at that time, I thought 109 all that stuff was bullshit." He looked in the glove compartment for a tape, found it, and put it in the tape deck. He fast forwarded until he found the song he was looking for. It was a song by Willie Nelson about a guitar player, a lover, a dreamer, who traveled and wrote poetry. It sounded like it was about me. Willie Nelson was almost idolizing the guy he was singing about, and I knew Leroy played that tape to try to show me how he felt about me. The white mist surrounded the car. I began to cry, sobbing deeply, and I wasn't embarrassed. Leroy knew what was happening. ONE MOTHER

Leroy walked his fluffy white lamb with a leash and bright red collar through the neighborhood of tract houses in a Los Angeles suburb. He had spent a frustrating day at the plant testing explosives for napalm bombs that were to be used in vietnam. Leroy looked forward to the weekend, when he would spend one night on the boat away from his family. He had bought a cabin cruiser in a marina south of

Los Angeles to use as his trysting place for an affair with a topless dancer. Leroy named the boat after his wife.

The boat was the Timmie II. Shortly after he'd bought it, Leroy mixed some poison to kill Timmie because he wanted the dancer, and he didn't want to pay alimony. The poison would supposedly be undetectable in an autopsy. But he didn't go through with his plan. He experienced what was for him a very unusual feeling: moral compunction. Not p01son1ng Timmie may have been the great moral act of

Leroy's life. Leroy was fearless about going to the edge

110 111

and even stepping over it. He was a dangerously free man.

One might even think of him as an artist.

And yet it was Timmie who was the artist, painting in oils beautiful strange pictures of beggars, lost girls, seascapes, and abstracts of the Madonna and Child. You would have thought Leroy was_just a working guy, a middle­ class chemist who mixed powdered explosives all day and came home and fell asleep in front of the TV. But Timmie had her own studio in the house. She studied French. She played piano and guitar. She transformed rooms of their old ranch­ style suburban house into luxurious salons. She reupholstered cheap, old furniture and made it regal, put fake bricks on the wall, and painted gold leaf on an almost­ antique desk.

Timmie transformed more than her home; her body was something to shape, manipulate, change, like a sculptor works marble. Her plastic surgeon and her orthodontist were her artist's helpers. Her nose became smaller, her breasts larger, her teeth straighter. She designed and made skirts so short that if she bent down, her panties would show. Her big new breasts bulged out of low-cut blouses. Timmie designed her body to what she thought were the specifications of the wayward Leroy. She lightened her already-blond hair and wore Scotch tape on the wrinkles on her brow while Leroy was at work. Her son, Jerry, was 15 112 when her physical transformations began. He studied her behavior.

When Timmie was a child, she was a prodigy, but nobody knew it because her field was philosophy, and she only shared her ideas with her younger sister, Elaine, who didn't understand them. Jus~ as some little girls can play the violin at three, this little girl, born in Nebraska in

1929, could philosophize at age three. At age four, armed with a vocabulary equal to that of most of the adults in her town, she climbed a tree like a little monkey and looked down at her family's small house and yard, and she realized that everything she'd been taught that day in Sunday school was a lie. Everything her mother had told her about God was false. It was a stupid story. Then she almost swooned.

She almost fell to the ground when she asked herself what there was before there was anything. When she conceived of nothingness, she almost swooned again, and again when she asked herself how and from what God had made himself.

Of course her ideas were not new, and though she developed them without academic study, they were not original. What was unusual about her was the intensity with which she thought metaphysical thoughts and the degree to which she felt that her thoughts mattered.

Later in her life, she became concerned with war,

and later, with child abuse. Before she lost the ability to

think, she had decided that if one wanted to change the 113 world, the proper rearing of children was the key concept to

be dealt with. She put all of the problems of the world on mothers: her favorite quote was, "Give me other mothers, and

I'll give you another world."

Timmie was born in a little house belonging to her

Great-Grandad Dewitt. The house was in the small farming

town of DuBois, in Southeastern Nebraska, right above the

Kansas border. Nellie DeWitt, Timmie's grandmother, helped

Agnes, her daughter-in-law, give birth to Timmie. Nellie was addicted to laudanum and was far more exuberant and worldly than other ladies in DuBois. She was plump and her

bosoms were full.

The birth was difficult. Agnes, only 18, was in a

lot of pain. Maybe it was going to be a breech birth.

Nellie DeWitt waddled downtown and found Doctor Grundig. By

the time he got there, Agnes was tired, and the pain was

becoming unbearable. George, Timmie's father, walked home

from his job at the butcher shop down the street and held

Agnes' hands as he had during the births of their other two

children. George was the only man in DUBois who stayed with

his wife during childbirth. He suffered more than she; she

had to hand him the chloroform-soaked rag that the doctor

had given her. Old Doctor Grundig, with crooked, gnarled

hands like claws, brought Timmie into the world. 114

Agnes couldn't nurse Timmie, so she used what the other ladies in the town used: expensive Eagle Brand powdered milk. Agnes added water to the powder to make a thick, sweet, rich liquid, not knowing that it lacked essential vitamins. At six months, Timmie's cheeks became extremely red. The doctor said she was in the early stages of rickets. He instructed Agnes to cook bacon until it was almost black and crumble it up for the baby to eat. He showed her how to boil lean beef in a jar until it became broth. Timmie improved rapidly. She grew to be very beautiful, with deep brown eyes and soft blond hair. When Timmie was three, Agnes made clothes for her exactly like the clothes of Shirley Temple, the famous child movie star, who was the same age and looked almost identical to Timmie. Timmie was desperate for attention. Eugene got a lot of attention because he was the oldest, a boy, and he worked with his father at the butcher shop. When Eugene was home, he ignored the girls, often reading big books with no pictures in them. Evelyn, the first girl, was a dark beauty and the favorite of her father. Then there were Timmie and Elaine. The youngest, Ruby Rose, was supposedly from God, because after Elaine's birth, the doctor had said Agnes would not be able to have more children, so Ruby Rose was automatically special. 115

In the middle of five children born at the rate of one a year, Timmie felt loved only when she sang and danced in the local stage productions put on by her Uncle Lewis in the little town hall. It was the only time her father,

George, ever seemed to notice her.

Her Uncle Johnny, however, always noticed her, and bounced her on his knee so hard she would hurt for days.

But Timmie never cried. She strived to become "the girl with a twinkle in her eye" and "the cutest girl in town"-­ lyrics from two popular songs of the time--and hungered for love from everyone she met.

Timmie felt frightened of the strange universe she found herself in, a world in which she could not use Sunday school or the Bible for instruction, a place where people were small and alone, and tragic things seemed to happen to them at random. From the time of her epiphany in the tree,

Timmie was constantly in awe of the world around her.

Perhaps life was a non-stop religious experience for her.

"What was there before there was a world?" she'd ask her younger sister, Elaine, and they'd both feel chills down their spines and goose bumps forming on their arms.

Timmie had only Elaine, who she made her subject, her disciple. She protected and tormented Elaine. She manipulated Elaine to stay with her. She kept Elaine from

Evelyn, their older sister, using the threat of leaving

Elaine alone. Timmie tested Elaine's love by deserting her 116 in the cornfield or hitting her in the stomach. "There's a bull! A bull's coming!" she'd say to Elaine, lost in the cornfield. She'd bend Elaine's little finger until she'd cry. She made scratches all down Elaine's arms and legs and then convinced her to tell the teacher that a cat had done it. She made her eat dirt. Elaine was loyal and never told on Timmie.

Timmie slept with all three of her sisters in a big bed in the living room of Great-Grandad's house, but cuddled only with Elaine. They slept as one, turning one with the other. They depended upon each other for warmth and safety in the Nebraska winters. Timmie would see things in the dark. "Elaine! Are you asleep?"

Agnes did piecework, sewing for 10 cents an hour every afternoon until after midnight. In the daytime, she was always tired and often took naps. Timmie thought she was gravely ill. Every night she'd pray that her mother wouldn't die. Her prayers became intense when Agnes and

George would argue. "Oh Aggie, come on Aggie," she'd hear George begging

Ln the night. Sometimes, after a loud argument with George,

Agnes would get up and play songs on the piano to settle the kids down. She'd play "Baby your mother like she babied you /

Back in your baby days," and a maudlin rendition of "Your

Silver-Haired Mother." 117

Agnes indoctrinated her children to almost worship her. Maybe this was because Agnes didn't have a mother.

Agnes was the last of 12 children born on a farm to German immigrants. Her mother died shortly after she was born, so mothers were holy, mystical things to her.

Agnes had to fend for herself at an early age. She was very creative and resourceful. When she was nine, the family got a pump organ, and Agnes, who had never touched a musical instrument, could play it immediately. Even though she was the youngest, she was soon expected to cook and care for her big farmer brothers. She was a tough Nebraska farm girl, and at 20, a tough woman and mother of five children.

While all of her children were attractive, Timmie was strikingly beautiful. Agnes would painstakingly craft the most lavish stage costumes for her, and Timmie got many chances to perform. Timmie stopped knowing if she was on stage or off. And fantasy and reality began to blend in her mind. Her old grandmother, Nellie DeWitt, probably had what is now called Alzheimer's disease, and her stories to Timmie were getting stranger and stranger. Nellie, still addicted to laudanum, stimulated Timmie's mind with wild stories that

Timmie could almost see for days after she heard them.

"Where is Lance?" screamed six-year-old Timmie. She and Elaine were frantic. Lance was a thumbnail-sized head cut from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. 118

"Shh. You're going to wake the baby," said Agnes.

"Who is Lance?" she asked, looking up from the clothes she was scrubbing on a washboard in the kitchen sink.

"He's the good little boy who won't let Rollo hurt the cat!"

"Who is Rollo?"

"He's the rich boy who hates Lance!"

"Where do these boys live?"

"Here!" cried Tinunie, holding up an old cigar box.

"I think Ruby Rose took him!" For Tinunie and Elaine, little

Ruby Rose was like a horrible monster, constantly crawling towards the cigar box and threatening its inhabitants.

"Now Tinunie, you know your baby sister hasn't been near your things all day. She's sleeping in her crib. You girls be quiet or you'll wake her up."

Tinunie dumped the contents of the c~gar box onto the big bed and looked once again. There was Lance, stuck ~n the hinge where the paper had begun to crack. She and

Elaine laid out their characters, each a little head with a tab of paper extending from its neck. The girls would place clothing for the characters on the paper tabs. Tinunie and

Elaine searched in the box for appropriate clothes. If they couldn't find what they wanted, they'd cut out a clothed body from the catalog and place it on one of the heads.

Timmie would use crayons to make the clothes of poor 119 characters look dirty or she'd make their socks not match.

The rich would wear fine, expensive clothes.

The girls didn't move the characters. Once they were dressed and set in place on the bed, the drama of their lives took place in the girls' imaginations, with Timmie telling most of the stories,_and Elaine cautiously making suggestions by asking questions. "Will Lance be able to find the cat that Rollo scared?" There was a small community of people living in Timmie and Elaine's cigar box.

Elaine felt the paper characters were real people, real live people. She could feel the weight of the personalities when she opened the box.

The characters couldn't change instantly, but they could make transformations based on their experiences. All of the stories in the girls' ongoing soap opera had a moral.

There were wicked characters, kind ones, evil ones, crippled ones, and sadistic ones. Rollo tormented Lance; Lance helped people and stood up for the crippled boy; Farmer

Johnson yelled at children when they came near his property.

Mabel Ord, the girl with webbed fingers, was crying in the middle of the schoolyard. Some kids stood around her, taunting her. "Look, the duck girl is crying!" they

said. Her shoulder hurt badly where Rollo, the banker's

son, had burnt her by focusing the sun on her skin with his magnifying glass. "Don't worry," said Lance. It'll be OK 120 pretty soon. Don't let that rich meanie bother you. He just doesn't know how to be nice to people."

Suddenly, a wind came up from the north and the spring sky filled with dark clouds. A heavy rain began pouring down on the schoolyard, and the teacher called all the children into the schoolhouse. Nobody noticed that little Mabel Ord had stayed out in the rain. She was embarrassed to go inside because the kids had seen her crying. She walked home in the driving rain.

She walked along the creek, watching it rise. The rain caused a flash flood to roar down the creek and wash away little trees at its banks. As she walked along the creek behind her neighbors' homes, she saw Rollo's father in his toolshed, frantically removing his tools and loading them into a wheelbarrow. The creek came up almost to the shed. Suddenly, the bank caved in, and the toolshed, with the banker in it, crashed down into the rushing water. The shed broke apart, and the banker flailed his arms wildly, trying to stay above water. He became trapped under a fallen tree, and the water rose above his head.

Mabel Ord dived into the water to save him. with her webbed fingers, she was a powerful swimmer and could easily keep her head above water. When she got to the fallen tree that trapped the banker, she pushed on it with all her might and moved it just enough to free him. She pulled him to the shore, where he lay gasping for breath. 121

The next day in school, Mabel Ord was sitting alone during lunch. Rollo came up to her and said, "Thank you for saving my father. That was a brave thing to do. I'm sorry for hurting you yesterday, and I'll never do it again.

Here's my magnifying glass. It's a present for you. And I wondered if you would come to my birthday party tomorrow."

Mabel Ord got her picture in the town paper, and

Rollo's father gave her father money to buy a new tractor.

The banker gave her a new bicycle, and she went bike riding with Lance every day after school.

"Timmie! Elaine! It's time to get washed up for dinner." The girls put the paper people back into the box.

When they finally did lose the paper head that was Lance, the girls mourned.

"We lost his little teeny head, Mama," said Elaine, looking desperately through the house.

Timmie loved to swing on the school sw~ngs.

Swinging put her into a meditative state. Her imaginative play with the paper people and her swinging were ways to get into another world. She would swing so high that Elaine was afraid to watch. There was something special for Timmie about looking down at the world from high places. She was a daredevil who would climb the highest trees and stay there for hours. 122

One of Timmie's favorite high places was the loft of her neighbor's barn. The first time Timmie saw the little naked babies there, she couldn't believe her eyes. They were little pink naked rat babies hidden in nests in the

straw. Their eyes were still closed. She and Elaine sat in the second-story loft and dropped babies down onto the cement below and watched them splat.

That night, Timmie was terrified of retribution by a hairy cat-sized mother rat. And if the mother rat didn't get her, she feared God would. How could she have killed

the innocent, pink babies?

Although she didn't buy the stories she'd heard in

Sunday school about fire and brimstone, she was obsessed with the idea of punishment. Why was Gladys Lukinville born

a blue baby? Why did Doug Kershank have a harelip? Why did

Mabel Ord (a real person as well as a paper one) have webbed

fingers? Why did Dwayne Huffman's left arm stop growing

after the sled accident? She felt guilty about doing bad

things, about rattling Great-Grandad's doorknob after he had

a stroke, about teasing the old gravedigger about the big

goiter on his neck, but she couldn't completely suppress her

dark side.

Timmie would spread egg white on her and Elaine's

arms and let it dry to simulate skin disease. They'd

pretend they were disfigured. They'd draw pictures of some

person who was disfigured or didn't know how to comb his 123 hair. Sometimes the girls would act like they were holding deformed babies, and they'd meet people and be awkward about it.

In order to avoid damnation, whether it was some kind of deformity or eternal burning, Timmie went out of her way to be moral. After church, she looked right at Frieda

Hoffman and sang, "Baby your mother, like she babied you ••• " because Frieda was bad to her mother. Old Mrs. Curl and

Grandma Drogge often received food baskets from Timmie and

Elaine.

When Timmie was 12 and Elaine 11, they walked hand

in hand down an unpaved farm road, and Timmie said, "It will never be like this again." They were moving to the big city, to Omaha.

George and some other DuBois men had gotten jobs at

a big new packing house in Omaha. George's starting salary was going to be pretty good because he was already a meat

cutter, but the family had little money saved. For their

first two weeks in the city, they had to stay in a filthy

hotel. There was a bad-smelling communal bathroom at the

end of a long, scary hallway.

The city was amazing to the four girls and their

older brother, Eugene. It was the first time they had ever

seen. a streetcar. They looked out the back of the hotel up

a dirt bank, and there was an old, ramshackle house. "There

are Negro kids crawling in and out of the windows!" 124

exclaimed Timmie. None of the Dewitt kids had ever seen a

black person before, and these black kids used windows

instead of doors. The black kids were watching the pretty white girls and their weak-looking brother, and the Dewitt

kids were watching back. One of the black kids glared at

them and yelled: "Poor White ~rash, Poor White Trash!"

These words would echo in Timmie's mind for the rest

of her life. She'd always thought that her family was among

the best of DuBois. But now a local church in Omaha thought

the family was so poor that they gave them a Christmas food

basket. The children couldn't understand; in DuBois,

because their father was a butcher, there was always enough

to eat, yet to the Omaha churchwomen, they were objects of

pity. There was a scarf for each girl on top of the cans of

food in the basket. Agnes made the girls wear the scarfs to

church the next Sunday. It was devastatingly humiliating

for all of them.

Timmie was very popular In high school. Schools

were just starting to test IQs, and they told her she was a

genius. She could rollerskate backwards with grace and

skill, spin in the air, and land on her feet like a

professional. She was elected class president and named

Queen of Popularity in the school yearbook. She dated boys

with foreign-sounding names who liked poetry. She was a

gifted artist who could get perfect likenesses of anyone she

drew. 125

While she was in high school, her brother, Eugene, was fighting on little Japanese islands. At first his

letters to Timmie were enthusiastic and patriotic. "The

only good Jap is a dead Jap," he wrote. Later letters were more introspective. "My job is to tear open the bodies of boys my own age with my Browning automatic rifle." From

Eugene, she'd learned to love literature, and she read

avidly while he was away, trying to be the perfect sister.

Eugene was left for dead on a jungle trail, and a whole

platoon of Japanese soldiers marched over his body. A medic

found him just as the last of the Marines were being withdrawn from the island and saved his life. He recuperated at a u.s. military hospital on Maui. While on Maui, Eugene found a Japanese man to

translate the writing on a Japanese flag he'd taken from the

body of a man he'd killed. The writing turned out to be

autographs and short messages of good luck from the friends

and neighbors of the unfortunate young Japanese. Eugene was

touched deeply by this, and he transmitted his abhorrence of

war by letter to his worshipful sister, Timmie.

Timmie became kind of a beatnik; she responded to

the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan by dropping out of

high school and going to New York to study art. She moved

into an old apartment building in Brooklyn and began looking

for work. The day after she moved in, a handsome young man

who had just come home from the army moved in to his 126 mother's apartment next door. Johnny Alex had already lined up a job with IBM, at the beginning of the computer age. He asked Timmie out the first time he saw her, and she accepted. They began dating almost every night, rollerskating together and going to movies. Johnny paid for everything. Timmie put off looking for work. She painted in the daytime and went out with Johnny at night. He was a good photographer and showed interest .. in Timmie's painting.

They got married two weeks after they met.

Because he was the man and she was the woman, she stayed home all day while he worked. They lived with Johnny

Alex's old mother in her musty apartment with Johnny's slightly-deformed younger sister, Rhonda. The mother abused

Rhonda mercilessly. Timmie was alone all day in a small upstairs room, and she could hear the mother shouting at

Rhonda and slapping her, burning her hands with matches, and belittling her. Timmie was sickened by this and often walked down to the beach. Her feet were so tough that she could walk on the scorching sand over rocks and broken shells without feeling it.

Rhonda's legs were bumpy from some kind of strange punishment Mrs. Alex had administered. Johnny and Mrs. Alex refused to discuss her with Timmie. Johnny would defend his mother and refuse to even talk with Timmie for days if she mentioned Rhonda's treatment. He'd ignore her in bed. He became even more furious when Timmie asked him why they 127 couldn't get a G.I. loan like the other veterans did and buy their own house right away. "Why do we have to live with your mother and your sad sister?" Timmie felt more alone than ever. She wanted Elaine to hold her and listen to her ideas about child rearing. But all she could do was read in her room or walk to the beach and read.

It was difficult to paint because she was too depressed to motivate herself to get her materials out and begin a painting. She stayed in a cocoon of reading.

Reading Malamud, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka took her deeper into

a serious, dark sense of foreboding, a seriousness about the

human condition.

Timmie was as beautiful as any movie star. Johnny was enraptured by her beauty. One of Johnny's favorite

pastimes was to photograph Timmie in a sexy negligee.

Timmie would forget her troubles when she was in front of

the camera. The old rush of being the Shirley Temple of

Dubois would come back to her, and she learned to pose like

a professional. Johnny gradually enticed her to take off

everything and even to allow him to make sexually explicit

photos, always assuring her he would destroy the negatives. She saw him destroy negatives, but she didn't know he had

others that he didn't destroy. If a picture was too

graphic, she'd tear it up, secure ln the knowledge that it

couldn't be reprinted. She would be shocked when she'd 128 sneak into his darkroom weeks later and see the same picture drying on the line. After six years of childless marriage, Timmie began studying Christian Science. She believed in the power of the mind to heal, and she realized that she was creating her sad reality with her mind. She suddenly decided to leave. She took a train to Las Vegas, Nevada, to get a quick divorce. It's fortunate that she left when she did. Johnny was becoming increasingly sadistic in bed. He remarried quickly, and later was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in the state penitentiary for cutting his wife's breasts off. It was in Las Vegas that Timmie met Truman Smothers. He'd recently quit his job as a newspaper reporter because he was bored with it. Since he was low on money, he decided to take a job at one of his father's banks. Truman became a teller. His father could have given him a high position, but old G.T. Smothers believed in making him work his way up. Timmie met Truman at the bank. "Can you cash this check?" she asked him sweetly. He, like most men who saw her, wanted to marry her. The check was for $75 dollars. "No, I'm sorry, I can't. It's from out of state. I sure wish I could help you." Realizing that he couldn't really be fired from this job and that he could make up the 129 amount if necessary, he added, "Do you have any ID?" She showed him a New York driver's license and a library card. "Are you Nellie Eileen Alex?" "I'm Timmie Dewitt." "Well this picture looks like you, and it sure is a pretty picture." Timmie smiled, or posed, and said, "Thank you. It's me, only I never use 'Nellie' and I'm never going to use 'Alex' again." Truman, feeling brave, said, "Are you married or single?" "Both." "How can you be both?" "I'm here 1n Las Vegas to get a divorce." She colored. Divorce was a sin; in DuBois it was something to hide. "Well, I guess I can cash this check ... under one condition." Timmie smiled at him sweetly but didn't ask what the condition was. "Don't you want to know what the condition is? "Tell me." "That you go out to lunch with me 25 minutes from now ... "Oh, I couldn't do that. I'm too busy." 130

Truman looked crushed, like a child who'd just had his favorite toy taken from him.

"But if that's the condition," Timmie added, "I suppose I'll have to make room for you in my busy schedule."

Truman brightened, and then, flustered by his success, stamped the check and counted out the money.

Timmie was broke and had nowhere to go, and Truman became interesting to her at once when she learned how rich his father was. She was touched when, during their lunch, she saw Truman comfort a little boy who was crying in the next booth and give him a nickel. Truman was sweet and romantic, and their courtship was like something out of a storybook. They were married one month after they met.

They had their honeymoon at the Grand Canyon, where a photograph of Timmie feeding a deer appeared in the local newspaper.

Their wedding presents were a new home in

Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Truman had gotten a job as a reporter, and a new '53 Buick. Truman made pretty good money for a reporter, and again, Timmie, because she was the wife, stayed home. Her painting stopped and her reading was lighter. Nine months later, Timmie had her first child,

Gerald Truman Smothers III, who she called Jerry.

Shortly after she became pregnant, Timmie felt

Truman's behavior change. He seemed to be obsessed with her safety, as if she were a child. Timmie thought that the 131 childish one was Truman. He made rules for her and became petulant when she failed to follow them. He prescribed a diet and exercise regime for her and forbade her to read in bed at night. She had to wash fruit and vegetables carefully in water as hot as she could stand and follow his careful system for washing and rinsing dishes. He started shaking and seemed to stop breathing when he saw her rinse off an apple in cold water and take a bite out of it. "Do you want your unborn baby to eat DDT?"

Truman hated the long hours in the dreary, noisy newsroom of the Albuquerque sentinel. He had no interest in state and local politics, and the fires and accidents he was sent to report on were upsetting and seemed unimportant.

But he wanted to stay with a job just this once to prove to his father that he could. He would come home desperate for perfect domestic happiness with his wife, yet he would always feel disappointed; Timmie was no longer attractive to him. When Timmie was six months pregnant, her body repulsed

Truman. "You look like a fat cow," he told her.

If she broke one of his rules, he would feel like getting revenge, even though he wouldn't admit this to himself. He was cruel in weird, creative ways. One morn~ng, when Timmie woke up bleary-eyed and went to the kitchen as she always did to make some coffee for them, she looked up to see a double-page photograph from Life Magazine of a huge, hairy rat that Truman had taped on the kitchen 132 window, and she fainted to the floor, striking her head on

the counter.

After Jerry was born, Truman made rules that were

absolute. Timmie was not allowed to get up from the dinner

table until the meal was finished, no matter how much Jerry cried. Jerry's cries would tear at her, but Truman would

reason with her: "The baby is fed, he has on a dry diaper,

and there's nothing wrong with him. We have to train him to

tolerate being alone for the short time we're able to be

together in the evening."

Timmie was pregnant again. "You pig," Truman would

say, when he saw his wife. He was frantic. They had just

moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where Truman was studying to be a

chiropractor, and the study was intense. His father wasn't

sending him much money, and the chiropractic college was

more expensive than he'd thought it would be.

When their second son, Tim, was born, Truman seemed

to be completely disinterested in him. He never held or

talked to Jerry, either, but he continued to watch over him

nervously, and he maintained his rules about his care. One

day, while Truman was at the chiropractic school, Timmie

broke Truman's rule about Jerry handling small objects and

allowed him to play with a box of plastic and metal trinkets

that she'd saved from her girlhood in Nebraska. Jerry was

not quite two. He swallowed a little plastic charm shaped

like a loaf of bread. Timmie sheepishly confessed this to 133

Truman when he got home that evening. He became livid.

They took their new baby, Tim, to the neighbors next door and put Jerry in a little car seat that hung by two flimsy brackets between them on the middle of the front seat of their Buick.

Timmie wasn't very worried. The plastic charm was small. But Truman was terrified. He face was white as he drove to the hospital.

"You stupid bitch. Can't you think? How could you let a two-year-old play with those little things? Do you know our son could have died because of your negligence?

Haven't I told you many times to keep small things away from

Jerry? You know a baby can choke on anything, can choke to death, God damn you! And do you know they might have to cut open his intestines now? How do you like that?"

Jerry, between the two adults, nervously ran his fingers over the plastic coating on the frame of the car seat where it bunched up in the corners.

"Truman, it's just a little thing. It'll go right through him. I was watching him the whole time; that's how

I knew he swallowed one. Jerry was too fast for me. I'm sorry. He loves those trinkets. I'll be more careful."

Jerry was fine. The doctor told Timmie to watch his stool until she found the trinket.

Truman was very strict with Jerry. He'd put a small wooden chair in a doorway to symbolize a boundary that the 134

little boy wasn't allowed to cross. Jerry would simply crawl around the chair and pass through the doorway, only to be spanked and thrown like a football into his crib. Truman was strict with himself, too. He tried to do everything equally well with his left hand that he did with his right. He forced himself to write left-handed and put on his shoes in opposite order every day. He read the Bible every morning in the bathroom while having bowel movements, and when he got all the way through it, began again with the first chapter. "I'm leaving this bastard," Timmie decided one morning. "I can't stand to hear his voice again." As soon as she saw his car head off towards the chiropractic college, she called a taxi. She took her two boys and caught a train to Los Angeles to stay with her brother, Eugene. He was just finishing his Master's degree in English on the G.I. Bill at D.C.L.A., and he was drinking heavily. He spoke in a raspy voice because his vocal cords had been damaged when the Japanese troops marched over his body. Timmie got the first job she applied for as a secretary, even though she could hardly type. She worked for Lee LaPort, a real-estate tycoon. He was a handsome but rather effeminate man who lived with his mother in a mansion with an electronic stair lift. They were soon engaged to be married. 135

Then Eugene's friend, Leroy, a chemistry major who was working during the summer as a lifeguard at a local pool, came over to drink with Eugene. It was a very hot day. Leroy's first impression of Timmie was that he wanted to marry her. Eugene fell asleep and Leroy went outside where Timmie was washing Eugene's car. Timmie's two little boys were running through the sprinklers on the dead grass in front of the apartment building. Leroy asked her out, and she refused, telling him she was engaged. He kept the conversation going, though, and within a short time, knew her favorite candy bar, her favorite authors, and even what size clothes she wore. Leroy was a good listener. He could tell she was attracted to him. Leroy, of Jewish Hungarian stock, was not tall and handsome like Lee LaPort. He was short and heavyset, and his black hair was curly. Timmie thought he didn't look American. But Timmie thought Jewish people were intelligent and exotic, and she knew that Leroy would be rich some day. still, Lee LaPort was already rich, and she was already engaged to him. Although she didn't love Lee LaPort, life was starting to look good for Timmie. She loved being near her brother, and now her sister Elaine lived just a few miles away. Elaine, who was almost as beautiful as Timmie, had married a successful mortgage banker who had been a fighter pilot in the war. He had put himself through college after 136 the war by playing piano in jazz bands. Elaine had a baby boy.

Timmie was happy to be around her sister once again, but Elaine had changed. She drank Scotch all day and chain­ smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. Timmie felt that Elaine was trying to keep her a secret f~om her husband. It seemed that on weekends when Timmie had a chance to see her, she was always busy.

Leroy stole somebody's lawn in a rich neighborhood in Long Beach. He rented a machine to cut the lawn and the sod below it so that it could be rolled up and transplanted.

In the middle of the night, he rolled out the new lawn in front of Eugene's apartment so Timmie could see it when she looked out of her bedroom window in the morning. He printed the words "Leroy loves Timmie" on a pink heart and taped it on her window. The next day, after Timmie had dropped the kids at the baby-sitter and gone to work, and after Eugene had gone to school, Leroy broke in and washed all the dishes and left a Cherry Mash candy bar for Timmie with a note: "I would give the world to you. with all my love, Leroy." A few days later, she received a letter containing beautiful poetry that Leroy had copied out of books by obscure poets and signed his own name to. Probably what won Timmie's heart was when Leroy took little Jerry fishing. He and

Jerry came back with some big trout, and Jerry was acting like a little man. Jerry couldn't stand Lee LaPort. 137

Eugene finished his Master's degree and drove to

Nebraska to visit his mother and father, George and Agnes.

Timmie had the apartment to herself. Leroy called every evening when Timmie got off work and asked her out. He had charmed her by his unwavering, energetic pursuit of her, and she finally relented. She IQaded her boys into her old

Dodge and left them with Elaine.

After going out for dinner and a movie, Timmie and

Leroy returned to Eugene's apartment for ice cream sundaes.

They were alone in the apartment, and Leroy was fearless about trying to seduce Timmie. While their ~ce cream melted, they kissed passionately. Timmie excused herself and returned momentarily in a beautiful black negligee, and they made love.

Leroy's body was strong and dark and hairy. He seemed like a wild animal to Timmie. He did things that

Johnny Alex and Truman would have never dreamed of doing to her, and she had her first orgasm.

A week later, she told Leroy that she'd marry him under one condition: that he got a vasectomy before they got married. He agreed. Leroy drove up to Northern California the next day to get his things. He broke into the administration office at D.C. Berkeley at night and found his records. He skillfully doctored them with an exacto knife and glue. He used the office typewriter to insert erroneous information to make it appear that he'd already 138 graduated. When he returned to Los Angeles, he lied, telling Timmie that he'd had the vasectomy. The next weekend, they had a small wedding in Las Vegas.

Although Leroy was poor when she married him, Timmie knew that because he was Jewish and had graduated from

Berkeley, someday he'd be wealthy. She was right about him becoming wealthy, if not about the reasons for it. The Cold

War was going strong, and the defense industry in Southern

California was booming. The companies he worked for-­

Rocketdyne, Aerojet, Hughes--checked his references and called U.C. Berkeley and found that he'd graduated with honors. Chemists were in demand, and once Leroy established his expertise in explosives, he never had any trouble finding work.

While Leroy went to work and tested rocket fuel or designed explosives for land mines, Timmie stayed home. But now she was beginning to feel her age; she was running out of time to distinguish herself as an artist. She disciplined herself to paint more, and she made reading lists and tried to check off at least one novel a week.

Shortly after they were married, Timmie felt morn1ng sickness. She was pregnant with her third son. She tried to believe Leroy that a small percentage of vasectomies are not successful.

Timmie named her new son after her father: George. 139

She felt awe in the presence of each of her sons.

They were miraculous, cosmic beings to her. It was inconceivable to her how other parents could ignore or hit a child. Because she was attuned to her children, they were well behaved even though she wasn't strict. Little George was weak and clung to her; Tim was strong and always outside. Jerry, the oldest, was her protege. She saw signs in him that he was a philosopher, and she tried to nurture his thought.

Timmie never read to the children as they were growing up; she told them original stories. Sometimes she used a flannel board on which she placed cut-out paper figures of people she'd painted expertly in watercolors and backed with flannel so they'd stick to the board. There was the crippled boy, his sister, the bad boy, the old couple, the nice boy who built a special wagon for the crippled boy, and the wagon itself, a technical masterpiece that she surprised her kids with at the end of one of her stories.

The crippled boy could actually sit in it; the wagon was designed to accommodate his stiff, polio-braced leg. At night, she told installments of "The Secret Star," about aliens who helped the ugly and the crippled, and transformed situations In their favor. They would triumph over the bad kid who stole or lied. Timmie was as excited about the stories as the children were, because she didn't know how they were going to end, either. 140

Her days of teaching Sunday school in Nebraska made it natural for her to talk about Jesus, whom she loved. She tried to show her children to put his teachings into practice. Heaven, hell, Mary's virginity, the idea of being born in sin, and the creation of the world were never mentioned.

As the children got older, Timmie painted more and read more. She felt frustrated by her role as mother and homemaker. Their house was large and took a long time to clean, but Leroy said they couldn't afford a housekeeper.

She longed to go to the beach and read, and so that's what she did. The kids and their friends piled into her PlYmouth station wagon, and she headed for the beach. She'd race home a half-hour before Leroy returned from work and make the house appear to be clean by pushing things under beds and into closets and hiding the dirty dishes under the sink.

She'd replace her old Levi's and her white shirt tied at the midriff with more conservative clothes. By taking TV dinners out of their aluminum trays and adding some frozen vegetables, she'd make it appear that she'd cooked dinner from scratch. After coming home late from the beach, she asked,

"Jerry, do you know where the fly swatter is?"

"Yeah. It's hanging next to the refrigerator."

"Could you get it?"

"Sure. What do you want me to do with it?" 141

"Let's play Slave and Master. You give me exactly

five minutes to finish cleaning up the kitchen and to vacuum the den, and if I don't finish in time, you get to beat me."

The three boys loved this game; they loved having

parental authority turned around. The most fun part was when she'd fail to finish in_time and she'd plead for a few more minutes.

As the children got old enough to understand, she

used to emphasize simplicity. "I'd be happy to just live in

a tent and read," she'd often say. She practiced yoga and

often stood on her head. She started making the kids eat whole wheat bread, and they were not allowed much sugar.

Jerry, at age 11, was old enough to understand and

believe her philosophies, yet young enough not to see the

hypocrisy of her actions. She manipulated Leroy into buying

her a beautiful white Cadillac and a wardrobe to match it.

Leroy had to moonlight as a parking lot attendant to make

the loan payments on the house, the cars, the motorboat in

the driveway, and to pay for their new swimming pool. She

prodded and manipulated him just as she had her younger

sister, Elaine, when they were children. And the short,

funny-looking Leroy could never quite believe that he could

have a woman who looked like a movie star. He was insecure

enough to try to keep her love with material things. She

played on his insecurities, reporting to him her daily

adventures: a cop stopping her just to ask her out, the 142

jeweler giving her free earrings, a bag boy running out to the car to help her load her groceries. Leroy, who had grown up poor in the Bronx, New York, wanted to live the

American dream, too, and it was easy for Timmie to push him.

They were the only family on the street that had a telephone answering machine. It was a large, bulky thing that whirred and clicked as the big reels of tape played the outgoing message and then recorded incoming calls. "You have reached Polynitro Incorporated. Jess Simon is not in right now. Please leave a message after the tone and he will call you as soon as he returns," would broadcast through the house at all hours of the day. Jerry knew that there was no such person as "Jess Simon"; Leroy Steiner was using a pseudonym to conduct his illegal business. Leroy stole explosives from the company he worked at as a chemist and resold them in his own packaging under a false corporate name. Jerry learned to type by typing invoices for him.

Timmie was the moral guidepost for the family, and since she didn't seem to mind when the answering machine switched on,

Jerry didn't mind either.

The first real intellectual conflict Jerry felt was

in the sixth grade. His strong, handsome teacher, Mr. Plant

(who had lost one of his lungs in the Korean War), spent half of the time reading gory, glorious stories to the class about the Green Berets fighting in Vietnam. Jerry knew that

his mother didn't approve of the war, but he would come home 143 excited about it, thinking that it was right to save those people from Communism. After school one day, he began discussing it with Timmie as she made something for him to eat in the kitchen. She led him into the living room, a place where he was usually not allowed to set foot. She sat him down beside her in a big easy chair and put her arm around him. "Mom, if we don't stop the Communists, they'll take over the whole world. We should go there and protect those people. If I were old enough, I'd go and fight." "But what about the people you'd be killing? Do they have feelings? Do they have pictures in their wallets of their mothers and their brothers and sisters and sweethearts?" "Well .•• but I don't care about them." Timmie told Jerry about Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, comparing them to Jesus. "Why did Gandhi love his enemies?" Jerry asked. "Because he could feel their pain just like he could feel the pain of his own people. He could feel the pain of every hungry child." "How could he feel their pain? If I stick a needle in you, I don't feel it." "Gandhi could feel everyone's pain. To protest England's occupation of India, he would let the English police catch him and imprison him. He would go without food 144 until the police got scared and let him out. They knew his followers would get mad and riot if he died."

"But how can someone feel someone else's pain?"

Jerry insisted. Timmie held him tighter and didn't answer.

The next day Timmie joined Every Mother for Peace and began protesting the vietnam war by passing out literature at the draft boards. Some of the young men entering .the draft boards would listen to her tell about the horror, the sadness, the cruelty they were letting themselves in for. One answered her: "I'm gonna cut a mark in the stock of my rifle for every gook I kill, and by the time I get home from vietnam, my rifle'll be covered with marks I"

Almost every day the cry "God damn it, Timmie, where's my black socks I" would echo through the house.

Leroy was increasingly frustrated about all of Timmie's causes. Besides talking to the boys at the draft boards, she was doing volunteer work with autistic and retarded children and studying anthropology at UCLA. She brought one boy, Carl, home with her several times a week. He walked sideways and knew the Latin names of every crustacean. He had started to believe that he was a lobster after his parents brought home a live lobster and allowed him to play with it for a couple of hours before they plunged it alive into boiling water. Leroy was jealous of Timmie's college 145 friends. He was sick of Elaine's kids coming over to swim in the pool or to sleep over. The house was getting messier. It seemed to Leroy that everyone was having an interesting and fun time but him.

Now, Timmie had her own studio built into the garage. When she was working in her studio, she couldn't even hear Leroy's black socks battle cry. Sometimes when

Leroy would come home from work a little early to take a nap before going to his second job at the parking lot, he'd see

Timmie's handsome young French teacher, a 17-year-old foreign-exchange student who lived nearby, lounging by the pool. Or Carl, the lobster boy, would walk up to him sideways and ask him if he had ever seen a Crustacea homarus. Jerry, now 15, would be in his room with his two friends, a guy with a harelip and a guy with extremely bucked teeth, playing ~nsane, never-ending, improvisational rock music on stacks of expensive amplifiers and speakers that rocked the whole house. By this time, Jerry had discovered marijuana.

Timmie interested Jerry ~n difficult books. "Do you want to read a book about a guy who turns into a roach?" she asked. He read Metamorphosis thinking that it was some kind of science fiction. Reading existentialist and metaphysical

literature recommended by Timmie was making Jerry overly 146 serious. He felt very depressed but didn't know what depression was; he couldn't identify it.

It broke his heart to see Timmie crying more and more. His parents' marriage was in serious trouble. Timmie was sleeping with her young French teacher, something Leroy never suspected. Although Timmie enjoyed the Cadillac bought with Leroy's ill-gotten money, she still talked like a Sunday school teacher, and Leroy fell for it. Leroy thought that he was the bad one, especially now that he was having an affair with a cute, young secretary at the explosives company.

Timmie found out because the woman's black hair showed up well in Leroy's new white Volkswagen. She was disconsolate. She used her oil paints to paint an incredibly realistic jagged cut on her wrist, and she put white powder on her face to make it pale. When Leroy saw

her lying on the bed with her bloody arm outstretched, he

realized that she was the only woman he could ever love, and

he felt full of remorse. He cried and promised, "I'll change, I'll change."

Now Leroy came home from work on time and tried to

be more involved with the family. He built a diving

platform for the pool and tried to teach Jerry how to hit a

baseball.

Every morning, Leroy drove through farm and pasture

land to get to the isolated explosives plant. He didn't 147 know why, but he loved to see lambs grazing in the fields.

One day, on the way home from work, he pulled his car off the road and went to a farmhouse to buy a lamb. A few days later, he bought five chickens. The three boys were thrilled to have their small ribbon of a backyard, bounded by the high freeway behind their house, become a farmyard.

Months later, when the lamb was almost a sheep,

Jerry and his brothers looked on sadly as Leroy desperately sprayed Raid insect spray on its stomach, trying to kill the maggots that were crawling out of its skin. Leroy, crying, lifted the lamb into the trunk of Timmie's Cadillac and rushed to the veterinarian. He came home later with the dead lamb still in the trunk.

Jerry watched films in junior high school about how marijuana could turn young people into fiends and drug addicts. Parents were supposed to watch for changes in their children's behavior. Jerry watched Leroy's behavior change and suspected he was on pot. Leroy grew his hair long and styled it somewhere between a Mexican lowrider's pompadour and a hippy's mane. He wore ridiculous glass beads, and his eyes were often red. Jerry knew right where to look for Leroy's stash. Leroy's brother, Glenn, who was stationed in Vietnam, was sending potent marijuana home in the spouts of Vietnamese teapots. Jerry found some in Leroy's closet and smoked it. He felt his arms falling off; he felt undreamed-of levels of paranoia. Walking outside, 148 he was suddenly surprised by a helicopter overhead and went shrieking down the street. He hid in a horse stall in a large lot behind his neighbor's house across the street and curled up in the fetal position, feeling like he was doing back flips through the universe.

Timmie was changing, -too. She asked Jerry to come into her bedroom and use the new Polaroid camera to photograph her wearing nothing but a very revealing baby­ doll nightie. She wanted Leroy to have some nice wallet photos to remind him not to stray. A few weeks later, she had silicone bags implanted in her breasts and bought a new wardrobe to emphasize them. Jerry was extremely embarrassed by his mother's appearance. Some of his friends were more interested in hanging out with her than with him. She was the sexiest woman many of them had ever seen in person.

Jerry couldn't understand how a person could be such a dichotomy. Now, the lady who wanted to live ln a tent and read was working on Leroy for a newer Cadillac.

But unbeknownst to Jerry, Leroy was working on

Timmie, too. Having two instant kids plus a third one on the way immediately after marriage had made Leroy feel robbed of his youth, and now, experiencing his mid-life crisis, he was trying to make up for it. A strange, attractive secretary at the plant was eager, he knew, to sleep with him, and she was also attracted to Timmie, who 149 she'd met at a company picnic. Leroy agreed to buy Timmie the new car if she'd have sex with him and Marian.

Marian was a strange lady who lived in an old barn on several acres of desert land near the explosives plant.

She'd saved thousands of dollars to buy this place, where she lived with her little two-month-old daughter, named after the seven wise men in the Bible. The little girl slept in a dresser drawer and was not allowed to wear clothes.

Timmie was intensely embarrassed by the proposition, but Leroy was obsessed by the prospect of having a menage ~ trois and wouldn't stop mentioning it. She wanted the

Cadillac, so she agreed.

The three boys were sent to Elaine's for the weekend, and the three adults went to a hotel in San Diego where they smoked marijuana and fulfilled Leroy and Marian's sexual fantasies.

Timmie felt very degraded, and she never looked the same after that. Leroy did not change. He had other girlfriends, and Timmie had other men. Timmie became pregnant by one of Leroy's friends and told Leroy that she had been raped in the front seat of her Cadillac. "It was a

Negro man. My head hit the steering wheel and I was unconscious. I don't even know what he looked like."

Leroy had no choice but to buy it, since he wasn't being faithful himself. It was 1967 and abortions were 150 still illegal, so they drove to a clinic in Tijuana. He had to stifle his rage when he learned from the doctor that she was almost through her second trimester, making the timing of the so-called rape impossible. Leroy asked the doctor, who spoke English very well, if the fetus had been fathered by a black man. The doctor said it would be impossible to tell by looking. Leroy reasoned to himself that if the rape story was a lie, then the father was probably white and possibly someone he knew. He had wondered why he had sometimes smelled his friend's tobacco in the house when he came home from work. Timmie hemorrhaged on the way home from Tijuana and had to go to a hospital in San Diego for a transfusion.

Leroy bought the Timmie II to have a place to sleep with his girlfriends. Timmie graduated from Miltowns to

Valiums. All of their children were failing their classes.

Timmie suspected that Jerry was on drugs.

"Do you feel alright, honey?" she asked Jerry, who had come home on Mother's Day just in time to join the

family for a drive to Leroy's mother's house.

"I'm OK. I just feel tired. I was reading until three in the morning," he lied. Timmie left the room to get ready. Jerry tried to make his eyes focus on the Sunday comics, but he was seeing double and triple.

When Timmie returned to the TV room, she saw Jerry

lying on the floor; he was drooling on the carpet. Jerry 151 opened his eyes just long enough to notice Timmie's expression. It was as if a project, a painting, of hers had been damaged. At that moment, she cared more about the inconvenience, the loss of face to herself than she cared about the painting. She looked at it--Jerry--like it was a piece of shit.

"Don't hit me!" said Jerry. Leroy hit him in the muscle on his thigh when he looked like he was going to fall back into sleep, and Timmie, just off the phone with the family pediatrician, was trying to get him to drink milk.

Every time he'd talk in his mealy, drugged voice, she'd slap his face mightily.

It took Jerry three days to recover from his overdose of Timmie's Valium. His body smelled of poison, and his skin was covered with red pimples. He couldn't get

Timmie's look of disgust out of his mind. He started to realize that he was supposed to be what she couldn't be, and that she had been living through him. He was supposed to live the philosophy that she hadn't been able to live, and now he had taken one of her last hopes away.

It was about at this time that a friend of Leroy's named Brad, a physicist who had worked on developing the first atom bomb, sat down with Timmie and Leroy to take the

Mensa test. Brad had gotten copies from the Mensa Society, a worldwide club of people who considered themselves among humanity's top two percent in intelligence. He was curious 152 how they would do. For Timmie, it was a game. Like an IQ test, many of the questions required visualization. She finished in half the time that it took Leroy and Brad and got 100 percent of the questions correct. Brad and Leroy missed several questions, but managed to squeak through and qualify for Mensa membership.- Leroy and Brad went out in Leroy's VW and smoked a joint while Timmie vacuumed and prepared dinner for them.

Leroy got a new job in Northern California making a propellant for a flechette land mine that would scatter metal darts in all directions at the level of vietnamese men's genitals. He received a substantial raise in pay. Now the family was truly upper-middle-class. They lived in a small Marin County town across from a country club and golf course in a big two-story house. It was at a country-club party that Timmie met Richard Dunham, a rich Chevrolet dealer who lived up the hill. He wore cowboy boots and a white hat. "Are those real?" were the first words he said to her, referring to her breasts. Leroy was no longer trying to hide his infidelity. Now Timmie had vaginal warts from him, and she was furious. Her doctor said the warts might be incurable. One of Leroy's girlfriends, the one with the warts, called him at home and said she needed to talk to him. Hearing a faint click and realizing Timmie was listening on the other line, 153

Leroy refused. In the morning paper, he read that his

girlfriend was the 501st person to jump off the Golden Gate

Bridge.

Leroy was going to a Mill Valley therapist and doing

LSD therapy. On one mental trip he made with his therapist

at an expensive crab restaurant in Sausalito, he went

through space on a flying carpet. Timmie still felt a sense

of metaphysical wonder at life and existence and couldn't

imagine needing to use drugs to enjoy a sunset or a meal.

(She considered the Valium her doctor prescribed a relaxant,

not a drug.) And Leroy was starting to get violent.

Timmie had turned their extra bedroom into "The

Persian Room." It had Persian carpets on the walls,

tapestries on the ceilings, and brass lamps from Iran. In

the middle was a large waterbed. This room was Leroy's den

of sex and drugs.

It was a Friday night and Leroy wanted Timmie to go

into the Persian Room with him and smoke a joint. She was

folding some clothes in their regular bedroom.

"Come on, Timmie. Just take one hit."

"I don't want to smoke any. Then you'll just want

to have sex."

"So, what's wrong with sex?"

"Nothing, if it's with you and not you on some drug,

if it's with your husband who is faithful to you and isn't

carrying some kind of hippy disease." 154

"You should talk about being faithful. Come on,

Timmie."

"I said no."

"You loved it the last time we smoked pot and made

love."

"I don't care. I didn't feel any love from you. I

felt like I could have been anybody and you were just tripping out on your drug. And I know that you brought a woman in there while I was at Elaine's last weekend. Do you

think I'm stupid?"

"You are stupid," he said in a penetrating, angry voice.

Timmie, trying to settle him down, joked, "It takes

one to know one."

But Leroy was already furious. "You're a stupid,

cold bitch. No one in this family cares about anybody but

themselves. Nobody gives a damn about my feelings," he

shouted.

"Stop shouting, Leroy. The kids can hear you."

"I don't give a fuck who hears me." He shoved her

against the wall of their bedroom and slapped her face. The

retainer for her orthodontic work flew out of her mouth.

She slumped to the floor and picked up the retainer. She

held the bent retainer and cried. She decided right there

that the kids were old enough that they could do without a 155 father, and she started divorce proceedings against Leroy the next Monday.

At first, he didn't care. He had recently lost his job when his new employers discovered that Leroy had tricked them: the explosive they were paying him to make had already been patented by his old employer. Leroy couldn't make the house payments and had been considering the most logical, foolproof ways to rob a bank. Now he didn't have to worry.

He signed the house over to Timmie, took the last of their money, and flew to Tahiti with a 21-year-old woman.

Richard, the cowboy Chevrolet dealer, had been harassing Timmie on the phone for weeks, asking her for a date. And now, desperate to keep her house, she called him.

"OK, Richard. Let's go flying."

Timmie had never been in a private airplane before.

It was remarkably like a car, like a noisy, bumpy car. She was terrified, but stifled her feelings. She drank some good Scotch from a flask she'd borrowed from Elaine. At cruising altitude, Richard put the double-engined Beechcraft on autopilot and started to kiss Timmie and put his hands allover her breasts and legs. Timmie didn't know that

Richard was an inept flyer and that he only vaguely knew how to use the autopilot instruments. They had sex in the back

seat of the airplane.

She created a fantasy about herself, almost as if she were one of her childhood paper dolls, and told Richard 156 that she was from a wealthy family in Nebraska and that she was 10 years younger than he. Actually, she was about the same age. Timmie had a professional photographer do a layout of her posing in a sexy black velvet dress with a bottle of Black Velvet Scotch Whiskey in the foreground and the Black Velvet logo above her body, and left the photos in a place in her home where she knew Richard would discover them. When she could tell he was getting serious about her, she suddenly disappeared for a couple of weeks, hiding out at Elaine's house in L.A. Richard was challenged and excited by this beautiful woman, who was from a refined family and who had worked once, he thought, as a model. He decided to leave his wife and marry Timmie. After they married, they moved to San Mateo, California, a nice community south of San Francisco, and bought Silver Springs Chevrolet. He and Timmie designed a house and had it built high in the green hills of the peninsula. There were so many mirrors in the house, that wherever you stood, you could always see your reflection. Timmie became the Silver Springs Chevrolet TV girl. "Wanna buy a Chevy for just eight dollars?" she said brightly in front of the camera for the twentieth time. For some reason, the words and melody of an old Shirley Temple song--"On the Good Ship Lollipop"--kept going through her head as she waited for the cameraman to prepare his 157 equipment for another take. "For just eight dollars down, you can drive away in any new Chevy on our lot ••• "

There was a history of heart attacks in Richard's family, and Timmie, although never afraid of high places, felt terrified that Richard would have a heart attack while they were up in his plane. She didn't have her pilot's license yet, but she had taken a few flying lessons. She had almost passed the instruments class she took with

Richard--which would have certified Richard and her to fly at night or in conditions of poor visibility--before dropping out to protect Richard's ego when she realized he was failing the class. Now Timmie flew their double-engined private airplane over their San Mateo estate while Richard tried to make a good aerial photograph of it with his new

Hasselblad camera. As she flew the plane and looked down on her stately home, she did not recall her childhood experience of looking down from a tree at her little house in DuBois, Nebraska, and thinking of God or the origins of the universe. She thought of how to get the most advantageous shot of their new house and what the enlarged picture would look like on the mantel of one of their fireplaces. They'd be the only ones in the neighborhood displaying an aerial picture of their home.

At first Jerry enjoyed the rich life. The girls at his new high school were beautiful, and they liked him, once he started playing guitar for a popular school rock band. 158

He had a sexy girlfriend named Bonnie. While Timmie and

Richard were traveling in Africa on points that Richard had won from General Motors for selling a lot of cars, Jerry got to stay home and take care of his brothers and make sure they made it to school on time. Once Tim and George were safely on the school bus, he called up Bonnie, and she came over for an afternoon of sex. They went into the master bedroom, where Bonnie tried on all of Timmie's costly, sexy negligees, and they had sex in all of them. Then Jerry found the extra key to Timmie's Corvette, and they raced through the mountain roads to a place where he and Bonnie could smoke a joint and view the whole Bay Area. They made it home just in time to be there when Tim and George came home from school.

But Jerry was beginning to feel seriously bored.

His therapist had pronounced him clinically depressed and suggested that he take Lithium.

"No way am I doing the Lithium shuffle," said Jerry.

"My pain is healthy. It means I can sense the reality of this sick society. Maybe the people who aren't depressed are the ones who are insane."

Richard and Timmie returned home exhilarated from their exciting experiences in Africa, only to have their mood soured by Jerry, now 17.

"Mom, Richard, I know you're not going to understand this, but I'm quitting high school. I'm failing anyway. 159

I'm going to L.A. to work for while and just to live on my own. After I take some time off from school, I promise you I'll go to junior college." Richard didn't care. He hadn't finished high school, and he'd been a millionaire since he was in his late 20s. Timmie was heart sick about Jerry's decision, but she didn't have the energy to protest. She was too caught up in maintaining the web of lies she'd told Richard. Timmie was busy. She had to constantly look her best so Richard wouldn't guess her age, and she had to sneak to see her C.P.A. and her real estate man while she tried to sell her and Leroy's country-club house without going bankrupt; she couldn't let Richard know how poor she really was when she married him. She also had a lot of self adjusting to do. She had to practice her face in the mirror so as not to appear offended when Richard made degrading remarks about her while he showed her off like property in front of the other Chevy dealers. "There's only one real report card in life," said Richard to Jerry as the family ate a going-away dinner for him at a local Denny's, "and that's how much money you make." Jerry's brothers looked bored. Jerry feigned interest, hoping Richard would palm him a fifty before he took off in his old Camara for L.A. "Do you think I care about selling Chevrolets?" Richard continued. "To me 160 they're just a bunch of steel; they're just game pieces.

Everything is a game piece, even your mother--"

"Oh, Richard, how dare you call me a game piece," gushed Timmie, acting cutely offended. Jerry marveled at

how Timmie's vocabulary went down a few notches when she was

around Richard, who had never read a book, and how when he wasn't around, she spoke the way he imagined a college

professor would speak.

Richard waited for her to finish and then resumed

talking: "Did I ever tell you about the time me and my dad

was out lookin' for radiators in the desert •• "

Timmie's sons no longer needed her. Tim left home

soon after Jerry, to work on the Alaska Pipeline, and George

was always at the dealership working for Richard. Timmie

had no friends; nobody interesting to her would have liked

her husband, and Richard was very possessive about her. He

discouraged her from having a life outside of their life

together. However, Timmie was happy.

Richard and Timmie traveled the world on month-long

vacations twice a year. They went on long cruises and flew

to every continent. They made an attractive couple on the

dance floors of cruise ships. Their home movies were

animated and happy: Timmie hugging a pyramid in Egypt,

Timmie on a canoe ride in the Amazon, Timmie sitting with 161 children in a daycare center in China. Timmie enjoyed being wealthy and felt comfortable in her marriage.

Between vacations, Timmie made lavish scrapbooks, adding her commentary and illustrations to thier travel photographs. She enjoyed playing her new grand piano. She felt fortunate that she was able to send a little money to

Jerry, who was now working as a night clerk and going part­ time to college. She had to sneak the money out of her thousand-dollar monthly household allowance Richard gave her. To explain the bandages that covered her nose after her first nose job, she told Richard that their maid had opened the door into her face.

George changed his last name to Dunham and worked his way up quickly in Richard's dealership. George married

Sue, a woman who wanted to get her hands on some of the

Dunham money. Lisa, their daughter, was precious to Timmie.

But Sue despised Timmie and rarely let her see her granddaughter.

Timmie was obsessed with Lisa. She worried about her granddaughter's safety, her diet, and whether she got enough love and attention at the day-care center while her parents were at work. She lost sleep worrying about the little girl, but felt blissful when she got to be with her.

Sometimes, she'd bribe Sue with gold bracelets or hint that she could get George another raise at the dealership, and she'd get Lisa for whole weekends at a time. Richard let 162 her charge anything she wanted to buy for her. She told stories to Lisa, painted with her, and taught her to sing all of the Shirley Temple songs she knew.

Over the years, as gas prices rose and Japanese cars became more popular, Richard found it increasingly difficult to run his dealership profitably. After declaring bankruptcy, he and Timmie moved to his home town, Bauxite,

Arizona, where he still owned some land that was listed in his mother's name, and Richard became a trailer-park operator, and later, a land developer.

Timmie was isolated almost like a prisoner. The nearest real town was 20 miles away, and Richard never let her go anywhere without him. Her Corvette was old now, and there was some problem with the wiring that Richard never got around to fixing. She couldn't risk breaking down in the desert heat, often as high as 120 degrees. Richard would jump in his pickup at six in the morning and wouldn't return home until late at night. He supervised work on his property and flew allover the state in his airplane buying used mobile homes for his workers to refurbish. Timmie sat alone in her richly-furnished library in their double-wide mobile home.

She subscribed to a publishing company that mailed her special editions of literature classics, with leather bindings and 14-karat gold edges on their pages. Timmie finally had time to read to her heart's content. Reading, 163 however, was no longer interesting to her. Each year, it seemed to get harder for her to read. She felt frustrated by how many times she'd have to read a paragraph before it would stick in her mind. She was now almost 60. Her mother, Agnes, was in her late 70s and still mentally sharp, still able to play musical instruments. But Timmie's ability to draw and paint was certainly deteriorating. She lied to herself and said it was just that she was out of practice.

Timmie missed her boys. Tim was in Idaho working as an electrician. George was getting remarried and starting medical school. Jerry seemed to be allover the place. He wrote to her a few times from Maui, and then from Denver, and she even got a postcard from him in Thailand, where he was visiting Leroy. Leroy had a job teaching English to

Thai police cadets.

Physically, Timmie felt better than ever. Every day, she would walk for several miles across the desert, going in different, random directions. She would stand on the small mountains that she and her husband owned and look at the little town below. Timmie made lists of things to do, even simple things such as putting the mail in the mail box. When

Richard would take her out to dinner with local businessmen and their wives, she'd secretly make a little seating chart on her napkin: circles with names in them showing the 164 location and name of each person. Little Lisa was no longer allowed to visit her grandmother and Richard. The last time Lisa had gone to Arizona, Timmie had forgotten to keep her eyes on her, and Lisa had wandered off into the desert, where she was lost for several hours. On his second trip to Thailand, Jerry called Timmie and Richard at their home in Arizona. They were in a big hurry because they were going on vacation to Russia, and they had to catch a plane. They were a little frantic because Timmie couldn't remember where she'd put their passports. They had a bad connection. Jerry shouted into the phone: "Guess what, Richard. I'm in Thailand. I'm getting married to a woman I met on the plane when I was here last year. " "Oh, you better watch out for those dragon ladies. Pretty soon she'll be controlling your money," said Richard good naturedly. "I'm just kidding. Congratulations, Jerry. We're real happy for you. Wanna talk to your mother?" "Hi, Mom. This is Jerry. I'm in Thailand! I'm getting married!" "Oh, my God," she cried, shocked to the bone by the prospect of an interracial marriage. She switched from her Nebraska mode to her California mode, and then, "Oh, my baby. I'm so happy for you," she cried. "We're going to Russia if I can find the damned passports. Oh, honey, I 165 love you so much. I hope you're careful over there in China." "I'm in Thailand, Mom." "Thailand." "I love you, Mom." "I love you, Jerry."_ Richard finally found the passports in the butter compartment of the refrigerator. He wasn't surprised. Timmie was acting strange and forgetful lately. She had been using his house key and car keys that day because she had lost hers again, and now she had misplaced his, too, and they missed their plane. They had to wait until the next day to leave. Jerry was the only one in the family who would admit that something was seriously wrong with his mother. Even his brother George, halfway through medical school, didn't want to see it. Timmie suspected that she had Alzheimer's disease. She ordered some books about the disease from a book store in Phoenix and kept them hidden from Richard. When Jerry returned from Thailand, he visited his mother. He wanted to tell her about his new wife and share his excitement. He would have to wait several months until Ruey would be able to get a visa and join him in the united states. Timmie decided to act as if everything was fine. She didn't want to upset Jerry. She and Richard had just 166 moved into a huge Spanish-style home that they had built at the base of the biggest mountain on their property. Timmie had designed it on a scrap of paper a couple of years before. She was excited that Jerry was finally going to see it. Jerry parked his car in front of the new house, and Timmie ran down the steps to hug him. They held each other tightly. "What's wrong, Mom?" asked Jerry. "What do you mean, 'What's wrong?' Everything is fine. Oh Jerry-Tim-George ••• Jerry, I'm so glad to see you." "I'm glad to see you, too." There had recently been an unusual desert rain, and the earth smelled like greasewood plants, and the desert was green. "Wanna go for a walk?" Timmie asked. "See, the desert is blooming today." They walked for about an hour before Jerry had the courage to broach the subject of Timmie's forgetfulness. Timmie had just screamed "Watch Out!" and saved Jerry from stepping on a rattlesnake, and Jerry's heart was pounding.

"Mom, I don't know how to tell you this, but you're changing, you're forgetting a lot, and I'm sure about it. You could graph it; I mean each year it's getting worse. I want you to go to a doctor." 167

"There's nothing wrong with me, you little idiot, and I'm certainly not going to one of these quack doctors around here." "Ok, have it your way, but I'm just telling you this because I love you and I'm worried about you. Half the time you don't even get my name right." They walked on for a while in silence, and Jerry noticed that Timmie was crying. He felt guilty for making her cry. "Do you know what Alzheimer's is?" Timmie asked. "Yeah, I've been reading about it." "So have I," she admitted. "I think that's what I have." "Well, why don't you go to a doctor and find out for sure? Maybe you just have a blood clot or something." "Because what if I do have Alz ••• whatever you call it If Richard finds out, he might put me in a home." "So you're just going to keep on trying to act like nothing is wrong, is that it?" "That's it. Nothing is more humiliating than losing your intellect. I can't begin to tell you the panic, the shame I feel knowing that my mind is doomed. Your mind lS where you are. That's your soul. Your mind lS who you are, your spirit." Timmie was talking flatly, as if she'd memorized what she was saying, or had thought about it many times. "The most frightening thing is the fear that 168 whenever I become confused, it's for a reason, that I'm getting worse. My heart actually hurts from fright, like

I've heard an intruder in my house. I get lost in the store; it's like a labyrinth for me. It's fatal, isn't it

Jerry?"

Now Jerry was crying. "Yes."

"Tell me again what's going to happen to me."

"If you have Alzheimer's, you'll lose your short­ term memory completely and forget where your are, forget everybody's names, forget what you just did or said. Then you won't be able to take care of yourself, like brushing your teeth and going to the bathroom. Eventually, you'll fall down and break your hip, get pneumonia, and die."

"Thanks a lot."

"Any time."

"I was going to take some pills or use Richard's gun, but now I don't feel like it. I'm afraid."

Richard kept her at home as long as he could. The women he paid to watch her would quickly become exasperated and quit. Timmie was smart and mean and could trick them easily. And Richard was feeling fear that she might do him bodily harm. He hid the two revolvers he always kept around the house and the kitchen knives. One night she ran through the house naked, screaming, "You have a big green head,

Richard! How does it feel to be pregnant?" Richard would 169 wake up in the middle of the night to find that she had turned on every faucet in the house. One time, she took all of his right cowboy boots, leaving the left ones in the closet, and threw them in the garbage. Another time, she filled the toilets with rocks. After she got lost in the desert for the second time,-he had her committed to a psychiatric hospital with a special ward for Alzheimer's patients. He was given power of attorney; Timmie was no longer a viable person.

Every Christmas, Jerry and Ruey-Fong drive to the hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, where Timmie lives. Ruey is a slender, pretty Thai woman. Her eyes flash with love and creativity. She is an accountant. Jerry is an English teacher. Timmie is 63 and has lost her mind. She lives in a luxurious Alzheimer's ward with other rich people who have lost their minds. The other patients look old, but from a distance, Timmie looks like a 40-year-old movie star. There was some concern among the hospital staff because Timmie's pubic hair had been shaved. Nobody knew who did it or why.

Jerry was afraid that she'd been molested and raped by some orderlies. If they had raped her, she would have forgotten about it instantly, as people with advanced Alzheimer's forget everything.

"Hi, Mom," said pregnant Ruey-Fong, running up to

Timmie and hugging her. Although Timmie had seen her many 170 times, Ruey was still a perfect stranger to her. Timmie did

recognize Jerry. She held him tightly and sobbed. Then she

stopped abruptly and smiled.

"I'm amazed. I'm over shrr, there's a grinner grinner and a grinner. I just can't believe it, I can't believe that I'm here and it's just getting me cuckoo.

Because two days before, I wanted to die and I don't even

know looking back to see what it was about then, but it is

so nothing, those big hotels, they're just so nothing, that

it just, they're just, I can't even eat, and it's just grush

and mush and not good food or anything. And that's just how

I feel. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel tomorrow. But that's the way I felt now seeing the cars going on the freeways."

"How are they treating you here, Mom," asked Jerry.

"Oh just fine. And then isn't there something you'd

like to see in this place maybe like Daddy died."

Jerry said, "Tell me about Daddy; tell me about your

father."

"It's hard to tell you now without telling you the way it really was," answered Timmie. "It's just strange,

it's nothing, it was like nothing to me in my childhood

besides Elaine and I, and if there's some money ln the side

of the side, that would be cuzzled up to my little ...

money, 'cause I always wanted to get money, but I wanted

there to be the money too, so I would be sure that there

would be money left over, and it was always in my head and I 171 hate it, you know, and it's even hard now, but I want things to be right, and that just means right to me [evil laugh] so then what did I do? [In high voice:] Hold me Daddy! He would have no way of even thinking within himself that anything would go wrong. He didn't know that it was that way, he just, everything was copacetic, and everybody else was always reading a book and I was always reading a truck. There's not much that I did. Daddy had a sharp shrun ••• trunk. It was probably comfortable to him. If this was your bed, it would be your bed. Well, I was. Shirley Temple, there she is. Right there. Under the bed when you want it." "Tomorrow is Christmas, Mom," said Ruey. "Well I know that. What's going to be our next big project in our little pile of goop. Then the phone would ring and sing and burst some place and go to bed. I think it was just trying, as high as I could go in the needle and still keep it going before the roof will come tumbling down. It's not very fun, is it? Let's just go eat ice cream." Jerry found a nurse and signed Timmie out for the afternoon. Ruey helped Timmie with the seat belt, and Jerry drove them to a Baskin Robbins. He had Ruey watch Timmie while he ordered the ice cream. When Jerry returned to the table, it was as if Timmie were seeing him for the first time. 172

"Hi, Elaine!" Timmie said to Jerry. "This ice cream is so good I'd eat it even if it were detrimental to my health. Baby your mother. Remember, God is watching you.

Well, he oughta come in a little closer."