Tag Archives: alcoholism

July 24, 2017 · 8:30 am

The Rosenbergs & Me, a reflection

ethel and julius rosenberg
The Rosenbergs & Me

Ethel arrived for court that day in a wool elf hat, beaming.  Her chin had grown double; her skin was flawless and glowing.  She wore a bit of lipstick.  Julius didn’t smile or frown — he looked like a man who had just woken up from a long, dreamless sleep.  Ethel draped her gloved hand over her belly as if to shield herself from unseen bullets.

Ethel & Julius grew up poor in New York, and came of age during the Great Depression.  They grew up going to rallies for the WPA, listening to radio broadcasts by FDR.  I grew up watching the rich debauch themselves in South Florida, and came of age during the Disco Years, the anything-goes Seventies.  John Travolta, spinning like a dervish in his white polyester three-piece suit.

Ethel and Julius and I were all politically inflamed at an early age — I wrote to Nixon at age 11 to protest lax emission control standards, and got a personal letter back, signed by Rosemary Woods, Queen of the Accidental Erasure.  Julius was contacted by the KGB and asked to spy for the U.S.S.R.  He found it flattering — was he really that important? — an offer he couldn’t refuse.  There were no KGB agents contacting me, but if they had… how would I have answered?

Unfortunately, in addition to the political, I also got inflamed past all reason by my mother’s drinking — I used to fling her gallon jug bottles of wine into the canal in the backyard.  My reaction was a type of revolution:  I wanted to throw off the chains of her alcoholism and be free at last.  I wanted to throw off the chains of her drunken love just as much, if not more, than Julius wanted working men and women to throw off the chains of their capitalist oppressors.

I had an ongoing fantasy:  a mother who could be confided in, a mother who wouldn’t judge, become angry, or load me up with confessions of her own, far greater problems than mine would ever be.  Once, I dreamed Ethel was my mother and it was a relief; I knew she’d fight for me; have my best interests at heart.  She looked to be a normal mother, cooking meatloaf and mashed potatoes in her tiny apartment kitchen, smoothing her boys’ foreheads after bad dreams, murmuring soothing words in the darkness.

My father and his left-wing ardor neatly complemented the Rosenbergs.  He once ran for Santa Monica, California city council on the Communist Party ticket.  It was only a few years after Kent State, the simultaneous apex & abyss of the “age of Aquarius.”  My father and I never discussed the Rosenbergs; we were in agreement on most things.

Ethel, Julius and I all studied Marxist doctrine, and I toyed with the idea of joining the American Communist Party.  I read the Party’s official platform (from the 60s), and decided, after considering Ethel & Julius’ fate, that joining wasn’t such a great idea.  To think was private, to act, public.  Plus?  I wanted to be a lawyer someday.

The Rosenbergs had a larger purpose — to transform society from what they viewed as unfair to something more egalitarian.  This is what most political rebels have wanted.  But who defines fair?  Those in power?  The USSR  hardly turned out to be an entity worth dying for.  Are Julius & Ethel content in their graves?  Maybe I should have been sent to the electric chair.

All of us spin out of control in some fashion; Ethel & Julius got caught committing actual crimes.  The main evidence against them was the testimony of Ethel’s brother, a man who turned State’s Evidence to protect his OWN WIFE.  He didn’t actually believe Ethel & Julius would ever be executed.  The government only wanted the Rosenbergs to name names.  They, however, remained silent.

After their deaths, Julius & Ethel were laid out in religious garb.  They didn’t look dead, just asleep.  The embalmer did an excellent job.  Three hundred people came to look at them.  The dead Rosenbergs left behind two young sons — I left behind my mother, slowly dying.  She was a child who wouldn’t grow up.  I couldn’t be her mother — her own mother couldn’t even be her mother anymore.  She had worn everyone out!  Julius, Ethel, don’t ask for God’s forgiveness — I can’t bring myself to.  God should be asking us for ours.  Our enemies have already forgotten us.

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April 3, 2017 · 10:35 am

Columbus Park

Older Chinese men playing Chinese chess, Columbus Park, Mulberry Street, Chinatown, New York City, New York USA.

Columbus Park

Layers, on this island the pearly nacre of creation — darkness,
light swirl for my attention. Walled around the park are giant
buildings, shades of gray and brown, windows glinting,
dark mirrors. I traveled a thousand miles to get here,

to find something, the heart of something, heaven,
earth, sore feet, my own heart. I am a dry sponge,
tramping from one street to the next, darting eyes
quick to latch on, transcend movement, freeze-frame

all in memory. The benches call out to me; I can’t refuse,
down low in Manhattan, where Chinese congregate,
playing some fast game. Like mah-johngg, like dominoes,
like poker, like checkers.  And a wino passes out on the bench

next to me — his mouth gapes, his teeth darkened with decay,
his tongue moving as he breathes. I am here on my bench
otherwise alone, trying to remember my divine nature.
The fact I don’t feel full of knowledge is sure evidence

I am. Nobody ever talks about how in his twenty-ninth
year, the Buddha left his wife and child in the middle of the night
without even saying goodbye. Nobody speaks of the tears
they shed next day. Buddha’s sobbing wife

is the mother of all things, and I have never known
her name. And I know without knowing I have two
souls — the one that will die with my body, the other that will
wander the world. Everything here becomes holy;

I take the wino in my arms, feeling his foul breath
grow sweet, becoming perfume of heaven. The world blooms;
I am its soul, dancing upon the knife-blade, bleeding, but not
falling. No, not falling. As I understand, so shall I be delivered.

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August 27, 2015 · 2:08 pm

Night-Blooming Jasmine, a poem

illustration night blooming jasmine

Night Blooming Jasmine, a poem

After dark, anything could happen – each

moment was disconnected from the last.

There was no logical progression to our lives:

most events had the dramatic essence of a car

accident. One evening, my mother decided

to sneak out my bedroom window when my

stepfather cut her off. He was drunk himself,

but for some reason decided she shouldn’t have

more Scotch. I remember her butt, in white

nylon undies, decorating the center of my open

window. I both fretted and hoped that she might

fall and hurt herself. Another night, my stepfather

decided it was time to throw all the pillows away,

including mine, because to him they smelled like

“horse piss.” My mother followed, protesting

loudly, wrestling him for the pillows. She lost:

the pillows went into the garbage cart. This

happened in our front yard, on a warm night scented

with night-blooming jasmine. I watched the two

drunken grown-ups, distancing myself from the scene.

I watched it like a T.V. show or a movie. When

I try to tell people about these things now, I can’t

keep a straight face. The laughter chokes me,

renders me unable to speak. I am silenced.

They’re both long dead now… but I’m still here.

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March 21, 2015 · 9:23 am

Things We Never Said, a short story

img058 alcoholics anonymous big blue book

Things We Never Said, a short story

She was beautiful, as all mothers are to their children, but it was far more than that. Total strangers told me how beautiful my mother was. She was particularly fine-boned and delicate. Her skin was the softest I’ve known, her arms and hands the most stubborn, the most lethal.

Mom was an alcoholic, of course, and the most gruesomely stubborn person I’ve ever known. She went past simple denial and created her own alternative universe. Once, some quack psychiatrist she was seeing told her she wasn’t a “true” alcoholic — that she only drank out of boredom. She clung to that unfortunate phrase of absolution, repeating it like a robot in a variety of situations, until the day she died at 44 from alcoholic pancreatitis.

The only way we ever got her into rehab was when we threatened to call the police about obtaining drugs by false pretenses. She’d call the drugstore and tell them it was Dr. So-and-so’s office, would they please fill a prescription for such-and-such, three refills, please.

She got stiff all over when she drank, not like a normal drinker who gets loose. Stiff, and with a duck-legged walk that made my flesh crawl. I can’t tell you how many times I just let her lay there on the floor where she’d stumbled in a drunken stupor. I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.

If only Mom could have been more like Charity Hope Valentine, the taxi dancer in “Sweet Charity” who, after being pinched, pawed at, fondled, ridiculed, robbed, tattooed, thrown from a bridge, trapped in an elevator, and deserted at the altar, rather meekly accepts the cheery and somehow redeeming gift of a single daisy from a group of 60s flower children, pulling herself out of her misery yet again, and living “hopefully” ever after.

My mother and I both said “I love you,” a lot, and to no avail. Neither of us believed in love. We believed only in self-preservation. Trust was unknown. I have never learned the reasons for staying with another. All I can think of, now that I’m married, is what I’m missing, giving up for the other. How short life is, and how unhappy.

I took a developmental psychology course once, while my mother was still alive. The teacher explained that no child ever actually dreams of killing the mother. Infantile rage exists, yes, murderous anger exists, yes, but the true desire to kill can never be resident in the child’s subconscious. “The instinct for preservation is too great,” she said.

When I told her, later and in private, how I’d dreamed that very act, how in my dreams I’d taken the great butcher knife out of the kitchen drawer and stabbed it viciously and repeatedly into my mother’s fine and delicately boned chest, she shook her head skeptically.

“You didn’t really dream that,” she insisted. “You only think you did.” I didn’t argue. I was still too afraid it might happen in reality to insist that it had happened in dreams.

She was never a very good mother. I was never a very good daughter. After she died, I went to confess my guilt over my record as a daughter once, to an Episcopal priest. “I let my mother down,” I told him.

“No, you didn’t,” he insisted. “You were the child. You had the right to go off and live your own life.” I was angry at him, and never went back.

I still feel guilty about the first time I knew I’d hurt her feelings. She made me a bunny rabbit salad – a scoop of cottage cheese for the bunny’s face, cut up vegetables for the bunny’s ears, eyes, nose, and whiskers. It was adorable. But I hated cottage cheese, and salad. I was four years old. “I don’t like cottage cheese,” I told her.

“Just try it,” she said.

“No.” I refused over and over again. Finally, she ran out of the kitchen, to the bathroom, and I knew she was crying. I sat in the kitchen, staring at the rabbit, not eating it. I didn’t follow her, I didn’t apologize, and I sat there until someone, probably my grandmother, covered the plate with a piece of plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator. I knew I was never going to eat that bunny rabbit salad.

I mailed the invitations to my own daughter’s birthday party today. She’ll be four in sixteen days. Oddly enough, all I could think of as I wrote out the cards was how much my own mother would have enjoyed seeing my child, her first grandchild. I know exactly what my mother’s face would look like if she were at the party — lovely, tremulous, inevitably a little weepy. I also know half of my pleasure would come from seeing the tenderness in my mother’s wide brown eyes as together we would watch my little Katie blow out all her candles.

 

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December 7, 2014 · 4:38 pm

Lovely Girl, a short-short story

illustration lovely girl
Lovely Girl, a short-short story

Jan. 11, 1979

Kenneth got into a big fight with his father last night. His Dad said that he follows me around like a puppet, and that he’s being bought. Then his Dad told him he was a lazy little bastard for not fixing his car & going somewhere with his mother. Then Kenneth said something back and his Dad tried to choke him and Kenneth left & went to the library.

I have a feeling Kenneth’s Dad hates me, or at least dislikes me. He would probably be a lot happier if I wasn’t going out with Kenneth. I would like to go up to his Dad and say that if he would prefer Kenneth not go out with me — because he thinks Kenneth would be better able to concentrate on sports & school — I will comply.

All I know for sure is that I don’t know anything anymore. Sometimes, I want to go far away – to Europe, maybe – and meet strange people and find out how to live. But then I get scared and I am suddenly glad to be in my safe room with all my possessions that tell me who I am supposed to be. I don’t know who I am – I used to, but things have changed so much, I’m not sure anymore.

Ever since Mom and my stepdad got divorced, it’s been harder and harder to just live. Mom is getting worse with the booze and sometimes I get so angry that I scream at her. Then I feel awful and try to hug her and tell her I’m sorry, but she’s so out of it she just stands there, swaying a little with her eyes half-crossed, and I end up stomping into my room and slamming the door and locking it. Then I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and sigh.

It’s the best just after I get home from classes at community college. Mom isn’t here, and I am alone. No one can bother me, and if the phone rings I don’t answer it. It gives me a sense of power – listening to that phone ring and ring and ring until whoever is calling hangs up, frustrated. I close all the curtains and put on records and smoke cigarettes. In my cool, dark cave I find peace for a few hours.

At six o’clock, though, I hear that fucking bitch, my mother, put her key in the lock, and I jump up and run down the hall to my room to get away. If Mom says something to me, I try to be nice, but it’s usually only a few minutes before our voices become sharp and anger is in the air again. Until she’s blotto, that is. Then, wobbling and bleary-eyed, she’s all lovey-dovey, but also by then all I want to do is shake her until her head falls off!

The only positive things in my life are Amy and Kenneth. Amy is my best friend and Kenneth is my lover. They know, and once in a while I can talk to them about it, but I know that friends can only take so much before they are tired of hearing it. The only person that would listen to everything you said and be interested was a psychologist or psychiatrist, and I’ve thought about going to one, but it’s really too expensive. So I just don’t let myself think about things most of the time.

I keep this journal and write my thoughts down, and that helps a little. Most of the time I’m fine, but it’s always there, hanging over me. Actually, I function very well. I graduated in the top five percent of my high school class, and after a year at junior college I have a 3.8 average. And I’ve never gotten into any serious trouble at all. I’m what grandmothers like to call a “lovely girl.” On the outside. Happy? What did happiness ever have to do with any of my fucking life choices?

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November 12, 2014 · 10:21 am

Hungry Baby, a short story

hungry child

Hungry Baby

Whenever Ella was feeling close to the edge, a hair’s-breadth from lunacy, she liked to shop for groceries. She went up and down all the aisles, methodically picking out food. She threw boxes and jars and bags and cans willy-nilly in her cart, always stocking up for the big one, the storm that would tear the roof off. It’s a habit, one she learned as a child. The women in her family were bony, starry-eyed drunks, with bad skin and lank hair, but by God, they knew how to grocery shop.

She was in this twitchy, nervous state because her mother had showed up again last night. She would never know if it was just a dream: she hoped it was. Ella opened her eyes and saw her mother standing next to the bed, almost touching the mattress. She didn’t smile or speak, but simply shook her head. Mama seemed angry; Ella could tell her mother wanted to hit her. Mama was jealous that Ella was still alive, driving Mama’s car, watching her TV, wearing her jewelry. Ella met her fierce gaze without moving, then closed her lids against the image like hurricane shutters.

The room was so dark, and her mother was like a column of gray smoke, rising over Ella. Meeting death hadn’t changed Mama’s face one bit. How was it that Ella still missed her? That was an embarrassing, childish pain, an overgrown mouth sucking a rubber pacifier. There would never be a second chance for Mama and Ella; Ella wished she could believe in heaven like she believed in hell. If her mother had loved herself, or Ella, even a little, maybe she’d have pulled through the dark waters. But poor Mama was so full of self-hate there was no room for anything else. Now Ella was afraid her mother’s habits were coming after her.

Ella confessed it; often she had hated her mother too, while she lived. She even killed her mother once, in a dream. She stabbed Mama many times with a kitchen knife, and it felt right, like it was the only graceful way out for both of them. There wasn’t as much blood as Ella expected, though there was still enough to soak her mother’s nightgown all the way through. When she woke, clammy and trembling, Ella hurried to Mama’s room to make sure she still breathed. Ella knelt at the side of her bed, watching her mother’s scrawny chest. At first, it didn’t stir, and Ella almost cried out. Then she saw movement, enough to know her mother lived. Forever after, she feared the terrible anger in herself. It was always waiting, a tiger with ivory teeth and steel claws — waiting for her to stumble, to lose her grasp on mercy, on forgiveness, and throw open its cage.

Wishing her mother was dead half the time didn’t keep Ella from breaking down the door in a panic when she thought she’d overdosed. After the first incident, Ella wasn’t all that worried, she knew her mother to be too much of a bumbler, she would screw it up, or not finish, like she did everything else. The door became only an excuse for Ella to use her rage, to make her hatred tangible, give it life, a physical existence. She used a heavy folding chair, swinging it over and over again, watching first the splintered crack appear, then the bit of light, marveling at how the door-frame itself gave way all at once and the entire door fell cleanly into the room. Mama sprawled on her bed, half-clothed, her knobby knees the bulkiest part of her, her huge, brown, doe-like eyes looking puzzled. Even with all the noise, Mama was so out of it, she couldn’t figure out how Ella had gotten in the room. Later, sober, she realized she’d underestimated her daughter, she hadn’t known what Ella was capable of. Much later, a couple of years after Ella left home, after a hundred false starts, Mama managed to finish what she’d begun.

Ella shopped hours for the perfect funeral dress; pulled grimly through all the racks, looking at everything dark. No, not dark, black. “Nobody wears mourning black anymore,” the saleslady said, but for her own mother, Ella insisted. In photographs, she appeared the proper, bereaved daughter. She spent three days wearing the black dress, feeling grimy by the day of the burial, and glad of it.

They buried her mother in front of a croton bush, God, how Mama had hated those things, crotons. Ella stared at the shiny marble urn where it sat in the little hole, the tacky brass plaque glued to the top. She couldn’t object to the shrubbery, not with the priest standing there, tall and lean and handsome like some Marlboro Man, chanting and swinging his billowy canister of incense on its copper chain, the black robes clinging to him under the harsh weight of the sun, his hand so big and hard when she shook it, her knees almost gave way.

That night, Ella left the house long after dark, she walked in shaky high heels down the street and around the corner, ruining the delicate heel tips on the asphalt. She decided to keep walking until she dropped; to walk forever if no one came running after her. She stopped only a couple of miles away, limp from the humid August air. Crickets vibrated, frogs exhaled, stars flickered; the glowing, yellow windows of strangers were her last comfort, her final safe haven. Nothing but love for those strangers kept her from leaving for good, nothing but fear of the anger-tiger kept her from going any farther after her mother; Ella stood alone in the velvet grief of that hot summer night, calling her mother’s name over and over again like a stupid, hungry baby.

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June 14, 2014 · 10:45 am

Possessing My Daughter, section one of a short story

Possessing My Daughter, section one of a short story

illustration possessing my daughter section one

I think the human race somehow needs to evolve beyond children.  Beyond parenthood.  I certainly didn’t want to be a mama.  I resented it and I still do.  Even from the land of the dead, I still begrudge her all my time and effort.  She took so much, so much from me.  She was never grateful, never.  That’s why I’m making her write this now.

I almost had an abortion, but her father talked me out of it.  He could talk a dog off a meat wagon.  He carried me off across the desert to Las Vegas to get married.  My own father was so angry when he found out.  There I was, suddenly, on my own at 19, out of my father’s house.  My new husband and I took a small apartment in Venice Beach.

David had this asinine idea of being an artist.  He had this notion that my father should pay the bills indefinitely.  I had dropped out of college halfway through sophomore year.  I was seeing a psychiatrist.  It was 1959 – need I say more?  Freud was God.  My doctor said I hadn’t resolved my Electra complex.  That, he said, was what was making me so tired.  I slept more than 12 hours a day.  When I wasn’t sleeping, I shopped and went to parties.  The only bad part was knowing that eventually I’d have to make a decision and do something with the rest of my life.  It appeared that being deb of the year in my hometown wasn’t going to cut it much longer.

The first boy I loved broke my heart.  I vowed that it would never happen again.  So I did nothing to repair that broken heart.  I let it stay broken.  It was the only way I could think of to protect myself.  It’s been so long….

Since I’m already dead, I suppose you’re wondering what the point of all this is.  The point is this:  I don’t want anyone else to suffer what I suffered while I was alive, and especially  not what I’m suffering now that I’m dead.  Passing from life to death was supposed to bring me some sort of enlightenment, wasn’t that the fairytale?  I was supposed to experience an end to all my worldly cares – joy, peace, rest, or just plain oblivion.  Well, I didn’t get any of those things.  I’m not surprised:  why should my death be any different from my life?  I got the exact opposite of oblivion.  I got awareness and clarity of vision, a vision so merciless and sharp it would make my head hurt, if I still had a head.  Yes, I see everything  clearly, for the first time, and let me tell you, I’d settle for oblivion any day of the week.  All I want to do with my death is shake all of you by the scruff of the nectk until you get clarity of vision, too.  Then maybe, since you people are still lucky enough to be alive, you’ll do something with that vision while you still can.  Maybe you won’t end up like me.

My poor daughter, even after I died I wouldn’t let her alone.  I visited her over and over again in her dreams until she couldn’t stop thinking about me.  I took control of her heart and her mind – actually, now I see I did that the day she was born – and I never let go.  Now I can see how I really wanted her to tell my story all along – that’s why I raised her the way I did, to give her the necessary skills.  It was like heating iron in a forge and pounding it into a useful shape.  She’s writing it all down, every last bit.  I won’t let her stop until she’s done, and I’m satisfied.

Oh, she’s so much like her father.  What a mistake I made.  I’ve told so many lies since then that I’m not really sure what happened between us.  I think he could sniff out the complications I carried and wanted nothing to do with them.  He didn’t want to hear about how I’d suffered during my parents’ divorce and their custody battle over me.  He didn’t want to hear how I’d stopped eating after the judge sent me to  live with my father.  He didn’t want to hear how much I’d hated boarding school.  But I do remember wanting to have sex with him and him turning me down.  He was too fastidious to have sex with a girl he thought would make for a Problem Breakup.  That would only make the problems more problematic.  The excuse he used was that he still had a lot of schooling to get through – a year or two of college, then law school – and he couldn’t afford to get serious with anyone.  Not, he said, that I wasn’t beautiful and desirable.  The issue was I was too beautiful, too desirable, and getting serious with me was apt to derail his train, headed for success.  He’d lose sight of his goal, and so we had to stop seeing each other.

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June 13, 2014 · 2:31 pm

A Collection of Matchbooks, a short story

matchbooks.indd

A Collection of Matchbooks, a short story

1952, the Wayland Manor Hotel, Providence, Rhode Island.

The day is warm and humid, the yellow roses in the park across the street are in full bloom.  Eva tugs at the sleeves of her powder-blue silk suit.  She’s meeting Neal, the young lawyer she met at a Republican fundraiser last week.  Though Eva’s handsome, prep-schooled husband played tennis for Yale and still buys her wonderful presents, she’s lost her passion for him after five children.  Neal doesn’t have a dime, but he has smoldering dark eyes and soft, manicured hands.  He’s a good talker, very charming, the way he lights her cigarette seems so Continental.  Ever since the night Eva ran that girl over with her car after too many glasses of White Star, she’s been looking for a way out.  She knows her husband will never let her take the children, that’s what bothers her most.

1953, the Ambassador Hotel, Chicago.

Eva sits in the lobby waiting for Neal.  On the train back East from Los Angeles, Neal didn’t sleep more than two hours a night.  He’s frantic to make this business deal.  Eva’s money can only go so far, and though her mother contributes what she can, Neal’s ego is suffering.  Maybe if he didn’t spend so much time playing gin at the Club, he’d do better.  His wife really stung him in the divorce, he paid her a lump sum he could ill afford, but he felt so guilty.  He was only the second person in his family to divorce, the first was his older sister Nina.  She married the guy because her father told her to, so when he started getting weird in the head, she bolted.  Has her own dressmaking business back in Providence.  She dates the young boarder she took in.

1955, the Roosevelt Hotel, New Orleans.

Neal and Eva are stopping over for the night on their way to Savannah.  This trip was Eva’s idea, she wanted to revisit her childhood home, show him the house that survived the ’26 hurricane.  Her mother grew up there, raised by an aunt.  Eva remembers the switchings her nurse gave her for crossing the road by herself.  Lilly Mae had a gold tooth in front and wore the most outrageous wigs, red, blonde, honey chestnut.  Her bosom was soft, like feather pillows.  Eva is disappointed when the hotel can’t give them the Honeymoon Suite.  Neal shakes his head, smiles at Eva, pinches her fanny in the elevator on the way up to their room.

1956, annual convention of the California Polled Hereford Association, Berkeley, California.

Neal dances with his daughter, and Eva snipes at how clumsy the girl is.  Truth is, she’s gorgeous, and Eva’s feeling old.  They got both of Neal’s kids to live with them, Neal’s idea, Eva only wanted sweet little Patrick, not this sullen teenaged girl.  She misses her own children dreadfully.  Her ex-husband lets them visit in the summer.  Still, Eva manages to be kind to Neal’s daughter, she pays for Liza’s boarding school, the very best in the state.  Neal had this idea to raise prize Herefords, Eva’s mother thought it was a great idea, so they bought the ranch in Ojai.  The cattle women all look the same — brown cheeks, pale orange lipstick.  Eva doesn’t fit in, but she doesn’t care.  She orders another chilled vodka, downs it in three swallows.  Her throat burns, it feels cleansed.

1956, Diamond Jim Moran’s, New Orleans.

Liza’s in the ladies’ room, helping Eva to vomit.  Liza wipes Eva’s forehead with a damp towel.  The attendant turns away, afraid she’ll start laughing.  Eva’s hair flops over her forehead and Liza takes the comb and smoothes it back into her thick French twist.  Eva and Neal are on their way home after taking Liza and Patrick to visit their mother in Jacksonville.  It was the least Neal could do, considering his ex-wife’s frame of mind.  When the children left her, she lost 40 pounds in a month.  Liza misses her mother, but doesn’t want to move home.  Next summer, she’ll be a debutante.

1959, the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.

Liza’s on break from Mills College, meeting a boy, Ted, for drinks in the lobby.  She wanted to go to UCLA, but her father wanted her at a girls’ school.  It won’t help.  She’ll be pregnant within the year.  Ted, the baby’s father, fancies himself a Beatnik.  He grew a tiny goatee, sparse but bright red.  Liza is getting tired of the same old thing.  She sees a woman without legs being pushed in a wheelchair across the lobby.  Ted’s right behind, and Liza knows they’ll have sex in the car later.  She wonders what it would be like to have no legs to get in the way.

1959, the Luau, Beverly Hills.

Neal’s throwing a reception for Liza after she eloped to Las Vegas.  He put a good face on it, announced the wedding in the local paper, but he tried to talk her into an abortion.  Liza refused, and Neal thought about having her committed, but Ted talked him out of it.  Ted swears he’ll do the right thing, but Neal has a sick feeling.  The kid has dollar signs in his eyes, just like Neal at that age.  Neal should have listened to his heart, not Ted.  He envisions his daughter in a roach-infested apartment on Venice Beach, wearing nothing but black leotards, her enormous belly heaving as she dances to jazz records.  He wants to kill someone.

1960, Arnaud’s Restaurant, New Orleans.

Eva and her mother are on their way back out West after a shopping trip to New York.  Her mother bought a hat covered with white peacock feathers, and Eva hates it.  She wants to strangle her mother, wants her to hurry up and die so Eva can inherit the family money.  Eva’s ancestors made their money in shipping, sailing goods up and down the Eastern seaboard, and she is absolutely certain none of them owned slaves.  Eva’s mother is a spiritual nut, always falling for some Asian philosophy or another.  Next, she’ll run off with the little Mexican gardener, and Eva will have to concoct a suitable cover story.  They’ve never been close, not since her mother left for Mexico when Eva was two.

1961, the Redwood Room, Clift Hotel, San Francisco.

Ted and Liza are filing for divorce.  Neal is listening to his daughter sob.  She thinks Ted needs her, but Neal knows there’s nothing wrong with the kid that a good bank account won’t cure.  He had that illness himself.  Ted’s refused to work, has taken only art classes instead of working for his MBA like Neal wanted.  The baby lives on fried chicken and Pepsi.  Still, the little thing is cute — ten months and she walks, no, runs, already.  She’s got more of Neal in her than anyone else.  Ted’s parents pleaded with Neal not to interfere, but he can’t stand by and watch his daughter worry where her next meal is coming from.

1963, the Seven Seas Restaurant, Miami.

Neal sent the baby to live with his ex-wife, and sent Liza back to school.  Liza chose secretarial training, and works in a bank by day, looks for men at night.  Liza gets jealous sometimes at how happy her mother is with the baby, but Liza’s not very maternal to begin with.  This man she’s involved with is a sailor.  She’s never dated someone who didn’t go to college.  Even his hands are different.

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a big fat A-hole

a big fat A-hole

leslie moreland gaines, “documentary filmmaker,” con man, artistic failure, hypocrite, and all around evil son of a bitch

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April 24, 2014 · 11:16 am
April 14, 2014 · 3:00 pm

I was thirteen the first time I had to lie to the police to protect someone I loved, a short story

illustration mom hit the boy on the bike

I was Thirteen the First Time I Had to Lie to the Police to Protect Someone I Loved, a short story

I was thirteen, in my first year of high school, and one afternoon I was home watching TV by myself while my mother went to pick up my little brother from nursery school. The doorbell rang: a police officer stood outside, tall and broad and scary. He had gleaming handcuffs and an oily looking gun buckled to his belt; a long black stick with ominous scuffmarks hung at his side. “Your mother’s okay, but she’s been in an accident,” he said. Less than an hour ago I’d seen the way her whole body swayed as she went out the door. Her empty glass was sitting right behind me in the kitchen, unrinsed and still reeking of Scotch.

Even now I see my mother’s face, soft and drunk, pale and frightful, moving through the darkness, soaring over me as mysterious and unreachable as the moon. Her affection waxed and waned, never constant. When she’d had enough to drink, she loved me, but the way she went about her mother love, pulling at me with sorrowful, clumsy arms given unnatural strength by liquor, made my flesh wither under her touch.

“She hit a boy on a bicycle,” the policeman said. “Do you know if she’s been drinking?” he asked. He shifted his weight from one leg to both legs evenly, spread his feet wider on the cement walkway and moved his arms from his sides to his belly, holding his hands together down low at his belt.

“No,” I answered the policeman, looking unflinchingly into his eyes, which was excruciating but imperative, I knew, if I wanted him to believe me. “She hasn’t been drinking.”

My mother had skin like rose petals, eyes like a fawn’s. There were the rare times when she forgot to be sad, if only when some equally sad eyed man noticed her. If a man loved her to the point of obsession, to the point of contemplating suicide, she imagined she might find the strength within herself to survive, but she eventually rejected all such suitors, wanting only those who were hard nosed and cold blooded, as her father and, later, her husbands were. Remote, a source of funds and orders and criticism, the closest men in her life approved of her external beauty but not her soul. They didn’t care what she wanted: they wanted her to be like all the other girls and women, to be beautiful and obedient. They broke her will; she broke their hearts.

She was memorable for simple things: her rose garden and her Scotch and water, her menthol cigarettes and her Pucci nightgowns, her ladylike hands and her A cup breasts, her bitterness, her resignation, her unending string of sentimental, alcoholic boyfriends. She taught me how not to be. How not to live. A psychic once told me she was my one true soul mate in this life and that my heart had been broken the day I was born, that first hazy time I looked into her eyes and saw nothing there for me. One normal thing I remember is hanging clothes out to dry with her in the backyard when the dryer was broken. Once, she even took me out to the movies.

“Are you sure she’s not drunk?” the policeman said. His face was a smooth blank, revealing nothing, but then so was mine. “She’s acting pretty out of it.”

“She gets that way whenever she’s really upset,” I said.

“We need you to come take care of your brother,” he said. “While we decide what to do.”

The policeman herded me into his car, and we drove to the place Mom had the accident. They’d already taken the boy away in an ambulance; all that remained was his bright yellow bicycle, its frame horribly crooked, its front wheel bent almost in half, sprawled on the ground in front of my mother’s car, a powder blue Cutlass Supreme. I glanced offhand at the front of the car, afraid to look too long, afraid the policemen would be able to tell something from the way I acted, but I didn’t notice dents or blood or anything. Even without that, the bike, obviously brand new before the wreck, was as frightening as a dead body. Mom was sitting in the back of another patrol car, and her eyes were red, her face was wet.

My three year old brother sat beside her, and I could tell he hadn’t cried yet, but I could tell when he did it was going to last a very long time. Then I wanted to tell the police she was drunk, yes, she was drunk today and every single afternoon of my life, but the way she looked — her beautiful hands trembling as she smoked — temporarily severed the connection between my conscience and my voicebox. I couldn’t talk at all, because I knew I’d cry. I’d protect her from the police, make sure she wouldn’t end up in jail, but later, I would coldly steal money from her wallet, cigarettes from her purse, clothes from her closet. In the end, the boy on the bike died, and she died, too.

Toward the end, my mother said she was on fire from the neck down. Her arms and legs felt like they were glowing, orange red, molten. But her head felt like a block of ice. She was emotionally or spiritually paralyzed, she said, and worried about whether the condition was permanent. She felt like the nerves from her head down to her body were cut, and she didn’t know if they would ever grow back.

Right before the end, she said she could not distinguish life from dreams; she slept little, ate even less. She didn’t feel mad, she felt terribly, irrevocably sane. Everywhere she walked the ground seemed on the verge of opening up into blackness, into fire. If only she could go mad, she said. When I found her cold and stiff on the living room floor, she wore nothing but blue nylon panties and her white gold wristwatch, given to her by her own mother in 1958.

A watch which is in my jewelry box, upstairs, right this second, and which I wore to the Palm Sunday service, yesterday, at Holy Faith Catholic Church. I took Communion from Father John, even though I am not now, and have never been, and never will be, officially a Catholic. My friend Clyde, my dear friend, mentor, and fellow lawyer, told me that he thought I would still be eligible for Heaven, regardless of what the Catholic Church, as an institution, might determine.

Because of all this, and a couple of other things which I won’t bother to mention here, I had to hold myself very still, and open my eyes a bit wide, during the reading of Jesus’s betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane in order not to allow the fucking tears to drop out of my eyes. Yes, I am a liar. So sue me. Good luck!

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