31 May 2003


All Over

My mother killed herself on a Friday evening, March 9, 1969, just as the sun was going down. Earlier that day, she and my brother drove north up the California coast to Santa Barbara and back. The two of them had a late lunch at one of her favorite greasy-spoons, then returned home.

I got home from school before them and was puttering around the house barefoot and completely lost in thought about a college boy, a friend of my brother's, who was turning 21 the next night. Smart, funny and eager to amount to something, John cut dashing figure in his yellow Porsche-356 convertible. He was a welcome change from the surfers, football players, and small-town heroes at my public high school. Thrown together as a result of our mothers’ friendship, we’d grown closer through our mutual passion for sailing small boats. By that Friday afternoon, I had developed a full-blown, high-school-girl crush on him, which I pursued single-mindedly.

When my mother walked in the backdoor and through the utility porch to the kitchen, where I stood beside the water-cooler, glass in hand, she paused to kiss me on the cheek. I brushed aside her kiss, impatient with the show of affection. I didn't know, you see. Couldn’t know. That it would be the last time I would see her alive.

How many times I’ve replayed that scene in my mind. She knew that she was kissing me goodbye. She was a suicide survivor herself, my grandfather shot himself with a hunting rifle in my grandmother’s kitchen just weeks after my mother married my father. Why did she do that to me, leave me with such a haunting final encounter?

I don’t remember how she reacted to my brush-off, so lost was I in daydreams. The last thing she said to me was, "I'm going to go take a shower, then lay down for a nap."

"Okay…." I said, then went back to thoughts of John.

"Hey, I’ll help you wash the car…whaddya say?" my brother snagged my attention. His love affair with cars was already several years old, and and could spend hours washing and detailing them. I was a lot less enthusiastic, but the prospect of water, a hose, sponges, and bubbles…it would kill some time.

So that’s how we came to be alongside the house washing the family VW Bug when my mother shot herself in her bedroom just yards away. We were drying the curvy, white fenders and shiny hood with ragged towels as the sun dropped below the horizon, when I thought I heard something. Having no idea what was happening, however, I ignored the sound and promptly forgot about it.

We finished and went back into the house. My brother flopped down on the couch and flipped on the TV while I went toward my bedroom to change clothes. At the last second, however, I veered off in the hallway and headed for the closed door of my mother’s and father’s bedroom. "I’ll just check in on her," I thought and cracked open the door.

I glanced in. So much did I expect to see her sleeping that I was in the act of closing the door again to proceed to my own room, when the thought intruded. "People don't sleep like that."

I opened the door again and stepped into the room. My mother was sprawled on the bed, her head toward the door, surrounded and partially obscured by throw pillows. The orientation, the unusual contortion of her body and the fact she was stark naked momentarily froze me. I knew something was wrong but shock was setting in, making me slow on the uptake. True to my emergency plan, though, I was determined to take charge and fix whatever was wrong.

So I stepped back into the hall, yelling to my brother in the living-room, "Something’s happened to mom!" and grabbing the phone. I dialed "O" for operator—this was before the advent of 911—and told the women who answered that we had an emergency and needed an ambulance. "I’m not sure what happened, but my mom’s hurt," I said, and gave her our address. She didn’t keep me on the line.

While I was on the phone, my brother peeked from the doorway into the room, then returned to the living-room where he collapsed in uncontrolled weeping. After I hung up, I re-entered my parents’ bedroom, determined to do whatever was necessary to keep my mother alive until the ambulance arrived.

No panic, not this time! Although my actions were pointless, there was nothing I could do to save my mother. She’d made certain of that, putting the barrel of my father’s .357 magnum into her mouth and pulling the trigger.

Unaware of the futility of my efforts, however, I moved several throw pillows away from her face and that’s when I saw that she had used them to muffle a gunshot. They were soaked with blood and the revolver lay near her hand. I realized there was nothing I could do, but I didn’t—couldn’t—admit to myself that she was dead.

I left the bedroom and began pacing—the hall, the living-room, the kitchen. I couldn’t sit down, couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t cry. It seemed like forever until I heard sirens, although it was probably only minutes. As they approached, our German-shepherd, "Soldier," loose in the backyard, began howling, creating an eerie duet of sirens and cries that sent chills up my spine.

The police arrived first, followed by the ambulance, then more police. Drawn by the commotion, a crowd began gathering in a semicircle in front of our house. I stood in the darkened dining-room, peering through the slit in the curtains and felt shame, then loathing toward the strangers and their morbid curiosity.

I turned from the window as a young EMT emerged from my mother’s bedroom and strode toward us down the hall. I remember his approach as if it happened in slow motion. I was thinking, "The professionals are here now. Miracle-workers. They’ll save her." I still hadn’t let in the horror of what I’d seen in the bedroom.

When someone is shot, especially with a weapon like the one my mother used, the bullet makes a relatively small entry wound and a very large exit wound. The result is quite different than what Westerns and war movies of the 1950’s and 60’s typically showed. In those, people drop dead from gunshots with no wounds at all. No trauma, no blood, no guts spattered all over the wall.

Whereas my mother had, in effect, blown the back of her head off, splashing bits of bone, brain and blood all over the pillows, the bed, the bedclothes. The bullet had lodged in the ceiling, making a hole that would remain for weeks until it was finally repaired. Weeks, during which I slept steps away, down the hall, sometimes alone in the dark because my father had already started dating and spending nights away.

The EMT strode his slow-motion way down the hall and stopped at the edge of the living room. He shook his head, his expression bleak. "It’s all over," he said.

I’ll never forget those words. All over. My brother’s weeping crescendoed. I stared at the EMT, feeling like I was floating inches off the floor, strangely disembodied. I felt cold—deadly cold—but no other emotions at all, beyond anger at the curious bystanders outside, and shame at the awful, ugly spectacle I was caught up in.

Later that night, I would also feel disappointment: I won’t get to go to John’s birthday party. Then remorse at my selfishness.

But in the living room, facing the EMT, I cut off all feelings and focused on my father. He was going to come home from work and find all this drama! The ambulance, the police, flashing lights and the crowd. "We’ve got to let my dad know," I said to the half-dozen police officers crowding the inside of my house.

Ever since he’d arrived, the sergeant in charge of the scene had been trying to calm me down. "Please," he’d say. "Why don’t you just sit down? For a minute?" His eyes beneath his cap were filled with concern.

But I couldn’t sit down. Sitting down might lead to crying, like my brother’s, which would signal acceptance on some level that all this was actually happening. That it was, indeed, all over.

I couldn’t admit that, yet.

29 May 2003


The Men from Camarillo

In late January, the winter of my mother's suicide, the skies opened up over our sleepy seaside town of Ventura, California, and unleashed a torrential downpour. On biblical scales over the next forty days and forty nights, three storms --the first two warm, semi-tropical systems arising over Hawaii, the final a cold front from the Gulf of Alaska—delivered a two-three punch that left locals reeling and digging out from under tons of mud and debris.

Overall, the storms dumped a record-breaking 68 inches of rain on Matilija Canyon, the hardest hit section of the county's watershed. That's nearly six feet of water falling over roughly three five-day periods, separated by a scattering of semi-clear days between.

The normally arid scrub-and-sagebrush-dotted hillsides couldn't handle the deluge. Run-off flowed to creeks and rivers, which eroded and overflowed their banks, washing away houses, roadways and railroad tracks. Orchards and farmlands were flooded, bridges demolished, and entire hillsides transformed into rivers of mud. Thousands were forced to flee their homes and businesses and at least a dozen people drowned. Early estimates placed the county's financial damages at $60 million.

A pervasive sense of vulnerability and dread spread through a populace already off-balance from events on a national scale. The year was 1969. In the previous April and June, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy had been felled by assassins' bullets nine weeks apart, almost to the day. The war raged on in Vietnam, with escalating American casualties fueling a growing anti-war movement. In August of 1968, demonstrations exploded on the streets of Chicago, where they were met with a level of police violence never before unleashed against middle-class college students. Television cameras broadcast the shocking images to even small, out-of-the-way places like Ventura, where we sat hunched over our TV-dinners while we watched the cops with Billy clubs advance on young demonstrators.

Saturation bombing of North Vietnam and secret invasions of Laos and Cambodia were just beginning, still the war-juggernaut hungered for fresh blood. My brother, 22 at the time and just married, had dropped out of college the previous summer, and his draft notice was quick to follow. The week before he was to report for his physical, however, my mother cryptically reassured him, "Don't worry, honey. I'll take care of it."

None of us had a clue what she meant at the time. Although she was making no bones at all about voicing her intentions to kill herself, I naively believed the false adage, much in circulation at the time, that stated if somebody said he was going to kill himself, he never would. That sentiment comforted me, 17-years-old and preoccupied by teenaged concerns. I was lulled into a false sense of security. Especially that Friday morning in early March when my mother told my father and me, "If you don't take me to Camarillo, I'm going to kill myself. I swear it!"

Camarillo! That was the nearby state-run psychiatric hospital. I'd heard horror stories about what went on in those snake-pits, with helpless mental patients at the mercy of sadistic staff. No way I'd send my mother there. Besides, saying she was going to kill herself meant she wouldn't, right?

In denial, with most of my thoughts on a party the next evening at the house of a boy I had a crush on, I headed off to school that morning. My father called my brother, who took the day off from his job as a grave-digger—his last position before he dedicated himself to a lifetime of selling cars—and he came over to keep my mother company. No one, not one of us, thought to remove the .357 magnum handgun, which my father had purchased from an ex-cop friend, from its shelf in my parents’ closet. There it sat, with its fat, shiny, snub-nosed bullets rolling around loose, in a frayed cardboard box.

It wasn't raining that day. The third and final storm had slammed into the coast two weeks before, causing the Santa Clara River to burst a levee southeast of town and flood the newly-constructed Ventura Marina. The muddy surge snapped moorings and swept away some 540 boats—hundreds washed out the harbor mouth where huge waves forced them back onto the rocks of the twin breakwaters. Ten days before my mother's death, beach-dwellers woke up to the spectacle of dozens of yachts, masts broken, white hulls split-open, and cushions, charts, clothing, and other water-sodden possessions strewn helter-skelter along the shore. Amazingly, no one was hurt or killed.

The destruction, however, deeply disturbed my mom. Bedridden with a bad case of the flu, she didn’t rush down barefoot onto the chilly morning sand to witness the wreckage firsthand, like I did. Instead, she read about it in the Ventura County Star-Free Press, lingering over the sensational photo spread.

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, my mother had, in her 56 years, forged a strong emotional attachment to the Pacific Ocean. Strolling its beaches, or gazing out on its constantly-changing surface, often lifted her out of what were becoming deeper episodes of depression. Now, the images of those yachts, broken to pieces and foundering, seemed to drag her down with them.

Never very emotionally stable, she was subject to strong mood swings. By turns playful and despondent, she was also jealous and possessive, quick to anger, and a heavy drinker. Slender, tall, with broad shoulders, large breasts and a regal bearing, Dottie—as her friends called her—was a beauty, with an expressive face dominated by high cheekbones and flashing green eyes. She and my handsome father made a striking pair as they entertained friends. Invariably, though, the parties ended with terrible, shouting matches, often started over a perceived flirtation on his part.

The weeks leading up to her suicide, however, saw a dramatic change in my mother, especially after she suffered anaphylactic shock after a penicillin shot. Unaware she was allergic, she had received the shot to treat fever, congestion, and a debilitating cough—lingering symptoms of the virulent Hong Kong flu that swept Ventura county that winter, eventually claiming nearly 34,000 lives nationwide.

I’d been laid low by it, too, around Christmas, spending ten days dozing feverishly in my sleeping bag on the couch in front of the TV and beside the twinkling Christmas tree. Then I gave it to my mom. The penicillin shot almost killed her. She collapsed on the floor of the medical clinic and was only saved by an adrenalin shot to jumpstart her heart.

Nonetheless, they sent her home straightaway, rather than keeping her for observation. She never was quite the same after that. Her depression worsened, disrupting her ability to go about any daily routine. She became afraid to leave the house, even to walk a block to the corner store to buy cigarettes. And she became consumed by paranoia, convinced my father and I were talking about her behind her back.

In one routine I found unnerving, she'd get up out of her sick-bed, trade her Hawaiian-print muumuu or worn bathrobe for one of her best outfits (including overcoat), and plop herself down in an armchair in the living-room, feet planted side-by-side and hands folded on the purse in her lap—a prim picture of decorum far different from her usual self.

If questioned, she'd respond that she was waiting for “them to come pick me up.”

“Waiting for who to come?” I'd ask.

“The men from Camarillo,” she'd say.

I'd try to talk her out of it, sometimes spending hours at the task—displaying a fierce, teenaged dedication—all the while convinced that committing her would be the worst possible thing we could do. “We didn’t call anyone to come!” I’d insist, over and over. Until eventually she seemed to believe me.

That is, until the next time I’d find her in the armchair.

Where was my father while all this was happening? He was fleeing the reality of his deteriorating marriage through long hours at work, emotional distancing and heavy drinking. Not an uncommon scenario in the late 1960’s.

In her final days, my mother remained mostly bedridden as she recovered from both the flu and her allergic reaction to penicillin. During this time, she suffered panic attacks in which she felt she couldn't breathe. One time, I was home alone with her when it happened and I completely went to pieces.

I was sure she was dying, I didn’t know what to do, so I raced around the house, from her bedroom to the kitchen to the living-room and back, in a whirl of ineffectual motion, while my mother slowly regained her composure—and her breath—on her own.

When it was over and I finally slowed down and reassured myself she was okay, I got so angry at myself. “She could have died!” I thought. “And if I’d been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, instead of giving her CPR or calling an ambulance, it would have been my fault.

I vowed, “Next time—if there is a next time—I won't fail her!”

It was a promise that set me up for a fall.

25 May 2003


The Good Old Days



My parents’ romance was star-crossed from the start and would have never happened but for World War II.

In late September, 1945, my father was granted a 10-day liberty from the Coast Guard, which he had joined as a 21-year-old seaman at the outset of the war. But now the war was over and every available train, bus, and airplane had been requisitioned to transport demobilized servicemen. After a frustrating three days in Sacramento trying to book a passage home to Boston, he decided on the spur-of-the-moment to hitchhike to Lake Tahoe, instead, and spend the rest of his liberty at the casinos.

It was a decision that changed his life. He and my mother met at the ski resort where she was working as a hostess. He bedded the pretty redhead and, like the good Irish-Catholic boy he was, married her in Reno before the liberty was over.

My mom seems to have regarded the whole thing as a bit of a lark—at first. A party-girl from the San Francisco Bay Area, she had been married once before to a handsome milkman with a heavy drinking problem. Their short marriage ended when he turned up dead under mysterious circumstances in a sketchy Oakland hotel. Her subsequent boyfriends tended more toward worldly-wise tough-guys, than an earnest, sexually-naive man like my father.

Dad told me that, on the bus-ride back from Tahoe to San Francisco, when he had voiced his intention to look up a Catholic priest and make their union "legit," my mother had stared at him in open-mouthed amazement. “You're really serious about this, aren't you?” she had finally asked.

Indeed he was.

The couple muddled through 23 years of mutual bewilderment that only increased after four miscarriages, the birth of my brother and me, and a move from the Bay Area to Southern California. As I remember it, they were never, either one of them, much inclined toward introspection. They partied hard, drank heavily, and fought bitterly. Early on, my mother seemed to have held the upper hand, throwing my dad's sexual inexperience in his face during arguments and threatening on occasion to, “Pick up the phone and have any number of guys come running over to pick me up!”

It’s a threat she never carried out. As time ran on, the power dynamic shifted. In the years leading up to her suicide, my father held the emotional advantage and he criticized and taunted my mother—and my sweet, somewhat effeminate brother—relentlessly. He coined demeaning nicknames. “Say, you going to sweep the garage, Broomy?” to my tidy brother. Or, “The Golden Goose is ascending her throne!” crowed gleefully when my mother tried to retreat behind the bathroom’s closed door.

Derisive laughter became my father’s weapon of choice, wielded at the slightest hint of vulnerability. Nothing was off limits. He mocked physical frailties, bodily functions, personality traits, appearances; he even resorted to ethnic slurs. “Hey, Isadore the Jew, how about a loan?” was a routine taunt to my thrifty brother. I grew up thinking “Jew the price down,” was an acceptable expression of speech, until one day in my late teens when a Jewish shopkeeper angrily set me straight.

Surviving my family was like an 18-year tiptoe through an unmarked minefield. I learned early on to tread softly and keep my head down. Dare to challenge my father’s bullying, and he would take the offensive. “What’s the matter, you got no sense of humor? Aw, come on, I was only joking!” he'd say. “Can't you take a joke?”

The effects of his emotional bullying were devastating. My brother’s self-esteem was ripped to shreds before it had a chance to develop.

As the youngest, I looked on the emotional carnage and knew I never wanted to be a target of my father’s bitter humor. So, to my everlasting shame, I joined forces with the enemy. I embraced the nicknames, laughed at the put-downs, and joined my chorus of criticism to my father’s. Picking here, finding fault there, we became a relentless tag-team. Looking back, I realize I acted out of self-preservation—understandable, under the circumstances. But I am still so sorry.

But why did my father do it? Perhaps the answer lies in his own childhood. Deprivation and conflict run as themes through the stories he tells of that time. His birth, in 1920 in Boston, surprised his then 49-year-old Irish-born mother. There were seven children already. And seven years difference in age between him and his next nearest sibling; 18 between him and the oldest. While he speaks glowingly of his mother—a saint, who fed a family of nine on a shoestring budget and never turned away a hungry beggar from their door—he says little beyond the barest of facts about his father.

Rather, the stories of his Depression-era youth revolve around Boston winters so cold, you could see your breath in the air of his unheated, garret bedroom; older brothers who drank too much, ran with the wrong crowd and brought only grief to the family; fistfights between roving bands of neighborhood kids. And no affection ever shown by his father to his mother, or to the children.

I know my mother was beaten by her father; it seems likely that my dad was by his, too. Else why did they treat us as they did? “Shut up, or I’ll give you something to cry about!” was a common threat. And one carried out, too.

My memory is hazy on the details, but as I recall it, my mother’s violence was typically spontaneous—a shout, a quick grab of the wrist and a slap or two or three, usually across the buttocks. My father’s, on the other hand, was delivered in a cooler state of mind. “Wait ‘til your dad gets home!” occasioned hours of dread on the part of my brother or me. When the punishment was finally administered, it was bent over my father’s knees, with the belt he used to hold up his pants applied to our bare flesh.

Even worse, though, were the few times my father went off at my brother in a rage. One time, I remember looking on in horror as he picked my brother up and threw him through the air and against the wall of the bedroom.

I’ve completely forgotten the cause of his fury, whether or not he had been drinking, even what happened afterwards. Did my brother cry? Was he knocked unconscious? Did my father apologize, show remorse?

I don’t know. All I remember is the image of my brother’s body hurtling through the air—skinny 12-year-old arms and legs flailing—and slamming into the wall.

No bones were broken. No doctor called or authorities of any kind summoned. No one intervened that occasion or any of the times events spun out of control in our family. Back then, I believed such a level of domestic violence as ours was just the way families were.

I’ll never understand popular nostalgia for the 1950’s and 60’s. For me, it is an era filled with bigotry, denial, ignorance and shame, all mixed together under a veil of uncomfortable secrecy. No way I’d ever want to go back.