Girl in a Band (4 page)

AS TEENAGERS,
my friends and I used to walk inside one of the giant sewer pipes that led out to the Pacific Ocean. The pipes were huge and echoing, smelling of old age, caked salt, rotten sea grass. There was always the thrilling possibility that a torrent of water would come gushing down with no warning, which is why we had to be ready at any second to scramble up onto a wall ladder. The risk of water thundering down on you and pulling you along, and the prospect of having to think fast, always made that long walk out to the sea worth it. Risk and excitement were in short supply for me in the neighborhood where we lived, so we found it instead on the shifting coastline and farther inland.

As kids, my friends and I used to play on huge dirt mounds, which none of us realized at the time were freeway on-ramps in the making. One time Keller and some of his group went to a nearby ravine and jumped down off the cliff, landing on a squishy, sandy slope below. What's that old parental cliché—
If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?
The answer in my case was yes. Trying to prove how tough a little sister could be, I landed on my back, the wind rushing out of my body.

I couldn't breathe, to the point where I thought I was going to die. I felt so stupid and embarrassed I didn't even tell my parents. I always hated making mistakes, hated getting into trouble, hated not being in control.

To me the canyons in L.A. held the most glamour. Rustic hillsides filled with twisted oak trees, scruffy and steep, with lighter-than-light California sunshine filtering through the tangles. In the winter, the dripping rain made them look more unkempt than usual. They were also denser, more able to hide the funky, scrabbled array of houses. The canyons were eternally shaded. This was where all the interesting, seemingly non-self-obsessed types were, and where the cool musicians lived—Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, and so on. In the hills, you could imagine you were anywhere in the world, at least during the day, when the trees and the overgrown landscaping hid the gluey sprawl just below. I listened to Joni Mitchell a lot as a teenager and always thought of her sitting up in a woody, funky, thrown-together canyon house, maybe one with a porch, with trees and vegetation dripping off the roof. She would be melancholy, looking out the window. I was in my room a few miles away, painting, smoking pot, and getting sad listening to her.

The canyons were a big contrast to the banal, flat, middle-class section of L.A. where my family lived. Even when we moved to a nicer, bigger, Spanish-style house in the same neighborhood, it was just the same: freshly mowed green lawns camouflaging dry desert-scape; constant, compulsive watering and pruning; everything orderly but with its own kind of unease, what with the constant pressure to be happy, to be
new, to smile. And beneath it all, shadows and cracks and breaks—all Freudian death instinct.

Once I remember my mom pointing to a big undeveloped area of sand, mud, and grass that grew to become Century City. “There's going to be a city there someday,” she said, not in a soothsayer way but stating the obvious, that soon every inch of Los Angeles would be overtaken by more cars, more gas stations, more malls, more bodies, and of course she was right.

We were an academic family, as opposed to a showbiz family, a division I picked up on early and one that held a lot of weight in Los Angeles, especially. In high school, I had a good friend who lived with her mom and brothers, and her dad had been a movie director before he died. They lived in an apartment in Beverly Hills, on Beverly Glen. The mother was beautiful and polished, warm and effusive, and more than anything I admired her emotive qualities. One night they came over for dinner, and after they left, my dad immediately said something sharp, and out of character for him, about how she wasn't a “real” person. Being “real” was such a 1960s ideal. He saw, I think, how enamored I was of my friend's mother, how glamorous I found her—the way she called me “darling” and spoke to me about things my mother didn't. He didn't want me to get sucked into all that.

When people ask me what L.A. was like in the sixties, I tell them that there wasn't as much terrible stucco as there is today: no mini malls with their approximation of Spanish two-story buildings, no oversized SUVs bulging out of parking-space lines. What used to say “Spanish-style” is now something diseased looking. Nobody seems to know how to stucco anymore.

WHEN MY DAD
was getting his college degrees, he got to be friends with a couple of his students, some hipsters, and later beatniks, who all turned him on to jazz. They lived in Venice in a worn-down house, at a time when it was unheard of to live there. Coltrane, Brubeck, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz—those were their reigning jazz heroes. John Coltrane was probably the most avant-garde of the bunch, but my dad loved him, too. I'm almost positive my dad's jazz record collection later influenced me, or at least got me used to abstract music—that, and my parents' blues, folk, and classical LPs, as my mom was always coming back from neighborhood garage sales
weighed down with box sets of Mozart and Beethoven. But jazz has been a lifelong love and interest of mine. I remember when I was little, my dad and I went to visit one of those Venice beatnik guys, though I mostly remember his glam girlfriend with her long, straight black hair, her red-polished fingernails, and her guitar. She was the first beatnik I ever met. I sat in her lap, thinking,
I wish my mom were as cool as this
.

My mom worked out of our house as a seamstress. She was the go-to person in our neighborhood for tailoring clothes. She made all my clothes growing up, and what she didn't design, cut, and sew, she bought in local thrift shops, a habit that surely came from growing up during the Depression. When I was a teenager, she began making more florid, eccentric stuff—caftans, clothes made out of velvet or chiffon, block-printed by a designer she knew. These were haute hippie-looking outfits that she'd sell alongside the wares of other artistically inclined friends—ceramics, jewelry. Still, I hated that she made my clothes or picked up bargains at secondhand stores. Ironically, during my faux-hippie period in high school, I grew to love vintage stores, and thrifting, a habit that carried into my years in New York—anything but the uptight stocking-and-preppy look that was the current fashion at my school. I would raid my mom's sewing room for funky, exotic caftans and beautiful tie-dyed silk “abas,” as she called them.

Basically, I never really knew how to dress during my middle and high school years. I still have a photo of myself in my bedroom at sixteen, sitting on a turquoise bedspread—my favorite color then and now—wearing a pair of baggy, flowered, homemade pants my mom had crafted out of an Indian bedspread, and a wine-colored turtleneck with a zipper up the neck, worn backward. That, or flared hip-hugger cords, or jeans, with a fringed Mexican top. Whenever I told my mom that I wanted to buy some jeans she would let out a theatrical sigh and take me to the army surplus store on Venice Boulevard. It's still there, I think. Along with high-grade military and camping gear, they carried Landlubber, a popular brand in those days.

Looking back, I'm sure that my mom's creative-but-unconventional
fashion sense, coupled with my sense of deprivation, made me covet “new clothes” while also sparking an ambivalence toward conventional fashion, as it was all laid out in the fashion magazines: how a girl or woman is supposed to dress; what expresses her personality; how does she handle wanting to be sexy, or appealing, while still being true to herself? At home I stared for hours at record covers and photos of Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Peggy Lipton, Joni Mitchell, and other cool girls, wanting to be just like them. It was an era of no bras, free-flowing hair, vintage lace, and crushed velvet borrowed from traditional boudoir scenarios of passive female sexuality and placed front and center. Anita Pallenberg's look was wild enough to influence the Rolling Stones. Men wore women's clothes, sheepskin vests, short white pants, lamé scarves, and exotic Moroccan jewelry, while women slipped into pinstripe suits, and boyfriends and girlfriends swapped shirts and pants with no concern, all male-female stereotypes muddled and switched and subverted. The newest, coolest girl around was Françoise Hardy, a French singer who dressed as a tomboy. In Westwood there was a store that sold small, overpriced Jane Birkin–esque French T-shirts, and I think I caved in finally and bought one.

At the same time, from early on my mother feared I was “too” sexy, the result being that I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone's noticing me. In L.A., bodies are always on show, and just walking down the street as a teenager could be scary. Guys in cars would whiz by, slow down, reverse, offer rides to who-knows-where. When I turned fifteen, my mother let me know I was too old to wear short shorts, and Keller, I remember, told her she was a “prude.” These days, I find it kind of cool to be slightly old-fashioned.

Still, my mother always knew better than to try to teach me to make my own clothes. A few times I pulled out her sewing machine to take in my jeans, but the technology always overwhelmed me. Plus, I didn't like her telling me what to do, and I still bristle at authority. When Coco was born someone gave her a onesie from the seventies that said
QUESTION AUTHORITY
. I could relate. I remember asking my mother once if she thought I would have a good figure when I grew up. “Yes,” she said, “you have slim hips and broad shoulders,” though when I matured early on, she mostly seemed afraid I would get into trouble, get pregnant, every mother's biggest fear.

If my dad was in his head most of the time, my mom was the practical one, anchored, a little self-absorbed. She ran our house. She was the enforcer, like most stay-at-home moms. She brooded a lot, said little about her own life before her family came along, but still, you would never have mistaken her for an average 1950s housewife. I knew that growing up her older brother was cruel to her, which is why looking back I find her hands-off parenting style so strange when it came to Keller and me. Maybe I became so good at hiding my oversensitivity that she had no idea how much he traumatized me. Maybe she didn't notice. Maybe she noticed but hoped to toughen me up. I was seven or eight years old when my cat was run over, and a few days or weeks later my mom let me know it was time to stop being sad, time to move on. Maybe she was right. As for her, I never saw her cry, except once when I stayed out all night without telling her, and her tears that night had more to do with anger and relief. As I said, until I was in college I knew nothing about her family's early California origins and even when I found out, my mom had nothing to add. Two years before she died, she said in passing to my aunt, “I should have never left California.”

I'm still not sure how to take those words, but I remember being disturbed when my aunt told me that. Did my mom mean:
I should never have married your father
? Or,
If I'd never left California to go to Kansas, I would never have ended up as a faculty wife and a mother
? Or,
I would never have been the mother of a paranoid-schizophrenic son
? No one knows what goes on inside anyone else's marriage, especially their parents'. Over the few times they met, my mom and Thurston's mom, Eleanor, who was a decade younger, developed a friendship of sorts. Once my mom confided to Eleanor that she'd considered leaving my dad but was glad she hadn't.

I always got the feeling my mom would rather have been doing something else, that she wanted
more
for herself—more recognition, maybe, as a creative person. Maybe she secretly wanted to be a movie actress, wanted to be recognized less as an academic's wife and more as the person she felt she was inside—I won't ever know. Once, I remember, she made a collage out of
New Yorker
covers that she placed above the stove. It was a grease catcher, she told us, but in truth it was more than that, a piece of clever, unconventional art. Another time she made a series of long, rectangular wall reliefs with shells in colored cement on wood, more art than craft, making me wish she would make more. Maybe, like me, the clothes she cut and designed and stitched were the arena where she felt the freest to show off the things in her life that were blocked or frustrated. When she dressed up to go out at night in the fashion of the 1950s—low-cut dresses, an ample bosom, a cinched-in waist, flared skirts—she laughed and enjoyed herself with an ease I didn't see very often in her everyday life. I couldn't help but feel sometimes that no one ever told her she was beautiful growing up, that she felt like the unattractive one in her family. To me she was gorgeous, like Ingrid Bergman.

My dad was elderly by the time Coco was born in the summer of 1994. The Parkinson's had set in, and he wasn't really able to hold her safely. My mother was nearly the same age as my dad but always did yoga and played golf and walked. My mother really loved Coco—she was her first and only grandchild—but instead of holding her, she spent hours watching her. “She's going to be okay, because you really play and interact with her,” my mom once said to me, as if to say this was something she'd never done with me. I was always very independent, she reminded me, but looking back, I missed that closeness with my mother. When I was ten, my family spent a year in Hawaii, and I have a memory from that time of one day wondering,
How come I don't sit in my mother's lap anymore? How come she doesn't hold me or hug me?

Both my parents were brooders. My dad was preoccupied with academic politics. For years he was an associate dean, and he eventually became dean. My mom was equally absorbed in her own thoughts. In
private she worried about a lot of things. Keller would say something to her like “You're so uptight!” and I'd add “Yeah, Mom, why do you look so sad?” and she'd say something like “Because the world is so depressing—the war, for starters.”

It wasn't just the sixties. It was family stuff, most having to do with Keller, and the worry and the stress that seemed to follow him. Even after my dad retired from UCLA, he never wanted to travel or take vacations. Instead, he gardened and paced. Sometimes I could hear him out in his jungle of tomato plants in the middle of the night, prowling around, and I felt bad for him. He never talked about what was going on with my brother, but he must have been keeping watch, waiting on the worst, duty-bound to be there in case something went down with Keller, because by then something was always happening with Keller.