The White Album (5 page)
Authors: Joan Didion
8
Driving a budget Rent-A-Car between Sacramento and San Francisco one rainy morning in November of 1968 I kept the radio on very loud
.
On this occasion I kept the radio on very loud not to find out what time it was but in an effort to erase six words from my mind, six words which had no significance for me but which seemed that year to signal the onset of anxiety or fright
.
The words, a
li
ne from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” were these:
Petals on a wet bl
ack bough
.
Th
e
radio played “Wichita Lineman” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine
.
”
Petals on a wet black bough
.
Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and
Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations
.
Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and
Vallejo it also occurred to me that the fright on this particular morning was going to present itself as an inability to drive this Budget Rent-A-Car across the Carquinas Bridge
.
The Wichita Lineman was still on the line
.
I closed my eyes and drove across the Carquinas Bridge, because I had appointments, because I was working, because I had promised to watch the revolution being made at San Francisco State College and because there was no place in
Vallejo to turn in a Budget Rent-A-Car and because nothing on my mind was in the script as I remembered it
.
9
At San Francisco State College on that particular morning the wind was blowing the cold rain in squalls across the muddied lawns and against the lighted windows of empty classrooms
.
In the days before there had been fires set and classes invaded and finally a confrontation with the San Francisco Police Tactical Unit, and in the weeks to come the campus would become what many people on it were pleased to call “a battlefield
.
”
The police and the Mace and the noon arrests would become the routine of life on the campus, and every night the combatants would review their day on television: the waves of students advancing, the commotion at the edge of the frame, the riot sticks flashing, the instant of jerky camera that served to suggest at what risk the film was obtained; then a cut to the weather map
.
In the beginning there
had been the necessary “issue,” the suspension of a 22-year-old instructor who happened as well to be Minister of Education for the Black Panther Party, but that issue, like most, had soon ceased to be the point in the minds of even the most dense participants
.
Disorder was its own point
.
I had never before been on a campus in disorder, had missed even Berkeley and Columbia, and I suppose I went to San Francisco State expecting something other than what I found there
.
In some not at all trivial sense, the set was wrong
.
The very architecture of California state colleges tends to deny radical notions, to reflect instead a modest and hopeful vision of progressive welfare bureaucracy, and as I walked across the campus that day and on later days the enti
re San Francisco State dilemma—
the gradual politicization, the “issues” here and there, the obligatory “Fifteen Demands,” the continual arousal of the police and the outraged citizenry—seemed increasingly off-key, an instance of the
enfants terribles
and the Board of Trustees unconsciously collaborating on a wishful fantasy (Revolution on Campus) and playing it out in time for the six o’clock news
.
”
Adjet-prop committee meeting in the Redwood Room,” read a scrawled note on the cafeteria door one morning; only someone who needed very badly to be alarmed could respond with force to a guerrilla band that not only announced its meetings on the enemy’s bulletin board but seemed innocent of the spelling, and so the meaning, of the words it used
.
“
Hi
tl
er Hayakawa,” some of the faculty had begun calling S
.
I
.
Hayakawa, the semanticist who had become the college’s third president in a year and had incurred considerable displeasure by trying to keep the campus open
.
“
Eichmann
,
”
Kay Boyle had screamed at him at a rally
.
In just such broad strokes was the picture being painted in the fall of 1968 on the pastel campus at San Francisco State
.
The place simply never seemed serious
.
The headlines were dark that first day, the college had been closed “indefinitely,” both Ronald Reagan and Jesse Unruh were threatening reprisals; still, the climate inside the Administration Building was that of a musical comedy about co
ll
ege life
.
“No
chance
we’ll be open tomorrow,” secretaries informed callers
.
“Go skiing, have a good time
.
”
Striking black militants dropped in to chat with the deans; striking white radicals exchanged gossip in the corridors
.
“No interviews, no press,”
announced a student strike
leader who happened into a dean’s office where I was sitting; in the next moment he was piqued because no one had told him that a Huntley-Brinkley camera crew was on campus
.
“We can still plug into that,” the dean said soothingly
.
Everyone seemed joined in a rather festive camaraderie, a shared jargon, a shared sense of moment: the future was no longer arduous and indefinite but immediate and programmatic, aglow with the prospect of problems to be “addressed,” plans to be “implemented
.
”
It was agreed all around that the confrontations could be “a very healthy development,” that maybe it took a shutdown “to get something done
.
”
The mood, like the architecture, was 1948 functional, a model of pragmatic optimism
.
Perhaps Evelyn Waugh could have gotten it down exac
tly
right: Waugh was good at scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people absorbed in odd games
.
Here at San Francisco State only the black militants could be construed as serious: they were at any rate picking the games, dictating the rules, and taking what they could from what seemed for everyone else just an amiable evasion of routine, of institutional anxiety, of the tedium of the academic calendar
.
Meanwhile the administrators could talk about programs
.
Meanwhile the white radicals could see themselves, on an investment of virtually nothing, as urban guerrillas
.
It was working out well for everyone, this game at San Francisco State, and its peculiar virtues had never been so clear to me as they became one afternoon when I sat in on a meeting of fifty or sixty SDS members
.
They had called a press conference for later that day, and now they were discussing “just what the format of the press conference should be
.
”
“This has to be on our terms,” someone warned
.
“Because they’ll ask very leading questions, they’ll ask
questions
.
”
“Make them submit any questions in writing,” someone else suggested
.
“The Black Student Union does that very successfully, then they just don’t answer anything they don’t want to answer
.
”
“That’s it, don’t fall into their trap
.
”
“Something we should stress at this press conference is
who owns the media
.
”
“You don’t think it’s common knowledge that the papers represent corporate interests?” a realist among them interjected doubtfully
.
“I don’t think it’s
understood!’
206
T
Two hours and several dozen hand votes later, the group had selected four members to tell the press who owned the media, had decided to appear
en masse
at an opposition press conference, and had debated various slogans for the next day’s demonstration
.
“Let’s see, first we have ‘Hearst Tells It Like It Ain’t,’ then ‘Stop Press Distortion’—that’s the one there was some political controversy about
.
...
”
And, before they broke up, they had listened to a student who had driven up for the day from the College of San Mateo, a junior college down the peninsula from San Francisco
.
“I came up here today with some Third World students to tell you that w
e’re
with you, and we hope you’ll be with
us
when we try to pull off a strike next week, because we’re really into it, we carry our motorcycle helmets all the time, can’t think, can’t go to class
.
”
He had paused
.
He was a nice-looking boy, and fired with his task
.
I considered the tender melancholy of life in San Mateo, which is one of the richest counties per capita in the United States of America, and I considered whether or not the Wichita Lineman and the petals on the wet black bough represented the aimlessness of the bourgeoisie, and I considered the illusion of aim to be gained by holding a press conference, the only problem with press conferences being that the press asked questions
.
“I’m here to tell you that at College of San Mateo we’re living like
revolutionaries”
the boy said then
.
10
We put “Lay Lady Lay” on the record player, and “Suzanne
.
”
We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos
.
There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, and in the evenings the smell of jasmine came in through all the open doors and windows
.
I made bouillabaisse for people who did not eat meat
.
I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town
.
There were rumors
.
There were stories
.
Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable
.
This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin”—this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969
.
A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in tne community
.
The jitters were setting in
.
I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full
.
On August 9,1969,1 was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive
.
The phone rang many times during the next hour
.
These early reports were garbled and contradictory
.
One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains
.
There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen
.
Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed
.
I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not:
I remember that no one was surprised
.
11
When I first met Linda Kasabian in the summer of 1970 she was wearing her hair parted neatly in the middle, no makeup, Elizabeth Arden “Blue Grass” perfume, and the unpressed blue uniform issued to inmates at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Los Angeles
.
She was at Sybil Brand in protective custody, waiting out the time until she could testify about the murders of Sharon Tate Polanski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, and, with her lawyer, Gary Fleischman, I spent a number of evenings talking to her there
.
Of these evenings I remember mainly my dread at entering the prison, at leaving for even an hour the infinite possibilities I suddenly perceived in the summer twilight
.
I remember driving downtown on the Hollywood Freeway in Gary Fleischman’s Cadillac convertible with the top down
.
I remember watching a rabbit graze on the grass by the gate as Gary Fleischman signed the prison register
.
Each of the half-dozen doors that locked behind us as we entered Sybil Brand was a little death, and I would emerge after the interview like Persephone from the underworld, euphoric, elated
.
Once home I would have two drinks and make myself a hamburger and eat it ravenously
.
“Dig it,” Gary Fleischman was always saying
.
One night when we were driving back to Hollywood from Sybil Brand in the Cadillac convertible with the top down he demanded that I tell him the population of India
.
I said that I did not k
now the
population of India
.
“Take a guess,” he prompted
.
I made a guess, absurdly low, and he was disgusted
.
He had asked the same question of his niece (“a college girl”), of Linda, and now of me, and none of us had known
.
It seemed to confirm some idea he had of women, their essential ineducability, their similarity under the skin
.
Gary Fleischman was someone of a type I met only rarely, a comic realist in a porkpie hat, a business traveler on the far frontiers of the period, a man who knew his way around the courthouse and Sybil Brand and remained cheerful, even jaunty, in the face of the awesome and impenetrable mystery at the center of what he called “the case
.
”
In fact we never talked about “the case,” and referred to its central events only as “Cielo Drive” and “LaBianca
.
”
We talked instead about Linda’s childhood pastimes and disappointments, her high-school romances and her concern for her children
.
This particular juxtaposition of the spoken and the unspeakable was eerie and unsettling, and made my notebook a litany of little ironies so obvious as to be of interest only to dedicated absurdists
.
An example: Linda dreamed of opening a combination restaurant-boutique and pet shop
.
12
Certain organic disorders of the central nervous system are characterized by periodic remissions, the apparent complete recovery of the afflicted nerves
.
What happens appears to be this: as the lining of a nerve becomes inflamed and hardens into scar tissue, thereby blocking the passage of neural impulses, the nervous system gradually changes its circuitry, finds other, unaffected nerves to carry the same messages
.
During the years when I found it necessary to revise the circuitry of my mind I discovered that I was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why
.
I was interested only in the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge
.
In this light all narrative was sentimental
.
In this light all connections were equally meaningful, and equally
senseless
.
Try
these: on the morning of John Kennedy’s death in 1963 I was buying, at Ransohoff
’s
in San Francisco, a short silk dress in which to be married
.
A few years later this dr
ess of mine was ruined when, at
a dinner party in Bel-Air, Roman Polanski accidentally spilled a glass of red wine on it
.
Sharon Tate was also a guest at this party, although she and Roman Polanski were not yet married
.
On July 27,1970,1 went to the Magnin-Hi Shop on the third floor of I
.
Magnin in Beverly Hills and picked out, at Linda Kasabian’s request, the dress in which she began her testimony about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive
.
“Size 9 Petite,” her instructions read
.
“Mini but not extremely mini
.
In velvet if possible
.
Emerald green or gold
.
Or: A Mexican peasant-style dress, smocked or embroidered
.
”
She needed a dress that morning because the district attorney,Vincent Bugliosi, had expressed doubts about the dress she had planned to wear, a long white homespun shift
.
“Long is for evening,” he had advised Linda
.
Long was for evening and white was for brides
.
At her own wedding in 1965 Linda Kasabian had worn a white brocade suit
.
Time passed, times changed
.
Everything was to teach us something
.
At 11:20 on that July morning in 1970 I delivered the dress in which she would testify to Gary Fleischman, who was waiting in front of his office on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills
.
He was wearing his porkpie hat and he was standing with Linda
’s
second husband, Bob Kasabian, and their friend Charlie Melton, both of whom were wearing long white robes
.
Long was for Bob and Charlie, the dress in the I
.
Magnin box was for Linda
.
The three of them took the I
.
Magnin box and got into Gary Fleischman’s Cadillac convertible with the top down and drove off in the sunlight toward the freeway downtown, waving back at me
.
I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did
.
13
I recall a conversation I had in 1970 with the manager of a motel in which I was staying near Pendleton, Oregon
.
I had been doing a piece for
Life
about the storage of VX and GB nerve gas at an Army arsenal in Umatilla County, and now I was done, and trying to check out of the motel
.
During the course of checking out I was asked this question by the manager, who was a Mormon:
If you can’t believe you’re going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what’s the point
of dying?
At that time I believed that my basic affective controls were no longer intact, but now I present this to you as a more cogent question than it might at first appear, a kind of koan of the period
.
14
Once I had a rib broken, and during the few months that it was painful to turn in bed or raise my arms in a swimming pool I had, for the first time, a sharp apprehension of what it would be like to be old
.
Later I forgot
.
At some point during the years I am talking about here, after a series of periodic visual disturbances, three electroencephalograms, two complete sets of skull and neck X-rays, one five-hour glucose t
olerance test, two electromyelo
grams, a battery of chemical tests and consultations with two ophthalmologists, one internist and three neurologists, I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system
.
I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life
.
These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes
.
They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling
.
Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not
.
It could not be predicted
.
The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it
.
The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning
.
This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing
.
I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife
.
In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me
.
I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone
.
The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind
.
“Lead a simple life,” the neurologist advised
.
“Not that it makes any difference we know about
.
”
In other words it was another story without a narrative
.
