Yesteryou Chapter 7

7.

It was it a night like any other.  No it wasn’t.  It was raining that night, I remember, and it doesn't often rain in Southern California.  I lived with Richard.  I lived with just Richard from the time I was two, when Beth and Richard got their divorce, until the time I was 6.  Then there was quiet and cynical Linda, my almost stepmother who lived with us for a few years, then just me and Richard again.

Anyway, it was a dark and stormy night.  It was around 8:30 and Richard was on a date when Josie called me, crying.  She was my best friend for three years, and I was a little in love with her, the way in books and movies sometimes and I’m guessing in real life too (with other girls besides me), teenaged girls become obsessed with each other when they become close friends.  It was hard not to; she understood me so perfectly, from all the many hours-long conversations we had the endurance and the enthusiasm for, at the zenith of our friendship, and I understood her so perfectly too, I thought, and we were always touching, always sleeping in the same bed when we had our almost weekly two-person slumber parties.  Sometimes her breasts looked so nice I couldn't stop myself from eyeing them covertly, it gave me butterflies in my stomach, but other nights, I got frustrated with her for taking too long to put on her makeup and her clothes – - I was anxious for us to be on our way to the party or concert we were going to on these nights because some boy I liked was supposed to be there, and on these nights, Josie wasn’t the beautiful girl who knew all my secrets, she was just the impediment to my fun night starting, and not the fun itself.  She did the same type of thing to me.  She was boy crazy, but sometimes, at a party, she’d push through the crowd to find me because she was bored with everyone else, and we’d spend the rest of the night connected at the hip, as they call it, holding hands and whispering insults about everyone else in the room, which is what friendship is, being able to relate to someone else, but the way we breathed on each other’s necks as we whispered our gossip, it felt romantic.

"Molly," she said to me over the phone on this rainy, rainy Monrovia night, "Calvin's been outside my room since I got home.  I'm so scared."

"Really?   You can see him?"

"No, not fully.  I just know he’s there.  I've just been sitting in bed pretending to read.  I can see the tip of his head when I sit up more.  He must be crouching under the window."  Then in a quick whisper, "I was hoping if he heard me tell you all this over the phone, that I know he's out there, he'd just leave.  But can you come over?  I'm so scared.  This feels unreal."

"You want me to spend the night?"

"If you can.  Is your dad home?"

"No, he's out.  I've never gone out on a school night before, I don’t think, but I’m sure it's fine.  I'll just leave him a note explaining that it's an emergency."  I actually wasn't sure it would be okay, because I was shy of dad, Richard, when I was younger, and he was of me, too.  I didn't have a handle on his personality or his motivations, though I knew he was kind.  But he was strict sometimes, and I didn't know whether or not he'd decide to get upset about me going out on a school night, even if it was under these special circumstances, to help Josie, mildly suicidal Josie whose demeanor was meek but who was always getting herself into bad situations she never let on about to her aloof parents or the authorities; she was always having to cope with some awful situation like the one she was in now, waiting for her stalker to leave for the night.  There is a whole world of masochism and danger that only teenaged girls offered sheltered lives know about.  Bored or just curious, these girls turn the shelters upside down and make canoes of them; then they sail to the least friendly island and dig in their heels there, welcoming storms and starvation.  There are reasons, when you are one of these girls, for cutting into your own tender upper arm, that seem inarguable, sometimes.  There are reasons for going to a man’s house that seem almost not like free will but like fate.  Sometimes, it is impossible not to become hypnotized by curiosity, or by the heady draught of pointless, youthful self hatred.

"I'll call George to give me a ride."

"Thank you, Molly, thank you.  Do you think you can get here soon?"

"Yeah, probably within a half hour.  Just hang in there, babe.  Just wait for me.  We'll figure it out."

"Okay.  Thank you.  My parents are asleep.  Just come in quietly."

Beth didn't used to know how to drive, and Richard used to always be too busy, so George was the one who took me places when I needed a ride.  Every Friday afternoon after school, he picked me up where I sat, waiting for him on a strange household's lawn a block parallel to my school building, and we went to the library, to wait for Beth to finish her shift.  Then he drove us to his bookstore, where mom and I either waited for him to get a chance to drive us home, or else waited for one of the buses to pick us up.  During all these years of this particular routine, the mood between George and me was always convivial, comfortable, but definitely not open.  We didn't talk to each other very much at all.  I could never tell him, "I love you, George," for example, even though it was the truth (I was only finally able to say those words to him the last time I saw him, in fact, when he was so bodily depleted from cancer that he was dead the next morning).  We spent entire hours on the freeway together without so much as a comment about the weather or the relief of an upcoming weekend passing between us, I guess because we weren't peers and we weren't family either.  But it was never an uncomfortable silence.  It was a silence full of our silent observations of the wild city around us co-mingling in the still air of the car, all silent, but our thoughts were in unison.  Oh, I miss you.

Anyway, when I called him to ask if he could give me I ride, I was relieved when he didn't ask where Richard was or if I had permission to go out on a school night.  George knew what was truly important.

Yesteryou Chapter 6

6.

On a Thursday night (a school night), when I was 15, a thing happened that has made me feel closer to George than to people my own age, ever since.

Richard and I lived in a small town about 30 miles east of Los Angeles proper, called Monrovia.  Monrovia nestles right up against the base of the San Gabriel mountains, like a dog curled up and napping at the foot of a master’s giant bed.  The flat, southerly part of Monrovia is mostly apartment buildings built in the 1950's.  One time I was walking around a neighborhood that had literally only pick-up trucks parked in the driveways and along the curb. 

As the land starts to noticeably elevate, in other words, when you start to notice you're walking uphill, that's where the nice houses are, little mansions some of them, Ranch-style houses, also built in the 1950's.  I don't know if it's from something I read or saw a photo of, but I imagine that Marilyn Monroe stayed in one of these houses.  There was a park at the end of one of the east-west streets in the fancy area that had something wonderful and abandoned on its grounds.  It was a huge old iron and wood apparatus with a ladder that went at least 50 feet up and led to a horizontal crossbeam laddered with iron bars.  I'm not quite sure how to describe it, I was always so confounded and amused whenever I made my walks there, but I think it was trapeze equipment for practicing circus acts.  I think it was the type of giant dinosaur that some circus worker could glance at only peremptorily and say, "Oh yeah, it's just a pedestal board and some fly bars, duh!  Big deal," but to me it was an absolute mystery.  Why was it there?  More than once, especially in the amount of time since I haven't been back to Monrovia, even for a drive through the streets, which happens to coincide with this current time we're living in where virtually anything can be found out about online, I have tried to look up information about the old circus equipment in that park, and have found absolutely no information about it.  When I used to live there, though, I didn't tell anyone local about it, except Richard, of course.  And then Josie.  The night I'm about to describe has mostly to do with Josie, and with George.

Yesteryou Chapter 5

5.

            The friendship of George and Richard was wrought with enough complicated feelings and nuances that I feel compelled to describe it in familial terms, but that does not provide the sort of shortcut I wish it would.  I want to say, “They loved each other like brothers, and like brothers, neither one could imagine life without the other, but, also like brothers, they did not always enjoy each others' company,” but this is not quite right, because, through Beth as well as Molly (me), George and Richard were connected to each other for over 20 years, but their connection had its lulls and eddies, and there were whole years where they only saw each other at holidays, when Richard would be dropping Molly off at Beth’s apartment and, like clockwork (because George was set in his ways) it would be George who answered the door, having arrived at Beth’s place a couple hours earlier to help clean up for Molly’s visit, and George and Richard would have a brief conversation, not bothering to fill each other in on recent significant events, assuming that Molly took care of relating important news to all the outposts that comprised their makeshift family, which she did.  However, these brief and apparently superficial doorway conversations were not insignificant to either man.  After kissing Molly on the crown of her head and saying, “Have fun, kiddo,” as Richard walked back to his car, invariably anticipating the date he almost always had with one of the girlfriends of his life on the nights Molly stayed with Beth, there was also a portion of his consciousness that was considering the conversation he’d just had with George.  George.  George.  George made funny quips referencing characters from contemporary British novels written by women, and Richard had never read any of these books.  It filled him with pity for George that George’s life was so limited to books and Beth.  But it filled him with gratitude that George had assumed Richard had read the books George spoke about.  Did he spend the night at Beth’s, or just get to her place early this morning?, Richard would wonder, and if he got there the night before, what did they do that night (not sex, of course, but what movie did they watch on TV, or did George take her out for drinks and dinner?), and did childishly selfish Beth make him sleep on the couch, or give him the bed (Richard never knew that Beth always preferred sleeping on couches to sleeping on beds, much as her own mother had)?   What does George think of me?, Richard asked himself.  Unlike the friends he made at work, who drifted out of his life and never drifted back in, and who were, ultimately, expendable, Richard knew, during the years he and George acted as mere acquaintances, that George would always be in his life.  Is that how brothers feel about each other?  Is that the rhythm of brotherhood?  I can only guess.

            Then, there is the first year of the friendship of Richard and George.  Before Richard and Beth’s brief marriage ended, before the afternoon a newly divorced Beth showed up at George’s bookstore, pushing Molly in a dark blue stroller, knowing instinctively that George would provide her lifelong safety the second he looked up from his book and smiled at her, it had been Richard who stopped by George’s bookstore all the time, sometimes as often as three evenings a week, after work.  He didn’t know, during these visits, how significant George would become to the woman he would marry, the child he would have.  He liked to spend a few hours in the bookstore almost the same way a celebrity likes to shop in a K-Mart unrecognized; in other words, to slum.  But what is at the heart of the enjoyment people find in “slumming” is something genuine, though the act of slumming hinges on falseness.  What is at the heart of slumming is the desire to experience another way of life.

Those are two stages of the friendship of George and Richard. 

Beth moved to Phoenix, Arizona, during the bewildering summer of 2001.  It was the most uncharacteristic act imaginable; she hated the heat, she hated even to leave her apartment sometimes for days at a time, and her survival depended on her proximity to George, who gave her money whenever he could and who even bought her groceries for her, often, knowing what she liked to eat, delivering the bags of food, Vodka and diet cola right to her doorstep.  Nonetheless, she moved to Phoenix, Arizona. 

            Once Beth left the state of California, with all its legendary goldenness, George was a changed man.  He became bewildered and wore a constant searching expression on his face.  At this point in their friendship, Richard, with Molly’s help, became providers for him.  They had him over for dinner every Tuesday, Thursday and any other night he seemed to want to linger at their house.  In 2002, he began to rapidly lose weight.  It was discovered he had renal cancer.  I think this might be a common way for poor people (which he was by this time, having lost his store long ago) to die:  the county hospital can perform surgery on a poor person, sometimes, when its budget allows for charity, but the patient might have to wait for months, and is sent back home as soon as possible.  George’s chemotherapy treatment was in the form of a pill.  He swallowed it and then retched and shivered, hardly able to move, for the next few days. 

During this first bout with cancer, he lived with Richard and Molly for two months.  Molly liked to behave particularly solicitously with him during this time, because she’d thought she would never get a chance to openly love him, that because of his reserve and shyness, she would have to permanently act like she took him for granted, as she used to when she was a young chile.

            Richard began to think of George as a paternal figure during this stay.  He noticed that when he told George about his day at work, George always asked follow up questions, and ended the conversations with an encouraging summary of the strong points of Richard’s character.  Maybe I matter in this world, Richard came away from their conversations musing.   Maybe I do.

Book Reveiw: Coney by Amram Ducovny

There’s a wonderful bookstore in downtown L.A. called The Last Bookstore.  It’s in a huge space, and the whole second floor is cheapskate bookworm heaven because everything up there is $1 (and in absolutely NO sort of order, no genre or alphabetical organization at all, just thousands of books stacked willy nilly on at least 4 rooms full of floor to ceiling shelves).  The first time I went there, I decided on just 3 books, a Billie Letts novel, the worst Anne Tyler novel I’ve ever read (Noah’s Compass, the only story of hers I haven’t loved), and Coney, a novel by Amram Ducovny.  This here paragraph is part autobiographical information (as per usual on this blog), part book review.  Coney is about a Jewish family in a very seedy Coney Island in the late 1930’s.  The book jacket calls this book “part noir thriller, part coming-of-age novel”, and I cannot fully agree with this, because the thriller genre uses tension and suspense, which the violent occurrences of this story lack; I feel like there’s no tense build-up to the crimes and deaths in this work, they just happen.  I have a weird relationship with Judaism.  My grandmother’s dad’s side are Eastern European Jews but her mother was English and non-Jewish I think (when I was talking to grandma the other day about how much of our family wants to claim jewishness all the time except her, she said “I’m always telling [uncle] Harry, ‘British, not Yiddish’--  she’s a devoted Anglophile).  My grandfather, on the other hand, is 100% eastern European Jew.  Both Grandma and grandpa are atheist intellectuals (unlike their brothers and sisters) and the only religion they raised their kids with was at the neighborhood Christian church they sent them packing to every Sunday so they could have a little quiet time.  This had the unexpected effect of turning two of their children into Christians (one is a minister!), but my uncle Harry is an atheist with an interest in his Jewish roots and my dad is an atheist with Buddhist leanings.  I do not like religion at all.  In fact, Christianity is my pet peeve, and Judaism is something I am fascinated with but when it comes down to it, it’s still a religion, so it’s still centered around exclusion and beliefs I could never swallow.  But I have always been very interested in Jewish culture:  the Maus graphic novels, Chaim Potok, Dorothy Parker, Maurice Sendak, Philip Roth, and other one-off novelists, as far as literature goes, and as for movies, I have long been a huge Woody Allen fan, and more recently (judge me if you must!) Adam Sandler too.  I’m interested in Jewish culture in general, like the strongly Jewish history of Atlantic City (where some of my family lived for awhile, my great-aunt and uncle who often lamented my non-Jewish ways in their top-decibel voices when I stayed with them once, and their Jewish/black grandson who lived with them and whose beautiful little boy was named Shalom.)  I also like to read non-fiction accounts of the Jewish experience during World War II.  But as I’ve been reminded by many a Jew, I am not at all Jewish, because my mom’s side are English and Italian Catholics, and Jewish heritage is matrilineal.  This is a little rule, or distinction, that really hurts my feelings – my grandpa’s relatives were in concentration camps, yet I can claim no Jewish roots because my mother isn’t Jewish?  Anyway, whether or not I’m technically entitled to it, I do have this interest in Jewish culture, and I also have a LOOOOOVE of Coney Island and related lore, so this novel was really up my alley.  There is a lot about the Yiddish language in this novel, as well, which has a fascinating history, but in general the story is too ugly to recommend.  Almost everyone besides the immediate family of the protagonist, 15 year old Heschel, and some of the sideshow freaks he befriends, is a horrible person, like an actual murderer or else someone who aids a murderer.  This sweeping evilness and murderousness is a little much.  Maybe it was realistic, though I doubt it, but even if so, it over-saturates the story.  Like, every time someone turns around, they’re getting killed or seriously injured.  So I can’t recommend this one.  It is so cool to read about old Coney Island though, and the last paragraph of the novel, which takes place in a concentration camp as it’s being liberated, is really touching, like SERIOUSLY.  You will cry.