Foreign Correspondence (8 page)

Lawrie’s father was a doctor’s son who split with his family to become a baseball player. He was a gifted athlete, a talented artist and a fine singer. He was also an alcoholic who would die young and indigent in a Salvation Army home.

Lawrie, six years old, was in the courthouse in Santa Barbara the day the judge in his parents’ divorce case found both of them guilty of “moral turpitude.” The judge awarded custody of the boy to his grandparents.

From sleeping on the veranda of his parents’ tiny one-bedroom cottage, he found himself in a spacious house on the corner
of Broadway and Main in Santa Maria. In those days, Santa Maria was a small farming town, but its tree-lined Broadway was a hundred feet wide, so that horse-drawn carriages could turn there.

I didn’t bother to check an atlas before I wrote to Joannie. Otherwise, I might have learned that Maplewood, New Jersey, was a continent removed from my father’s childhood haunts in Santa Maria, Pismo Beach and Fullerton.

Her first letter arrived in the yellow mailbox in late August 1968. It was plastered with stamps of Thomas Jefferson and the Statue of Liberty. In careful printing, Joannie wrote:

“I’d like to be your pen-pal.… I just turned 13 on June 4.… My favorite subject is, obviously, science (biology).… I, too, am crazy over L.N. My closet door is overflowing with pictures. The U.S.S. Enterprise, Jr. reposes on my bureau, and Mr. Spock, poster-size stares down from the wall! … Coincidence! I play recorder, too.… I’m an avid reader. I devour science, science fiction and fantasy.… Please write soon, and I’m glad that you’re my new penpal.” To my delight, she signed her letter with the Vulcan salutation, “Live long and prosper, Joannie.”

Joannie, like me, was a late-life child of older parents. Her two brothers and one sister were in their twenties. I had a beloved dog and cat; Joannie had a menagerie—dog, cat, kittens, mice (named Mr. Spock, Desilu, Constellation, Eugene McCarthy and Leila), guinea pigs, even water snails. She wanted to be an astronomer. Clearly, that ambition didn’t raise anybody’s incredulous eyebrows, since her eldest brother was a molecular biologist at Stanford University.

“I’m having some photographs developed and if there’s a good one I’ll send you it next letter. If you want a general
description though—I’m five feet three inches tall, weigh 98 lbs., hair dark blonde, eyes green-brown. Okay?”

It certainly was okay. Everything about Joannie was okay by me. We were so much alike, even down to our height and weight. When she sent me her yearbook picture, it revealed an oval-faced beauty with long, honey-colored hair and a black velvet choker around a swanlike neck.

We wrote to each other every week. Instead of a mundane date such as Dec. 13, Joannie would head her letters 6812.13—a pseudo-star date like the kind Captain Kirk used for the log entries that began each “Star Trek” episode. As I’d hoped, she gave me the rundown on upcoming adventures: “Here’s another Star Trek: ‘Plato’s Step Children,’ a study of power induced depravity. The power is psychokinesis (direct action of mind over matter). Its wielders are arrogant sadists who force visitors to inflict indignities on themselves.… First rate.” (This episode contained TV’s first ever interracial kiss, when the aliens forced Kirk and Uhura to smooch for their amusement.) In return, I filled Joannie in on the plots of episodes from the first season of the series, which had aired before she started watching the show.

When NBC threatened to cancel the program after only seventy-nine episodes, we were among the fans who deluged the network with protest letters. Joannie sent thirty-six. By then, she was signing off her letters not only with the Vulcan salutation, but actually writing it in Vulcan:
Lash doro V’Succa
.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why this program absorbed us, as it did so many others. At thirteen, we were beginning to wake up to the world, only to find it a tragic and perilous place. Girls in my class were seeing their older brothers go reluctantly to Vietnam. The help that Menzies had sent in order to ingratiate himself with Kennedy had burgeoned from a few trainers into a full-scale troop commitment, including conscription. Australia now had CIA spy satellite bases in the Outback that would
make us a target in a nuclear war. Life seemed precarious, even in faraway Sydney. To Joannie, the chill of the Cold War was icy.

“Last night around eleven fifteen
P.M
. the whole sky lit up all over pale orange for a few seconds and then there came the loudest thunderclap I’ve ever heard,” Joannie wrote. It was an oil refinery explosion, “but at the moment it happened I was sure that a Bomb had fallen. It was really scary because I was so sure of it that I was almost wondering to myself, ‘How much longer am I going to be alive?’ We could see the flames from our second floor.… Afterwards I realized that had it been a bomb I wouldn’t have been alive, because the ones they have today are so powerful to destroy everything far beyond twenty miles from New York, which is appx. where we are.”

In “Star Trek’s” optimistic scenario, we had survived the twentieth century. The Cold War was over, because the Russian, Pavel Checkov—“Keptin! Keptin! The Klingon ship is wery close!”—was part of the
Enterprise
crew. Race didn’t matter, because a black woman was communications officer. Humanity’s face in the twenty-third century was a reassuringly benign one.

But Joannie and I had to live in 1968, and as the year drew to a close it was the day-to-day reality of our own times, rather than the weekly escapism of “Star Trek,” that began to occupy our correspondence.

Joannie sent me a poster: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” I pinned it up over my desk and sent her an Australian Vietnam Moratorium button, a red badge with white Vs radiating from the center that had become the popular symbol of opposition to the war. I wrote passionately of my antiwar beliefs, and questioned her about her politics.

“Yes,” she wrote back, “I am a Eugene J. McCarthy supporter.
I was very disappointed that McCarthy wasn’t nominated. Such a horrible choice—Nixon and Humphrey! America is deteriorating.” Since this was also my father’s view, I had no doubt it was correct.

My father had turned his back on America with the same finality with which he had ended his singing career. He viewed the country of his birth the way a parent views a child who has grown up to be a disappointment. Through his eyes, I saw the California of his childhood as a golden place, full of promise. But materialism and overdevelopment had ruined it. In Sydney, he saw the unspoiled Los Angeles of his youth. He despised the Darwinistic individualism of the United States. His views were a much more comfortable fit with the cooperative, collectivist spirit of the Aussies he’d met in the Outback, in the army, and at his job in the trade-union-dominated printing industry.

Ever since he quit singing in 1961 his life had been bracketed by a dreary, hourlong bus commute to an eight-to-four proofreading job. But he never seemed restless in his workaday routine. He loved the English language; he took grammar and spelling errors personally. He crusaded for the correct usage of words like “decimate” and “juggernaut.” To say “centered around” rather than “centered on” was to invite a lecture. All through school, I felt torn about whether to give him my essays to proofread. I knew he would catch every error. On the other hand, his indelicately scrawled proofreader’s hash marks would mean I had to make the effort of rewriting the paper.

I think he also felt contented in his job because the men he worked with at the newspaper were his ex-army buddies and fellow musicians—his mates. It’s hard to convey the freight carried by that loaded Australian word. It signifies a singular, fierce friendship between man and man that doesn’t seem to
exist in quite the same form in any other country. Reams have been written about Aussie mateship: its origins in the cruelties of convict life when six of every seven prisoners were men; its tempering by the hardships of isolated Outback settlement; its parasitic effect on male-female intimacy; its tendency to promote a particularly vicious, defensive brand of homophobia. But I think that for my father it was mostly a good thing, a surrogate for all the different kinds of man-to-man relationships his own upbringing hadn’t provided.

Although his grandmother was a kindly woman, the big house in Santa Maria was a lonely place for a little boy. Ronald, his only sibling, had died at fifteen months, when my father was just two weeks old. All his life, my father was tormented by the possibility that his arrival had caused his parents to neglect his brother’s signs of illness. With his father gone, brother dead and grandfather austerely distant, his one friend was a large orange cat named Silver. There is a picture of my father, a sad-eyed little boy, clutching the cat, rubbing his face into its fur. Not long after the photo was taken, the cat fell into a rainwater barrel and drowned.

Over the years, his mother worked her way through a series of husbands that included card sharks and moonshiners. When he was allowed to visit, he learned that one way to avoid abuse from these men was to be quick when the police arrived. His job was to grab the lid of the still and make off with it into the woods. If the still wasn’t intact, the police couldn’t prove that moonshining was under way. No matter how awful each visit, at the end of it Lawrie would beg his mother to let him stay with her. She always turned him down.

If my mother formed my imagination, my father shaped my politics. Sometimes he would arrive home in midafternoon with
an announcement that there was a blue at the paper. The dispute may have concerned the hourly rate paid to rural delivery men or an insult to a copy boy. But the Australian rule was “one out, all out,” so the whole staff of the newspaper, from journalists to janitors, would be on strike until it was resolved.

Even though strikes meant lost wages, my father enjoyed these blues. He loved to see the workers flex their muscle in a good cause. And even if the cause wasn’t so good, he loved to see the bosses squirm.

He had been militantly pro-union even as a singer, trying to organize the diverse egos of individualistic musicians. He worked on the headline performers, the stars, reminding them of the hard conditions they’d encountered on their way up, and warning that they’d meet them again on the way down, if the people in the spotlight didn’t take a stand on behalf of the people in the chorus line. “You think your talent will protect you?” he’d argue. “Maybe it will while you’re at the top of the bill, but who knows how long you’ll be there.”

In our family, it was a given that we always favored the battler over the silver-tail, the little bloke over the boss-cocky. Anyone who crossed a picket line was lower than a snake’s armpit. And a scab—well, even my father’s extensive and colorful vocabulary didn’t have words for the degree of contempt in which such a person was held. To underline what we thought of scabs, he told me what had befallen one reporter who had stayed at work when his mates had a blue. On his way home from helping the bosses put out the strike paper, the tram conducter had refused to sell this scab a ticket. Worse, his local pub wouldn’t serve him a beer, and even the night-soil carters of those pre-sewer days refused to empty his outhouse bucket. This, according to my father, was the worker solidarity that made Australia great.

My father despised Menzies’s misnamed Liberal Party, which was conservative, probusiness and antiunion. He always
voted for the Labor Party—which meant he’d voted for losers in every election since 1949. An election, for him, was just like any other blue, and in any blue he always backed the underdog.

That rule applied even if the blue happened to be a millennial conflict taking place half a world away. My father always had an opinion; he always knew exactly where he stood. And, desperate to find some common ground with this puzzle of a parent, I scrambled to find a way to stand there with him.

5

Shalom, Mate

“Daddy, can I have a stamp?”

“Oh, nuts! Hell’s bells! Why doesn’t your mother ever buy stamps?”

My father has a clutch of these archaic semicurses. Asking to borrow something always elicits one. Profligate and reckless with household finances, my father is meticulous about his own small horde of possessions. He always has an ample supply of stamps and aerograms in his bedside drawer, so that if he feels a midnight urge to dash off a letter to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom or the director of the local sewage authority, he will be able to do it.