Girl in a Band (3 page)

ONCE WHEN SONIC YOUTH
was on tour in Lawrence, Kansas, opening for R.E.M., Thurston and I paid a visit to William Burroughs. Michael Stipe came along with us. Burroughs lived in a little house with a garage, and the coffee table in his living room was crisscrossed with fantasy knives and daggers—elegant, bejeweled weapons of destruction. That day, all I could think of was how much Burroughs reminded me of my dad. They shared the same folksiness, the same dry sense of humor. They even looked a little alike. Coco, our daughter, was a baby, and at one point when she started crying, Burroughs said,
in that Burroughs voice, “
Oohhh
—she
likes
me.” My guess is he wasn't somebody who spent much time around kids.

My dad's academic specialty was sociology in education. In Rochester, he'd done his Ph.D. on the social system in American high schools. He was the first person ever to put a name to various school-age groups and archetypes—preps, jocks, geeks, freaks, theater types, and so on—and then UCLA had hired him to create an academic curriculum based on his research.

One of the conditions for my dad taking the UCLA job was that Keller and I were able to attend the UCLA Lab School. That school was an amazing place. The campus was designed by the modernist architect Richard Neutra, with a large, beautiful gully running through it. One side was grass and the other concrete—for hopscotching or Hula-Hooping or whatever. The gully flowed up into an untamed area where a covered wagon and an adobe house sat beneath some trees. As students, we fringed shawls, pounded tortillas, and skinned cowhides out among those trees. Our teacher drove us down to Dana Point, in Orange County, where we tossed our cowhides down on the beach for imaginary incoming boats, copying what the early traders must have done. There were no grades at that school—it was all very learn-by-doing.

My dad was tall and gentle, with a big expressive face and black glasses. He was a gestural guy, physical, emphatic with his arms and his hands, but incredibly warm, too, though the few times I remember his getting angry at Keller or me were frightening. The angry words seemed to start in the soles of his feet and travel up through his entire body. Like a lot of people who live in their heads, he could be absentminded; there was that popcorn story, after all. Once when I was little he put me in the bathtub with my socks on—he hadn't noticed—which of course I begged him to do again and again from that point on.

He'd grown up doing chores beside his mother and sister—cooking and gardening, pretty much anything involving his hands—and the habit stayed with him. During cocktail hour, which my mom and he never missed, he made amazing martinis and Manhattans with a chilled
martini shaker kept in the freezer at all times. This was the late fifties and early sixties—people took their cocktail hours seriously. The backyard of our house in L.A. was thick and stringy with the tomato plants he grew. My mom liked to tell me that my dad's skill with his hands was something he'd passed down to me, and I always loved hearing that.

Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live. My mom told me once that my father had always wanted to be a poet. It is likely that growing up during the Depression with no money made him want to seek security, pushing him toward a career as a professor instead. But aside from his love of words and the self-deprecating jokes and puns he slung around with his close friends, it was something that until she told me, I never knew about my father, which is striking, especially since my brother later became a poet.

From my childhood I recall days spent home sick from school, trying on my mom's clothes and watching television show after television show. I remember spooning out chocolate or tapioca pudding from the box—
tapioca,
a word no one uses anymore. The smell of the house, damp and distinct. The aroma of old indigenous L.A. houses, even inland ones, comes from the ocean twenty miles away, a hint of mildew, but dry, too, and closed up, perfectly still, like a statue. I can still smell the barest trace of gas from the old 1950s stove, an invisible odor mixed with sunshine streaming in from the windows, and, somewhere, eucalyptus bathed in the haze of ambition.

UPSTAIRS IN MY HOUSE
in western Massachusetts, I have a stack of DVDs containing old movies of my parents fishing in the Klamath River, just south of the Oregon border. They're with their best friends, Connie and Maxie Bentzen, and another couple, Jackie and Bill, all of them members of the liberal, food-loving UCLA group my parents belonged to. These were funny, ironic people who also happened to be passionate fishermen.

Starting in the late sixties, my parents drove up to Klamath every summer, staying in a rented trailer and spending the next month fishing with this core group of people, others coming and going. Klamath was
all about fishing and socializing and cooking and eating, and waking up the next day to start over again. My dad made his own smoking devices—homemade baskets he placed in oilcans and submerged in hot coals to smoke fish, chicken wings, or his famous ribs. There were no social rules except that “good times” were to be had. You ate what you caught, and to this day the salmon right out of the smoker that Connie Bentzen made is the best thing I've ever tasted. An actual rule in Klamath: you were only allowed to take home two fish. My mother once smuggled a third fish onto the campsite inside her waders, a story of transgression that turned into an ongoing joke between her and their friends.

The Bentzens were documentary filmmakers, close friends with cinematographers and directors like Haskell Wexler, who worked on films like
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest,
and Irvin Kershner, who worked on
Star Wars
. Maxie Bentzen was a funny, lighthearted former grad student of my dad's, the first woman I knew who wore blue jeans day and night. Her husband, Connie, had the same electric-blue eyes as Paul Newman. During the year they lived in Malibu, in a house on stilts, with
Peanuts
cartoons and
New Yorker
magazines on their living room table. If you were spending the night in their guest room, just below the high-tide mark, you could hear the waves fiercely crashing underneath the house, true white noise that sloshed you to sleep. As a kid I remember wanting to be just like the Bentzens, to host dinner parties just like theirs, with my friends' children running around in the backyard, kids who would look back someday and use words like
magical,
because that is what those nights were. I'll always remember the night JFK got elected, the party they threw, the charged sound of adult laughter and chatter.

The Bentzens had first pulled into Klamath in 1953. Over the next few decades the region grew up around them, getting more and more crowded, with lumber companies taking out huge swaths of fir and pine trees, but the Bentzens prided themselves on being discoverers and originators and they pushed back. Klamath got so busy and populated
that in the 1980s, to mark off their spot and also keep out the rednecks, Connie erected a big stuffed scarecrow of a UCLA mascot that everyone referred to as “Johnny Bruin.”

In the videos, there's my mom, tight-lipped in a button-up blue-black cardigan, and there's my dad, too, with his big glasses. He's holding up a salmon he just caught, cupping the fish under its chin. Friends wander in and out of the frame.
A six-pounder,
I can hear Maxie say.
Look at the size of that thing,
Connie says, and
Take a picture
and
He's getting tired
and
Hard to believe you caught that thing using that little reel of yours, Wayne.
Jackie goes around snapping photos. Then they go for double dry martinis at Steelhead, a lodge nearby where they went to drink at night.

I went along with my parents to Klamath only once when I was a kid, when I was seventeen. When they were gone, Keller and I had the house to ourselves. Fishing was never really my thing, but I loved being there with my parents and their friends. The wilderness could be slow going, and if you weren't out on the river—which could be dangerous and chaotic, like a freeway intersection—there wasn't much else to do but sit and read and eat, do puzzles, and find a quiet spot away from the wind where you could sit alone and relax. The whole scene was tranquil and arresting in its wild American gorgeousness.

At one point in one of the videos—it must be 1986—I show up, and Thurston trails in, though usually he liked to hole up in our camper, reading, until cocktail hour. Keller is there, too, mellow but animated, talking and joking, the usual patch of black stubble covering his chin. Whenever he went up to Klamath, Keller slept in his own private tent, a cave of sorts in the center of my parents' little camp.

Connie is behind the camera, gently firing off questions about what I've been up to. It was around the time of
Evol,
Sonic Youth's third album. “I mean, yeah, we made a
little
money off of that,” I say.

“Maybe you'll get to be a millionaire,” Connie says. He always had a jokey, gruff, great way of speaking. “Those rock-and-roll people make so much money you can hardly stand it.”

“Well, that's a whole different ball game you're talking about than what
we
do,” I say.

“And you're not going to get
into
that ball game, Kim?”

“Well, the problem is, we'd have to tailor our music too much. We'd have to start wearing long wigs and eye shadow and glitter pants.”

“Okay, okay, well, that's life,” Connie says. “Now who wants to
eat
?”

In some ways it was easier not to talk about what I did for a living. New York City and our music were both too hard to translate. And being in Klamath wasn't about what you did out in the world anyway; it was about family and fishing and eating and socializing and making corny jokes, like when I tried to fire some darts into a wall target and someone yelled out, “Kim, that's an
objet d'art
!” Maxie, though, was a great supporter of young people and was always saying, “You guys are so great!” whereas Connie was always saying, “You kids are never going to live up to the older generation,” at which everyone would laugh.

My parents were never more relaxed than when they were up at Klamath. The Bentzens were family but even better, a tribe that unlike your real relatives wasn't obligatory and never pressured you. My dad didn't have much contact with his own Kansas relatives. It wasn't snobbery that kept him away, more a culture divide, as most of my dad's family was small-town religious. He did stay in touch with his mother and sister. With Connie, Maxie, their son Mike, Jackie, and Bill, my parents were truly themselves, at ease and off duty.

Today Klamath is unrecognizable, though that's probably true for any place you look back on—it's certainly true about New York. These days you're hardly allowed to fish at Klamath at all, and the tourist industry is pretty much gone. Klamath was always depressed, but it's more lowdown now than ever, deserted, creepy, a place that portends abandoned meth labs in the woods.

Jackie still lives in Malibu. Her husband, Bill, is dead. Maxie and her son, Mike, still live in Santa Cruz, but most of the others, including my parents, are gone. In the late 1980s, a short while after my dad stopped working, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. His basic neurological
functions began to leave him, one after another. At some point, my mom really wasn't able to take care of him by herself, and she made it clear he'd be better off—in fact, it was his job and his responsibility to do so, she told him—if he went into a nursing home, which he did. My mom was tough and pragmatic, though in fairness to her, she didn't have the money to pay for the twenty-four-hour nursing staff his condition required.

It wasn't the Parkinson's that killed him. It was the nursing home, where he contracted pneumonia, and then the hospital. A nurse, an old-timer who should have known better, inserted a feeding tube down the wrong pipe. But my family never sued the hospital, as by that point my dad's Parkinson's was so advanced it had taken away most of the person we all remembered anyway. In the year before he died, I remember how he never complained. I'm sure he missed doing things like cooking, and tending to his tomatoes, and playing with his custom-made smokers. I missed the father who'd given me a book of Emily Dickinson poems, sweetly inscribed, for my sixteenth birthday, even though I found Dickinson corny. I missed the man who took me to lunch at the UCLA faculty center, introducing me proudly to the people he worked with, making me so happy in return that he was my dad. During his last year I mostly remember his docility, his sweetness, his acceptance of what was ahead.