Girl in a Band (5 page)

KELLER'S WHOLE CHILDHOOD
became the stuff of family fables, jokey legends, tributes to his smartness or his independence or both. Here's one: at the exact moment I was being born, Keller, who was three and a half, disappeared down the street with his four-year-old girlfriend to shoplift candy from a neighborhood drugstore. Or this: Keller didn't learn to read until the fourth grade, which seems unlikely if not impossible.

In old photos taken when he was young, Keller's always attired in a cowboy costume, with leather-looking boots and a big hat, smiling a massive, mysterious grin. From a young age he was willful and
uncooperative, a troublemaker, and this in our family made him the center of attention, usually the negative kind. He was crazy smart, too, hyperverbal, the torrent of words coming out of his mouth so thick and constant it was as if he were drowning in them. He always had a comeback, a response, a return that cut short any conversation or argument. In many ways he ran over me, erased me, made me feel invisible even to myself.

I worshipped my brother. I wanted to
be
like him. But he was vicious to me throughout our childhood—teasing me nonstop, physically fighting with me—sprinkled with occasional moments of niceness. Looking back, I wonder whether his sadism might have been a symptom of the disease that showed itself later.

His ridiculing and button-pushing went beyond the typical sibling ragging. At dinner, I'd let drop some trendy word or expression and Keller would jump on it, and on me, for my faddishness, my ordinariness, my lack of originality. When a scene in a movie or a Disney special made me laugh or cry, he'd make fun of me for laughing and make fun of me for crying and make fun of me when I didn't say anything at all. He always knew he could get a response from me, which provoked him to do it even more.

At some point I turned off entirely. Knowing I'd get mocked or teased, I would do anything not to cry, or laugh, or show any emotion at all. The biggest challenge as I saw it was to pretend I had some superhuman ability to withstand pain. Add that to the pressure girls feel anyway to please other people, to be good, and well mannered, and orderly—and I backslid even more into a world where nothing could upset or hurt me.

Sometimes my brother's teasing crossed over into physical violence. One night he and I fought so hard on my parents' bed that the TV set smashed to the floor from the vibrations. Another time Keller, who had become something of a neighborhood ringleader, arranged a fight between me and a boy from down the street. He went so far as to place bets among his friends that I could win. I knew I couldn't, but I went along with it anyway because I wanted him to feel proud of me. Whenever
I complained to my parents about Keller, or asked them to make him stop tormenting me, they just said, “Oh, go hit him back.”

Oh, go hit him back
—words that still circle my brain forty, nearly fifty years later. Because no matter how hard I tried, I could never
not
react to Keller, but neither could I depend on my parents to protect me or take my side. If something happened right in front of them, they would step in, but otherwise my dad would say something like “Just knock it off.” But there was no justice in that—just eventual retaliation from Keller.

Maybe that's why for me the page, the gallery, and the stage became the only places my emotions could be expressed and acted out comfortably. These were the venues where I could exhibit sexuality, anger, a lack of concern for what people thought. The image a lot of people have of me as detached, impassive, or remote is a persona that comes from years of being teased for every feeling I ever expressed. When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn't negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.

But throughout my teens, my brother was the charismatic one—a nerd with a big, movie-star-sized head and an otherworldly glow, the leader of his small, passionate friend group. Long before
Freaks and Geeks
came out, Keller created a fanzine, which he called
The Fiend Thinker
. It was a celebration of nerd-dom and outsiderness, including definitions of words he'd made up, which he mimeographed and passed out to his followers. In middle school he and his friends even carried out their own sociological study of their eighth-grade class. They interviewed kids from various social groups—surfers, nerds, popular kids, and Spanish-Americans, or SAs as they were known back then. My dad was proud of Keller for this, how he applied his ideas to a contemporary situation, even if the study was a direct appropriation. My brother got a lot of recognition for that study. It was one of his first and last great accomplishments.

IN 1963,
the year JFK died and right before the Beatles went on Ed Sullivan, my dad took a yearlong sabbatical at a think tank, and my family went to live in Hawaii. I was incredibly excited to go. When I was little, I loved the musical
South Pacific
, which takes place on an island, Bali Ha'i, and I spent a lot of time reenacting the songs in my room. At ten, I was a restless preadolescent, mature for my age, curious about sex, starting to feel my sensual side, and the encyclopedia entry for Hawaii showed photo after photo of half-naked women with flowers around their necks. On the plane the Pan Am stewardesses were beautiful and served everyone, including me, free champagne. When we
arrived, I insisted on getting a two-piece bathing suit with a slightly padded top, which made me feel even more grown-up.

The glamour ended when I began attending a public school, where for the first time I was a minority. In Asian cultures, “Kim” is a male name, and Hawaii's population is mostly Asian, so I was picked on constantly. Still, it wasn't all bad. I remember walking barefoot through the Manoa Valley. The grass was dewy, and the fragrance in the air was an ideal backdrop for my preadolescent sexual feelings. Keller and I had done some surfing out at Latigo Shore Drive just past Malibu, so the beach and the water were familiar to me. I had my new bathing suit and my own surfboard, a small Hobie, and the cute young Hawaiian surf guides in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel flirted with me. I always looked older than my actual age—like a classic blonde California girl, in fact. The gap I'd always had between my two front teeth had grown in, and the chicken pox marks on my face, which had always made me feel so self-conscious, blended in with my tan.

Two years later, when I was thirteen, my dad was asked to launch a study-abroad program for UCLA, and our family packed up to spend a year in Hong Kong. Moving away from my friends was the last thing I wanted to do, although having started junior high in the middle of the year and being thrown into the alien public school structure of L.A. after my experiences in the lab school and in Hawaii didn't make me exactly eager to stay. Everything at school had changed. I was tuning out, spending time down at the gully that ran through the school, courting a little bit of trouble. In Hawaii, I'd been something of a wild child, going to school barefoot, and in L.A. I was thrust into the public junior high school, where the other girls wore pleated skirts and little sweaters. I hated it. Still, I made it clear to my parents I had no desire to go to Hong Kong. There was even talk of my going to live in New Jersey with old friends of my parents, a family who had lived next door to us in Rochester, who had two boys around my age. Or that Keller and I could even go to a Swiss boarding school, which, in retrospect, sounds ridiculous.
In the end, we did none of those things, and I still love to say that my dad inaugurated a study project in China for UCLA.

The four of us arrived in Hong Kong during the tail end of a typhoon. At the airport, staffers handed out umbrellas that blew away instantly. Hong Kong was like nothing I had ever experienced before. The air was so hot and humid it was like stepping inside a kiln, and you had to gasp to catch your breath. The smells and sounds were overpowering. My first night there, I remember knocking into people on the street, and crying, which fogged and blurred the city's yellow lights even more. I felt so overwhelmed by Hong Kong's heat, chaos, clamor, and odors that I was convinced I would never—never—survive there a year.

That first month we lived in downtown Kowloon in a hotel. Chinese girls in fifties-style chiffon layered skirts played Beatles songs in the downstairs hotel bar. Walking along Hong Kong's streets was like moving inside a slow riot. At night, you could hear the palmed dice and quiet slap of mah-jongg games. Then as now, the city's prevailing backdrop seemed to be the exchange of money for goods, at all hours. Merchandise was cheap, too. Morning would dawn, and with it the familiar onrush of wet heat, and the aggressive, sleazy shop owners would take up position in their doorways, beckoning to me and to any other girl passing by. In those days Hong Kong was an English colony and a major port, and now I wonder how my parents allowed me to wander around by myself. Sailors from all over the world roamed the sidewalks, calling out suggestive things, one even lightly jabbing me in the stomach with a “Hey, girl, what are you doing?” I walked by him fast, mortified, but thrilled too that in a strange new world I felt visible and noticed.

Because we were living in a hotel, Keller and I had to share a room, and one night, he tried to climb into my bed. He was naked. When I pushed him and told him to get away, he called me a slut, a word I found hard to shake, though I knew he was not in his right mind. Still, I was afraid to ask my parents if they would pay for a separate room. They would ask why, and as usual, no matter how scared and upset I
felt, I didn't want Keller to get into any trouble. I still idealized him, convinced myself he was better than he was, wanted to protect him, and I always hated hearing my dad yell at him. Back then Keller was eccentric, but no one, especially me, recognized the signs of his eventual schizophrenia. Instead, I let myself feel guilty, as if I were somehow responsible for everything he did wrong.

Our Hong Kong school, named after King George V, was about two decades behind the schools we had known in America. Along with swats, caning, and mandatory uniforms (which I kind of liked, in a romantic movie–like way), there were punishments that included writing the same sentence over and over hundreds of times—“I must not talk during class”—among other wonderfully useful skills. The most feared and ruthless teacher on the faculty was the school's religious instructor. He scrutinized the class for the slightest hints of bad behavior and wore such stiffly starched white colonial shorts you could see up them whenever he took a seat.

English schools began a year earlier than U.S. schools, which meant that everyone in my class was a year younger than I was. The boys came up to my chest. As the semester went on, I met an older English boy, a fifteen-year-old drummer who became my first boyfriend. Our relationship was extremely ceremonial. The two of us would go to his house and make out in his bedroom, followed by a silent formal lunch in the old-fashioned dining room with his parents, the meal served by the family's amah—a domestic servant. In Hong Kong, it seemed, everyone had at least one amah, but his family had two.

I was very aware of Hong Kong's legendary red-light district, Wan Chai—it was well-known, even to tourists—as I was becoming curious about sex. I went there once with a friend, and in the daytime its brothels and massage parlors and girlie bars looked ordinary, uninteresting. In an attempt to brush up on my limited sexual knowledge, I read
The World of Suzie Wong,
but in that respect it was disappointing. I also read all of Ian Fleming's books, at the time a step up from Nancy Drew. My mother gave me, or let me read,
Lolita
and
Candy,
Terry Southern's
popular sex farce, which I read with eyes wide open, taking in every word. As my growing sexuality seemed to upset and worry my mom, she must have thought these books would show me how
not
to be. Around that time I also remember her telling me that boys might like girls because of the way they looked, but the quality of a girl's brain was the ticket to a more satisfying relationship. It was advice that caused me all kinds of neuroses. It also proved to be wrong.

Hong Kong is divided up into three parts, and after a month in Kowloon, we moved into a hilltop apartment in the New Territories section of the city. It was mountainous and peaceful, about an hour's car drive from downtown, with a veranda that looked out across a shimmering, placid sea usually dotted with one or a pair of distant Chinese junks. If you hopped a train, you would eventually arrive at the Great Wall of China, but I wouldn't see the wall until Sonic Youth played there many years later.

Keller and I had an American friend named Barry Finnerty, who lived down at the bottom of the hill beside the train tracks. A pimply-faced adolescent two years older than me who was just learning how to play Beatles songs on his electric guitar, and whose mother was always getting complaints from the neighbors about the noise, Barry had managed to get himself kicked out of King George V on the second day of school for making up swear-word lyrics to the hymns during the morning assembly. He liked to go around exclaiming loudly that he was a “retired Jew and an agnostic atheist.” Freight cars would stop in front of Barry's apartment building, some of them carrying pigs for slaughter, their snouts poking through the endless train bars. Wrapped in his American revulsion for all things earthy, carnal, and exotic, Barry would run out into the station and take photos of those hundreds of snouts, one of his favorite things to do.

Barry later became a respected jazz guitarist, at one point playing with Miles Davis, and he and I stayed friends for a long time. When my family moved back to L.A., I used to fly up to San Francisco, where Barry lived with his mother. In those days, the last flight on PSA Airlines
was at ten or eleven
P.M.
Friday night, and the ticket cost $10. At fifteen, I might have been too young to hang out on the Sunset Strip—there was a ten
P.M.
curfew if you were under the age of eighteen—but in San Francisco I was free to roam around and see bands at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom. I loved San Francisco and told myself I would someday go to art school there.

In the meantime, we took full advantage of how cheap Hong Kong was, the tailors especially. Keller ordered button-down shirts in various colors with a big surfer “Competition Stripe” across the middle, custom-made to fit him. Me, I spent all my allowance money on a bikini, though when I finally tried it on, it didn't match the way girls and bikinis looked in women's magazines. My idea of heaven was frequenting a Hong Kong store that sold English mod-style clothes: red corduroy hip-hugger bell-bottoms, dusty-pink pants that laced up in the front, crop tops. I'd spend my days wandering through racks of clothes I couldn't afford, thinking of all the places I would wear them. As usual, Keller grabbed all the attention when one night he and some friends snuck off to the island of Macau, the dark, nefarious port where gambling was legal. My parents had told him repeatedly he couldn't go there and were furious when they found out he'd done it anyway. This was the beginning of Keller's rebellious teen years, a time when he also made friends with a boy named Mitch, whose parents were visiting missionaries. A year later Mitch would play a cameo role in Keller's unraveling.