One and Only (26 page)

Mother lived in Compton and Venice during her school years and recalled that they were very lonely. She was friendly with her two stepsisters and said she adored the older one, Marion, but was always in competition with the younger one, “Baby,” over her father's affection. My granddad, the policeman, was very strict, and life with him was very rigid. Early on, he did have a job working for Jack Benny, who was a radio and movie star before his hit television show. She recalled times when she would visit Benny's house for a birthday party, and how she received lovely gifts such as a porcelain doll set of the Dionne quintuplets. For fun, Mother used to play at being in radio shows. Then Granddad became a policeman, and his attitude seemed to become a lot more serious, as he emphasized to Lu Anne that she must follow rules without question. She was a good student and from all accounts very sweet and warm—an all-around good girl. But she never felt truly at home in Los Angeles. When she would tell me these stories of waiting for her mother and brothers to come rescue her and take her back to her real home, I always pictured her as poor little Cinderella.

The day finally arrived when her mother came to visit, when Lu Anne was about 12. At the end of her mother's stay, her father took my mom aside and told her that her mother wanted to take her back to Denver.

Whenever my mother told this story, this is the place where she would break down. My mother said she did not give it a second thought—she packed in five minutes and was so, so, so happy to leave. She kissed her dad goodbye and did not look back. She would always say, “All those years he raised me, loved me, and I did not even consider staying with him.”

To make matters worse, when she started school in Denver that year, 1942, she changed her last name to Henderson so it would match her mother's, who had married Stephen Henderson, an Air Force photographer. She just wanted to fit in at school with the same name as her family, so no one would know she was from a broken home. When her father found out what she had done, he wrote her a hurtful letter, accusing her of betraying him. Furious, he said he felt his name was “no longer good enough” for her. After that, they did not communicate for years. Not until almost a decade later, after I was born, did she finally visit with him. At that time, she was introduced to her half brother Dan, who was only a year older that me. The problems between them must have been more than they were willing to forgive, because I never knew my Granddad Bullard or his family until many years later when Dan and I connected through a genealogy site. Mother believed her dad was a brokenhearted man for many years after she left him, and she carried that guilt for life.

 

Even though she used the name Henderson, her relationship with her stepfather, Steve, was rocky. The life in Denver was quite a bit different than her life in Los Angeles had been. She said she was shocked to see her mother drink and smoke, which her father would never have allowed with the Bullard women. Her mother owned Thelma's Crystal Bar. She recalled quarrels between her mother and Steve, on nights when she would come back late from the bar, that often left Thelma with black eyes. She had never seen a man hit or abuse a woman before, and so she became very angry and lashed out at Steve verbally as well as physically, especially once she became a teenager. Though Steve and Gramps remained married the rest of their lives, Lu Anne's rift with Steve was never repaired; but they did eventually learn to tolerate each other for Gramps's sake.

 

There were many instances of abuse in Lu Anne's subsequent marriages. Mother never indicated to me that her relationship with Neal was violent, but there is the well-documented punch at her head which landed on the wall instead, and left his hand somewhat handicapped. The marriage to my father, Ray Murphy, lasted less than two years due to alcoholism and the frequent beatings he gave her. After the annulment with Neal, Mother married Murphy, my father, in a civil ceremony on April 14, 1949, in Denver. He arrived at the wedding drunk, meeting Gramps and Steve for the first time at the ceremony. Mother was extremely embarrassed but went through with the wedding anyway, though she should have been warned of things to come. During the next year, while she was pregnant with me, she went to catechism every day at St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco, which was right across the street from
our house on Stanyan. She converted to Catholicism for her Irish Catholic husband so that they could marry again in church before I was born. Their “official” Catholic wedding took place at St. Agnes Church on November 15, 1950. I was born December 18, 1950.

My father was a merchant marine when they met, but got into sales that first year. She said all went well for a while; but when this Irishman drank, his temper flared and even slight disagreements could escalate into violence. After he repeatedly put her in the hospital with a broken nose and bruises, she wanted out. The final straw was him holding me out an open window as a threat to try to make her stay.

Mother had originally converted to Catholicism to satisfy her husband, without much belief in it. The only churches she remembered from Colorado were the revival-meeting tents, where the preacher would terrify everyone with fire-and-brimstone sermons, which put her off from religion for quite a long time. But increasingly she went to Catholic church now for comfort, and her belief in the religion grew. The church became her safety net, and she spoke to her priest about Ray. Though he dutifully advised her on marriage laws—which demanded, in essence, that a wife stick with her husband through thick and thin, beatings or no beatings—he also, secretly, gave her enough money to escape by bus to friends in Clear Lake, California. She told me she left with only my clothes and a bag of oranges for us to eat. That summer, a single mother for the first time, she found a job waiting tables. She eventually came back to San Francisco and filed for divorce. I never met my father until I was 14 years old, and then there was no further contact with me for several years, though he did send cards to us once in a while. In later years, he and my mother would sometimes visit each other, and—with the old wounds finally healed—they seemed concerned about each other's lives.

For the next few years, she and I lived alone in the city. She worked at various clubs in North Beach as a cocktail waitress and eventually met and married Sam Catechi, who owned the Little Bohemia nightclub. I was three years old when they married. The following year, they bought a house in Daly City, which is the house I grew up in. Mother kept it until about 1978. I really don't know the reasons this marriage failed, though they stayed close friends for life, and I always called him Daddy. It was during this time that Mother started having serious medical problems.

She had always been bothered with stomach issues—a cluster of symptoms that are known collectively as irritable bowel syndrome. She had had a tube pregnancy while married to Sam and suffered greatly with gynecological issues after that. It was in 1957 that she became so ill we rented out our house and moved to Florida to stay with Gramps and Pappy (Steve). She was hospitalized many times during that year and, the last time, almost didn't make it home. Upon her release, she wrote the letter to Neal telling him how important his love had been to her. Eventually she felt better and wanted to get back to San Francisco. She flew back to California ahead of me and got the house ready for us, and then I joined her, flying alone for the first time at eight years old. She and Sam picked me up at the airport with a new puppy named Coco for me.

Our home in Daly City was not the typical suburban house. At one point, we had chocolate-brown walls covered with primitive African oil paintings. Over the fireplace was a picture of two natives, a man and a woman, that scared me every time I looked at it. Their eyes always seemed to be watching me. Mother was not your typical PTA mom. Since she normally worked nights, she would sleep till at least noon most days. It would not be unusual for me to wake in the morning for school to a living room thick with cigarette smoke, full of people I'd never met before listening to jazz, or maybe having a
deep philosophical discussion that involved Jack Kerouac, though at that time I did not know who he was.

On weekends, you could find anyone from the chief of police to female impersonators from Finocchio's hanging about, having drinks or sipping coffee together. People from all walks of life—from writers to Teamsters to homeless folk—all found their way to my mother's door. We always joked that if there was a nut within 10 miles they could find her. She took in many people over the years that needed care. A pregnant woman who worked for her close friend Joe needed to get away from her abusive husband. Mother took her in for about six months, and she became the little girl's godmother. She had at least 10 godchildren throughout her life. Once a neighbor sold her house and moved away, but left her tenant in the basement. The tenant, a woman, had emphysema and was an ex-con. Mother put her in our extra bedroom, and she lived there for the next five years.

Life with my mother was never dull, though I often found myself disapproving of her behavior. I was always the conservative one, and she was the free spirit. In many ways, I was the mother and she the child. A few years back, she visited me in Virginia, and we drove over to the Edgar Cayce Institute in Virginia Beach. We had read his book
The Sleeping Prophet
when I was quite young, and I have since learned that Neal and Carolyn Cassady were big followers of his. We went to a lecture and past-lives reading. According to the reader, my mother and I actually did have our roles reversed in one of our previous lives. We are supposedly destined to go through our many lives as best friends, mother, and daughter in many different combinations.

There was one area, though, in which I learned some very important lessons from her. Lu Anne had a profound understanding—an almost inborn understanding—of how wrong racism was. Her
experience with it began in California at the start of World War II. In Los Angeles, she had Japanese schoolmates, one of whom became a very close friend of hers. After Pearl Harbor, this girl, along with all the other Japanese in the area, were hauled off to internment camps. Many of them lost their homes and everything they had. Only 12 years old, Lu Anne was crushed by the loss of her friend, and angry at what seemed to her such an obvious injustice. Then, when she returned to Denver, a new face of racism showed itself in the prejudice against Mexicans. My mother always loved to dance, and she told me how the best-looking boys, as well as the best dancers, were usually Mexican. When she mentioned her interest in certain Mexican boys, however, Thelma was aghast. She told Lu Anne, “You do not socialize with Mexicans. You do not go out on a date with them. It's simply not done. A nice white girl like you does not date a Mexican.” My mother just did not understand. She would always ask, “What's the problem?” and nobody gave her any answer that made sense to her.

As she began to strike out on her own in Denver—in her years of teenage rebellion—she would go to the all-black jazz clubs in Five Points, and she began to be exposed not only to different races, but to people with a variety of different lifestyles. She was always very accepting and very friendly to everyone, and she gave everyone the opportunity to be themselves. In later years, she made a point of inviting people of all races, nationalities, and economic levels into her home. When she moved to Florida in 1957—when it was still the Deep South—she encountered the real, hard-core racism against blacks. She got a job at Vic Tanny's fitness club, which had both black and white employees. But the employees were kept completely segregated. There was no intermingling in the lunch area. My mother had become friendly with several of the black employees, and one day she brought her lunch over and sat down with some of them. As
she prepared to eat her lunch, the boss walked over and told her it was not acceptable for her to eat lunch, or even to sit down, in the “colored section.” My mother refused to move; and after that, she ate lunch in the designated black area every day. For some reason, they didn't fire her.

When I was growing up, she would tell me, very pointedly, that I should never judge anyone by their race, religion, color, or their status in life—that I should accept everyone as an equal, even if they were homeless. And I saw her practice what she preached. She always befriended people from all walks of life.

And then there were the things we did together that weren't about life lessons or had anything to do with other people—they were just wonderful mother-daughter times we had together. There are so many good times I had with her that had nothing to do with her Beat life, which so many people now want to hear about. For one thing, she loved to cook—maybe because early on she didn't know how, and she had had to teach herself. So it became a hobby and also a way for her to relax, to experiment and be creative. She would never go by recipes. She would start cooking at seven or eight o'clock at night; and by the time she got done, we'd have a six-course meal waiting for us—it might be roast beef, mashed potatoes, salad, all the trimmings—at eleven o'clock at night! Sometimes it would be pasta or a fancy stew. By the time it was ready, if it was a school night, I'd grab a few mouthfuls and then have to go to bed. And I'd end up eating roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy for breakfast. Lu Anne just loved cooking those big dinners, and she also loved inviting people over for big dinner parties. She was known as a very, very good cook.