Queen of the Oddballs (8 page)

• I work day and night at the McGovern for President headquarters. He wins the Democratic nomination! Two weeks later my co-volunteers and I are all depressed when McGovern drops his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, after it’s revealed he had electroshock therapy to treat depression.
  
 

• See Ingmar Bergman’s
  Cries and Whispers
  four times. I am fixated with the scene where the young maid cradles a woman against her bare breast. Develop huge crush on Liv Ullmann.
  
 

• See
  Anne of the Thousand Days
  three times. Develop huge crush on Genevieve Bujold.
  
 

• Develop huge crush on my best friend, Karen.
  
 

• Since I’m so conflicted about my sexuality, the number one song on the
  Billboard
  charts sums up my existence: “Alone Again (Naturally).”
  
 

• Five men are arrested breaking into the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.
  
 

• As my high school women’s consciousness-raising group continues to meet weekly, the first issue of
  Ms.
  magazine is published. It’s an immediate success—all 300,000 copies sell in eight days.
  
 

• The musical
  Hair
  ends its Broadway run after 1,742 performances. I see it when it plays in L.A. at the Aquarius Theatre and almost miss the most infamous part, as I desperately have to pee and am heading to the ladies room. Luckily, I catch the nude scene from the back of the theater.
  
 

• A week after Nixon and Agnew are nominated for re-election by the Republican National Convention, Nixon claims at a press conference that an investigation of the Watergate break-in, led by White House counsel John Dean, has revealed that no one employed by the administration had anything to do with the bugging.
  
 

T
he day my seventeen-year-old brother led the police on a high-speed chase in my parents’ Lincoln Continental and ended up going to a mental hospital, I went to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and saw
Fantasia
.

That summer my mother volunteered, transcribing books for the blind. She toiled daily on a Braille typewriter, transforming the novel
The World of Suzie Wong
into tiny raised dots. My dad spent his weekends wearing paint-splattered shirts and espadrilles, carving ancient Egyptian scenarios into wooden shutters for the den. I was fifteen and going through my Zen period; I meditated, chose a Zen name (Munan Duvi) and read
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
until the pages were worn. And Howard, the only white boy in upscale Bel Air to sport a huge afro, fell under the spell of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books and decided to experiment with hallucinatory drugs.

Howard was a high school revolutionary. One of the founders of a notorious underground school newspaper called the
Red Tide
, he wrote scathing anti-establishment articles and organized countless demonstrations at school. Carrying the flag of the United Farm Workers and passing out flyers, he urged students to boycott the cafeteria until the school stopped serving grapes; he picketed outside Auto Shop, demanding that girls be allowed to take the boys-only class, and he staged an anti-war protest in the administration building—a gathering so large, the school had to shut down for the day. Howard was out to make the world a better place and, despite our brother-sister bickering, he was my hero.

With my newfound Eastern philosophy, courtesy of the books I purchased at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood, I tried to stay in the moment at all times, tried to remain nonjudgmental and accept “what is.” But while I was sleeping with
Music for Zen Meditation
playing softly on my turntable, my brother was eating peyote buttons and sleeping in the lilac bushes on the hill in back of our suburban home.

My mother and I began noticing something was really off with Howard when one day the three of us were climbing into the Lincoln Continental to go to the supermarket. I automatically opened the back door since my older brother always had “dibs on shotgun.” Only on this day, with the early summer Santa Ana winds stirring up trouble, Howard darted into the backseat, practically knocking me down.

“Sit in the front,” he commanded.

“Really? What’s the occasion?”

“Just do it.”

I didn’t argue. I jumped in front. As we took off, my brother slid across the backseat until he was lying flat, his large afro squished against the passenger door.

“Turn left, they’re following us!” he suddenly shouted.

“Who?” my mom asked as she looked in the rearview mirror and saw no one.

“The same guys who are tapping our phone.
Turn left now!”

My mother did turn left, but then she pulled over to the curb. “How, what’s going on?”

I chimed in. “Look, there’s no one even behind us.”

“Trust me, they’re there. They must have ducked out of sight. They’re very shrewd.”

Okay. My seventeen-year-old brother was together enough to say someone was “very shrewd,” but he was hiding in the backseat, blathering in bizarre paranoia.

“And just who do you think is tapping our phone?” my mother probed.

“I don’t
think
they are—I
know
they are. They’re after me.”

“Who?” she persisted.

“The FBI. Just drive.
Drive!
”

Frightened, my mother flipped on her turn signal and pulled back into the traffic. She just looked at me and remained silent while Howard shouted out directions.

“Faster.
Faster!
”

“Turn right.”

“Pull in front of that car. Quick!”

Now, my brother’s saying that the FBI was tapping our phones and following him wasn’t that much of a stretch, given his political activities. But even if it were true, there were probably more rational ways of dealing with the situation than lying down in the backseat of the car shouting out directions to nowhere.

We drove around for fifteen minutes more, until my mother gathered her courage and declared, “Forget groceries, we’re going home.”

When we reached the house, Howard ran upstairs to his room. I loved his room. I’d often sneak in there to look at the psychedelic Day-Glo posters of Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon that plastered the walls alongside the “Free Angela” and “Free Huey” bumper stickers stuck on his closet door, all eerily illuminated by a black light.

I followed my mother into the kitchen and sat at the white Formica table as she made herself a martini and pulled a bottle of pills out of the cupboard. She took a gulp of her cocktail, washing down a Miltown.

“What are you gonna do?” I asked.

Trying not to cry, she paced back and forth on the gold-speckled linoleum. My mom’s frosted hair, which she had just gotten done at the beauty parlor the day before, was wilting in the heat, despite the stiff spray holding it together like a helmet.

“I’m going to wait until your father gets home.”

She took another swig of her martini, ate the green olive floating on top, tossed the pit in the trash, then began to yank vegetables out of the refrigerator and throw them into a large pot on the stove. She cut up an onion and allowed its bitter sting to finally release her tears. When my father arrived a half hour later, my mother intercepted him at the door.

“Would you go talk to your son? He’s really freaking out,” she said, compulsively wiping her hands on her “Kiss the Chef” apron. As she explained what had happened earlier, my father just shook his head. He stamped his cigarette out in one of the large glass ashtrays that sat everywhere around the house, took another Benson and Hedges out of the pack in his shirt pocket, and lit it with a book of matches from Scandia. “It’s drugs, isn’t it?” he stated more than asked, deeply inhaling his frustration and keeping it locked in his lungs. He then trudged up the stairs.

My mother called out, “After you talk, bring him down for dinner. Tell him we’re having beef stew.”

My father knocked on my brother’s door and disappeared into the black-lit room. Twenty minutes later he led Howard downstairs, and we all sat at the kitchen table and ate dinner like any normal family. I looked at my brother and squeezed potatoes through the spaces between my teeth, which always made him laugh. When he didn’t even crack a smile, I knew something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

Over the next week or two, Howard grew more distressed and defiantly refused to listen to any parental reasoning. Finally my mother said, “We’ve made an appointment for you to see someone. We’re getting you help.”

My brother shouted back indignantly, “Don’t you see
that’s
who’s after me?”

“Who?”

“
Them,
” he answered cryptically.

“No one’s after you,” my father said gently yet firmly. “We’re talking about a counselor who can help you deal with the situation.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” my brother shouted even louder, then slammed the door and stomped out to the bushes to take a nap.

A week later, it was Howard’s graduation night from University High School. A few months prior, he had been expelled from Uni for trying to sell an issue of the
Red Tide
for ten cents to his social studies teacher. The principal defended the expulsion by explaining that selling
anything
on campus was illegal. Even though the writers of the newspaper used pseudonyms, the administration knew who was behind the
Red Tide
, and they were looking for any excuse to suspend or expel the perpetrators. Howard became the first sacrificial lamb.

My brother had transferred to Hamilton High for the remaining months of his senior year. When he was invited to graduate with his old class at Uni and once again play drums with the school band, he was thrilled. I wasn’t sure why since he hated the school that had expelled him, and was by no means finished with the political activities that got him kicked out in the first place. When I asked him why he was going to the graduation, he ominously replied, “You’ll find out soon enough.”

Since the auditorium at Uni High was too small for the large senior class, graduation was held in Pauley Pavilion, a cavernous hall at UCLA. I sat with my mother and father, and we searched the crowded stage, finding Howard, in his cap and gown, playing with the band. My parents smiled proudly, relieved that this chapter in my brother’s life was finally coming to an end. The ceremony was uneventful until the principal called Howard up to receive his diploma.

My brother stood, ripped off his graduation gown, and exposed a T-shirt that was emblazoned, front and back, in bright red, revolutionary lettering: FUCK HIGH SCHOOL.

He ran around the stage to make sure everyone could see it, then tore-ass out of the auditorium to resounding cheers. Moments later the fire alarm sounded, forcing everyone to evacuate the building in the middle of the ceremony. To this day no one knows for sure if my brother, in one last authority-riling crescendo, set off that alarm or not, though the timing was uncanny.

At home later that night, Howard seemed calmer. In fact, he seemed so together the next day, my parents left for Palm Springs as they had earlier planned.

Twenty-four hours later, on a quiet Sunday morning, the police spotted a suspicious-looking, freaky, seventeen-year-old white boy with lilac leaves and twigs knotted into his afro, driving a fancy car in an upscale neighborhood at 6:00 a.m. They tried to pull him over for questioning, but Howard took off.

The high-speed police pursuit started in Bel Air, continued east on Sunset Boulevard, then swerved north into a posh gated community where Howard and the police sped through twisting, narrow streets lined with estates.

If this had occurred today, the chase would interrupt television programming; it would be shown live from various choppers.
Breaking news
. A graphic and a snappy title would accompany the story: “Bel Air ’Burb Boy Provokes Police Pursuit.” While reporters added drama, we’d hear:

“It looks like a light-skinned African American male.”

“He possibly stole the car.”

“He may have a gun.”

But back then the only ones who ever knew the pursuit occurred were the few early-morning onlookers collecting their newspapers from their driveways—and my grandparents, who were called to bail Howard out of jail after he was arrested when, twenty minutes into the chase, he took a right turn and hit a dead-end street.

When my grandfather finally called my parents to give them the news later that afternoon, they rushed back from Palm Springs to find their teenage fugitive sitting at my grandparents’ kitchen table eating a turkey sandwich and playing gin with my grandmother.

Meanwhile I was home alone reading a book of Zen quotes when a heavy rain shook me out of my contemplation. I listened to the thunder, loud and soft, and ran out to the backyard to greet the summer storm. Face up to dripping clouds, I smelled the downpour in my hair, licked it from my lips. I was a nature freak—I had made mobiles from driftwood and shells that I gathered at the beach, took hikes through the neighborhood hillsides, and picked flowers then dried them by tying the bouquets at the stem and hanging them upside down from a string I had tied across my bedroom.

I returned to my lavender bedroom, leaving the rain-slapped window wide open. I picked up my book again and started reading more Zen quotes. I was feeling calm and centered when the doorbell rang.

I opened the door to see Dr. Levenson, a close friend of my parents who was also our family physician.

“Hey, how ya doing?” I asked casually.

“Okay.” His face looked unusually stern, void of emotion.

“Uh…my parents are out of town, and I’m the only one home.”

“I know. They asked me to meet them here.”

This did not sound good. Were they going to break the news that my mom had cancer or my dad had a brain tumor? “Is everything all right?”

“Well, no it’s not.”

I felt my knees start to weaken.

“Your brother’s been arrested, and I’m here to do an intervention.”

“A what?”

“He’s on drugs. We’re going to take him to a mental hospital.”

“Oh. Wow.”

The rain stopped, leaving one of those spectacular pink-and-orange L.A. sunsets in its wake. As Dr. Levenson filled me in on the news of my brother’s attempt to flee from the police and his arrest, my parents drove up in the Lincoln Continental with Howard in the backseat. He jumped out of the car before it came to a stop and ran to his own dirty yellow Dodge Dart parked in the driveway in front of Dr. Levenson’s shiny green Buick Electra.

Howard was so focused on getting out, he put the Dart into reverse and stepped on the gas. Tapping the doctor’s Buick, he pulled forward, turned his steering wheel, and backed out again, trying to maneuver his way past the car. Again and again he hit the gas, turned the wheel, the tires rubbing against black asphalt. When he finally realized his car was trapped, he jumped out and ran.

My dad and Dr. Levenson tackled my brother in the driveway, where they held him down and forcibly maneuvered him into the backseat of the doctor’s car. My mother stood motionless with her hand stuck over her open mouth, a statue of fear. I clutched the book of Zen quotes I was holding as if I could manually force the lessons of enlightenment into my horrified body.

Dr. Levenson tossed the keys out the car window to my mother. “You drive.”

Snapped into action, gathering what little emotional strength she had left, my mom climbed into the driver’s seat. As they pulled away I saw my brother in the back, kicking and screaming as my dad and Dr. Levenson restrained him.

Left alone in the fading light, I felt like one of the onlookers who, just that morning, had watched a stranger lead the police on a chase. Perhaps it was my homespun Zen practice of detachment kicking in or maybe the scene was just too big and surreal to grasp.