The Horror Movie That I Lived Through, Memories of Mother

My father was working in Lake Tahoe helping build an apartment complex that he would co-own with a group of investors. My mother and I had been up to visit him. We’d returned to Berkeley and received an invite for dinner at my Aunt, Uncle and cousins' house in Orinda. I always enjoyed visits there. My three cousins were like sisters to me, especially the oldest, Helen, with whom I was close.

We had a nice visit including a big dinner prepared my Aunt Elsa who seemingly had magical powers when it came to meal preparation. We returned home and as it was Summer I looked forward to the coming days and hanging out with my friends. I was about eleven-years-old.

But as soon as we got home my mother started angrily yelling. I don’t remember the specifics of what she said other than, “I hate those people,” in reference to those we’d just visited. I made a particular point not to recognize or remember exactly what she said in such states as if to do so would make them them real and her mania something real.  

I was torn to pieces when she started raving. I’d been enduring such horror for as long as I could remember. One never gets used to their mother raving like a lunatic. You just want it to end, you want to be left alone. You can’t bear the horrible sound of your mother’s voice in such unprovoked, unreasonable anger. It was an affront to normalcy. Ugly. Cruel. Heartbreaking.

Sometimes her ravings were directed towards a wall or a lamp but on this day, though she wasn’t “speaking” to me, I was in the direct line of fire. She even followed me into my bedroom. There was no escape. Mom was so close that covering my ears did no good, nor did playing a record on my little turntable. How I could have used noise-cancelling headphones!

It was amazing how long she could go on without succumbing to exhaustion or without her powerful voice cracking. (Odd to remember that her elocution and diction was so perfect.)

That day I had to take it, she’d invaded my space and there was no getting her out. I’d have rather taken a physical beating, it would have made more sense.

After I don’t know how long (time is an odd concept in such circumstances) she stopped and left my room. I immediately forget that anything out of the ordinary had happened. What else was I to do? Dwell on it? I never cried, I never brooded, I never grew philosophical and I never told a soul. I wanted to put it out of my mind. I wanted to live in a world where my mother was normal or dead. 

No one else knew. My mother could turn it off when others were around, at least until I was about thirteen when she could contain herself no longer and the demons came out in front of my father and later others including my older brother who’d left home for college a few years before.

But for now it was our little secret. I couldn’t imagine saying to my father, “sometimes when you’re not home Mom starts raving like a loony bird, screaming and yelling and saying foul things about any and everyone.” No, that would have been impossible. At least for me. So it was my burden to carry. 

I don’t know this for a fact but I’m relatively certain that later than night while I slept Mom came into my bedroom and put the covers back on me because I had a tendency to kick them off at night. Sometimes I was aware of her presence. It was weirdly comforting. The next day she would have done the chores around the house and made sure I had a nice dinner. I never went without a meal and Mom never neglected the laundry, dishes or anything else. That was for later years when she’d added heavy drinking to the mix.

The next day I would have gotten out of the house early and connected with friends. I’d have not thought about the previous day for one second. I had a remarkable ability to compartmentalize. The awful scenes propagated by my mother were in a box. 

Only when I returned home would I dread my mother. As I approached the front door I would have been full of trepidation. I never knew what was on the other side. Would mom be “normal”? Would she be raving? Maybe worst of all she would be perfectly fine as I entered the house and found a snack and sat in front of the TV only to start raving and raging after I’d gotten comfortable. It was impossible to completely relax when I was growing up. I could never be sure what was next.

Thankfully she could and would turn it off when others were in the house. Then I was protected. How I hated it when my father went to work in Tahoe. I had no protection. Once he was back the nights, at least, were safe.

It was about two years after the evening described above that it all came tumbling done. Mother could contain the beast no longer. Dad and later my brother were exposed to her lunacy. She coupled this with moving out of the master bedroom and denying my dad any manner of affection. She also went on wild spending sprees, buying junk mostly. Jewelry, a chest of drawers we didn’t need, expensive knickknacks. My poor father was devastated. His world had collapsed underneath him. He could make no sense of it. He tried gamely to tell me it was menopause — something I’d never heard of. But I wasn’t buying it. I knew she was nuts and had been for as long as I could remember. Even at this point I said nothing to my father about how this was no new condition but merely something she could no longer control.

Then she started drinking. Bad got worse.

My father and I went to see the family doctor. He said that absent her being a threat to herself or anyone else we could not commit her. Well, she was no physical threat but she’d done a fair amount of damage to me in ways that still manifest today. PTSD forever.

You can imagine how I welcomed high school graduation and escaping to a college that was hours away from Mom. I spent the rest of her life avoiding my mother. Who could blame me? 

I’m occasionally visited by the awful memories of my youth (as well as the many good times I had). I still don’t cry over it. I’ve talked about my mother to a string of psychiatrists and therapists and counselors over the years. The fact that some have been skeptical of my story has compounded the pain. I’ve written a lot about mom too. Who knows how much it helps? It all happened, it’s all over and it was all painful beyond words.

I don’t generally watch horror movies. I lived through one.

The Author Celebrates His Birthday By Reviewing His Life and Times

That's me on the far right with brother and mother.

It’s my birthday. 

I’ve had one every year starting with my debut in this world in 1954. I was born a few months before the United States Supreme Court handed down their epic decision in Brown v. Education. I was born seven and half months before the then New York Giants baseball team won their last World Series title in the Big Apple. (It would be 2010 before they won one in San Francisco.)

I was born during the second year of Dwight Eisenhower’s first term as president. I was born during the relatively early days of the Cold War. I was born when there were 48 states in the USA. Statehood was four years away for Hawaii and Alaska. I was born a month after Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio married. I was born just a few days after the polio vaccination was first administered on a mass basis. (This was at a time when science in general and vaccinations in particular were held in high regard.) I was born a month before From Here to Eternity was awarded the Oscar for best picture. Two months after I was born Senator Joseph McCarthy began the Army hearings that would help bring about his downfall (today he’d be Attorney General). I was born a few months before the words “under God” where added to the Pledge of Allegiance. I was born just before Elvis Presley became famous and before Sports Illustrated had published its first issue. I was born within a few weeks of Matt Groening, Patty Hearst, John Travolta, Ron Howard and Rene Russo. I was born five months before On the Waterfront hit theaters. 

When I was born about 65% of American households had televisions and about 0% had personal computers. Telephones were infinitely more likely to be on walls than in pockets. Indeed the very idea of taking your telephone with you when you left the house was still absurd when I left for college. When I was born Vietnam was generally referred to as Indochina and it was the French who were entangled there, not the U.S. When I was born The Beatles were just under ten years from the American television debut. Major League baseball had sixteen teams, the NFL had twelve, the NHL six and the NBA had eight including teams in Fort Wayne, Syracuse and Rochester. Only the NFL had teams west of the Rockies. NCAA football teams were in geographically sane conferences of workable numbers. For example the University of California was in the nine-team Pacific Coast Conference which consisted of four schools in California, two in Washington, two in Oregon and one in Idaho. Today the Bears are in the unwieldy seventeen-team Atlantic Coast Conference which is comprised of two California schools and one from Texas with most of the rest being in states boarding the Atlantic Ocean and ranging from Syracuse in the north to Miami in the south.

When I was born Jim Crow still ruled in the American South and for that matter much of the rest of the country. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was over a year away and Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcom X were not well known. The US Senate hadn’t passed a federal anti-lynching law. Civil Rights bills wouldn’t be passed for another ten years. 

Gays were still very much in the closet and were not spoken of except as being perverse oddities that were lible to molest children. 

Women were being raised to be future housewives and were not afforded the same legal rights as men.

Me in 1978

Many African and Asian countries were still under colonial rule. Most African countries were under French or British rule. There was both an East and West Germany and countries like Poland, Estonia and Romania were under Soviet rule.

In my life time there have been the assassinations of a president, John F. Kennedy, his brother Bobby, then a presidential candidate, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton and scores of other civil rights leaders. There was also been the entire run of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I’ve been alive for the all of the Watergate saga which brought down a president. I was around for the Zodiac killings which terrorized the Bay Area and the Patty Hearst kidnapping and her conversion to an SLA warrior and her magical transformation back to a law-abiding citizen. I have memories of the Jim Jones cult and their mass suicide in Jonestown and the murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk that same month. My life has also coincided with Charles Manson, his "family" and the brutal slayings they inflicted. I also recall Woodstock and Altamont. Likewise the arrival of the Beatles which transformed my life and sensibilities. I was witness to the emergence of the Hippie Movement and the protests of the Sixties some of which I participated in. 

I started life with a black and white TV that had five channels and now have a large high definition color TV with a flat screen and more channels than I can count plus several streaming services. For most of my life if I wanted to see a movie that was not in theaters I had to wait for it to be on TV where it would be decimated by commercials. Now I can find any movie I want (with rare exceptions) and watch it at my leisure, commercial free. Indeed I own about 300 films on DVD. Similarly, in my youth if I wanted to listen to a song that I didn’t have on an album or a .45 I had to hope that it would be on the radio. Now I can find it, often accompanied by a video, on YouTube.

Information that used to require a trip to the library is now at our fingertips. Then again a great deal of lies that we would not have been exposed to in the past are also at our fingertips. 

I was born into a more dangerous world. There were no seat belts, bike riders didn’t wear helmets, playgrounds could be veritable death traps. On the other hand school shootings were not nearly so ubiquitous and the government was actively trying to make us safer from disease rather than making false claims about the dangers of inoculations. This gets to the worst thing about the world today. A reckless idiot who is dismantling all the good things that the government can do for the people, especially the most vulnerable, is bending over backwards to serve the needs of the wealthiest. He holds the highest position in the land. 

When I was growing up climate change was not a thing though people were becoming aware of the need to protect our environment. I was in high school when we had the first Earth Day. Today we’re already living with the effects of climate change.

I was born before Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published and before Allen Ginsberg’s first public reading of Howl. Both those pieces of literature have been meaningful in my life.

I was born when my beloved Cal football team was mediocre. Today they are mediocre. In between they have mostly been mediocre and bad more often than good. I love them no less. It was seventeen years before I became aware of London’s Arsenal Football club and I have loved them ever since. They have given me much joy. As previously noted the San Francisco Giants were in New York when I came into the world. They are playing in their third different ballpark in SF. Virtually every professional team that you can name is in their second or third home since the fifties. The astroturf era has come and mostly gone. Women's sports have become popular and I am a dedicated fan of Cal's women's basketball team.

My wife was already in the world when I was born. She is the love of my life and offsets any travails I’ve ever experienced. Only the love I have more daughters matches the way I feel about her. I've had many friends, sadly too many of them died young. In 2017 two great friends died within six months of each other. Life can be cruel. I've seen many other people suffer great misfortune and have had a fair share of my own mostly in the form of a mentally ill mother. I've struggled with PTSD all my life and attendant issues such as drug and alcohol addiction, depression, anxiety and panic attacks. With all that I've been luckier than most. I've remained physically healthy and had a long and rewarding career in teaching. 

I enter a new year feeling incredibly lucky that I’ve been along for the ride and I’d like to stick around for as long as possible. It’s been a lot of fun and damned if you know what's going to happen next in this world.

Before I was 20, Absolutely True Facts About Yours Truly

The author

In my early teens I thought that Grace Slick’s name was Gray Slick. Gray seemed to be such a cool first name. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that plain ole Grace was her first name.

At my sixth grade graduation three friends and I lip-synched to The Beatles. We had a drum set, guitars and all wore Beatles wigs. I was surprised and disappointed that adults laughed.

As a nine-year-old I went alone to a Jerry Lewis triple feature and sat in the front row.

As a child I played imaginary basketball games in my backyard featuring teams comprised of characters from my favorite sitcoms.

I’ve been told that the Paul Revere and the Raider’s song, Indian Reservation, was the theme of one of my high school acid trips. I have only the vaguest recollection of this.

When I was in high school we went on a field trip to the headquarters of the the Black Panther Party in Oakland. It was cool.

At the age of 19 I was taken before the judge of a small Northern California Valley town for hitchhiking illegally and not having a valid ID. When my identity was established via a phone call to a friend I was released.

While in high school a friend and I once snuck into a Joan Baez concert in the Greek Theater in Berkeley. She played a few songs with her sister, Mimi Farina. Both were barefoot. I thought Mimi was hot.

My maternal grandmother would make me pancakes in the middle of the day if I asked her. 

I went to high school with Lenny Pickett who went on to be the first musical director for Saturday Night Live. Prior to that he played for Tower of Power. 

I also went to high school with the son of famed music critic Ralph Gleason.

Once in high school I literally got blind drunk.

In junior high I had a long-term substitute teacher whose name was Mr. Twain and yes, his first name was Mark.

When I was a wee tyke I thought that a grand slam was achieved when a home run left the ball park.

The bully at my elementary school was named Mark Fuhrman, the same name as the chief police investigator in the OJ Simpson murder case. I once got revenge on Mark and stopped his bullying with a well-placed karate chop to his shoulder. 

As a child I thought in addition to robins, bluejays, sparrows etc, there were just plain birds. I also believed that in addition to different breeds of dogs and mutts there were just plain dogs. And I believed in addition to a cold or the flu or strep throat you could be just plain old sick. 

In the sixth grade I asked my teacher, the comely Mrs. MacDonald, what a hem was. We were the only ones in the room. She lifted her skirt just enough to show me the hem of her stocking. I went outside to lunch and told my friends. They all accused me of lying.

As a fifth grader I was the first in the school to find out that President Kennedy had been assassinated. This was because I went to my grandmother’s for lunch. When I returned to the playground and informed other students they didn’t believe me.

There used to be an empty lot in the middle of Berkeley that was covered in blackberry bushes. My brother and I used to go there and feast and bring enough home for my mother to make a pie. There have been several different buildings there since, currently it's the site of a savings and loan.

My mother used to send me to the corner store to buy a half gallon of milk. She gave me fifty cents. I was allowed to keep the change which I invariably used to buy baseball cards and/or candy.

One day in 8th grade science class I was the first to finish a test. As I brought it to the teacher’s desk she said aloud, “don’t worry students, the first to finish a test doesn’t usually do well.” I’ve hated the teacher, Mrs. Snyder, ever since.

When I was a child my father told me that there used to really be Golden Bears and the last one was killed by a Russian hunter on the exact site of Memorial Stadium in Berkeley where the University of California Golden Bears play football. I believed him.

At the end of my Cub Scout team’s baseball team' season  I told my mother that I was the team’s rookie of the year (there was no such award). Somehow she turned this prevarication into getting me a spot in a car in Berkeley’s annual parade where I sat in my Cub Scout uniform waving at onlookers.

"Like Countries You Can’t Name" How the Virgin Suicides Explores Males' Enduring Fascination With Women

To most men, women are an enduring and fascinating mystery. A mystery we spend our whole lives trying to unravel. Misogynists turn their perplexity into anger resenting the complications that arise out of their inability to make sense out of women. But for the rest of us women are to be appreciated and admired in large part for how they beguile us.

(For purposes of this discussion we’ll set gender fluidity and non-binary individuals aside for a separate discussion.)

Young boys reject females entirely finding them far too strange and unknowable to even consider. But by adolescence when sexual attraction develops, males start a lifetime of curiosity and exploration about these strange creatures who do things like wear dresses, put on makeup and eschew sports. Those girls who don’t wear make up or dresses and do play sports are further wonders: why aren’t they doing what other girls do? 

Women are in control. They often look at us knowingly possessing a strange wisdom we have no access to. Society requires that we  come to them to initiate a relationship and they’re generally happy to make us wait. If truly interested in us and if we can’t see what’s right in front of us, women know how to manipulate us. Women are remarkably adept at getting what they want.

It's been said that "women go to Mars to eat candy bars while men go to Jupiter to get more stupider." Truth. 

I recently read The Virgin Suicides, a brilliant novel by Jeffrey Eugenides and then watched the equally brilliant film from 1999 faithfully based on it directed by Sofia Coppola. (It was Eugenides’ first novel and Coppola’s first film, what great starts to careers!) The story is about five sisters who commit suicide. The youngest goes first and the others follow a year later as a group. Both book and film seem to be about the girls, their family and what might possess five teenage siblings to take their own lives. But on closer examination I think the story is really about the boys who narrate the story and watch the girls from across the street. The boys devote large portions of their days and nights obsessing over, watching, and trying to communicate with the girls. I've seen The Virgin Suicides described as a coming-of-age story. It is the boys who come of age.

The story is told decades after the girls have died: the boys, now men, still see one another and still discuss and even argue about the sisters. There’s nothing like suicide to deepen the mystery of what makes a person tick. When there are five suicides the mystery is that much deeper. 

This is also a story about yearning. The boys yearn to understand the girls, to help them, protect them, to possess them and — though it’s unspoken — to make love to them. They ache as they watch the girls and they ache decades later to think of them.

An important element of the story is the sisters’ repressive parents who limit their daughters' social interactions to heavily chaperoned parties or dates watching TV with the rest of the family. When one of the girls (played by Kristen Dunst in the film) stays out until the wee hours after the homecoming dance, they are all pulled out of school and their rock albums are destroyed. They are prisoners. Obviously this does more harm than good and likely hastens the girls’ destinies. 

Of course the parents are bereft at the loss of their children but more than that they are stunned, overwhelmed by the enormity of an incomprehensible loss. Whether they accept any culpability in the mass suicide is left to the reader/audience to ponder.

In the book the boys pursue the mystery of the suicides well into adulthood. Not their years in college, their jobs, their marriages, or their children have stood in the way of their obsession.

It can be like that. Females take up a tremendous amount of space in men’s brains. 

What is she thinking?

What did that look mean?

Why did she say no?

Why did she say yes?

Why on Earth does she like him?

What does she do up in her room?

What do they talk about?

Does she like sex, does she think about?

What does she think of me?

What does she look like naked?

It sometimes seems a miracle to a man that a woman he likes finds something to like about him. If this progresses to love…well, that’s an incredible gift and the smart ones among us are eternally grateful beyond words. That we so often find ways to sabotage our relationships with women is a sad commentary on the male ego and masculine-based stupidity.

Part of what makes the Virgin Suicides work is that the boys respect the girls yet don’t put them on pedestals. They see them as wondrous creatures, a gift from the heavens. Any tidbit of information they can learn is cherished as helping forge an understanding of why the girls are so compelling.  They don’t objectify the girls — a cardinal sin that men are forever committing. Yes, they’re pretty, but they are even more distant than most girls, even more inaccessible. The brutal finality of their deaths means that they are forever out of reach, rendered topics of discussion and not people to have and to hold and to understand and to share a life with. 

We do love a good mystery.

I’ve been on this planet for a long time and I barely understand women anymore now than I did when I was a teenager. I’ve accepted that such is the way of the world and content myself that I know what I need to. The Virgin Suicides serves as another mechanism through which to explore this mystery. I’m grateful for that.