Diving Into the Wreck : Stories of Drink, Dreams, Chaos and Secretly Remembered Joys From a California Childhood

I’m almost the only one around here who drinks anymore. But I like to sit out back and look at the steep walls of Topanga and sometimes--after or during a third glass of Chardonnay--I dream a little bit about my family.

I’ve been writing a history of how drugs and drink have worked in our family for the last 50 years. We’ve been here since before the Revolution. How lucky for those starving peasants--to make it out of England, Ireland, Scotland, over here to a land of unimaginable opportunity. The trouble was, they were starving peasants, so they really couldn’t imagine the idea of opportunity or dream. It took about 14,000 drinks for them to calm down.

Once in America, they divided: You could say they became the poor and the rich. The losers and winners. The former have a particular set of belief systems. They are prone to dreaming, wool-gathering, calling in sick. They lose the deeds to their houses and cry easily. They are often eloquent and intelligent, but they succumb to melancholia, drink and drugs. The latter? When they hear about clinical depression, they say, “Oh, everybody gets discouraged sometimes.” They do not see the abyss. Maybe in their world the ground is flat and safe. Maybe it’s a golf course.

This is partly the story of the abyss, a family finally getting enough of it. It’s history seen through a purple haze, full of secrets and chaos and distortions, and secretly remembered joys. I’m beginning to think it may be the unwritten history of America.

*

THE YEAR IS 1940. THE PLACE IS EAGLE ROCK, A WORKING-CLASS--BUT very pretty--suburb of Los Angeles. The address is 5212 Townsend Avenue. The house is pale-yellow painted wood, a small but inviting California bungalow with a wide front porch. A fence runs by the driveway, smothered in Cecile Brunner roses.

The time is just a little before 4 o’clock in the afternoon. My mother has picked me up from St. Dominic’s Elementary School. We’ve stopped off at the Safeway to shop, and I’ve run around in the aisles, so she’s beating the living s - - - out of me. I stand in the back yard holding my skirt up so she can get easy access to my legs. She crouches down in front of me, pulling switch after switch off a convenient hedge and using them until they break.

She’s breathing heavily and her cheeks are pink. She’s smiling. She’s beautiful.

After a long time she rests. She can’t be said to lose her temper because she’s already lost it, but she loses something more. “Get that look off your face!” She’s panting with exertion. I don’t and won’t get that look off my face. (There’s another reason I can’t get that look off my face and she knows it and I know it. I’ve got a birthmark, something I’ve already begun to think of as a map of North and South America, on my right cheek. It’s purple, with a fingerprint of dark blue at the bottom. So I can’t get that look off my face.)

I raise my chin and look right at her. Whatever she can give, I can take. She pulls another switch off the hedge, peels the leaves off with one skinning gesture of her left hand and whales away at me again. The roses shimmer behind her, and the sky above is a deep, deep afternoon blue.

She sends me in to wait for my father, a newspaperman working cityside for the Daily News, the cool paper of the day. In my room, I sit on one of the twin beds and look out the window. It must be close to 5 by now. I can hear Mother getting dinner ready. She’ll be scrubbing down potatoes with an awful scrub, or snapping string beans with an awful snap. She’ll be peeling a clove of garlic to put in her French dressing. She’ll shake the living daylights out of the dressing in its big mason jar and put it on the kitchen sink right next to Daddy’s bottle of Scotch and her bottle of Hill and Hill Blend. We use jelly glasses for everyday, and mother will, in the middle of cooking, pour out half a glass of Hill and Hill Blend, toss it down in one gulp, make a terrible face, pour a belt of tap water to chase it down, then go on cooking.

When I come out, I set the table, under my mother’s careful eye. Then I go into the little living room to wait for Daddy. He’s always glad to see me. By dinner time, the levels on both the bottles have gone down considerably. My father is cheerful as always.

From 7:30 to 8 we listen to the radio: “I Love a Mystery. The Decapitation of Jefferson Monk--a New Carlton Morse Adventure Thriller.” My dad gets a kick out of this show. He gets a kick out of anything. He gives it his best shot. My mother, exasperated and bored, insists I finish my potatoes and beans and halibut.

My part of the night is getting done by now. I have to be in bed by 8. Mother goes to bed the same time I do. She’s sick to her stomach; she has a headache; she feels “as if rubber bands are snapping” inside her head. When I get up at night to go to the bathroom, I’ll see my mother in bed, and if I look out into the other side of the house, my dad will be sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper, or out in the living room in lamplight, reading a book. Mark Twain, or James Branch Cabell, or Herman Melville.

Maybe, around 1, he’ll go to bed. Both bottles will be empty.

Sometime in the summer of 1944, at an extended poker party up by Big Bear Lake, 100 miles from Los Angeles, four journalists (my dad among them) and their devoted wives took to discussing what they would do with their lives--if they could actually do what they wanted. One yearned to journey to the South of France to study Provencal (accent circumflex below c). My dad knew he could write the Great American Novel. The wives tactfully said that they had everything they wanted in their lives, just to take care of their wonderful husbands and bring up their kids to be healthy and happy.

But when my mother’s turn came, she was dealing, and she didn’t even look up.

“I want to drink and play cards,” she said.

My father, George Laws, took a look at his wife Kate through the clouds of cigarette smoke and the noisy banter of a 12-hour poker game. Although Kate was still very beautiful, he found her wanting.

George had already moved a big newspaperman’s desk into the back bedroom of our little home. He began to write Western stories for the pulps. My mother still drank and had terrible hangovers. My father still drank and held his liquor.

Then the man who owned our house in Eagle Rock decided to sell it. A friend of my father’s had a Spanish-style house in Silver Lake on the Micheltorena hill, and he wanted to sell it; my dad decided to go for it. But my mother hated our new house with a passion I couldn’t figure out. Even though it had a picture window and a view so magnificent you could see a glittering ribbon of the Pacific 30 miles away, she wept every time she picked up a broom--quiet, bitter tears.

Silver Lake, then, was sort of in Downtown, sort of out. There was no community that you could see. My parents hated the new church. They didn’t belong to clubs. Then there was a vacation over Labor Day weekend; my mom and I stayed alone in a sad little cabin at Balboa Beach. My father came down on Sunday afternoon. They talked inside as I sat outside on the steps. When he left that day, he walked right over me, without saying goodby.

The next night, when dinner was ready, the phone rang. It was my father, who told me to relay the message to my mother that he wouldn’t be coming home anymore, and--no thank you--he didn’t want to speak to her, I could just relay that message to her, and he’d be calling me later.

My mother cried quietly for the first three weeks. I would come home, alone, from the seventh grade in a huge public school where I knew no one, climbing the Micheltorena hill with dread, come in through the back door and walk down the long “Spanish” hall to my own room, where my mother would be lying in my bed. She couldn’t bear to go into the room she’d shared with George. She would have spent the day crying.

When things got worse, they actually got a little better. Mother had the beds changed around, so that my twin beds went in her room, and I moved in there, so she wouldn’t have to spend the nights alone. She went to business school for 90 days and got a job working for an insurance broker, whom she loathed. She took a look around this house she hated and assessed what her 14 years of marriage had left her. A kid with a birthmark.

Which is when she began to really shout, “Get that look off your face!” Which is when she began to say, “If you don’t like it around here, why don’t you go live with your father?” Which is when I stopped getting any sleep for about four years, because once she saw I was asleep, she’d begin to scream, and scream, and scream all night, and smash so many pieces of costume jewelry, it’s amazing she had anything left (except I still have one gold locket of hers). Which is also when she came home with a bottle of bourbon a night, and walked straight to the kitchen sink, poured off a full jelly glass and flung it down in one chug-a-lug, gasped, made a horrible face, held the glass under the faucet for a water chaser, gulped it, and poured off another jelly glass of bourbon, to do the same thing again. She fell asleep, by 6:30 if I was lucky, so that I could cook a dinner for myself, get my homework done, my clothes ironed for the next day, so that I could be up and out of the house in the morning, sometimes before my mother. But about 9 or 10 every night, she’d wake up, sizzling with a terrible energy. It was like living with an earthquake, watching books and wristwatches and hairbrushes and occasional stockings swirling and crashing around the bedroom we shared, but it was reassuring too. She screamed and raked her nails across her face, but she was coming back, beginning to resemble the woman I knew.

I knew that school was the only way out. I made up a list of 10 people every night: five boys, five girls that I was going to force myself to say hello to the next day. “Hi!” I’d blurt in the halls of Thomas Starr King Junior High, and they, startled, often answered back “Hi!” In the seventh grade I made two real friends. One, Margie, had a bookie for a dad, who went to jail. Her mother was a raving drunk, worse than mine. And a girl named Georgia, who cut off our friendship with a devastating phone call: “Do you have any idea at all how much people hate you? How much they laugh behind your back for that pathetic smile you have?”

Well, of course I had an idea. I might have been pathetic but I wasn’t dumb. “What course of action,” I might have asked bitchy little Georgia Brown, “do you suggest I take? I’m 11 years old and friendless, entirely alone in the world. The one person I depend upon hates me worse than snakes. The one person I love is gone. We’re very poor now, so I can’t buy friendship. So what do you suggest, Georgia? I’ve got my list of 10 people in my hand. I’m going to pretend that things are cool. I’m going to say hi to Kenny Smallwood and Bruce Willock and Jimmy Johnston and Morgan Morgan and even Marc Marcus if I get up the nerve. Then I’m going to say hi there to Beryl Towbin and Joan Wilheim and Nancy Stone and Jackie Joseph and even Donnetta Dehan if I get up the nerve. And if they hate me, Georgia, well, it can’t be worse than the flying costume jewelry that ricochets across the bedroom I share with my mother here at home. I’ll tell you something, deceitful, vicious Georgia Brown: I don’t know what I want out of life, I’m only 11, but THIS IS NOT IT!

Down at the SOS Bar, my mother had snagged Charlie Lentz, a well-meaning contractor who was making a living putting up badly built tract homes south of what was then Los Angeles. From my point of view, life began to normalize a little. My mother still began the night with two enormous slugs, then passed out for an hour or two, but Charlie hung out with her during this process. Every night, as my mother wept or snored or screamed, I did my homework and made phone calls. Charlie held my screeching mom in his burly, boring arms.

“As soon as you’re 18, you’re out of here,” my mother said daily, in her lucid moments. “If you think you’re getting anything more than that out of me, forget it.” But since I was 12 by then, I took that as a sign of hope. Six years! Anyone can stand six years.

I took academic courses, even in junior high. By the end of eighth grade, my incessant hi-theres earned me an invitation to Donnetta Dehan’s birthday party. I’d lucked into a cadre of four girls: two desperately poor, two quite rich. The rich girls--Joan and Nancy--had us over to their houses and lent us their clothes. The poor girl, Jackie, still my best friend, lived alone with her drunken single mom, who was wilder than my mother but far less mean.

During the four years--from when I was 12 to when I was 16--my whole purpose and goal was to turn myself into a rock, a stone, a tank. When my mother said I was like my father, I said nothing. When she said if I wanted clothes I’d have to work for them, I borrowed clothes from my rich friends. When she said men would know I’d be an easy lay because of my birthmark, I duly noted it. Everything my mother did, I watched and thought about. Scorn was my career.

Charlie was followed by Jim, a startlingly unattractive lawyer. Mother was divorced by then. Charlie had tried to kill Jim when mother started seeing him, and after he failed, he killed himself. Mother’s aim was to sober Jim up and get him practicing law again. He insisted my mother stop working--which she did with alacrity--but that meant they had almost no money. We moved into the second floor of a decrepit duplex in Glassel Park, close to the railroad tracks. We had gone from nowhere to ultra-nowhere.

My mother married Jim in a quick Las Vegas ceremony, and maybe three months later she was pregnant, and sick as a pig. She threw up and threw up and threw up. She drank grape juice and ate crackers. Jim came home every night, and when he drank, boy, he drank! He threw his shoes around the house. He passed out cold, falling straight forward from his heels, so that his forehead hit the floor and he got a concussion. My dad got married again about this time. At 15, I could look at the future and think: three more years.

My mother got further and further along in her pregnancy. She lost weight all nine months because she’d adopted a policy of no eating at all. One night in May, when I was 16 and in the 11th grade, sitting in my room typing a paper, my mother opened the door. She was smiling. “The baby’s coming,” she said. “Jim’s driving me to the hospital.” The old lush hauled himself out of his chair and drove her on over.

The next day, I had a baby sister, Rose.

One morning when Rose had been home less than two weeks, my mother sat down at the breakfast table and looked at me.

“You’re more like your father every day. You still have that look on your face. You’re going to have to live with your father. If he won’t take you, you’ll have to go out on your own. I can’t stand the responsibility anymore. You’ll find out what life is really like. Because I can’t believe he’ll ever let you in.”

As I remember it, I got up, balanced my books on my hip and left the house without a word. At the bus stop, at a pay phone, I called Daddy and told him what was up. He too was newly married, living in a one-room apartment with twin Murphy beds, but he said he was delighted, and I really think he was.

A boy from school drove me home that afternoon. I packed my two straight skirts, my three blouses, my two pairs of Capezio flats. My books. My pictures. We scooped up everything in 15 minutes flat.

Three weeks later, after school, while I was--as always--doing my homework, as relaxed and happy and shook-out as when you step off the most horrid roller coaster ride in the scariest amusement park, the phone rang. It was my mother, crying. “Oh, please come home, you can come home now, I don’t care about the others, I don’t care about anyone but you, oh, please come home, you can do anything you want, you can have anything you want, because I hate the others, I hate the baby, I hate Jim, I hate them, hate them, hate them! So you can come home and come home right now.”

I took a look around the tiny apartment, my dad’s old desk where he had finally written his pulp stories, the books from floor to ceiling, the cozy clutter.

“Oh, gee, I don’t think so. I don’t think I could do that,” I said, and hung up on her.

To go back a little in time, when my dad left, he left my mother and me the house and the square piano. He took a water color of himself by Don Masefield Easton. He took his desk. He took the records, books and fun.

Every Saturday or Sunday for five years after the divorce, he’d come over and take me out. He took me to Scandia and the Brown Derby. He took me to Chinatown, often. He bought me pastries and Chinese rice-pattern tea cups. We had our picture taken by “Charlie Chan.” The photo that survives shows a cardboard cut-out of a drunken rake holding an outlandishly large cocktail glass with a scantily clad nymphet perched in it. He put his head in the hole of the rake and I’m in the hole of the nymphet’s head. We thought we were having fun, but the picture, when it got developed, showed two human beings in surprising misery.

My dad had bought into the twin myths of the journalist who could drink the world under the table, and the novelist who had to drink to unleash his demons. He, like my mother, still had at least a bottle-a-day habit. The difference was that while my mother tore up the furniture and screeched, my dad kept his Scotch in a drawer at work and paid the janitor to take out the empties so that his co-workers wouldn’t know.

Then, my father changed his life. He’d decided to stop drinking, my father said. (He didn’t tell me why.) He joined Alcoholics Anonymous. AA was small then, no more than 2,000 members in Los Angeles. You could almost have known Bill W.

One night in 1949, he took me to hear Peggy Lee at an AA fund-raiser. That night she was exquisite. She wore brown suede and belted out songs. The theater was packed with insanely happy people. Afterward, my dad drove me to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which was then a hangout--not the bar, no, not the bar, but the coffee shop--where crowds of intense people hammered out the AA program. What if you didn’t believe in God, what about that? Because these were mostly intellectuals, agnostic by nature, fed to the gills with organized religion. But the Book just said a power bigger than yourself. That could be a bus , you know?

They drank 20 cups of coffee at a time and, wired out of their minds, denounced people who weren’t in the room for every crime in the book. Infidels who took sleeping pills to go to sleep. Who destroyed their anonymity by telling people they were in AA. The nerve! They laughed like crazy and told stories of what they used to do--how much they used to drink.

Those people in AA in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s can be said to have reinvented American narrative style. All the terrible, terrible things that had ever happened to them just made for one great pitch.

The thing was: You could change your life. You could remake your life. But you had to go by the Book. And although this new, sober, moral, honest organization was aggressively classless (no heads, no dues, no bosses), a natural hierarchy began to form. How could it not? If you had a boring pitch, you didn’t get to give that pitch at an AA meeting very often.

One afternoon, my father showed up with a tall new woman. She had girlish breasts, a porpoise torso and a face that was astonishing in its beauty. Wynn Corum had translucent skin with a tiny dusting of freckles, Katharine Hepburn cheekbones, turquoise eyes. She was a knockout, and she knew it. She dressed like a chorus girl. She could do that because, even though she’d gone through four husbands and had a flock of stepchildren, and had done jail time for drinking, she was sober now, and she had known Big Bill--Bill Wilson, who along with Dr. Bob, had envisioned this extraordinary organization. Indeed, she would say often, she’d come within a hairbreadth of becoming the First Lady of AA. Bill was married, unfortunately, but he did put her story in the second edition of the Big Book, under the section “They Lost Nearly All.”

Wynn’s tale was hair-raising and, in another time, might have been perceived as a tale of ur-feminism--a story of a powerful woman constantly blindsided in her lifelong quest for an identity. Wynn’s mother had deserted her in order to go out and live a hell-raising life. An unloving grandmother raised her in strict poverty. At some time, she contracted typhoid fever and all her hair and (though she would not admit this) her teeth fell out. When she recovered at about age 16, with beautiful new red hair and a set of dentures stuck in so firmly that no one saw her without them, she began carving out a career as a femme fatale and started drinking, to bridge the gap between the grim hash-slinging reality she was born to and the golden mirage of American romance she yearned for.

As she herself told it, she thought the clear and simple way out was to marry money. She was beautiful, and so she did. That marriage didn’t work out; who could have said why? In her pitch, Wynn put it down to the fact that she was full of resentments, an alcoholic through and through. In her long conversations with me, she said that guy was a jerk, not worth knowing, that when she spoke with him, she felt more alone than when she was alone.

Wynn’s second husband was a bandleader, and she sang for the band. But the drinking had got out of hand, she’d say with great dignity in her pitch, and she’d do things like come to parties stark naked.

When World War II came along, Wynn married her third husband, a captain in the Army. The war and its excitements carried them through, but peace brought back the dread reality of the everyday. The captain turned out to be a schlump in a business suit. Wynn had one last female dream to fall back on. The typhoid left her unable to have children, but her fourth marriage would be to a widower with a flock of kids. She would make a home. Except that the widower had been having sex with his children for many years, she said, and didn’t see why he’d have to quit now.

You could say, “She lost nearly all.” You could also say that--given something as simple as a BA degree--she could have “done something amazing with her life.” Accidents of time and place and disease and education and alcoholism kept her from it. In AA, Wynn finally found a place worthy of her energies.

*

When Wynn, George and I moved from the one-room apartment into a little bungalow in the San Fernando Valley, three people tried, in that house, as hard as they could to make a family. My father worked, and once again gave up his ideas of writing. My stepmother, having, as she saw it, a blank page to work with, began to try to redeem her mixed-up, teen-aged stepdaughter.

I needed clothes. She bought me a green-and-black fake-satin cocktail dress with a plunging neckline. I was in my senior year. We needed Capezio flats, long, gray wool straight skirts, starched white blouses, cashmere sweater sets. Wynn bought me acrylic sweaters with sequins on them. I was in the same bind I’d been in with my mother. Before, I’d walk to school in a straight skirt and blouse, get to school, find a friend and change into a better version of a straight skirt and blouse. Now I had a large collection of puffy rayon skirts and nylon see-through blouses with beads on the collar. I’d wear one of those outfits to school, find a sympathetic friend, change into a straight skirt and blouse, live out the day, change back into my green-and-yellow nylon clothes and take the bus home.

I’d come in as a bankrupt: My own mother didn’t want me, that was bad enough. I was by definition unloved, but beyond that, my mother and her husband were alcoholics, unregenerate and shameful. Wynn would never bad-mouth them directly, but her opinion of alcoholics who didn’t choose to turn their lives and minds over to the care of God pretty closely paralleled what a Methodist minister might think of the Devil himself.

Within a few months, because the tension in the house had become intense, I told my father I’d be leaving right after high school graduation. We sat in my bedroom. Daddy had come in to tell me to be kinder to Wynn, more respectful, something like that. Wynn had railed that I should get a job; I was not only godless, I was lazy, lazy! But I absolutely refused to get a job until after I graduated. They would not get rid of their responsibility until I was out of high school.

“Well,” he said, “you’ll be leaving home when you’re 17. I guess that’s not so bad. I left home when I was 18. Are you going to be a typist? Maybe you can work up to stenographer.”

“I’ll work part time,” I said. “I plan to go to college.”

He sat, slouching, his hands slack between his knees. “That takes money . . .”

“Don’t worry,” I said haughtily. “I won’t take any money from you. I’ll work my way through.”

He told me about fourteen-thousand times he loved me and then got up and left the room. Regret, guilt and misery showed up about equally in his face. But I heard him out in the hall telling Wynn that I’d be leaving soon, and his tone was airy with relief.

*

After I moved out of my dad’s house, my sense of anger was so strong that, at some level, I couldn’t even feel it. I blamed Wynn, and I blamed AA--because Wynn and the organization she put so much faith in had the absolutely enraging habits of always being right and always having it both ways. Wynn had been wickeder than anyone, and now she was better than anyone.

Alcoholics Anonymous does one wonderful thing. If people want to stop drinking or doing drugs, they can. AA does a second wonderful thing. For people who are aware of the abyss and worry about it, the outfit builds a wonderful suspension bridge made of the sweetest consolation in the world: the pitch, the story. AA can be said to have worked for my father and Wynn. Although they would divorce, neither of them would ever take a drink again.

Wynn got cancer within a year after I left--cancer of the uterus--and when her uterus went, so did their sex life. Wynn, with characteristic energy, seized the chance that cancer gave her and became chairperson of the regional American Cancer Society. Just as she had in AA, Wynn rose high in the organization. She made another gallant run at a rich and prestigious marriage, but she struck out. AA couldn’t fix the fundamental fact that she was a hard-luck girl from the American underclass, with a snowball’s chance in Hell of any dignity, respect, financial security, recognition.

But here’s the other thing. My father wanted, above all else, to write. All I ever wanted was to write. But guess who really got to be the writer? Who was the one in our family who actually changed, improved, transformed thousands of lives? The woman who wrote “Freedom From Bondage” under the section “They Lost Nearly All” in the AA Big Book. The girl who lost all her teeth from typhoid when she was in her teens, who slung hash way up into her 40s, and who died a cruel death from cancer when she was way too young. She couldn’t have done it if she hadn’t “lost nearly all.”

There’s something to be said for free fall, the wild life. It’s ruined us, but it’s helped to save us, too. It’s given us our stories; and made us who we are. It has to do with dreaming, inventing, imagining, yearning. And there’s more of it--like blue smoke--in the American Dream than we’re ever, ever going to be able to acknowledge or admit.