Sirenita Lake's Open Salon Blog

My Absurd Arrest

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:04:57 -0400

I came to, or woke up, or whatever I should call the process of becoming aware of my surroundings, in the Yavapai County Jail in Prescott, Arizona. At first I was confused, then I knew I was in jail. My chest tightened with fear. Why was I there?

I started crying, I don't know why. I'm not a big crier, and certainly not when I get busted for something. If I did something and got busted, my reaction was a kind of resigned defiance. I certainly would not cry as if someone were being mean to me. I'd been arrested four times before. Twice I was put in juvenile lock-up, once with a young girl who didn't seem scary at first, but told me she was there for attempted murder. She claimed it wasn't her, she just held her sister's wig and earrings during the knife fight. She was kind enough not to mock my truancy charge.

I'd been locked up ten years earlier in adult jail for illegal hitchhiking. I was in a cell with six other women, one of whom was young and seemed respectable, another of whom was elderly and demented, while the other four were hard luck, alcoholic trailer trash who scared the shit out of me. I'd been arrested and released, not a moment too soon, at a college sit-in. My fellow protesters, aflluent white revolutionary youth, were workng my last nerve. Prescott was kind enough to lock me up all by myself, with no scary or tedious cellmates.

But I started crying. It was a culmination. I had been flunked out of the local college nursing program, for reasons that could only have had to do with racism. They don't like my kind in Arizona. A black law school professor explained it to me (black people have always been kind to me in explaining my rare run-ins with racism, a problem I don't often deal with in the Bay Area). I was "Mexican" (I'm of Salvadoran descent, but the Arizonans of the time made no distinction) and I had a degree from Berkeley. I was the smartest person in my year. It was an affront to my white, fundamentalist instructors.

In spite of my straight A's, I managed to be kicked out on the basis a bad subjective evaluation. I had fought the decision in an academic appeal to the college, which consisted of my professors testifying to my failings. When it came my time to speak, it turned out I had no right to speak. Nurses at the local hospital wrote letters of support, and my English teacher--I took Shakespeare for fun--tried to wing it by presenting my case, since he, as a professor, was allowed to speak. But I had no chance at all. The decision was made that my inadequacies were vast and I had no business being in the program.

I had made a (to me, not the patient) fatal mistake. One mistake, in the last 10 minutes of the semester. We were required to be checked off on a list of hospital procedures. After adjusting drips, doing dressing changes, even performing a gastric lavage, I failed the task of handing a pill to my patient. As the semester wore on, the nursing instructor made herself extremely scarce. She blew me off when I asked to be checked off on procedures. She was setting me up to not complete my required procedure check-offs.

Fortunately, the RNs on the floor could also check you off. I went to them and they got to know me and were willing to help. I had dispensed medications under the supervision of the floor nurses many times, and never missed a step. But the school refused rather arbitrarily to allow me to be checked off on medications by the floor nurses. On the last day of the semester, after I had tried for weeks to get the nursing instructor to check me off on medications, she finally agreed to watch me administer medications during the last 10 minutes of the semester.

Though I'd done this many times under the supervision of the hospital nurses, this time, feeling pressured and nervous with the hostile instructor, I forgot to check my patient's arm band. In my defense, we only had one patient every week. I had checked his armband several times that day. But it was a routine step that you had to learn to do by rote, even if the patient was as familiar as your brother by then.

While this was a required step, the teaching staff routinely overlooked this oversight if the student was able to identify the mistake. I'd seen that happen. The instructor would say, "Did you forget something?" "Oh, yeah, the armband." Pass. Except that one time. Several students, shocked that this happened to me, wrote letters to the academic committee saying that they had passed that procedure in spite of not checking the bracelet. In fact, if a student really screwed up medications, they got a do-over. Except me.

It was something about me. I realized the ultra-conservative, evangelical nurses of the school did not like anything about the annoying Latina from the Sodom and Gomorrah town of San Francisco. I was told not to ask questions in class. I was accused of "flirting" with a friendly patient (Latinas are over-sexed), when what I was doing was going over his rehabilitation history for my semester clinical report. I wrote a killer report, which the instructor never read. A student who flunked his report, a requirement to pass the course, was given time to get help writing it and turn it in that summer.

I could not do anything right. When I advised a maternity patient that it was not a good idea to beat her 4-year-old with a stick (as instructed by the Bible) I also reported the conversation to the instructor. I said I did not think she was an abuser, but maybe some counseling would be helpful. My final evaluation concluded that I did not respect the patient's religion. When I asked if there was a known dangerous level of radiation (actually a conversation a couple of students took part in) that question made it to my clinical evaluation as "questions the authority of doctors to order tests." There was nothing innocuous or even laudable I did that was not recorded as a serious failing.

When the year started, there were quite a number of Indian, Latino and black people. At the end of the first semester, they were all out except for one smart, perky, white-sounding black woman who came into the program with a certain amount of clinical experience. I was supposed to flunk out the first semester, too, but I protested and forced them to re-write my evaluation. The second semester, they were ready for me. I simply wasn't going to pass the clinical evaluation, no matter what I did.

I would have gotten a devastating review no matter what, but I handed them a legitimate issue when I forgot to check the guy's armband. The fact that the requirement was not enforced, and that the hostile situation and last minute nature of the test made it impossible to repeat the procedure, did not mitigate the fact that I had forgotten that one step.

So I was feeling pretty worthless. I had tried to fight. I had even spoken to a young lawyer in town who was so outraged by the case that he offered to take it on contingency. I felt somewhat validated by his take on it, and by the level of support I got from nurses I worked with and fellow students. But ultimately, it was my fault. People like me, female, minority, unintentionally abrasive, not having a sense of my proper place, are not allowed to make mistakes.

Other bad stuff was going on. The guy who I had moved to Arizona to be with had withdrawn from me, while at the same time playing on my guilt to pursuade me not to have other relationships. I gained 20 lbs from the stress. I drank every day. Three drinks were all I allowed myself on weekdays, but weekends were another story. Sometimes I went to one of the historic bars (mahogany bar brought by sailing ship around Tierra del Fuego!) on Whiskey Row. I would drink light beers out of caution, so I could drink steadily and stay in control.

I had already had one experience back home of getting a ride from a bar that ended in a high-speed police chase where I was seriously injured. I still wanted to drink but maybe with less excitement. When I wanted hard stuff, I had it at home. I don't remember being a whiskey drinker, but I do remember drinks with ice, so I must have been doing scotch, or possibly rum. Tim hated my drinking, and I figured he had a nerve, as miserable as he had made my life.

I met this guy from around town, about my age, mellow, cheerful, not pushing any kind of relationship, just wanting to hang out. I knew Eddie for a very short time, as it turned out. Tim was on a rare out of town trip, and I was alone for the weekend. Eddie asked if I'd like to go to a brunch gathering with him, a regular Sunday thing at the home of his friends. There was food, and they served vodka and grapefruit juice.

Strangely enough, I was never wrong about a guy I trusted to keep his paws to himself. Still, guys got me in trouble other ways when alcohol was involved. I went to this party just to meet some new people, people not from nursing school who did not know of my lost battle and disgraceful expulsion from the school. The party was in a subdivision rather far from our rental, which was closer to town. I decided to take my own car and follow Eddie. I was cautious. If I didn't like the company, I could leave and not disturb Eddie. When we got there, the folks were indeed kind of boring, though I remember little of what was said. I was offered a vodka and grapefruit. I said, sure. I figured it was similar to a Bloody Mary, which I'd had at restaurants a few times. While I was not fond of early drinking, a vodka and juice drink was kind of a breakfast tradition. I would have just the one.

I was handed a drink which tasted mainly of fruit juice, though I later learned it contained five shots of vodka. I like grapefruit juice. I found it refreshing. I drank it in about 10 minutes. By 20 minutes, I was feeling strange. I was drunk, but not like any other drunk I had ever experienced. I passed mellow, overtook tipsy, and reached the state of sick, dizzy intoxication within 20 minutes of walking in the door. Oh, I did not feel well at all. I asked Eddie to take me home, as I did not think I could drive. He refused, saying he wanted to stay at the party. That was, I suppose, our deal, but I was in trouble and he left me to fend for myself. I excused myself, saying I wasn't feeling well and went out the door.

I saw my car in the street and left it there. I was fortunate in that, of all the delusions I was capable of when drinking, thinking I could drive was never one of them. My cars had to get used to being abandoned at other people's houses until I could sober up and reclaim them. I have no sense of direction, but I chose a direction and walked and walked. Somewhere along the route, I noticed that I was not carrying my purse. Could I have left it at the house? Could I have dropped it? I never got it back. At that moment though, I realized that I did not have a key and that Tim wasn't home. I didn't have a friend in that town that I would just drop in on. My last conscious thought before I woke up in jail was, "I'll just break a window." This is what my family did when we got locked out, broke a window. I thought everybody did that.

Something went wrong, crazy wrong. Whatever I did, it must have been bad. Too much noise? Drunken antics? Hysteria? Or perhaps this was just what happened to outcasts and misfits. You go to jail, because jail's for hopeless fuck-ups and failures, and it's especially appropriate that you don't even know how you got there. I started crying, out of fear and despair.

"That's right, let it all out. That's the best thing to do." The young man's voice, soft, came from around a corner, from a cell that was hidden from me. Apparently, men and women were separated by a bend in the hallway.

"Who are you?" I asked, humiliated that anyone had heard me cry. "I'm sorry, I thought I was alone."

"Don't be ashamed. I can't tell you how many times I've cried in jail cells." It was the first kind, understanding, supportive statement I'd heard since moving to Arizona. Simple kindness from a stranger in another cell. A miracle.

We talked. He asked what I was there for and I said I had no idea. He advised me to call the guard and ask. I did, and I was stunned to learn that I had been arrested from trying to break into a house on Terrace Road. What house? The deputy consulted a report. "It says 922 Terrace Road."

"But I live there!"

The cop was dismissive. For one thing, I had no purse, and no ID. For another, I was not charged with breaking and entering, or trespassing, or anything that could be tied to the address. I was charged with disorderly conduct. I later learned that the cop who arrested me claimed on his report that I had assaulted him, though I was not charged with assault or resisting arrest. They gave me the catch-all charge, something easily justified.

Still, I was indignant. I realized by then that I had been stinking drunk on my one drink, and very likely had trouble explaining myself (which, as hungover as I was, was still a problem) but surely when the police understood the situation, they would let me go.

They did not. The deputy, giving me typical cop legal advice, told me my choices were to plead guilty, pay a $50 fine and go home, or wait another day for court to be in session, plead not guilty, have bail set, find a lawyer, and fight the charge in court. By now, my boyfriend was home. He was willing to come get me and bring $50 dollars. I had to get out of there. I agreed to pay the ransom.

Meanwhile, the young man was still there, and we continued to talk in between negotiations with the cops. He was a protected witness, a drug snitch. He had a handler in Phoenix, and the DEA had placed him in Prescott jail for his protection. But he hated it there. He said it was the worst he'd ever been in. The cops loved to fuck with him. The food was terrible. They would not let him contact his agent. Would I call the agent for him and ask that he be moved? Of course I would. I memorized the agent's name.

Sometime that morning, an older woman was placed in a facing cell. She was there for passing bad checks. She had a daughter that she wanted to notify, but she lived in another county, and the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department did not allow phone calls outside of Prescott and environs. She had no way of contacting her daughter. Would I call her?

Those were my first clients. They gave me something to think about besides my horrible situation. Eventually, I was taken to court, where I bitterly pled guilty. A board judge ordered a $50 fine. Tim paid. He was surprisingly gentle when he understood the situation, though I think he secretly blamed me as much as I did.

I did not forget my promises. I called the DEA agent in Phoenix. I told him that it was urgent that he move his witness. He said, "Ok, I'll handle it." I called the daughter of the incarcerated woman and told her that she needed to bring a couple hundred dollars and she agreed. I wish I could have done more to be sure that they got out.

The next day, I got a call from Eddie apologizing for not taking me home when I asked. "Uh, that's ok." I didn't want to get into it. I no longer trusted Eddie.

But he was sincerely apologetic. "This wouldn't have happened if I had taken you home."

"What wouldn't have happened?"

"You wouldn't have gotten arrested."

Shit. "How did you know that?"

"It's in today's paper."

In the newspaper. Where everyone from the hospital, the school, could read it. Why did I cry in the jail cell? For the same reason I wanted the earth to swallow me. For the shame.

Strangely, I felt no guilt at all. I had not done anything. Things had happened to me. But I felt the daily shame of being an outcast in my environment, of being unwanted and not tolerated for reasons I would understand later on, but which at the time I thought had to do with my innate inferiority. The only redeeming aspect of the whole debacle was that I was able to be of service to my fellow inmates.

I never told anyone about it, not friends, not family. I have a million stories, many of which are funny whether or not they make me look good. But that one carried a special charge of shame, and it was for years my skeleton in the closet. When a close friend confided that she had spent the night in jail for reckless driving, I could not bring myself to tell her that I'd been in jail, too. The shame defies logic.

Shortly after being arrested, I packed my struggling Volvo wagon and came home to San Francisco, where people like me are unremarkble and anonymous. Within a few years, I was onto my next career, teaching. I pushed the incident into an unvisited corner of my mind.

When Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested for breaking into his own house in 2009, my experience, which I'd largely avoided thinking about for 30 years, came back to me. I decided to to speak about it, to exorcise the shame, make it a funny story. After all, it was topical. Me and Henry Louis Gates. The hilarity of becoming blackout drunk on one drink. The absurd futility of trying to argue to the cops, "But it's my house!" I can tell it as a funny story.

But I can't write it that way.

Attack of the Japanese Killer Toilet

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:03:38 -0400

Trig's son, Eli, will be heading to a posting in Japan in a couple of weeks. That made me think of this story.

Also found this fascinating and hilarious post by Myriad on the vagaries of foreign toilets.

Last year, my sister and her husband had bought a fancy new toilet that gave me a bad flashback. It’s a thingy called a Washlet. The list of features goes like this:

Automatic open / close lid activated by sensors, or the simple touch of a button on the remote control
Auto flush activated by sensors or the simple touch of a button
Gentle Aerated, Warm Water, Dual Action Spray with cycling movement and massage feature
Adjustable water temperature and volume
Warm air drying with three variable temperature settings Automatic air purifier
Convenient wireless Remote Control with large LCD panel SoftClose anti-bacterial seat
Heated Seat with Temperature Control
Docking Station Easy to Install and Clean

Docking station? The features are operated by a remote control. Why remote? You cannot use some of these features remotely. I know. This was not the first time I’d run into one of these toilets. They were introduced in Japan long ago, and one of them attacked me.

In the 80s, my boyfriend (later to be husband) and I were teachers. One year, he did not land a contract and had to substitute teach. While I had a tenure track position, my principal was a psycho, and I did not think I would last long enough to get tenure. When my boyfriend was offered a job in Japan, it was a wrenching parting. But he succeeded in convincing his Japanese English school that I would be an asset, and I was offered a job, too. I took five minutes to decide between dim prospect of tenure with the psycho principal and a year or two of overseas adventure with the man I loved.

We worked Niigata Town, in Niigata Prefecture, in the northwest, where there were a total of 200 foreigners back then. It’s a two hour bullet train ride from Tokyo, and a whole different experience. Downtown is like a mid-sized American city, except for the packs of school kids in uniform pointing and screaming "gaijin!" (foreigners) and the old ladies with their elbows on the busses, but there was lovely countryside.

We took local trains all over the place, and walked in rice paddies and Buddhist cemeteries. We watched sumo at an exhibition tour. We stayed in Japanese inns where the foreign tourists didn’t go. We visited the remote island of Sado, so remote from the capital it was once used as a prison island, and still unspoiled. We stayed at a family-run inn, in a small fishing village where no one spoke English. We returned several times. We learned how to say in Japanese, “Long time, no see” – “Osashiburu desu” – while bowing to the grandma. I don’t know if she was the ranking family member, but she was our favorite.

Japan is lovely, dignified, kind, civilized and totally alien. Or rather, we were the aliens. We even had alien cards. Card-carrying aliens, that was us. But except for the occasional cop (the same the world over) who would stop us on the street and demand our papers, and one seriously grumpy proprietor of a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop near work, the people were so gracious, it’s hard to believe they were the same species as Americans. If you go to Japan and make friends, they will help you find things you otherwise would not see. We went to hot springs, we took cherry blossom trips, we went to tea ceremonies, we went to festivals and saw impressive (but incomprehensible) Noh theater.

I tried to be as polite a guest in their country as I could. My one lapse in proper behavior, outside of my run-in with the toilet, was when I had gone out drinking with some American engineers who were visiting my students at Mistubishi. One of them invited me to a Niigata disco, and in the way you can get drunk without trying in Japan, I got truly plastered. I got picked up by a Japanese lesbian, and we were thrown out of the club for kissing on the dance floor. Girls kissing was not OK. The American engineer left with us. I tried to apologize for the scene I’d caused, but he said it was the most fun he’s had in years. He looked truly happy.

The school we worked for arranged all our travel and health care. I once had a knot in my back and needed a massage. The secretary realized, after several refusals, that she could not tell the masseur that the patient was foreign if she hoped to make an appointment. In Japan, masseurs are blind. (I love Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, movies, about a wandering masseur and fighter.) I arrived at a massage appointment with someone I could not use hand signs with, who did not realize until that moment that I was a foreigner who did not speak much Japanese. Somehow he coped, apologizing for the smallness of his house, since Americans all lived in such big houses. I explained (I got good at this in Japanese) that I was from San Francisco, where many people, including me, had very small houses. I had a great massage.

But affluent Japanese, contrary to our expectations, were happy to invite us into their homes. All our classes were for adults, usually in workplaces, and the highest ranking student, usually a boss, often extended an invitation to a trip or a visit to his home. We were served anything from toasted soybeans and beer in front of the sumo tournament on TV, to a feast featuring fugu fish, the poisonous puffer fish, that had to be cooked by a specially licensed chef. Our host that night was a wealthy doctor.

Dr. Fukuda, who was a terror to the young residents under him, was an astonishingly generous host. Once, he invited my husband and me, plus a group of young doctors, to a countryside inn in a scenic location. He broke his leg skiing before the trip, but insisted the rest of us go at his expense. The evening of the puffer fish, we got to see his lavish house and even more lavish style of entertainment. Everything I complimented, he gave me as a gift, until I became reluctant to admire anything. So he asked me what I thought. “Do you like the sake?” I admitted that it was very good. I went home with a cask of aged sake, a sake pitcher and cup set, a bag of imported peaches, my favorite rice sweets, and assorted tchockas. At one point, my husband poked me with his elbow and whispered, “Tell him you like the sofa!”

But my most memorable visit was the one to Mr. Yamada’s home. Mr. Yamada, the curator of the local history and art museum, lived with his wife and daughter, Keiko, in an old-fashioned Japanese house. We had been invited to tea, and we sat on tatami in a traditional room for receiving guests, trying various finger foods and having a pleasant time. After about an hour and a great deal of tea, I asked to use the bathroom.

As I said, the house was old and elegant. Old houses all lean a bit, doors and windows not always opening easily. The bathroom was tiny, almost no room to turn around, but it had a toilet so modern, I was unaware that such things existed. I noticed the instrument panel on the side of the tank of the toilet, but I assumed it also had a handle to flush it with somewhere. By now I was used to the heated toilet seat, a necessity in a country where homes often freezing cold in winter, and a western toilet was therefore more uncomfortable than a squat toilet. Perhaps this was just an elaborate heated toilet. Anyway, I had no intention of using any of the zillion functions. Surely, one could just take a pee without actually flying the thing.

The peeing part I did really well. Totally successful. I want credit for that, since the rest of the story goes downhill after that. I did what I always did, peed, wiped, and zipped up my pants. But when I looked for the flusher, it wasn’t there. No handle. I tried moving the seat up and down a few times, to see if that triggered a flush. Nothing. No way was I going to leave my pee in the bowl. That was probably a major insult. I would figure this thing out if it killed me. It tried to.

The instrument panel had a bewildering array of options, all marked in characters. By now, I could read the two syallabic alphabets that were used sounding out words, one for foreign words and one for Japanese grammatical particles. In Japan, some imported words in common usage remain in the katakana alphabet, the one for foreign words, for example, beer, which is written with the syllables “bi-ru.” I was hoping to see “flu-shu,” but no dice.

I also knew a few character fragments. Using the book Learn Japanese Today I had memorized some basic elements that were repeated in many characters: mountain, field, person, power, various animals, water. Each character was made up of several smaller elements that combined to create the meaning of the word. There was one large button at the top of the instrument panel with a character that I could not parse. The large button seemed the obvious one to use to flush. But when I pushed it, very tentatively, it did nothing. I was afraid to push hard. It was a big button. What if it did something big?

Then I spotted a smaller button lower down with the fragment for “water” in it. Ah. That had to be it. Flushing must be something you did after several other operations, which, as a foreign heathen, I could just skip. So I pushed the water button, no harder really than the big button on top, only this one worked.

I stared in amazement, then in horror, as a small metal tube rose from the depths of the toilet and pointed itself at me. It pointed to where my crotch would have been had I been sitting, which I wasn’t. I tried to back away, but there was nowhere to go. The door was inches from my back.

The thing started firing water at me. If I had been sitting, I would have blocked it. As it was, it hit me on the front of my pants. I had activated the bidet function, and a mean, aggressive one it was. I rarely panic, but this was one of those times. Surely one of these buttons meant “stop.” I pushed them at random, water soaking my pants and now pooling on the floor. I had to get out of there!

I tried to open the door. The house chose that moment to demonstrate that it was indeed an old house with just enough lean to it and a sense of humor. The bathroom door jammed. I was trapped. Now the toilet was spraying my butt as I shook the bathroom door.

Finally, pushing the wall with a foot and pulling the knob as hard as I could, I broke the door loose, stumbling in the flood. By now, thankfully, the toilet had decided that my ass was completely washed and had stopped firing its water cannon. OK, the door was open, but now what? I had a toilet that wouldn’t flush and an inch of water on the floor of the Niigata museum director’s bathroom.

Meanwhile, in the tatami room, our hosts were becoming worried. They don’t like to let Americans out of sight for long for fear of mishap. Whatever they were thinking, it was not as bad as the reality. Finally, they heard my voice from the top of the stairs. “Keiko! Can you please come here?” In Japan, when in doubt, ask a young girl for help. They are the most discreet, efficient people in the world.

Somehow I explained to Keiko what had happened. She tried not to laugh, which made us both laugh. She pushed the big button, which was, after all, the flush, which made me feel stupid for having feared it and not pushed hard enough. Then she produced a mop from somewhere and got up most of the water. She handed me a towel and I dried my pants as well as I could.

My hosts were clearly appalled, not that I had flooded their bathroom, but that they had sent me alone into such a hazardous environment. I was as mortified as I have ever been in my life. Something had to be done. Next classroom session, I could feel Mr. Yamada’s discomfort. So I told the students, “I have a funny story about a computer toilet.” Calling it a funny story made it OK for them to laugh, and I could see Mr. Yamada relax. Fortunately, most Japanese toilets were of the squat variety with simple flushers, and I had flexible calves. I had no further run-ins with toilets in Japan.

Stealing Rachmaninoff

Tue, 7 Feb 2012 17:02:58 -0500

Lately, I’ve been thinking of all the people I know who have died. I’m unearthing vivid memories of the past. I remember my mother as a young woman, my aunt’s generous briskness, my father’s slightly tired affection. In those memories, I am a child, a teenager. The death of my two cats last year has altered my mood, and I’m apt to start crying at the photos on the fridge–Sirenita almost invisible against a black shirt, Milagrito lounging against my chest, held in one arm while I support myself on a crutch with the other arm. Crying about cats triggers a cascade of loss. Dead people and cats populate my mind. I feel alienated from the present and long for the past.

After a squall of tears while folding the blanket on the day bed, the one with the picture of the black cat that I used to position over Sirenita when she was napping (she loved having a blanket on top of her), I was making my way to bed. Going to bed is always hard, because of death. When I was nine, I went to bed one night, and the next day when I got up, my father was dead. Without knowing when I knew it, I realized there was safety in never going to bed. Things would not change as long as it wasn’t the next day yet. All these years later, I’m ambivalent about going to bed. I want to rest. I want to be warm. My husband wraps his arms around me, transferring his warmth, comforting me, protecting me. I’m safest when I get in bed. But, like Sirenita, who would flee when you tried to pick her up but would relax and purr the instant you caught her, I’m afraid of going down the path to sanctuary.

One way I deal with the ambivalence is not to notice I’m going to bed. I do that by reading while I brush my teeth, pee, or towel off from the shower. It’s a tricky time, that moment before bed. I could be drawn off the path and not find my way to bed for several more hours, perhaps because I thought I’d do a few minutes of work and got involved, or decided to check my schedule, which reminded me of something else, or sat down to read one last post that required a thoughtful response from me. Maybe I got trapped reading something interesting. I’ve learned not to do that. That night, I was reading the Science Times section of the New York Times, which I used to enjoy very much but which seems to be getting dumber. Easy-to-read articles on personal health are not science. But it was good for my purposes. Distracting but not riveting was what I was looking for.

There were a few interesting things in this edition, like a story about a group of extinct humans, the Denisovans, of whom I had never heard but who apparently outnumbered the Neanderthals. There's a mildly interesting piece on discoveries in immunity by a Russian scientist, though it was more human interest than science. I saved the article on Edison and some old wax recordings for last, after I was done reading all the dumb stuff. It was about a trove of recordings made in the late 19th century in Europe by an assistant of Edison, who recorded the voices of Otto Bismarck and other prominent Europeans.

As I stood in the bathroom holding the newspaper, the themes of the evening came together in a sudden, stunning memory from my teens, a memory of something I wanted so badly and couldn’t have, that the regret still lives in my gut today.

I was in high school. Adults were more repressive then, or maybe it was just my family. Nothing I did was right, but I accepted that as natural and it never occurred to me to think my family should have been more supportive. Nothing my mother told me suggested that I was much good for anything, though I had some natural qualities, which, in another person (my mom had examples) would have been quite laudable. I was smart, but. I was pretty, but. Those were complete sentences. I remember a time before adolescence when I had been “a good kid” but that was way in the past when I was 16.

In her angrier moments, my mother would say that I was a curse, that she hated my dead father for giving me to her, that there was insanity on his side of the family and I had it, that I was a whore. When I was 13, I caught her arm in mid-air as she swung a belt at me and told her I would never let her hit me again. But the devastating commentary on my worthlessness continued. My natural optimism co-existed with the conviction that I would be dead, in jail or in a lunatic asylum by the time I was 21.

I can think about those days without bitterness. My mother’s cruelty happened only after my father died, when she was left alone in a country she did not grow up in, with small kids to support and few practical skills other than her natural ability with language. Death made her mean, in a way she never intended, and which horrified her after I was grown. Her verbal impulsiveness, sudden fits of temper and lack of filters, I recognize in myself.

Because I was the oldest and the toughest, but also the most impulsive and unmoored, her anger was directed at me. I couldn’t be a good kid to save my life. I read, but I never did homework. I lost things, in my mom’s mind because I didn’t care that she slaved for everything we had. I could pay attention in class, but once class was over, I forgot all about it. I needed stimulation and novelty. Risk seduced me. Today, someone would diagnose ADD. Someone eventually did. As a kid, I was on my own. I was smart enough to be admitted to Lowell, the all-city academic school where rich folks sent their kids in preference to private school, and flaky enough to get thrown out in my senior year.

I remember a youth characterized by struggle and conflict, but also by rapprochement as my mother began to allow herself some forbidden fun, following my example and kicking over the traces just a bit. We recognized something of ourselves in the other and, when I was grown, found that we could have a damn good time together, taking in a jazz concert or laughing around the kitchen table, sharing a bottle of wine. A perennial late bloomer, I nevertheless resolved the parental conflict, internal and external, by age 25.

But at 16, I was still a black sheep, barely tolerated at home. We were poor, and I was even more broke than I needed to be. I was supposed to have an allowance of $2 a week, but I never got it because I did not “deserve” it. I got by on a nickle a day and my bus pass. The school cafeteria sold enormous cookies for 5 cents. I favored what I called the “oatmeal and cement” recipe. It filled you up like a road crew fills a pot hole, with something so hard and indigestible that you were not interested in eating another thing. I didn't care if I ate at school anyway. Money was nice, but I wasn't desperate for it. I would like to have bought the occasional concert ticket, with all the fabulous bands of the 60s playing in town, and I might have liked to go on a fancy vacation like my affluent friends. But mostly, I shifted for myself, borrowing money for lunch and expertly stealing my school clothes from department stores. I didn’t expect to be given anything. I asked for nothing.

One day after class (or cutting class, I don’t remember), pretending to be one of the middle-class kids who went to my school, a potential shopper, I walked to the nearby shopping center. Of course, I never shopped. If I got anything, it was stolen. But that day, I was in the mood to check out the new music store. I never stole anything from music stores. For one thing, music stores were not rich, like Macy’s. Then too, music stores were great. There was no hurry. People were expected to page through racks of standing albums, looking at each one. No one did more than offer to help you find something, then leave you alone. They didn’t keep an eye on you. They were mellow.

The store sold mostly new LPs and singles, rock, jazz and classical, but there was a small collection of used records. I had 35 cents in my pocket. My oddball upbringing manifested itself, away from my hippie friends. I ignored the acid rock. I looked at some jazz records, artists I had heard of, and imagined a cool future in which I slid one of those out of its sleeve onto the turntable, then settled back to listen with a glass of wine in my hand. I looked at some symphonies, works played by orchestras that I was familiar with. Those were records that even in our shabby, transitional immigrant household, we might own. My family loved classical music, and records were the one thing my mother bought. I drifted to the used section. Maybe there was something cheap enough for me to actually buy. A single was 50 cents, but maybe a used single?

I flipped through the odd collection of used records, and after a moment, I saw it. The thing I wanted most powerfully in my life. Maybe it was my age, an age when wanting is at its peak. Maybe I recognized it as something belonging to another life, something that could transport me away from my own life. I didn’t believe the record I was holding in my hand. It was some kind of miracle. I picked it up and stared at it with a visceral longing that made me wonder if I should, after all, steal it?

It was a 78, a vinyl record smaller than an LP. I have a poor visual memory, but I vaguely remember a cover with piano and pianist. I only clearly remember the desire, stronger than any desire for an object that I had ever experienced, or would experience again. It was Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, played by Rachmaninoff himself, recorded in the 1920s with an American orchestra. Not only did I love the piece, that record offered something that in my limited experience was never to be had again–a genius playing his own music, playing it as he heard it in his head.

It cost $25, a fortune for a record especially in 1968. But even I could tell that it was worth more. Perhaps the owner of the store, located in the closest thing San Francisco had to a suburban mall, then as now, did not expect to attract many buyers of rare recordings.

It might have cost ten thousand dollars, for all the chance I had to raise that much money. I could no more imagine asking my mother for $25 to buy a record than I could ask to spend a summer in Europe like my friends did. My sense of alienation from my family, of being loved but more tolerated than wanted, would never have allowed the thought to form. Could I have gone to my aunt, the generous one, the one who had no kids and made her own money and who loved music, and asked her for the money? It wasn't even a thought. She was generous, but not extravagant. Looking back, I think my mother might have given in, though that much money was half a week’s groceries, had I worn her down with nagging and promised to do the ironing for a year. After all, she found money from somewhere when the roof leaked. But I could never have asked. I didn’t deserve it.

Stealing it was a moment’s desperate thought, reluctantly but firmly rejected. I did not steal records. I calculated my risks, and records could only be stolen by the stupid method of grabbing and concealing. Besides, I did have my (tiny) scruples. The record itself demanded respect, as did the store owner who acquired it. So I contented myself with gazing at it. I swore to figure out a way to buy it, but I never did.

Would it have changed my life? I would have been a person who owned something of great value, more so than something merely expensive. Would I have been a different person, at least a different teenager, if I had ever owned a single damn thing of any value–a piece of jewelry, a musical instrument, a special book–hell, even a radio? Would I have stopped stealing earlier–not, as I did, at 18, because if you got busted then, it was an adult rap–or maybe not started at all, if I had any idea what it meant to own something?

Though I never stole from people (with the exception of cars, because I thought the insurance just bought them a brand new car and I was doing them a favor), I had no respect for property. I had very little idea of what it meant to own things, to feel proprietorship. I remember the meager stuff I had as a teenager–a small, woven straw box for my needles and thread (I had to have that, because clothes were mended, not thrown away), a darning egg which was really an empty L’Eggs container, a stuffed snake that had I pleaded for, and my prize, a leopard print nightgown that my mother bought me in a surge of generosity for my 15th birthday, which I thought was the most glamorous thing in the world and which I wore until it shredded. The best things in my room at any time were library books. We kids did own a few 45s (though no albums) which we played on my dead father’s nice hi-fi, the last good thing my family bought before becoming poor.

I was remarkably free of envy, given the economic difference between me and my friends, but I had no idea of what it meant to have your own stuff. To some extent, that could not be helped. But my mother enforced even greater poverty on me as punishment in our years-long struggle for control, and I rebelled against it. I often think of the truly poor kids in this country. Why should they bother to respect my belongings, why should they refrain from tagging my house or breaking my car windows, when they have no concept, no framework, for understanding the damage that they are doing?

I was a hippie, which absolved me to a great extent of having possessions. The culture is different now. A lack of possessions is a shameful thing. Poor kids in my neighborhood steal or damage your stuff, not just because they want it or even to fuck with you, but because they have no experience of ownership, which is necessary to understand what loss feels like to other people. While our culture is overly materialistic, being bereft of belongings is not healthy, either. It can make you a menace.

I was fortunate. I finally settled down to school, skipping a high school diploma altogether and going to college (you can do that!), becoming a teacher, then a technical writer, then earning a law degree, where I studied criminal defense. While health did not permit me to practice law, learning it at least focussed my thoughts on the root causes of crime and the twists that the development of a social identity can take in kids. We're all safer when kids have a chance to grow morally, develop empathy, and learn how to legitimately acquire their own things.

Back then, in 1968, a recording might be a rare thing. Now, music can be reproduced so easily that just about anything is available somewhere. I finally got my record, at least part of it, for free. This is the first movement of the recording that I held in my hands, Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, played by Sergei Rachmaninoff with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting, recorded in 1929:

Sirenita’s Excellent Adventure

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:11:12 -0500

With much thanks to Trish, the perfect high school best friend, who reminded me of this wacky outing not long ago. It was typical of our behavior back then. Surprisingly, we both turned out all right.

I have never been jealous of other girls, which is good. If I were, I would have been miserable in high school. My best friend, Trish, was a hippie goddess – long blond hair which she allowed to curl in contravention of the current fashion, big blue eyes, bee-stung lips that, if you saw them today, would make you suspect collagen. We fell in love with the same boys, and they fell in love with her. Didn’t make me like her any less. She remembers that I took care of her, one of those surprising differences in perspective that you only realize years later. I remember that she gave me courage. Courage to be as bad as I wanted.

Our parents were right. We were a bad influence. In the self-protective way of parents, her parents blamed me and my mom blamed her. But it was really both of us. One of us would say, “Have you ever thought about...” and we’d do it. We cut school a lot, until, as punishment, we were thrown out, first me, then her. (Makes a lot of sense to throw kids out of school for cutting.) We would use our free time to explore the city, going to the Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park.

Sometimes we went downtown, especially if we wanted clothes, which we acquired on the five-finger discount. We were never high when we shoplifted. I, in particular, considered myself a professional. It was not a lark. Unlike my high school colleagues, I was not affluent, and not having the talent to make real hippie clothes myself (which would have been better) stealing cute mini-dresses from Macy’s Juniors department was a way to make myself fit in.

Trish and I belonged to two distinct teenage social groups. Our friend Michael (her boyfriend, my heartthrob) knew a kid who had gone to his Catholic junior high. Now, Michael was with us at Lowell, the all-city academic public high school, for which you had to qualify, and his friend was at Polytechnic, one of the toughest schools in the city, known for its population of ghetto kids but also right there in the Haight. Michael took us along to hang out with his friend’s new crowd, a collection of street toughs and drinkers, 16-year-olds who looked so mean, no one dared refuse to sell them beer.

The Mob, as they called themselves, was a racially diverse group--whites, Latinos, a black kid, an Indian, a Filipino girl. Trish and I became part of that set as well as our druggier but tamer hippie crowd from school. It was a socially flexible time, the Haight was a melting pot, and middle class kids hanging out with thugs wasn’t as improbable as it would be today. Me, I’ve always been a misfit who fit in anywhere and nowhere, the child of Central American immigrants growing up in an Asian neighborhood, and now attending school with the children of rich whites. Luckily for us, this was before every teenager had a gun. Our new friends fought with their fists, which now seems quaint.

Across the bay from San Francisco, in Marin County, there is a lovely state park on Mt. Tamalpais. Campsites, hiking trails, woods and solitude. It was considered by us hippies the perfect place to get high. As teenagers, our main problem was transportation, as it was an hour’s drive from the city. The boys from the Mob had cars occasionally--some bought, some stolen--but Trish and I depended on our thumbs to get us places. Worked pretty well, too.

Michael and Jack had conceived the notion of going camping on Mt. Tam. Not something we did a lot of back then, but I remember one or two Mob camping trips, generally provisioned with a lot of beer. This time, however, Michael and Jack went up on their own, using what vehicle I no longer remember other than it was temporary, which probably meant stolen. Trish and I promised to come up mid-week and bring supplies. To that end, we cut school on Wednesday, went to the Haight and scored some acid, and got a wino to buy us a gallon jug of cheap wine. Then we went to the 101 and stuck our thumbs out.

We scored with our first ride. Two Mexican men in an old Chevy, laborers, not cholos, cheerfully offered us a ride in broken English. Trish and I hopped in the back seat of their beater with their other hitchhiker, a bearded, bulky Hell’s Angel, whom the Mexicans in their innocence had picked up. This was so incongruous, I almost forgot to glare at him. Unlike the other members of the Mob, who idolized the outlaw bikers, I hated the Angels. Bad as I was, I was never a fan of bullies, and there were enough Hell’s Angels in the Haight that I had formed an unfavorable impression of them. I almost got my boyfriend’s ass kicked once, saying funny things to an Angel in a hamburger joint late one night when I was high. He thought I was insulting him. It never occurred to me that the guy would threaten my boyfriend instead of firing back his own witticisms at me. A culture I don’t understand.

But today’s Hell’s Angel seemed to be some sort of exception. He was real, no doubt. He had the colors. Anyone who knew enough to impersonate an Angel would also know that it was instant death to do so. I assume his bike had broken down, though I wasn’t imprudent enough to ask questions. Accustomed as I was to the vagaries of hitchhiking, the combination of the Mexicans and the Hell’s Angel was damn weird. But the guy was not only pleasant, he pulled out a joint and passed it around. We rode companionably for the next hour, the guys from Mexico, the Hell’s Angel, my white blond beauty best friend, and me, the errant Latina smart mouth. Out of politeness, and because we had lots, we took out our wine and shared it, explaining that we had to save enough for our friends.

Our plan with Michael and Jack was quite clear. We were to meet in the final parking lot at the end of the road up to the peak of Mt. Tam. The Mexicans were enjoying themselves and decided they would go that way just for fun. We yelled at them to stop when we saw the parking lot where we expected to meet our friends, and climbed out of the Chevy nicely buzzed. We said good bye to our amiable new friends and looked around. Michael and Jack were not there. We sat down to wait.

Time stretched out. Doubt set in. Were we supposed to be at the parking lot or the amphitheater? Perhaps we should walk over and check, only which way was it? Thinking it was getting to be about time if we wanted to come down before evening, we dropped our share of the acid. Might as well trip while we waited.

It was not your usual Mt. Tam day, the kind of day that dawns clear and warm, and you think, how about the beach, or no, wait, how about Mt. Tam? The views will be great. No, it was not a Mt. Tam sort of day at all. It was foggy. There were no views. Everything looked mysterious and even spooky. Things bulked indistinctly in the fog. Boulders moved behind a curtain of fog, and trees watched you.

The acid was not that good old windowpane from earlier days. By then, acid you scored in the Haight was cut with some nasty stuff. Strychnine was said to amplify the effect, and speed was a common ingredient. I had a tendency to hallucinate, which Trish was envious of. Why I saw things and she didn’t, I have no idea. But I was hallucinating now, and feeling restless and jumpy. What if something had happened to Michael and Jack? We decided to go look for our friends.

We walked down the paths shouting, “Jack! Michael! Jack! Michael!”at the top of our voices and passing the jug of wine back and forth. Between the drinking in the car and the drinking in the park, the jug was down to a quarter full. We’d better find our friends soon if they were to get any at all. The scene was increasingly surreal--out in the woods on our own, disappointed at missing our friends, at a loss, the day shrouded in fog, high as tie-died kites. No one was on the paths. It was mid-week and not a Mt. Tam day at all.

But someone heard us shouting and he intercepted us. It was the first and last time in my life I have run into a park ranger at Tam. I didn’t even know they bothered with them in the state parks. Certainly, that one did not have a lot to do that day, other than try to decipher the puzzle of the two stoned teenage hippie chicks shouting their heads off in the fog-bathed woods.

“What are you girls doing here?”

Trish was momentarily the more verbal of us. “We’re looking for our friends. We were supposed to meet them.”

“Where are you meeting them?”

“Well, we think it’s the last parking lot, which is the one back there, but it might have been the amphitheater...”

The ranger shook his head. “That’s not the last parking lot. It’s about two miles further up.”

Damn. We had a poor idea of the layout of the park. It never occurred to us to consult a map.

“What’s that you got there?

“Just some wine.

“Well, you can’t have it here."

I found my tongue. “It’s for our friends.”

“Well, you can’t have it here. You have to pour it out or I’ll have to take it.”

“Ok, we’ll leave.”

“Pour it out!”

Trish reached for the wine in my hands to obey the ranger. But I needed that wine! This acid was too freaky not to have some wine to go along with it, plus what would Michael and Jack say? I pulled the bottle back toward me. Trish pulled the bottle to her. We struggled over the bottle for a moment, neither saying anything, and then it slipped from our hands and broke on the path. “Now look what you did!” Trish exclaimed.

Wine and glass splashed everywhere in slow motion, flashing and glinting in sprays of crystals. Drops of wine floated in the air, turning into bottomless jewels.

“Rubies!” I breathed. I was mesmerized. I stared at the colorful disaster of our wine bottle, entranced by the wreckage embellished by my hallucinations.

Trish looked apologetically at the ranger. “We’ll clean it up,” she promised.

The ranger shook his head. “Wine. Drugs. Kids,” he said in disgust. Then he shrugged and walked away. Only later did it occur to me that he could have arrested us. To this day, I have no idea why he didn’t, except I must have seemed like too much trouble.

Without wine, we moved a little faster. We must have hiked several miles, though it might have been the same quarter mile again and again. Finally, we began to feel cold, and realizing that it was getting late and we were coming down, we decided to head for home. We found our way back to the main Tam road and stuck our thumbs out.

A few minutes later, an old Chevy beater pulled over. It was our old friends, the Mexicans, without the Hell’s Angel, heading back to the city. What are the odds? They drove us back to San Francisco and home to our long-suffering families. Later Michael and Jack explained where we were supposed to have met them, and it was indeed a parking lot further up the road. But we tried, and no harm done. We survived, didn’t we, and we didn’t even get arrested.

On the Death of an Iconic Cat

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:09:54 -0400

Milagrito, my muse, the cat who started me writing again when he joined Catster, where he became a larger than life character, Miracle I, the Feline Pope in Exile; he of the compelling eyes and cosmic purr, the boss of our house, a virtuoso of trust, the cat who would happily have lived in our arms--Milagrito is dead at 12 years old. He joined his sister, Sirenita, in our garden. I wrote this to my friend Diane, who understands and who let me share it here, because I don't know how I can say it differently.

My Miracle is dead. He died in my arms. I'm cat-free.

I keep seeing cats out of the corner of my eye. Last night, I found myself taking the cat towels from the laundry and hugging them to my heart. I saw my aunt yesterday (shit, she's falling more, I had to take her to the emergency) and I saw her cat. He loves me and I petted him and he's not Milagrito.

I miss the cats together. I miss squealing "Come 'ere, little kittens!" to get them into their room at night. I miss the times they ganged up on me and I had Sirenita on my lap and Milagrito on my shoulder, sweating under that fur coat and not able to work, but zoned out on purrs.

We had made an appointment for Milagrito with the mobile vet and then we cancelled it when he started eating again. Then the day we were to have put him to sleep, the day of the reprieve (for him or for us?) he suddenly dropped an energy level. I was reminded of high school chemistry (speaking of cats and chemistry) and how the electrons move in energy jumps, up a level or down a level. (I'm probably remembering this wrong.) He was suddenly as tired as a dying person. I realized sadly that I know what this looks like. He didn't want to be picked up, wouldn't purr. Milagrito has never not purred.

I stayed up with him most of the night, and he perked up a bit as he does late at night, being a nocturnal creature like me. But he didn't fool me into thinking that he was just going through a rough patch. We did have some purring and he ate a couple of bites of fresh tuna. But it was not enough for him to live. The tumor made him look fat, but you could feel his hip bones. The tumor was eating his lunch, and now he couldn't even get the food into himself. The worst was, he was hungry. The tumor was so big, it made his stomach small. It was like he had it stapled for weight loss. He loved to eat and he tried and couldn't. It broke my heart.

I had Mark wake me up early to call the mobile vet. He's perfect. Peruvian and Catholic, wears a little cross, and crosses himself before performing the procedure that kills the animal. It's a Latin American gesture, asking God for a blessing or acknowledging that God is somehow involved in the death of your pet. I am an atheist, and I was grateful both times for his spiritual seriousness in putting my cats to sleep. He had to improvise a bit with Milagrito. The tumor was so extensive and hard, he could not give the regular shot through it. But the man is surprisingly brilliant. He has hands the way many doctors for humans do not. Maybe vets all have to have surgeon's hands. Anyway, there was no fuck-up, and no suffering.

I wished I could bury Milagrito without his tumor, as he was for most of his life. Why this monstrous, rock-hard thing growing out of his side? Why him? He was such a loving, connected cat, right up until just before his death. He lived with this thing for months, his movements changing, the effort growing, his abilities limited, and yet he was as sweet as always. I cannot say the same about me. I get crankier the worse my body gets. (Have I mentioned I need another hip?)

Anyway, the tumor was part of him at the end. I held him in my lap, soft, untouched side up, while Mark dug his grave. He felt so ordinary. Cats relax and fall asleep in your arms, and it's hard to tell them from dead. I can say so, having sat on my backyard bench holding a dead cat, waiting for a grave, three times in the last three years. They feel warm, limp, cat-like. Limpness is a feature of a good cat. You know they love and trust you when they let go control and manifest their essential limpness in your arms.

We are buying cement garden cats for the side-by-side graves. I'm oddly free to mourn Sirenita now. She lived a bit longer in him and he needed me--the present, engaged me, not the wailing, convulsing me. Now I'm totally free to mourn. Mourning scares me. The death of a cat scares me the way the death of a parent did both times. Maybe it's because of that early, archetypal death of a father all those years ago. The universe shows its dangerous face, the one that presides over the death of your loved ones. Grief scares me, because it threatens to be endless.

I had forgotten how much it scares me.