Girl in a Band Page 3

  He’d grown up doing chores beside his mother and sister—cooking and gardening, pretty much anything involving his hands—and the habit stayed with him. During cocktail hour, which my mom and he never missed, he made amazing martinis and Manhattans with a chilled martini shaker kept in the freezer at all times. This was the late fifties and early sixties—people took their cocktail hours seriously. The backyard of our house in L.A. was thick and stringy with the tomato plants he grew. My mom liked to tell me that my dad’s skill with his hands was something he’d passed down to me, and I always loved hearing that.

  Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live. My mom told me once that my father had always wanted to be a poet. It is likely that growing up during the Depression with no money made him want to seek security, pushing him toward a career as a professor instead. But aside from his love of words and the self-deprecating jokes and puns he slung around with his close friends, it was something that until she told me, I never knew about my father, which is striking, especially since my brother later became a poet.

  From my childhood I recall days spent home sick from school, trying on my mom’s clothes and watching television show after television show. I remember spooning out chocolate or tapioca pudding from the box—tapioca, a word no one uses anymore. The smell of the house, damp and distinct. The aroma of old indigenous L.A. houses, even inland ones, comes from the ocean twenty miles away, a hint of mildew, but dry, too, and closed up, perfectly still, like a statue. I can still smell the barest trace of gas from the old 1950s stove, an invisible odor mixed with sunshine streaming in from the windows, and, somewhere, eucalyptus bathed in the haze of ambition.

  3

  UPSTAIRS IN MY HOUSE in western Massachusetts, I have a stack of DVDs containing old movies of my parents fishing in the Klamath River, just south of the Oregon border. They’re with their best friends, Connie and Maxie Bentzen, and another couple, Jackie and Bill, all of them members of the liberal, food-loving UCLA group my parents belonged to. These were funny, ironic people who also happened to be passionate fishermen.

  Starting in the late sixties, my parents drove up to Klamath every summer, staying in a rented trailer and spending the next month fishing with this core group of people, others coming and going. Klamath was all about fishing and socializing and cooking and eating, and waking up the next day to start over again. My dad made his own smoking devices—homemade baskets he placed in oilcans and submerged in hot coals to smoke fish, chicken wings, or his famous ribs. There were no social rules except that “good times” were to be had. You ate what you caught, and to this day the salmon right out of the smoker that Connie Bentzen made is the best thing I’ve ever tasted. An actual rule in Klamath: you were only allowed to take home two fish. My mother once smuggled a third fish onto the campsite inside her waders, a story of transgression that turned into an ongoing joke between her and their friends.

  The Bentzens were documentary filmmakers, close friends with cinematographers and directors like Haskell Wexler, who worked on films like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Irvin Kershner, who worked on Star Wars. Maxie Bentzen was a funny, lighthearted former grad student of my dad’s, the first woman I knew who wore blue jeans day and night. Her husband, Connie, had the same electric-blue eyes as Paul Newman. During the year they lived in Malibu, in a house on stilts, with Peanuts cartoons and New Yorker magazines on their living room table. If you were spending the night in their guest room, just below the high-tide mark, you could hear the waves fiercely crashing underneath the house, true white noise that sloshed you to sleep. As a kid I remember wanting to be just like the Bentzens, to host dinner parties just like theirs, with my friends’ children running around in the backyard, kids who would look back someday and use words like magical, because that is what those nights were. I’ll always remember the night JFK got elected, the party they threw, the charged sound of adult laughter and chatter.

  The Bentzens had first pulled into Klamath in 1953. Over the next few decades the region grew up around them, getting more and more crowded, with lumber companies taking out huge swaths of fir and pine trees, but the Bentzens prided themselves on being discoverers and originators and they pushed back. Klamath got so busy and populated that in the 1980s, to mark off their spot and also keep out the rednecks, Connie erected a big stuffed scarecrow of a UCLA mascot that everyone referred to as “Johnny Bruin.”

  In the videos, there’s my mom, tight-lipped in a button-up blue-black cardigan, and there’s my dad, too, with his big glasses. He’s holding up a salmon he just caught, cupping the fish under its chin. Friends wander in and out of the frame. A six-pounder, I can hear Maxie say. Look at the size of that thing, Connie says, and Take a picture and He’s getting tired and Hard to believe you caught that thing using that little reel of yours, Wayne. Jackie goes around snapping photos. Then they go for double dry martinis at Steelhead, a lodge nearby where they went to drink at night.

  I went along with my parents to Klamath only once when I was a kid, when I was seventeen. When they were gone, Keller and I had the house to ourselves. Fishing was never really my thing, but I loved being there with my parents and their friends. The wilderness could be slow going, and if you weren’t out on the river—which could be dangerous and chaotic, like a freeway intersection—there wasn’t much else to do but sit and read and eat, do puzzles, and find a quiet spot away from the wind where you could sit alone and relax. The whole scene was tranquil and arresting in its wild American gorgeousness.

  At one point in one of the videos—it must be 1986—I show up, and Thurston trails in, though usually he liked to hole up in our camper, reading, until cocktail hour. Keller is there, too, mellow but animated, talking and joking, the usual patch of black stubble covering his chin. Whenever he went up to Klamath, Keller slept in his own private tent, a cave of sorts in the center of my parents’ little camp.

  Connie is behind the camera, gently firing off questions about what I’ve been up to. It was around the time of Evol, Sonic Youth’s third album. “I mean, yeah, we made a little money off of that,” I say.

  “Maybe you’ll get to be a millionaire,” Connie says. He always had a jokey, gruff, great way of speaking. “Those rock-and-roll people make so much money you can hardly stand it.”

  “Well, that’s a whole different ball game you’re talking about than what we do,” I say.

  “And you’re not going to get into that ball game, Kim?”

  “Well, the problem is, we’d have to tailor our music too much. We’d have to start wearing long wigs and eye shadow and glitter pants.”

  “Okay, okay, well, that’s life,” Connie says. “Now who wants to eat?”

  In some ways it was easier not to talk about what I did for a living. New York City and our music were both too hard to translate. And being in Klamath wasn’t about what you did out in the world anyway; it was about family and fishing and eating and socializing and making corny jokes, like when I tried to fire some darts into a wall target and someone yelled out, “Kim, that’s an objet d’art!” Maxie, though, was a great supporter of young people and was always saying, “You guys are so great!” whereas Connie was always saying, “You kids are never going to live up to the older generation,” at which everyone would laugh.

  My parents were never more relaxed than when they were up at Klamath. The Bentzens were family but even better, a tribe that unlike your real relatives wasn’t obligatory and never pressured you. My dad didn’t have much contact with his own Kansas relatives. It wasn’t snobbery that kept him away, more a culture divide, as most of my dad’s family was small-town religious. He did stay in touch with his mother and sister. With Connie, Maxie, their son Mike, Jackie, and Bill, my parents were truly themselves, at ease and off duty.

  Today Klamath is unrecognizable, though that’s probably true for any place you look back on—it’s certainly true about New York. T
hese days you’re hardly allowed to fish at Klamath at all, and the tourist industry is pretty much gone. Klamath was always depressed, but it’s more lowdown now than ever, deserted, creepy, a place that portends abandoned meth labs in the woods.

  Jackie still lives in Malibu. Her husband, Bill, is dead. Maxie and her son, Mike, still live in Santa Cruz, but most of the others, including my parents, are gone. In the late 1980s, a short while after my dad stopped working, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. His basic neurological functions began to leave him, one after another. At some point, my mom really wasn’t able to take care of him by herself, and she made it clear he’d be better off—in fact, it was his job and his responsibility to do so, she told him—if he went into a nursing home, which he did. My mom was tough and pragmatic, though in fairness to her, she didn’t have the money to pay for the twenty-four-hour nursing staff his condition required.

  It wasn’t the Parkinson’s that killed him. It was the nursing home, where he contracted pneumonia, and then the hospital. A nurse, an old-timer who should have known better, inserted a feeding tube down the wrong pipe. But my family never sued the hospital, as by that point my dad’s Parkinson’s was so advanced it had taken away most of the person we all remembered anyway. In the year before he died, I remember how he never complained. I’m sure he missed doing things like cooking, and tending to his tomatoes, and playing with his custom-made smokers. I missed the father who’d given me a book of Emily Dickinson poems, sweetly inscribed, for my sixteenth birthday, even though I found Dickinson corny. I missed the man who took me to lunch at the UCLA faculty center, introducing me proudly to the people he worked with, making me so happy in return that he was my dad. During his last year I mostly remember his docility, his sweetness, his acceptance of what was ahead.

  4

  AS TEENAGERS, my friends and I used to walk inside one of the giant sewer pipes that led out to the Pacific Ocean. The pipes were huge and echoing, smelling of old age, caked salt, rotten sea grass. There was always the thrilling possibility that a torrent of water would come gushing down with no warning, which is why we had to be ready at any second to scramble up onto a wall ladder. The risk of water thundering down on you and pulling you along, and the prospect of having to think fast, always made that long walk out to the sea worth it. Risk and excitement were in short supply for me in the neighborhood where we lived, so we found it instead on the shifting coastline and farther inland.

  As kids, my friends and I used to play on huge dirt mounds, which none of us realized at the time were freeway on-ramps in the making. One time Keller and some of his group went to a nearby ravine and jumped down off the cliff, landing on a squishy, sandy slope below. What’s that old parental cliché—If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you follow them? The answer in my case was yes. Trying to prove how tough a little sister could be, I landed on my back, the wind rushing out of my body.

  I couldn’t breathe, to the point where I thought I was going to die. I felt so stupid and embarrassed I didn’t even tell my parents. I always hated making mistakes, hated getting into trouble, hated not being in control.

  To me the canyons in L.A. held the most glamour. Rustic hillsides filled with twisted oak trees, scruffy and steep, with lighter-than-light California sunshine filtering through the tangles. In the winter, the dripping rain made them look more unkempt than usual. They were also denser, more able to hide the funky, scrabbled array of houses. The canyons were eternally shaded. This was where all the interesting, seemingly non-self-obsessed types were, and where the cool musicians lived—Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, and so on. In the hills, you could imagine you were anywhere in the world, at least during the day, when the trees and the overgrown landscaping hid the gluey sprawl just below. I listened to Joni Mitchell a lot as a teenager and always thought of her sitting up in a woody, funky, thrown-together canyon house, maybe one with a porch, with trees and vegetation dripping off the roof. She would be melancholy, looking out the window. I was in my room a few miles away, painting, smoking pot, and getting sad listening to her.

  The canyons were a big contrast to the banal, flat, middle-class section of L.A. where my family lived. Even when we moved to a nicer, bigger, Spanish-style house in the same neighborhood, it was just the same: freshly mowed green lawns camouflaging dry desert-scape; constant, compulsive watering and pruning; everything orderly but with its own kind of unease, what with the constant pressure to be happy, to be new, to smile. And beneath it all, shadows and cracks and breaks—all Freudian death instinct.

  Once I remember my mom pointing to a big undeveloped area of sand, mud, and grass that grew to become Century City. “There’s going to be a city there someday,” she said, not in a soothsayer way but stating the obvious, that soon every inch of Los Angeles would be overtaken by more cars, more gas stations, more malls, more bodies, and of course she was right.

  We were an academic family, as opposed to a showbiz family, a division I picked up on early and one that held a lot of weight in Los Angeles, especially. In high school, I had a good friend who lived with her mom and brothers, and her dad had been a movie director before he died. They lived in an apartment in Beverly Hills, on Beverly Glen. The mother was beautiful and polished, warm and effusive, and more than anything I admired her emotive qualities. One night they came over for dinner, and after they left, my dad immediately said something sharp, and out of character for him, about how she wasn’t a “real” person. Being “real” was such a 1960s ideal. He saw, I think, how enamored I was of my friend’s mother, how glamorous I found her—the way she called me “darling” and spoke to me about things my mother didn’t. He didn’t want me to get sucked into all that.

  When people ask me what L.A. was like in the sixties, I tell them that there wasn’t as much terrible stucco as there is today: no mini malls with their approximation of Spanish two-story buildings, no oversized SUVs bulging out of parking-space lines. What used to say “Spanish-style” is now something diseased looking. Nobody seems to know how to stucco anymore.

  5

  WHEN MY DAD was getting his college degrees, he got to be friends with a couple of his students, some hipsters, and later beatniks, who all turned him on to jazz. They lived in Venice in a worn-down house, at a time when it was unheard of to live there. Coltrane, Brubeck, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz—those were their reigning jazz heroes. John Coltrane was probably the most avant-garde of the bunch, but my dad loved him, too. I’m almost positive my dad’s jazz record collection later influenced me, or at least got me used to abstract music—that, and my parents’ blues, folk, and classical LPs, as my mom was always coming back from neighborhood garage sales weighed down with box sets of Mozart and Beethoven. But jazz has been a lifelong love and interest of mine. I remember when I was little, my dad and I went to visit one of those Venice beatnik guys, though I mostly remember his glam girlfriend with her long, straight black hair, her red-polished fingernails, and her guitar. She was the first beatnik I ever met. I sat in her lap, thinking, I wish my mom were as cool as this.

  My mom worked out of our house as a seamstress. She was the go-to person in our neighborhood for tailoring clothes. She made all my clothes growing up, and what she didn’t design, cut, and sew, she bought in local thrift shops, a habit that surely came from growing up during the Depression. When I was a teenager, she began making more florid, eccentric stuff—caftans, clothes made out of velvet or chiffon, block-printed by a designer she knew. These were haute hippie-looking outfits that she’d sell alongside the wares of other artistically inclined friends—ceramics, jewelry. Still, I hated that she made my clothes or picked up bargains at secondhand stores. Ironically, during my faux-hippie period in high school, I grew to love vintage stores, and thrifting, a habit that carried into my years in New York—anything but the uptight stocking-and-preppy look that was the current fashion at my school. I would raid my mom’s sewing room for funky, exotic caftans and beautiful tie-dyed silk “
abas,” as she called them.

  Basically, I never really knew how to dress during my middle and high school years. I still have a photo of myself in my bedroom at sixteen, sitting on a turquoise bedspread—my favorite color then and now—wearing a pair of baggy, flowered, homemade pants my mom had crafted out of an Indian bedspread, and a wine-colored turtleneck with a zipper up the neck, worn backward. That, or flared hip-hugger cords, or jeans, with a fringed Mexican top. Whenever I told my mom that I wanted to buy some jeans she would let out a theatrical sigh and take me to the army surplus store on Venice Boulevard. It’s still there, I think. Along with high-grade military and camping gear, they carried Landlubber, a popular brand in those days.

  Looking back, I’m sure that my mom’s creative-but-unconventional fashion sense, coupled with my sense of deprivation, made me covet “new clothes” while also sparking an ambivalence toward conventional fashion, as it was all laid out in the fashion magazines: how a girl or woman is supposed to dress; what expresses her personality; how does she handle wanting to be sexy, or appealing, while still being true to herself? At home I stared for hours at record covers and photos of Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Peggy Lipton, Joni Mitchell, and other cool girls, wanting to be just like them. It was an era of no bras, free-flowing hair, vintage lace, and crushed velvet borrowed from traditional boudoir scenarios of passive female sexuality and placed front and center. Anita Pallenberg’s look was wild enough to influence the Rolling Stones. Men wore women’s clothes, sheepskin vests, short white pants, lamé scarves, and exotic Moroccan jewelry, while women slipped into pinstripe suits, and boyfriends and girlfriends swapped shirts and pants with no concern, all male-female stereotypes muddled and switched and subverted. The newest, coolest girl around was Françoise Hardy, a French singer who dressed as a tomboy. In Westwood there was a store that sold small, overpriced Jane Birkin–esque French T-shirts, and I think I caved in finally and bought one.