Girl in a Band Read online

  At the same time, from early on my mother feared I was “too” sexy, the result being that I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone’s noticing me. In L.A., bodies are always on show, and just walking down the street as a teenager could be scary. Guys in cars would whiz by, slow down, reverse, offer rides to who-knows-where. When I turned fifteen, my mother let me know I was too old to wear short shorts, and Keller, I remember, told her she was a “prude.” These days, I find it kind of cool to be slightly old-fashioned.

  Still, my mother always knew better than to try to teach me to make my own clothes. A few times I pulled out her sewing machine to take in my jeans, but the technology always overwhelmed me. Plus, I didn’t like her telling me what to do, and I still bristle at authority. When Coco was born someone gave her a onesie from the seventies that said QUESTION AUTHORITY. I could relate. I remember asking my mother once if she thought I would have a good figure when I grew up. “Yes,” she said, “you have slim hips and broad shoulders,” though when I matured early on, she mostly seemed afraid I would get into trouble, get pregnant, every mother’s biggest fear.

  If my dad was in his head most of the time, my mom was the practical one, anchored, a little self-absorbed. She ran our house. She was the enforcer, like most stay-at-home moms. She brooded a lot, said little about her own life before her family came along, but still, you would never have mistaken her for an average 1950s housewife. I knew that growing up her older brother was cruel to her, which is why looking back I find her hands-off parenting style so strange when it came to Keller and me. Maybe I became so good at hiding my oversensitivity that she had no idea how much he traumatized me. Maybe she didn’t notice. Maybe she noticed but hoped to toughen me up. I was seven or eight years old when my cat was run over, and a few days or weeks later my mom let me know it was time to stop being sad, time to move on. Maybe she was right. As for her, I never saw her cry, except once when I stayed out all night without telling her, and her tears that night had more to do with anger and relief. As I said, until I was in college I knew nothing about her family’s early California origins and even when I found out, my mom had nothing to add. Two years before she died, she said in passing to my aunt, “I should have never left California.”

  I’m still not sure how to take those words, but I remember being disturbed when my aunt told me that. Did my mom mean: I should never have married your father? Or, If I’d never left California to go to Kansas, I would never have ended up as a faculty wife and a mother? Or, I would never have been the mother of a paranoid-schizophrenic son? No one knows what goes on inside anyone else’s marriage, especially their parents’. Over the few times they met, my mom and Thurston’s mom, Eleanor, who was a decade younger, developed a friendship of sorts. Once my mom confided to Eleanor that she’d considered leaving my dad but was glad she hadn’t.

  I always got the feeling my mom would rather have been doing something else, that she wanted more for herself—more recognition, maybe, as a creative person. Maybe she secretly wanted to be a movie actress, wanted to be recognized less as an academic’s wife and more as the person she felt she was inside—I won’t ever know. Once, I remember, she made a collage out of New Yorker covers that she placed above the stove. It was a grease catcher, she told us, but in truth it was more than that, a piece of clever, unconventional art. Another time she made a series of long, rectangular wall reliefs with shells in colored cement on wood, more art than craft, making me wish she would make more. Maybe, like me, the clothes she cut and designed and stitched were the arena where she felt the freest to show off the things in her life that were blocked or frustrated. When she dressed up to go out at night in the fashion of the 1950s—low-cut dresses, an ample bosom, a cinched-in waist, flared skirts—she laughed and enjoyed herself with an ease I didn’t see very often in her everyday life. I couldn’t help but feel sometimes that no one ever told her she was beautiful growing up, that she felt like the unattractive one in her family. To me she was gorgeous, like Ingrid Bergman.

  My dad was elderly by the time Coco was born in the summer of 1994. The Parkinson’s had set in, and he wasn’t really able to hold her safely. My mother was nearly the same age as my dad but always did yoga and played golf and walked. My mother really loved Coco—she was her first and only grandchild—but instead of holding her, she spent hours watching her. “She’s going to be okay, because you really play and interact with her,” my mom once said to me, as if to say this was something she’d never done with me. I was always very independent, she reminded me, but looking back, I missed that closeness with my mother. When I was ten, my family spent a year in Hawaii, and I have a memory from that time of one day wondering, How come I don’t sit in my mother’s lap anymore? How come she doesn’t hold me or hug me?

  Both my parents were brooders. My dad was preoccupied with academic politics. For years he was an associate dean, and he eventually became dean. My mom was equally absorbed in her own thoughts. In private she worried about a lot of things. Keller would say something to her like “You’re so uptight!” and I’d add “Yeah, Mom, why do you look so sad?” and she’d say something like “Because the world is so depressing—the war, for starters.”

  It wasn’t just the sixties. It was family stuff, most having to do with Keller, and the worry and the stress that seemed to follow him. Even after my dad retired from UCLA, he never wanted to travel or take vacations. Instead, he gardened and paced. Sometimes I could hear him out in his jungle of tomato plants in the middle of the night, prowling around, and I felt bad for him. He never talked about what was going on with my brother, but he must have been keeping watch, waiting on the worst, duty-bound to be there in case something went down with Keller, because by then something was always happening with Keller.

  6

  KELLER’S WHOLE CHILDHOOD became the stuff of family fables, jokey legends, tributes to his smartness or his independence or both. Here’s one: at the exact moment I was being born, Keller, who was three and a half, disappeared down the street with his four-year-old girlfriend to shoplift candy from a neighborhood drugstore. Or this: Keller didn’t learn to read until the fourth grade, which seems unlikely if not impossible.

  In old photos taken when he was young, Keller’s always attired in a cowboy costume, with leather-looking boots and a big hat, smiling a massive, mysterious grin. From a young age he was willful and uncooperative, a troublemaker, and this in our family made him the center of attention, usually the negative kind. He was crazy smart, too, hyperverbal, the torrent of words coming out of his mouth so thick and constant it was as if he were drowning in them. He always had a comeback, a response, a return that cut short any conversation or argument. In many ways he ran over me, erased me, made me feel invisible even to myself.

  I worshipped my brother. I wanted to be like him. But he was vicious to me throughout our childhood—teasing me nonstop, physically fighting with me—sprinkled with occasional moments of niceness. Looking back, I wonder whether his sadism might have been a symptom of the disease that showed itself later.

  His ridiculing and button-pushing went beyond the typical sibling ragging. At dinner, I’d let drop some trendy word or expression and Keller would jump on it, and on me, for my faddishness, my ordinariness, my lack of originality. When a scene in a movie or a Disney special made me laugh or cry, he’d make fun of me for laughing and make fun of me for crying and make fun of me when I didn’t say anything at all. He always knew he could get a response from me, which provoked him to do it even more.

  At some point I turned off entirely. Knowing I’d get mocked or teased, I would do anything not to cry, or laugh, or show any emotion at all. The biggest challenge as I saw it was to pretend I had some superhuman ability to withstand pain. Add that to the pressure girls feel anyway to please other people, to be good, and well mannered, and orderly—and I backslid even more into a world where nothi
ng could upset or hurt me.

  Sometimes my brother’s teasing crossed over into physical violence. One night he and I fought so hard on my parents’ bed that the TV set smashed to the floor from the vibrations. Another time Keller, who had become something of a neighborhood ringleader, arranged a fight between me and a boy from down the street. He went so far as to place bets among his friends that I could win. I knew I couldn’t, but I went along with it anyway because I wanted him to feel proud of me. Whenever I complained to my parents about Keller, or asked them to make him stop tormenting me, they just said, “Oh, go hit him back.”

  Oh, go hit him back—words that still circle my brain forty, nearly fifty years later. Because no matter how hard I tried, I could never not react to Keller, but neither could I depend on my parents to protect me or take my side. If something happened right in front of them, they would step in, but otherwise my dad would say something like “Just knock it off.” But there was no justice in that—just eventual retaliation from Keller.

  Maybe that’s why for me the page, the gallery, and the stage became the only places my emotions could be expressed and acted out comfortably. These were the venues where I could exhibit sexuality, anger, a lack of concern for what people thought. The image a lot of people have of me as detached, impassive, or remote is a persona that comes from years of being teased for every feeling I ever expressed. When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn’t negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.

  But throughout my teens, my brother was the charismatic one—a nerd with a big, movie-star-sized head and an otherworldly glow, the leader of his small, passionate friend group. Long before Freaks and Geeks came out, Keller created a fanzine, which he called The Fiend Thinker. It was a celebration of nerd-dom and outsiderness, including definitions of words he’d made up, which he mimeographed and passed out to his followers. In middle school he and his friends even carried out their own sociological study of their eighth-grade class. They interviewed kids from various social groups—surfers, nerds, popular kids, and Spanish-Americans, or SAs as they were known back then. My dad was proud of Keller for this, how he applied his ideas to a contemporary situation, even if the study was a direct appropriation. My brother got a lot of recognition for that study. It was one of his first and last great accomplishments.

  7

  IN 1963, the year JFK died and right before the Beatles went on Ed Sullivan, my dad took a yearlong sabbatical at a think tank, and my family went to live in Hawaii. I was incredibly excited to go. When I was little, I loved the musical South Pacific, which takes place on an island, Bali Ha’i, and I spent a lot of time reenacting the songs in my room. At ten, I was a restless preadolescent, mature for my age, curious about sex, starting to feel my sensual side, and the encyclopedia entry for Hawaii showed photo after photo of half-naked women with flowers around their necks. On the plane the Pan Am stewardesses were beautiful and served everyone, including me, free champagne. When we arrived, I insisted on getting a two-piece bathing suit with a slightly padded top, which made me feel even more grown-up.

  The glamour ended when I began attending a public school, where for the first time I was a minority. In Asian cultures, “Kim” is a male name, and Hawaii’s population is mostly Asian, so I was picked on constantly. Still, it wasn’t all bad. I remember walking barefoot through the Manoa Valley. The grass was dewy, and the fragrance in the air was an ideal backdrop for my preadolescent sexual feelings. Keller and I had done some surfing out at Latigo Shore Drive just past Malibu, so the beach and the water were familiar to me. I had my new bathing suit and my own surfboard, a small Hobie, and the cute young Hawaiian surf guides in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel flirted with me. I always looked older than my actual age—like a classic blonde California girl, in fact. The gap I’d always had between my two front teeth had grown in, and the chicken pox marks on my face, which had always made me feel so self-conscious, blended in with my tan.

  Two years later, when I was thirteen, my dad was asked to launch a study-abroad program for UCLA, and our family packed up to spend a year in Hong Kong. Moving away from my friends was the last thing I wanted to do, although having started junior high in the middle of the year and being thrown into the alien public school structure of L.A. after my experiences in the lab school and in Hawaii didn’t make me exactly eager to stay. Everything at school had changed. I was tuning out, spending time down at the gully that ran through the school, courting a little bit of trouble. In Hawaii, I’d been something of a wild child, going to school barefoot, and in L.A. I was thrust into the public junior high school, where the other girls wore pleated skirts and little sweaters. I hated it. Still, I made it clear to my parents I had no desire to go to Hong Kong. There was even talk of my going to live in New Jersey with old friends of my parents, a family who had lived next door to us in Rochester, who had two boys around my age. Or that Keller and I could even go to a Swiss boarding school, which, in retrospect, sounds ridiculous. In the end, we did none of those things, and I still love to say that my dad inaugurated a study project in China for UCLA.

  The four of us arrived in Hong Kong during the tail end of a typhoon. At the airport, staffers handed out umbrellas that blew away instantly. Hong Kong was like nothing I had ever experienced before. The air was so hot and humid it was like stepping inside a kiln, and you had to gasp to catch your breath. The smells and sounds were overpowering. My first night there, I remember knocking into people on the street, and crying, which fogged and blurred the city’s yellow lights even more. I felt so overwhelmed by Hong Kong’s heat, chaos, clamor, and odors that I was convinced I would never—never—survive there a year.

  That first month we lived in downtown Kowloon in a hotel. Chinese girls in fifties-style chiffon layered skirts played Beatles songs in the downstairs hotel bar. Walking along Hong Kong’s streets was like moving inside a slow riot. At night, you could hear the palmed dice and quiet slap of mah-jongg games. Then as now, the city’s prevailing backdrop seemed to be the exchange of money for goods, at all hours. Merchandise was cheap, too. Morning would dawn, and with it the familiar onrush of wet heat, and the aggressive, sleazy shop owners would take up position in their doorways, beckoning to me and to any other girl passing by. In those days Hong Kong was an English colony and a major port, and now I wonder how my parents allowed me to wander around by myself. Sailors from all over the world roamed the sidewalks, calling out suggestive things, one even lightly jabbing me in the stomach with a “Hey, girl, what are you doing?” I walked by him fast, mortified, but thrilled too that in a strange new world I felt visible and noticed.

  Because we were living in a hotel, Keller and I had to share a room, and one night, he tried to climb into my bed. He was naked. When I pushed him and told him to get away, he called me a slut, a word I found hard to shake, though I knew he was not in his right mind. Still, I was afraid to ask my parents if they would pay for a separate room. They would ask why, and as usual, no matter how scared and upset I felt, I didn’t want Keller to get into any trouble. I still idealized him, convinced myself he was better than he was, wanted to protect him, and I always hated hearing my dad yell at him. Back then Keller was eccentric, but no one, especially me, recognized the signs of his eventual schizophrenia. Instead, I let myself feel guilty, as if I were somehow responsible for everything he did wrong.

  Our Hong Kong school, named after King George V, was about two decades behind the schools we had known in America. Along with swats, caning, and mandatory uniforms (which I kind of liked, in a romantic movie–like way), there were punishments that included writing the same sentence over and over hundreds of times—“I must not talk during class”—among other wonderfully useful skills. The most feared and ruthless teacher on the faculty was the school’s religious instructor. He scrutinized
the class for the slightest hints of bad behavior and wore such stiffly starched white colonial shorts you could see up them whenever he took a seat.

  English schools began a year earlier than U.S. schools, which meant that everyone in my class was a year younger than I was. The boys came up to my chest. As the semester went on, I met an older English boy, a fifteen-year-old drummer who became my first boyfriend. Our relationship was extremely ceremonial. The two of us would go to his house and make out in his bedroom, followed by a silent formal lunch in the old-fashioned dining room with his parents, the meal served by the family’s amah—a domestic servant. In Hong Kong, it seemed, everyone had at least one amah, but his family had two.

  I was very aware of Hong Kong’s legendary red-light district, Wan Chai—it was well-known, even to tourists—as I was becoming curious about sex. I went there once with a friend, and in the daytime its brothels and massage parlors and girlie bars looked ordinary, uninteresting. In an attempt to brush up on my limited sexual knowledge, I read The World of Suzie Wong, but in that respect it was disappointing. I also read all of Ian Fleming’s books, at the time a step up from Nancy Drew. My mother gave me, or let me read, Lolita and Candy, Terry Southern’s popular sex farce, which I read with eyes wide open, taking in every word. As my growing sexuality seemed to upset and worry my mom, she must have thought these books would show me how not to be. Around that time I also remember her telling me that boys might like girls because of the way they looked, but the quality of a girl’s brain was the ticket to a more satisfying relationship. It was advice that caused me all kinds of neuroses. It also proved to be wrong.