Girl in a Band Page 5

  Hong Kong is divided up into three parts, and after a month in Kowloon, we moved into a hilltop apartment in the New Territories section of the city. It was mountainous and peaceful, about an hour’s car drive from downtown, with a veranda that looked out across a shimmering, placid sea usually dotted with one or a pair of distant Chinese junks. If you hopped a train, you would eventually arrive at the Great Wall of China, but I wouldn’t see the wall until Sonic Youth played there many years later.

  Keller and I had an American friend named Barry Finnerty, who lived down at the bottom of the hill beside the train tracks. A pimply-faced adolescent two years older than me who was just learning how to play Beatles songs on his electric guitar, and whose mother was always getting complaints from the neighbors about the noise, Barry had managed to get himself kicked out of King George V on the second day of school for making up swear-word lyrics to the hymns during the morning assembly. He liked to go around exclaiming loudly that he was a “retired Jew and an agnostic atheist.” Freight cars would stop in front of Barry’s apartment building, some of them carrying pigs for slaughter, their snouts poking through the endless train bars. Wrapped in his American revulsion for all things earthy, carnal, and exotic, Barry would run out into the station and take photos of those hundreds of snouts, one of his favorite things to do.

  Barry later became a respected jazz guitarist, at one point playing with Miles Davis, and he and I stayed friends for a long time. When my family moved back to L.A., I used to fly up to San Francisco, where Barry lived with his mother. In those days, the last flight on PSA Airlines was at ten or eleven P.M. Friday night, and the ticket cost $10. At fifteen, I might have been too young to hang out on the Sunset Strip—there was a ten P.M. curfew if you were under the age of eighteen—but in San Francisco I was free to roam around and see bands at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom. I loved San Francisco and told myself I would someday go to art school there.

  In the meantime, we took full advantage of how cheap Hong Kong was, the tailors especially. Keller ordered button-down shirts in various colors with a big surfer “Competition Stripe” across the middle, custom-made to fit him. Me, I spent all my allowance money on a bikini, though when I finally tried it on, it didn’t match the way girls and bikinis looked in women’s magazines. My idea of heaven was frequenting a Hong Kong store that sold English mod-style clothes: red corduroy hip-hugger bell-bottoms, dusty-pink pants that laced up in the front, crop tops. I’d spend my days wandering through racks of clothes I couldn’t afford, thinking of all the places I would wear them. As usual, Keller grabbed all the attention when one night he and some friends snuck off to the island of Macau, the dark, nefarious port where gambling was legal. My parents had told him repeatedly he couldn’t go there and were furious when they found out he’d done it anyway. This was the beginning of Keller’s rebellious teen years, a time when he also made friends with a boy named Mitch, whose parents were visiting missionaries. A year later Mitch would play a cameo role in Keller’s unraveling.

  8

  BACK IN L.A., going on fourteen, I was again faced with the prospect of public junior high school. I didn’t fit in with the “nice middle-class girls.” I didn’t really understand the idea of grades or of dressing up conventionally. Instead I hung out with the white-trash kids and tried to avoid the attention of the Mexican girls who would beat you up if you dared look at them the wrong way. I was much happier a few years later in high school when the late sixties were in full bloom, the dress code became more chaotic, and I could find more natural peers.

  Keller was now in high school and no longer a nerd. Becoming a surfer had brought out his good looks, and he began going out with a series of beautiful girlfriends. His Hong Kong buddy, Mitch, had moved in with us, as his parents wanted him to finish up high school in the States. In retrospect, this wasn’t the best decision by any means, as Mitch and Keller spent most of their time in their room, smoking dope and dropping LSD, the walls plastered with black-light posters and the space glowing with light boxes.

  After high school, Keller started attending college and became interested in Shakespeare and Chaucer, though he would later drop out. He wrote sonnets that sounded eerily Bard-like, and went around publicly reciting these and ancient works. “You want to hear my new poem?” he would ask. Not waiting for me to answer, he would begin intoning lines or whole stanzas. Even then it didn’t occur to me that Keller’s behavior was extreme, compulsive, or all that strange. Everyone smoked pot and dropped acid. The atmospherics of the era were all about breaking boundaries, flipping conventions, and acting “far out,” and at the time I didn’t consider it to be tied up with mental illness. Keller was a player in an era that made it possible for anyone’s behavior to slip from charmingly eccentric to worrisomely antisocial to schizophrenic without anyone’s raising even a small flag. On the contrary, it fit perfectly with the whole hippie take on the Elizabethan lifestyle embodied back then by Renaissance fairs.

  By now my brother and I had become friends, allies, and conspirators against our parents. He was at the pinnacle of his coolness, an evolution that began in Hawaii and intensified in Hong Kong. Inside our house, serious talk was happening—what if Keller got drafted to go fight in Vietnam? After all, he had attended college for a while but quit going, and during my last year of high school, he lived in a trailer in my parents’ driveway. Even if you weren’t in college someone his age could still get drafted. But inside the trailer, all conflicts were smoothed and blurred in hash smoke and audio recordings of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Twelfth Night. Keller turned me on to Nietzsche, Sartre, Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and all the other French thinkers, writers, and poets my high school felt it unnecessary to teach. We listened to avant-garde jazz—Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Archie Shepp. Our lack of any musical training didn’t keep us from impromptu jam sessions in my parents’ living room with an African drum, a Chinese gong, a recorder, and our own junky upright piano. It was just something Keller and I did together, wild, disorganized improv music, with me by far the more self-conscious, inhibited one.

  But my brother was going downhill in very slow motion. He moved his trailer out to Malibu. No one saw how nonsocialized and solitary he was becoming, how he was pushing away one old friend after another. He broke up with his beautiful girlfriend abruptly, without giving her any reason, and his reclusiveness made me concerned. Most of the time he was alone, writing sonnets to a world that didn’t care about sonnets. A year after high school, I had for all intents and purposes moved in with my boyfriend, and one night, Keller came over to the boy’s house. He couldn’t stop crying. He was depressed all the time, he said, and didn’t know what to do. I became alarmed and told my parents I thought he should see a psychiatrist, but they dismissed the idea.

  It was a strange role reversal. Suddenly Keller was looking to me, his little sister, for help. I’d become a symbolic older sibling, a protector, which is the role I still play for Keller today. He had never played that role for me.

  There wasn’t a name back then for what was happening to him. My parents were from a generation where you tended to your own problems, one where psychotherapy was an indulgence. They both came from families where you kept your problems to yourself and got on with life. If Keller was starting to act a little out of the ordinary, wasn’t everybody trying to quote-unquote find themselves in Southern California in the early seventies? Not to mention that psychiatry had a cuckoo’s-nest edge of paranoia about it. Articles appeared in the papers constantly about frustrated parents committing their iconoclastic kids to psych hospitals, which led to a law being passed in California that hospitals couldn’t legally hold patients against their will for longer than forty-eight hours. My parents were educated but they weren’t psychologically minded, and therapy and psych meds were for the truly mad, not for the idiosyncratic, and certainly not for their own idiosyncratic son. Even though they finally relented and found Keller a psychiatrist, it was too little too
late. We would all get to know the forty-eight-hour law well over the next few years.

  At some point, while living in Malibu, my brother started dressing entirely in white. He grew a long beard and carried a Bible, not for any religious reason, he’d say if anyone asked, but more for its literary excellence. He began making up words, his own private alphabet and language. He began referring to himself as Oedipus, intended to be a funny reference to Sophocles. Still, this didn’t seem all that extraordinary, as back then there were lots of eccentric bearded guys dressed in white roaming around L.A. Charlie Manson was starting to make appearances around the beaches and canyons of Malibu. Keller used to crash sometimes at a house at the foot of Topanga Canyon, where one night he met another Manson Family member, Bobby Beausoleil. Bobby would say repeatedly, “You should come up to the ranch sometime.” Fortunately, Keller never did. In high school, one of my brother’s ex-girlfriends, Marina Habe, was allegedly killed by the Manson Family. Marina was seventeen, and beautiful, and drove a red slinky sports car. She was home in L.A. for Christmas break from the University of Hawaii when someone shoved her inside a car and abducted her. Her body was later found off Mulholland Drive. She’d been stabbed over and over again.

  Keller and I used to hitchhike up to Malibu, just as Manson had done. In fact, I was constantly meeting people who had picked Manson up and given him a ride or dropped him off by the side of the road. “I met this strange guy who was talking about the end of the world and ‘Revolution 9’ and the desert,” they would say. After the Sharon Tate murders in 1969, I kept telling myself that things were going to be okay, that I lived in a middle-class neighborhood where nothing like that could ever happen in a million years.

  Keller eventually got his bachelor’s degree at the University of California in Irvine and went on to Berkeley, where he got his master’s degree in classics. My brother’s educational path was lengthy and stop-start, and it was probably for that reason that neither my parents nor I was there the day he graduated from Berkeley. That was the day he had his first full-blown psychotic episode. In the grip of a Shakespeare-inspired delusion about the women around him being “maidens,” he lunged at a girl in the cafeteria, and the campus cops ended up dragging him off to the psych ward.

  When he was released, he came back home and moved in with my parents. Over the next few years, it became harder and harder for them to control him. He would move into a halfway house, pledge to start taking his meds again, and then break his word and end up on the streets, or turn up at my parents’ house, aggressive, threatening, and paranoid. They would return him to the psych ward at UCLA, and forty-eight hours later, he’d be rereleased and the cycle would start all over again. Eventually he ended up in the jail system.

  This is just the way it is was my parents’ response—a tragedy, organic, inexplicable. How much my mom read or knew about Keller’s condition I don’t know. At one point she reached out for help, as I remember her telling me once that schizophrenia support groups for families were “depressing.” She always held out the hope that Keller would get better, turn a corner, restart his life. It didn’t happen. Eventually a place in Santa Monica that offered something called Step Up on Second helped my parents figure out the best way to navigate the system.

  Despite its large homeless population, California is low down on the list of states that offer decent social services or mental health programs, and Reagan went out of his way to shutter mental institutions across the U.S. In those days almost no programs existed to help families dealing with mentally ill relatives who were over eighteen, unless you could prove they planned on harming themselves or someone else. There were only halfway houses, some better than others, but most were sad, dangerous places.

  In the end, my parents had no choice but to make Keller a ward of the state. It meant they were no longer legally responsible for his well-being, no longer the go-to people whose phone rang at two in the morning whenever some crisis happened. In the end they found him a place out by CalArts, a rehab facility filled with a mixed population of drug addicts, alcoholics, and people like Keller. Later he moved to something like a nursing home in the San Fernando Valley, where he lived for many years until recently.

  Every year, sometimes twice a year, I fly out to California to visit him. I’ve been making this same trip for the past few decades. The home where he currently lives is in a lower-middle-class Latino neighborhood, and it’s run by a group of Christian African-American women. Only two other patients live there. The rooms are bright, the food is good, and there’s a backyard of struggling grass. I bring him cigarettes, potato chips, and Coca-Cola. He’s completely happy. There are no computers or e-mail, and he and I don’t speak on the phone during the year as I know he’ll inevitably end the conversation with “Where are you?” and “When are you coming out to see me?” and I don’t want to get his hopes up or disappoint him.

  Keller is in his midsixties now and seems better than he has in a long time. His brain is still the same, skittering from reality to fantasy and back again, though the medication he’s taking has made him nicer, warmer. It’s hard sometimes to recall the aggressive, paranoid, on-the-cusp-of-violence person that his disease turned him into. One minute he’ll be discussing the Nobel Peace Prize he was just awarded in Oslo, and the next minute he’ll bring up some scarily precise detail about an actual person or place I’d forgotten about myself. Last year, he recited a poem he told me he had written in German, a language he doesn’t speak, though from his flowery German accent you could have sworn he was a native Berliner.

  He’s still my brother, the only connection I have left to my family of origin, and to a place and a time. I still struggle with the idea that I let him make me feel bad about myself. The modern-day self-help notion is that “only you can make yourself a victim.” I wonder what or who I would have been without him as my brother.

  9

  L.A. IN THE LATE SIXTIES had a desolation about it, a disquiet. More than anything, that had to do with a feeling, one that you still find in parts of the San Fernando Valley. There was a sense of apocalyptic expanse, of sidewalks and houses centipeding over mountains and going on forever, combined with a shrugging kind of anchorlessness. Growing up I was always aware of L.A.’s diffuseness, its lack of an attachment to anything other than its own good reflection in the mirror.

  My mom wouldn’t allow me to hang out with the other kids on the Sunset Strip. To her, the Strip was evil territory, flashy, fast, destructive. One of my closest elementary school friends had a nanny, and I remember the day she complained to me that my friend was hanging out on the Sunset Strip, plastering on way too much makeup. The nanny asked why my friend couldn’t be more like me. I found this humorous. The thing is, I really wanted to go to the Strip, except I would have needed a phony ID, and my mother and I argued a lot about that, since I took it as my responsibility and duty to question authority. Then and now, under the palm trees and sand and daily light, L.A. is a police state with strict curfew laws. Spelled out, “It is unlawful for any minor under the age of eighteen (18) years to be present or upon any public street, avenue, highway, road, curb area, alley, park, playground or other public ground, public space or public building, place of amusement or eating place, vacant lot, or unsupervised place between the hours of 10:00 pm on any day and sunrise of the immediately following day.” In 1967 a low-budget movie, Riot on Sunset Strip, was released into theaters, its plot revolving around the on-off riots that took place on the Strip between 1966 and 1970. It depicted what was going on there accurately, and who wouldn’t have wanted to be a part of that?

  High school was a dark period for me—I never felt like I fit in, and the other kids seemed alien to me, because, in fact, they were—but I got through. In those days people threw around the words identity crisis about teenagers, and some still do. A bizarre phrase, and one I used to spend hours thinking about. I thought that the older generation was framing the idea of growing up in such a fearful way. That term instills so much an
xiety and dread around becoming who you actually are and who you’ll be someday. Why is Who am I? considered a crisis? I had no crisis. My identity was straightforward: I had made art since I was five years old, and aside from dance, art was the only thing that interested me. If that didn’t fit into the conventions of the day, who cared?

  In the late sixties Alan Watts and other thinkers were introducing America to ideas from Eastern philosophy and Buddhism. The idea of banishing the ego was in play, in contrast to Western thought, which was all about the three-act Hollywood structure of beginning, middle, end. I was much more interested in the nontraditional narrative flow, the kind embodied by French New Wave cinema. That, combined with taking acid and smoking pot, set me off in a new direction of thinking. From that point on, I would never feel sure, or comfortable, about making conclusions or bold, definite statements about anything. Questioning things fit in with “becoming,” which in turn brought me closer to living in the present and farther away from the idea that you’re done, ready, formed, or cooked at some preset age like your early twenties. Maybe that’s why the HBO series Girls resonates with so many people. It shows that stage in life when older people assume that just because you’ve graduated college you know who you are, or what you’re doing, and in fact most people don’t. I did know this much: I couldn’t find out who I really was until I’d left L.A. and my family. Until that day arrived, I was just waiting, suspended. Families are like little villages. You know where everything is, you know how everything works, your identity is fixed, and you can’t really leave, or connect with anything or anybody outside, until you’re physically no longer there.