Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father Read online

  At first glance, Cloud House seemed like a crazy house. In the storefront window, poems, hand-lettered in cutouts and Magic Marker, were Scotch-taped to the windows and walls. Above the door we saw a sign: “Walt Whitman Breathes Here.” Dad asked the cashier about Cloud House and was told they held open readings every Thursday at 8:30. Dad went the next week for the first time, with me in tow. There were no other kids.

  Through the dimmed light I could see the walls were covered with posters, drawings, and photos as well as handwritten and typed poems. A short, intense man with black hair ran in and out of the back room fetching hot water for everyone’s tea. He introduced himself as Kush.

  “Why Cloud House?” my dad asked him.

  “Clouds are families made of evaporated forms,” he said. “It’s important to put your head in the clouds and feel like a cloud because clouds release what they have to the earth. Poetic visions aren’t just private but can reach others. We do that at the Cloud through open readings. Everyone’s welcome. Come, sit down.”

  He waved us to the center of the room, where Dad and I found several people sitting in a circle around three or four kerosene lamps. We quietly took a seat on the floor behind them. A cassette tape of somebody reading was more or less ignored as joints and conversation were passed around the circle. The air then filled with the smell of burning sage, to “drive out negative energy.”

  When the tape finished, the black-haired man shook some wind chimes, which hung on a long rope from the ceiling in the center of the room. He then walked around the circle chanting a Native American prayer. His deep bass voice seemed to penetrate the floorboards where we sat. Finally he pulled out a wooden flute, played a few notes, and announced that the floor was open to whoever wanted to read.

  A tall young man with an overgrown beard, sparkly eyes, and a cowboy hat stood up and began reading from a weathered black notebook. After he finished, everyone clapped. Next, a big woman in a floor-length dress stood up. Shifting from one leg to the other, she read nervously, apologizing for every poem. All the while, Kush sat hugging one knee, listening intently. “Why don’t you read that again,” he’d say, or, “How’d you come to write that?” When people’s comments went too far afield, Kush would interrupt, “Let’s hear some more poems!”

  Then a tall, thin man with a harried expression stood up and everyone yelled, “Moe!” This was David Moe, nom de plume H. D. Moe. He always seemed addled and out of breath, as though he’d just emerged from a space pod. Or maybe this was an expression of his dyslexic poet persona, which was part Beat, part mad scientist:

  Duchamp pas de deux

  electric Voltaire

  wombing Ouija!

  After Moe left the stage amid hoots and howls, a man dressed all in denim with a bowl haircut and mirrored sunglasses stood up. “Hullo. I’m Dennis.” As he read he manipulated his voice, which buzzed and droned like a futuristic machine. All the while he raised and lowered his body like a wizard casting a spell. I’d never heard a sound like that coming out of a person before. Dad and I were transfixed.

  Dad was too shy to read on the first night. When everyone who wanted to read had finished, Kush concluded the evening with a final chant of his own.

  Dad returned home in a state of feverish inspiration. After I was changed into my nightie and tucked into bed, he got to work on a comic poem—lines of verse interspersed between comic book frames. The poem was simple, consisting of permutations on the phrase, “Faster than love, your words burn up my fire.” He called it “The Poet as Arsonist.”

  The following Thursday we returned to Cloud House and Dad shared his poem, which was showered with praise: “It’s like William Blake!” Kush insisted Dad let him Scotch-tape the poem to the wall. Emboldened, my father began to do a series of comic poems, which he mimeographed at Cloud House as eight-by-ten broadsides, then taped up in cafés and laundromats all over town, with me running just behind him.

  Dad had studied poetry as an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska with John Berryman and Karl Shapiro, but stopped writing in 1967 because poetry then seemed to him “an empty, meaningless parlor game.” Finding Cloud House reignited his passion. Soon he stumbled on a used copy of Jack Spicer’s Billy the Kid. The book changed him utterly. In the 1950s Spicer, along with Robin Glaser and Robert Duncan, helped forge an avant-garde poetry which they named the Berkeley Renaissance. Spicer especially showed Dad that poetry was a way to get in touch with his gay identity. “Spicer’s work acted like a magnet drawing out mine,” he wrote.

  We were soon spending several nights a week at Cloud House. I’d find a sun-faded pillow in the corner, where Dad would set me up with paper and crayons. I drew fluffy cloud houses and cloud high-rises, all populated by eager inhabitants arriving on the backs of birds. Kush hung my pictures in the windows, so that every time I walked into Cloud House, it felt like my house too.

  So many evenings of my girlhood were spent sitting in crowded, hushed rooms, waiting for the quiet to be pierced by these strings of strange words. Rarely could I follow what was being read. To me it was just background noise, a soundtrack for my curious wanderings, paging through books on shelves or looking at the Garfield and Snoopy comic books I’d brought from home. Other times, the steady and repetitive rhythm of the readers, the warmth and tone of their different voices, worked on me like a lullaby. I’d climb onto Dad’s lap and drift off to sleep, soothed by the movement of his breathing, his warm skinny chest which I listened to as it vibrated in animated conversation. There was no place I’d rather be.

  Cloud House readings were often followed by potluck dinners. The grown-ups often drank too much, filling the rooms with their cigarette and marijuana smoke, reciting poetry, then arguing about it.

  Poet 1: “In order to bring poetry to the people it has to relate to them personally, to expand their dreams. Protest poetry puts blinders on people.”

  Poet 2: “But if there’s no revolutionary poetry, there may be no revolution!”

  Poet 3: “I see the cassette tape recorder as the lethal weapon. We’ve gotta go out with the cassette players and instead of playing disco, play some consciousness!”

  Dad and I always came home late from these evenings. We’d stumble into our respective beds, still in our clothes, and the next morning we’d wake up and rush out the door, late to school again.

  SOON AFTER STARTING at French American I began to wet myself. At five and a half, I was three years out of diapers. I was not a bed wetter at home and I have no recollection, nor does Dad record in his journals, of my having accidents at home or anywhere else. But at French American, at the least convenient moments and least convenient places—high on the jungle gym or on the farthest reaches of the schoolyard—I’d have a sudden and uncontrollable urge to pee.

  I was old enough that I could simply have gone to the bathroom in the morning or broken off from the single-file march from our classroom to the playground. But during those first few months I developed a deep and abiding wish to disappear. I didn’t want to call attention to myself by asking to go to the bathroom and I didn’t know how to ask in French. Besides, I’d grown accustomed to holding inside anything that was too embarrassing or too shameful to share: my dad’s boyfriends, my mom’s death, my pee.

  Over the next few weeks, I got to know the unsmiling school nurse and her wordless riffling through a box of lost and found in an effort to find me dry clothes I could change into in the back office. I remember itchy plaid polyester pants that were too short and the astringent smell of my urine-soaked clothing tied together in a clear plastic bag that I carried along with my lunchbox while I waited for my dad to pick me up after school. Other kids smelled it too; I was sure of it. I believed myself stained with the scent. Seizing on my shame, a pair of second-grade girls decided to punish me further. Who was I to argue?

  After our class filed outside for recess I’d be playing alone, crouched in a corner of the yard. I’d look up and there they’d be. I can’t remember their names
but I do remember one bully had blond hair with dark brown eyes and eyebrows, the dissonance of her coloring emphasizing her menace. The second bully, a mousy brunette, had an overlarge forehead. Standing in navy skirts and kneesocks, they towered over me. I remember them marching me to the water fountain at the entrance to the school. They stood beside me, forcing me to drink until I said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Then pee!”

  But I couldn’t pee on command, so they walked me down the hall to the girls’ bathroom and told me to sit on the toilet, but with my clothes on. I tried again.

  “Do it.” Their words echoed in the empty bathroom. “Do it. Pee!”

  But my body still wouldn’t let go. So we marched back to the fountain where I had to drink more water. Then I returned to the toilet seat. Finally, after pushing down my skirt and peeling off my stockings, a small trickle of pee streamed and then surged through my underwear. I would have pulled off my underwear but the girls insisted that I keep it on.

  I learned to long for the rainy days when our classes stayed in for recess. Under the sweet watchful eyes of the English teacher, Mrs. Meadows, I spent my recess drawing. With crayon and paper I created large families: A mother in a blue dress and brown bun pushing a baby carriage surrounded by brothers and sisters, grandparents and cousins. I made drawings inspired by television shows, The Brady Bunch and Eight Is Enough. In these fantasy worlds there was always a sibling nearby to provide company or protection, as Peter Brady did for Cindy when she was being teased about her lisp.

  In math class we learned about shapes and were encouraged to find shapes in our environment. The clock was a circle. The door, a rectangle. At pick-up time, I noticed each family formed a shape of some sort. Three kids and two parents formed a pentagon. Two parents and two kids formed a perfect square. Even an only child with two parents formed a triangle. But Dad and I were just two points. A line. Not even a shape.

  I could have told Dad about the bullies at school, but deep down I suspected he was more the source of my problem than its solution. I used to pray that he wouldn’t pick me up wearing his leather motorcycle jacket. That all the shiny cars and pretty pigtailed girls would be gone before our dingy beige VW bug finally rumbled up to the curb at Grove and Steiner.

  When he arrived, he reached across the passenger seat and opened the door while the engine was still running, a cigarette attached to his lower lip. Inside I noticed the cracked and ripped leather seats, which exposed crumbly yellow foam, and the overflowing ashtray that wouldn’t close no matter how much I tried to close it.

  THE NEXT WEEK we returned to Cloud House, Dad was the first to stand up and read. He was so mild and soft-spoken in daily life that it was strange to see him before an audience, strange to see him magnify his voice to fill the big room. I sat on the dusty floor at his feet. All was silent except his words soaring above my head:

  THE DEPARTURE

  I suppose it’s all over now.

  Brief as a cloudless sky

  Empty as my daughter’s mouth

  You are flying home for Christmas.

  Back home

  I read this note:

  “Dear Tooth Fairy,

  Tonight’s the night!”

  Tooth under her pillow.

  Your plane drones on.

  I don’t know where it’s taking you.

  I replace Alysia’s tooth

  With a shiny tin quarter.

  (She, so anxious. For days

  It just barely hung in there

  A dead white star.)

  Under my own pillow

  I dream fitfully.

  A sad, savage bird

  Drops you

  Into an album of fading wings.

  Come morning

  I’ll be the only good fairy

  Left in town.

  H. D. Moe was the first to publish Dad’s poetry. At a time when many experimental West Coast poets had a hard time getting published, Moe started his own journal, called Love Lights. But after finding that a poetry magazine wouldn’t pay the rent, or even a few days’ bills, he started putting erotic photos of women on the cover and selling Love Lights from newspaper vending machines. Unsuspecting leches fed quarters into Moe’s machines thinking they were getting porn but found instead pages and pages of absurdist poetry.

  Through Moe and Kush, Dad met poets all over town. Dad was frequently asked to produce and put up comic strip flyers for various readings. He embraced the tasks with zeal, not caring whether or not the posters featured his own name. “Poetry was my new religion and I, its eager acolyte,” he wrote.

  North Beach was the heart of the city’s poetry scene since the founding of City Lights bookstore. Its future was argued over in almost every café and bar. In Caffè Trieste, “proletarian poet” Jack Hirschman would read from his recent translation of Jean Cocteau or Alexander Kohav with the conviction of the reborn, his stringy blond hair hanging around his face “like a halo around the death mask of Samuel Johnson,” my Dad wrote. Hirschman and Moe argued vehemently about politics and aesthetics. Whenever he was pressed on particular points, Hirschman would laugh and retreat into metaphor. “The Red is the Black,” he’d say, waving his arms, then read another one of his translations. Moe, for his part, argued for “Correctionism,” by which he meant that everything in life was in constant and interdependent flux. Most poets of the time were coining their own catchwords, one writing “Budada” manifestos, another proclaiming “Actualism.” Night after night, Dad listened to these disputes, which were sometimes, he noted, “observed by a shy and aloof Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or mocked by the obnoxious clowning of Gregory Corso.”

  But poetry didn’t clean up our apartment or wash out the crumbs and banana stench from my Scooby-Doo lunchbox. Poetry didn’t help me practice reading French at night, or get me to school on time, or bake Rice Krispie treats for the many school picnics and parties. In fact, because of poetry, Dad was even more remote, more irritable when I disturbed him in his room, notebook balanced on his lap, cigarette burning in the ashtray beside him.

  March 13, 1977: Problems with Alysia lately. She’s alone a lot, bored with TV. And I want to write, type, read, work at my craft instead of play with her. I try to give her some time each day or night and we talk about the problem. But it’s an aggravation to me and a hurt to her. I’ve been cranky with her. She brought me the Oscar the Grouch book to read two nights recently to clue me in, I think.

  At French American, the bully girls were thinking up new ways to harass me. The previous week, they’d forced me to eat orange rinds. Another afternoon, they tried to get me to hurl obscenities at Marc Lovejoy, the meanest-looking boy in the second grade. Weak and weird as I truly thought myself to be, I wasn’t stupid. Marc’s relative size had already impressed me in games of Nerf football in the courtyard.

  “No. I don’t want to,” I said.

  The blond bully pulled a small Swiss Army knife from her pocket and opened it. “You better tell him.” I found refuge when the bell rang and we were called to line up with our classes. Later that day I told my English teacher about the incident. Soon after, the bullying ended, and the blond girl was expelled.

  My days of torment were over, but the damage was done. I conflated the bullies and my bathroom accidents with an inchoate sense that something was wrong with me. I broadcast my sense of complete otherness through my slumped posture, downcast expression, and extreme timidity. Kids at school called me weird so often that after a while I believed them. I hid myself behind a curtain of tangled hair.

  Even though I wasn’t gay, I knew “gay” applied to me because of Dad. And during my first couple of years at French American, in between French dictations, math lessons, visits to Kewanee, and hours spent in front of the TV, I learned that gayness was a) “gross” and b) beyond my control. Grossness wasn’t something you did; it was something that could just happen to you, or something that you were born into.

  So when, early that spring, I found a nest of
spiders in my Weeble tree house in the backyard after months of neglect, I didn’t think, “Hmm, Daddy should have put this tree house away last fall. I should ask him to wash it out.” I thought, “This tree house is gross because it is mine and I am gross.” And when I put my stuffed animals to bed under a felt blanket with a plug-in bulb so that they wouldn’t be scared of the dark, as I was, and then, after running off to play, forgot the animals under the blanket so that the bare bulb burned a tiny hole in the blanket, emitting a terrible black smell, I didn’t think, “How silly! I forgot to put away the animals! I should show Daddy what happened.” Instead, I hid the blanket and waved away the offending odor, thinking that the smell was because of me, further proof of my essential badness which needed to be kept hidden.

  The experience with the bullies merely confirmed the harshness of the world I’d been thrown into, the difference between the world of Dad, which though far from perfect was still ruled by love, and that of school, which for me continued to be ruled by fear.

  Many mornings, I’d be weeping as Dad pulled me up the stairs to French American. I dreaded facing Hortense, who on being told that I was late because the bus we had to take that day was late answered, “Buses aren’t late, people are late.” Then one day, I abruptly stopped, sucked in my breath, and wiped my face dry with my sleeve.

  “What happened,” Dad asked. Why’d you stop crying?”

  “I changed the channels of my emotion,” I announced.

  He squeezed my hand and smiled.

  “I changed the channels of my emotion,” he repeated. “I like that.”

  I took note of Dad’s reaction and at that moment I felt something like the power of language. Whether or not my declaration actually turned around my day, I can’t recall. But I liked the way Dad looked at me when I said it, I liked the feeling it gave me, and I wanted to feel it again.

  OVER THE NEXT two years Dad integrated me into his writing life. When I memorized a Baudelaire poem for school, he pushed me in front of the open mic at a North Beach coffeehouse to recite it. Few of the assembled poets and poetry fans understood me, especially as I was reciting the poem in French and at light speed, but most thought it “far out” nonetheless, and Dad grinned widely.