No, billions.
My grandfather was a CIA plant.
Ours is not a family of pathological liars as you sometimes suspect, girl-child. But you have to understand something about the nature of memory, history, schizophrenia, and the long-term effects psychedelic drugs can have on the brain before you start taking anybody’s word for anything.
What’s that poem? That line? Childhood is a time when nobody dies? I don’t know whose childhood they were talking about. When I was a kid they dropped like flies. The revolutionaries off their barstools. Mayors. City supervisors. Cult members and cult leaders. Bearded wanderers who called themselves ‘Wolf.’ The potters shot point-blank by their husbands-men who wouldn’t see the insides of jail cells for two decades. Later, I’d stumble upon missives in the newspaper, ‘So-and-so finally brought to justice.’ The poets all climbed over the railing and flung themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge. I remember feeling sorry for one who survived. And relieved for her when I heard that she’d managed to drown herself in barbiturates and whiskey as soon as they had released her from the hospital. When I was a kid there seemed to me nothing quite so tragic as a failed suicide.
There were survivors, of course. There are always survivors. The poets moved into seclusion, up into the woods near Fort Bragg. The potters went back to school. Heald College. They learned computer programming basics and moved into condominiums. Invested quite wisely in the stock market.
The revolutionaries were diagnosed with manic depression. And the painters with paranoid schizophrenia.
At first your grandfather wouldn’t take his medication. He said they were trying to kill him. But eventually he succumbed. Eventually, everyone succumbed.
And the children, we were scrubbed clean and dragged off to White Flower Day. Thrust suddenly and unprepared into innocence. Excessive sanitation. Hushed tones. A belated sober revelation that there are certain things children should not be told.
In that instant, as if by some mysterious curse, everyone stopped dying. Jeans were patched and pegged. Chocolate replaced carob. Margarine turned into butter. All the tastes changed. And all the smells. Pot and eucalyptus became roses and fresh paint. No one described hallucinations at the dinner table anymore. And I wondered: Did they stop seeing demons on their bedroom ceilings at night? Or did they just stop telling?
I was born on the Monterey Peninsula in the summer of 1970. Born to unmarried artists, refugees from Beverly Hills who had left everything but a flair for the dramatic and a nasty habit of name-dropping behind Who had shrugged off the trust funds that weren’t really there and left for the cooler waves that came crashing on northern sea cliffs and foggy shores. That much checks out.
You know, girl-child, there’s something heart-breaking about your grandmother’s poetry from those days. We-your aunt and I and the rest of the kids who used to huddle together on Saturday mornings before the grownups came to, huddle at the neighbor’s house, in front of the forbidden TV, with spoonfuls of peanut butter and slabs of stolen ham-we were supposed to be the first generation of truly free children. Free to trample each other at the Bay School. Free to eat tofu and bean sprouts. Free of the sway of pop culture and advertising and Saturday morning cartoons. Free of finger bowls and social constructions of every kind. Free not to suffer from the eating disorders and gender-identity crises that weren’t supposed to come later, but did. Of course they did.
Still, I was never nostalgic for the hopes in that poetry. I didn’t miss the communal living and talkof nonviolent revolutions. I never did like the anarchist’s free school.
When we moved to Palo Alto and Jimmy Carter morphed into Ronald Reagan and folk song circles became Amnesty International meetings, I didn’t think of the olden days as tie-dyeing parties and Pacific Coast fields of Monarch butterflies. Yes, there had been that, too. But what I missed was the raw truth of it all. I missed the suicides and the open weeping. I missed believing that we would someday come into a family fortune. I missed my father, and all his colorful visions. I missed believing that someone was following us. That’s what made us special, after all. We had the thickest FBI file. Didn’t we? I’d always wonder.
When your grandmother finally settled down with my stepfather and they started shopping at Williams Sonoma, life got more predictable. More peaceful. But I missed the headlines and whispers behind our backs at the food co-op. He’d been a Catholic priest, after all. ‘Torn from the cloth by a temptress named Eve.’ I missed the journalists. I missed believing that our mother was the most scandalous woman on the block. I missed her altered states.
Their wedding song was Cat Stevens’s ‘Morning Has Broken.’ But I missed the night.
I don’t know if I spent my early years in the olden days, girl-child. An editor called this morning and asked me to describe a girlhood in the counterculture. I told her I wasn’t sure I had one to tell.
Because, you know, the funny thing about olden days and modern days, about culture and counterculture, is the way they blend and blur. The way dawn can look just like dusk when you awaken disoriented after a day-long nap or a night-long sleep.
What culture are we living in now? Your grandmother curses my tattoos. Did she change? Or did I?
This morning you asked me to buy you peace-sign earrings at Clothestime, girl-child. Tonight the network newscasters told us straight-faced that the war was over. The smart bombs had done their job and all the casualties were friendly fire.
And sometimes I still wonder: Did everyone really stop dying? Or did everyone else just start lying?
Lisa Michaels
In 1969, my father was arrested for his part in an antiwar protest f in Boston and was sentenced to a two- year prison term. (He and my mother had split up several years earlier, but they had remained close, sharing the child-rearing duties and trying to forge a new kind of divorce, one that was in keeping with their progressive politics.) He began serving his time at Billerica not long after his twenty-eighth birthday. I was a little over three years old. Once he was settled, my mother took me to see him in prison. He had written her a letter asking for books and a new pair of tennis shoes-he was playing a lot of pick-up basketball in the yard to keep his head clear. On the ride out to the prison, I clutched a box of black Converse hightops in my lap, my head bubbling with important things to tell him, thoughts which percolated up, burst, and disappeared-their one theme: Don’t forget me.
I remember very little of our lives then, but that visit has the etched clarity and foggy blanks of a fever dream. We pulled into the broad prison parking lot and stepped out to face the gray facade punctured by a grid of tiny windows. Mother lifted her hand against the glare, then pointed to a figure in one of the barred openings. Was it my father? She hoisted me onto the roof of the car, and I held the shoebox over my head and shook it. I thought I saw the man wave back.
In the waiting room, the guards called our names in flat tones, never looking us in the eye. They led us through a series of thick pneumatic doors and down long corridors to the visiting room. Once we were inside, I saw something soften in their faces. ‘Sit right here, missy,’ one of them said. Mother lifted me into a plastic chair and my feet jutted straight out, so I stared at the toes of my tennis shoes, printed with directives in block letters: left, right.
I sat still until a door on the far wall opened and a flood of men filed in. Out of the mass of bulky shapes, my father stepped forward, the details of his face reassuring in their particulars. He grinned and reached for me across the tabletop scribbled with names and dates, and despite the no touching rule, the guards said nothing. When he took my hand, every manic bit of news I had practiced in the car flew out of me. I was stunned by the dry warmth of his skin, his white teeth, the way he cleared his throat in two beats before speaking. Distance made me notice for the first time these familiar things, which proved him to be real beneath the clipped hair and the prison uniform.
Our conversation was simple. There was little we could say in the span of one public hour. He read me
